Tennessee bureaucrats are trying to stop parents from founding charter schools based on Hillsdale’s model.
At Treasure Coast Classical Academy in Stuart, Fla., students are immersed in the historical, literary, and scientific traditions of the United States and Western civilization. They’re taught phonics, grammar, Latin, the Socratic method, Singapore math, foreign languages, and other practical and philosophical disciplines so that they might become competent, enlightened, and good citizens.
Between 2020 and 2021, TCCA outperformed the county’s public schools by significant margins in third-, fourth-, sixth-, and seventh-grade English and mathematics. TCCA is one of 80 publicly funded and privately operated charter schools that have a current or pending advisory relationship with Hillsdale College, a liberal-arts college in rural Michigan that receives no government funding.
With some boasting recent test results that blow their district and state averages out of the water, these Hillsdale start-ups are attractive alternatives for parents whose children suffered severe learning loss due to Covid-19 school shutdowns. They can also offer parents an escape from critical race theory, gender ideology, and other radical curricula that their children are increasingly exposed to in public schools.
In 2021, a pandemic year when elementary math proficiency plummeted nationwide, 93.2 percent of fourth graders at the Hillsdale-associated Orange County Classical Academy in California passed the state achievement test in mathematics, compared with only 35.9 percent of students statewide.
Now that the K–12 educational consensus has once again accepted phonics as the best method for teaching reading, Hillsdale’s charter-school project has been vindicated in a big way. Decades ago, many public schools ditched phonics, substituting in “whole language learning” that created space for teachers to infuse reading instruction with their pet ideological causes but left many kids, especially low-income minorities, struggling. Classically oriented charter schools, like Hillsdale’s, were ahead of the curve in making students master the building blocks of English, often fast-tracking their reading comprehension.
For example, a middle-school English teacher at Founders Classical Academy of Las Vegas, a Hillsdale member school, shows her prioritization of the fundamentals in online instruction plans about consonant, pluralization, syllabication, and vowel rules. She teaches her students to write in cursive, a penmanship style which exercises an important mental muscle but which many public schools abandoned when the 2010 Common Core Standards dropped the requirement.
As Tennessee parents watched the school-choice movement liberate kids across the country from zip-code constraints, giving them the opportunity to enroll at higher-quality institutions, they began pushing their elected representatives to prioritize the issue. In his January 2022 State of the State address, Republican governor Bill Lee announced his intent to support a process for launching hopefully dozens of schools across the state.
The plan was a go, until a hidden-camera video leaked, appearing to show Hillsdale College president Larry Arnn disparaging the way public-school teachers are trained while speaking at a private event with Lee. In his remarks, Arnn criticized the educational bureaucracies that claim expertise but tend to produce teachers without crucial subject knowledge. He questioned the value of education degrees, claiming that public-school teachers come from “the dumbest parts of the dumbest colleges in the country.”
While brash, Arnn’s comments are supported by a 2011 CBS News analysis, which in 2011 found that education is the easiest college major, recruiting students who enter with the lowest standardized-test scores but finish with the highest grades. For STEM majors such as math and science, the inverse is true, according to CBS.
Arnn’s comments served as ammunition for the liberal-dominated school boards in Madison, Montgomery, and Rutherford counties to reject the applications of American Classical Education (ACE), the management organization that’s working with Hillsdale to open three new charter schools in Tennessee.
District officials in Rutherford said in their review of ACE’s application: “Members of the (district’s) review committee have expressed serious concerns about Dr. Arnn’s comments regarding teacher qualifications and education, as it brings into question the applicant’s ability or interest in recruiting licensed teachers.” The school voted six-to-one to scrap the charter school.
The Jackson-Madison school board voted eight-to-zero, with one member absent, to deny the application and repudiate Arnn, noting that “it does not believe it is in the best interests of the students to be exposed to a charter school with such close ties to Hillsdale College.”
Kathleen O’Toole, Arnn’s daughter and the head of Hillsdale’s K–12 Education initiatives, says critics grossly exaggerate the control the college exerts over its affiliated charter schools.
“Our way of working with charter schools is totally unique. We don’t own or operate a single one. All we do is advise them. We don’t hire and fire. They’re totally separate organizations from us,” she tells National Review. “And they’re totally free to follow our advice or not follow our advice if they want to. It’s their show, we’re just there as a provider of resources to help them be successful.”
And Hillsdale doesn’t earn a dime from these charter schools either. Rather, it’s the college that makes the out-of-pocket investment, O’Toole says. “It’s a competitive process to work with us. When we work with a school, we spend hundreds of thousands of dollars and an incredible amount of time on it. And we do it because we want to help them be great. There’s nothing financially for us, and that’s true of every school we work with.”
Hillsdale has a second tier of charter schools called curriculum schools, which receive free curriculum from the college and often have ambitions to graduate into member schools, which entitles them to consulting, training, and conference invitations from the college. There are 46 Hillsdale curriculum schools. To earn “member school” status, they must demonstrate that they adhere to Hillsdale’s standards for curriculum, pedagogy, school leadership, board governance, and school culture.
For curriculum, this means implementing Hillsdale’s K–12 program guide. Hillsdale’s preferred classroom structure is predominantly teacher-led rather than student-led with teacher “coaching.” The school’s leadership should have charter-school experience. And the prospective school’s board must demonstrate that the institution has wide appeal, “so this can’t be a pet project of a specific family,” O’Toole says. “There are legal requirements and a duty to serve every student who comes in the school.”
