Jan 9, 2025
OPINION: Parents Have Way More Influence than They Realize in Shaping Their Children’s Success by Jenny Anderson and Rebecca Winthrop at The Hechinger Report. Parents with academically unmotivated and disengaged kids are often at their wits’ end. When kids are in third grade, 76 percent say they love school. By 10th grade, that number has flipped: Only 24 percent say they do. But parents aren’t powerless. They have way more influence than they — and teachers — realize, we found in research for our recent book. Read
Parents Defending Education Poll: Parents Support Girls-Only Spaces in Schools, Oppose Parental Exclusion Policies and Grading for Equity by Parents Defending Education. Parents Defending Education (PDE) released new polling on key issues facing schools in 2025 with questions on the role of the Department of Education, school choice, antisemitism, foreign funding in schools, critical race theory, gender ideology and school surveys. As policymakers across the country debate these issues, these numbers shed light on voters’ views on these subjects. The poll, conducted by CRC Research, sampled 1,000 parents with children 18 years old or younger in their household between Dec. 12-18, 2024. Read
My Advice to Catholic Schools: Double Down on Your Catholicity by Thomas W. Carroll at National Catholic Register. Catholic schools often face the tension between their solemn obligation to pass on our Catholic faith and the reality that many parents choose Catholic schools for lots of reasons that have nothing to do with faith. These include strong academics, smaller classes, strict discipline, a safe environment and a sense of community…By age 13, 50% of children raised in Catholic families walk away from their faith — a staggering 86% by age 18. This high failure rate can only be turned around if we make Catholic schools engines for evangelization. Here are a few practical ideas. Read
America’s Battle Over Choice in Education by Vince Bielski at Mercator. Private school choice advocates expect that 2025 will be the year that they finally bring the last big red state, Texas, into the fold. The likely victory would, in turn, pose the next big challenge for the controversial movement: Can it win in enemy territory -- that is, blue states -- too? Inspired by free-market ideology and Christian faith, advocates aim to give families more educational choices by providing them with public funds that they mostly use for private instruction at religious schools. Although the movement now has a foothold in almost all red states, to become an influential force in education, it needs to make deeper inroads into densely populated blue states, where Democrats, teachers’ unions, and rural Republicans have built a formidable wall of opposition to protect public schools. Read
Catholics Weigh in on Australia’s Social Media Ban: ‘A Void in Our Children’s Spiritual Lives’ by Jonah McKeown at Catholic News Agency. Archbishop Peter Comensoli of Melbourne, who leads Australia’s largest archdiocese, told CNA that the Church in Australia is actively engaged in advocating and proactively helping parents to protect their children online, including from the potential negative effects of social media and smartphone use. He said the archdiocese has taken steps to train teachers and parents on the importance of “cybersafety” and this year convened an eSafety Summit with over 120 educators from around the archdiocese to hear from experts in the field on the best ways to work with students using technology. Read
A Looming 'Demographic Cliff': Fewer College Students and Ultimately Fewer Graduates by Jon Marcus at NPR. This "demographic cliff" has been predicted ever since Americans started having fewer babies at the advent of the Great Recession around the end of 2007…Demographers say it will finally arrive nationwide in the fall of this year. That's when recruiting offices will begin to confront the long-anticipated drop-off in the number of applicants from among the next class of high school seniors. But the downturn isn't just a problem for universities and colleges. It's a looming crisis for the economy, with fewer graduates eventually coming through the pipeline to fill jobs that require college educations, even as international rivals increase the proportions of their populations with degrees. Read
Screwing Heads on Backwards: Historicism in the Humanities by Andrew J. Ellison at Cana Academy. In one of his essays on education, the late, great Jacques Barzun writes of a moment in a high-school classroom when a history teacher asked students to summarize a reading they had just completed about the Italian poet Petrarch. A student raised his hand and, looking down in his textbook for a prompting, answered “He was the vanguard of the new emphasis.” Barzun does not tell us the teacher’s response, but he rightly notes that this kind of half-understood parroting is what happens when students are spoon-fed secondhand, abstract jargon by their teachers. They get clunky terms and buzzwords to be repeated and soon forgotten. Read
The Reading Debate Is Over by Mark Bauerlein at First Things. The latest installment of an ongoing interview series with contributing editor Mark Bauerlein. Robert Pondiscio joins in to discuss his articles, “How Public Schools Became Ideological Boot Camps” and “On curriculum and literacy, Texas gets it.” Listen
Penance and Pancakes: The Catholic School’s Guide to Celebrating Shrove Tuesday by Tyler Storey at Institute for Catholic Liberal Education. Shrove Tuesday takes its title from the English verb to shrive, meaning to confess and receive absolution. It is the traditional English name for what we more commonly hear called Mardi Gras, or Fat Tuesday. In the British tradition, it is the last day of the period known as Shrovetide, beginning on the Sunday before Ash Wednesday, and just as Lent is the period of preparation for Easter, Shrovetide, and especially Shrove Tuesday, is the period of preparation for Lent…It’s a perfect day for building an annual school celebration. And, unlike other events on the liturgical calendar, Shrove Tuesday never lands on a weekend or during the summer, so it’s an excellent candidate for an annual event. Read
Throwback Thursday
Classical Education & The Recovery of Culture (Guest: Jeremy Tate) by Eric Sammons at Crisis Magazine. Virtually all our institutions today have been co-opted and used to push anti-Catholic and even anti-human ideologies. How can we take them back? The answer starts with education. Listen