Parents are looking for alternatives to public schools and at least one conservative institution seeks to help. Amid nationwide debates over school districts infusing far-leftist ideas into their curricula, school choice has never been more important. Hillsdale College is expanding its efforts to make it easier for concerned parents to ensure their children are educated instead of indoctrinated.
The Washington Times reported:
Hillsdale College is expanding its footprint to accommodate parents frustrated with woke classroom instruction in their local K-12 schools.
Since 2010, the conservative Michigan-based college has helped open 21 charter schools and partnered with 33 others in 27 states through its Barney Charter School Initiative, offering classical education focusing on civic virtue and moral character.
Kathleen O’Toole, the college’s assistant provost for K-12 said in a December virtual town hall that its operations “are growing like wildfire” and that the organization is being “careful about our growth because we want to make sure every school that we are working closely with is an excellent school.”
This endeavor has been decades in the making, according to The Washington Times. For over 30 years, “conservatives have been building an alternative K-12 educational universe rooted in classical education,” the news outlet reported.
Hundreds of classical academies have materialized, including charter and private religious learning institutions. The focus of these schools is “the preservation and restoration of the liberal arts,” and the “traditions of Western civilization” according to The Times.
“Classical education is a commonsense approach to teaching, coupled with a curriculum that brings the best methods for reading instruction, mathematics instruction, cursive, sentence diagramming, all of those things that we know really work, with the best that Western civilization has produced,” O’Toole explained. “The best books, the best thought.”
Hillsdale’s network currently enrolls over 14,000 students at 21 member schools and 33 curriculum schools. These also include private and charter schools. Over 8,000 students are on waiting lists at 54 of the college’s affiliates.
The organization’s expansion comes at a critical time as Democrats have launched aggressive attacks against charter schools. The Biden administration snuck measures into the proposed $1.4 trillion spending bill that would place onerous requirements on charter schools. It is a blatant attempt to curtail the proliferation of charters and could be seen as a response to the new trend of parents pulling their kids from public schools. Indeed, public school attendance has dropped precipitously even in the post-COVID era, as parents place their kids in private and charter schools or choose to homeschool.
In Tennessee, Democrats are pushing back against an effort by Gov. Bill Lee to partner with Hillsdale to create 50 new charter schools. They argue that state funding should be kept for public schools – where the indoctrination is taking place.
This story will probably become one of many as more parents become fed up with public schools and progressive attempts at using them as indoctrination centers. The far left has opposed any and every measure designed to ensure that parents are involved in their children’s education. Indeed, when it comes to gender identity and sexuality, they are pushing for teachers to instruct kids younger than seven years old on these matters.
Chicago Public Schools, the third-largest school district in the nation, has instructed its teachers not to inform parents if a child indicates they might be struggling with gender dysphoria or issues concerning sexuality. Wisconsin’s Eau Claire Area School District gave educators a presentation in which it asserted that parents are “not entitled” to know if their child is transgender and that they have to “earn” this trust.
The far left has been carrying on a full-blown gaslighting effort to convince the public that there is ‘nothing to see here’ in public schools. They insist there is no problematic teaching going on in the classrooms and that even if there is, we’re all bigots if we oppose it. This has not exactly been a winning strategy when it comes to winning hearts and minds. The majority of Americans – including most Democrats – agree with laws prohibiting teachers from presenting this type of material to young children.
Nevertheless, the progressive crowd is still pushing its ideology on K-12 children, which has prompted this burgeoning exodus from the public system. While legislation banning teaching on gender identity, sexuality, and Critical Race Theory are a step in the right direction, they are not as effective at protecting children as exercising school choice. In fact, school choice is needed more now than it has in the recent past. When parents have more options, they are far less vulnerable to progressive conditioning, which is why the left is fighting tooth and nail to limit parents when it comes to their children’s education. Unfortunately for them, the tide is going in the right direction.