In Tennessee, ACE was established by Hillsdale after Lee requested that it help set up 50 charter schools across the state. While ACE was launched at the behest of the college, the company is independent of it, volunteer ACE board member and Rutherford County resident Michelle Garcia tells National Review.
After the school boards denied the applications for ACE’s first three charter schools in July, the company appealed the decisions to Tennessee’s nine-member Public Charter School Commission. Lee signed off on the creation of the body in 2019 to insulate the charter school incorporation process from the whims of local school boards. Its members were selected by Lee and confirmed by the state GOP supermajority legislature. ACE’s petitions to overturn the school boards’ rulings head to hearings this week, to be followed by a final verdict that will likely be handed down in October.
Tammy Sharp, a Rutherford County school board member who voted “yes” on a charter school in her district, published an op-ed in the Tennessee Star in June dismissing the notion that ACE is compromised by its Hillsdale connection.
“The ACE charters are not funded by Hillsdale. They also are not a Christian school. They have their own money to build or buy a building that our local taxpayers don’t have to fund to start a charter school in this area. This is an additional choice for our parents. The only affiliation with Hillsdale is the curriculum,” she wrote.
Since the commission hearings have been underway, mainstream media outlets have spread misinformation about ACE’s involvement with Hillsdale – or lack thereof, former Tennessee state senator and current ACE board member Dolores Gresham tells National Review. In a recent article, the Associated Press reported that ACE didn’t show up to the original Rutherford County school board meeting on July 18 to defend the application for the Hillsdale-affiliated school, citing text messages sent by commission staffers. Gresham says the AP’s framing is inaccurate.
“American Classical Education was never formally invited to speak before the Rutherford County school board. ACE was only notified two days before the hearing that the board chair would potentially consider allowing the charter applicants to speak at the referenced school board meeting,” Gresham says. A personal family emergency, which was communicated to the board chair in advance of the meeting, prevented ACE’s executive director from attending, she adds.
However, many ACE supporters, including parents and teachers, were in the audience, she says. She notes that ACE sat in on both other votes before the Jackson-Madison and Clarksville-Montgomery school boards and “at neither of them were they given any opportunity to speak.”
Democratic political candidates and anti-school choice activists held a protest and press conference before the Rutherford hearing Wednesday in which they mischaracterized the charter schools as “private” and “Christian” schools, Rutherford County parent Mandy Massey said.
Besides fearmongering about the charter schools as a sort of Hillsdale heist, opponents have tried to diminish and discredit their popularity among parents and the public.
Of the 12 people who showed up at the Rutherford hearing, all twelve spoke in favor of greater choice in education. Combined with a survey of the Rutherford community, “numerous parents firsthand … gave us far more confidence” that there was great demand for a charter school in the area, ACE CEO Joel Schellhammer testified.
Gresham and Garcia say they hope the commission will judge the appeals on their merits and not be swayed by political bias.
Massey, one of the parents who took the podium, has been homeschooling her little kids in the classical style since Covid-19 hit, “reading tons of books and applying the three R’s: reading, writing, and arithmetic.” She calls it a “lost art.”
Shocked at how much her kids learned, Massey says she wants an ACE charter school in Rutherford so the classical model can be made available for free to parents who can’t swing homeschool or afford private school.
“There aren’t enough options,” she says. “My only other option to get a quality classical education would be to send my kids to private school. I can’t afford that, and I know so many parents who would say the exact same thing.”
What she observed in the public-school system was a soft bigotry of low expectations, she says.
“There really isn’t any rigor in Rutherford County Schools,” she adds. Public schools often have the wrong learning benchmarks for children when they don’t yet have the cognitive ability to perform at those levels, Massey claims. The classical model, on the other hand, reflects the natural way kids pick up information.
Massey’s sixth grader, searching for more structure, once tried public school after homeschooling. She knew more than her English teacher because her grammar background from homeschooling was so intense, Massey says. “Her grade expected so little of her.” Her daughter had excelled so far ahead in English and other subjects that Massey ultimately pulled her out of the school. The way math was taught was also basically as a foreign language, she jokes.
“As a parent, I desire the best public school for my children and our family believes it’s important to provide quality choices to families outside of a zoned public school,” Rutherford County parent Callie Cook says. “Even the best school is not the best fit for every child. Our family, along with many other parents in our community have consistently advocated for public school options including American Classical Academy. Other areas in our state have public charter schools and we believe our children should have access to high quality charter schools as well.”
Parental involvement has long been a priority for Hillsdale and its partner schools, says O’Toole, who started and served as principal at one before she took over the college’s K–12 enterprise.
“It was made very clear by Hillsdale that we’re not going to hold the parents at arm’s length,” she says. “That’s how they feel when they send their kids to public school. There’s one week a year where you’re allowed to observe classes. If you want a meeting with the principal, you must get it two months out. The whole feel is like, ‘We’re the experts and you don’t really need to be involved, just trust us.”
Hillsdale schools, while tuition-free public schools that follow the same laws and regulations as any others, don’t do that, she notes. “It’s all about recognizing that parents are the primary educators of their children and our job as the principal or teacher is to come alongside them.”