The Decline of the Christian School Movement

I was reminiscing with someone earlier this week. Fifteen years ago, as a young math teacher with just two years' experience, I was looking for a different Christian school at which to teach. Even though I had only listed my name with my alma mater's placement office—and had done very little active searching beyond that—the contacts from schools were frequent. For a season, it seemed like I heard from another new school every day or two. The maxim that "Math teachers are always in high demand" never seemed more true.

By 2010, as a much more experienced teacher with a far more impressive resume, the opportunities were few, and generally so low-paying as to not be options at all. Now I work at BJU Press (which, I hasten to say, I enjoy very much), possibly having left Christian school teaching behind for good.

In the 1980's and 1990's, Christian schools were often growing. Today, few are.* Why is this? I would like to offer several key reasons that I have seen from my own vantage points.

Parents: Sadly, fewer and fewer parents view the financial sacrifice of Christian education as worthwhile for their children. While the next two points below may have something to do with that, even those parents with good Christian school options in their area are often passing up the opportunity.

Many of my parents' generation decided that, no matter what, their children would not receive the humanistic worldview and education found in the typical public school classroom. They wanted a better education, one centered on the Bible and free of the politically correct and godless brainwashing so prevalent in public education. Today's parents are more convinced that they can somehow counter what their kids absorb in public education.

Parents also have a responsibility to instill a desire for excellence and a love of learning into their children, and to model such things in their own lives. This seems to be less common than it was when I was a kid.

Lowering of Standards, both academic and otherwise: This, quite frankly, is a terrible shame. A Christian education should—must—be both thoroughly Christian and academically excellent.

Some Christian schools have bought into the idea that if they stop teaching about certain potentially controversial Bible principles, or if they open up their admissions policies to accept students from families that do not have similar beliefs, or if they lower their dress and behavioral standards so that carnal fashions and behaviors aren't rebuked, they will retain students and/or grow. Decades of observations seem to tell us the opposite: You can't have much of a Christian school [as defined for this post] by doing so. Furthermore, you certainly can't expect God's blessing on it.

The lowering of academic standards is shameful. Just because we live in an age where parents will howl if their precious little one doesn't get the honor roll grades they feel they so richly deserve [when, in fact, they are not deserved] does not mean we need to make it possible for all kids to find their names on the honor roll. Christian schools should be trying to provide quality faculty with a desire to shape young minds both spiritually and academically—and then making sure that academic quality is a part of the picture. Christian schools may brag that their test scores are better than the public schools' scores, but this is a bogus comparison. They ought to be far and away better than the public schools, first because they are not accepting every kid in the district, but primarily because the quality of the education is high.

What parent is going to sacrifice for a Christian education if the "Christian" is diluted and the "education" isn't strong?

Mismanagement: The majority of Christian schools have not been run well. In many cases, they are (a) led by pastors with somewhat autocratic authority, who have no training or experience in running a school and usually don't supervise its day-to-day operations anyway; (b) run by school boards comprised either of parents [who, in most cases, cater to the whims of the students, wanting to "keep them happy"] or of a generally uninvolved group of church leaders; or (c) led by administrators who are not trained in school administration. The number of Christian school administrators/principals who got the job simply because they were a relative or friend of the pastor or another church leader is an absolute outrage.

Furthermore, it seems that too much administrative effort has been put into placating parents and pleasing students, and too little put into improving the academic and spiritual climate of the school.

Christian schools would do well to figure out who they are, and then strive to do what they do better. Their leaders should ask, "Is this what we believe the Bible teaches? Is this the kind of education we want to provide?" Once those sorts of questions are answered, then stick with it, and quit trying to pleasing everyone.

Homeschooling Movement: I have no problem with those who, out of conviction, choose to homeschool their children, thinking it to be the best way to educate their children, and doing so with all the skill they can muster. I have no respect for those who make it into a glorified form of truancy.

On the one hand, there are those who have taken their children out of good, solid Christian schools to homeschool them anyway. (I am not at all convinced that the majority of them have righteous motives for doing so. I'm thinking of writing a series of posts on problems with homeschooling, too.) Some feel that they can do a better job, but if the Christian school is providing the kind of quality education it should, that's a pretty tall order that most parents, toiling alone, cannot do.

On the other hand, there are those who have seen mismanagement and lowered standards and decided that they can indeed do a better job. Perhaps they can.

Whether or not the homeschool crowd is doing a good job is not the point in this post. The point is that students are being taken out of Christian schools to be homeschooled...and that's hurting Christian schools of various types and qualities.


*The definition of Christian schools, for the purposes of this post, is somewhat limited to those that openly and literally believe the Bible as the authoritative Word of God, that hire only teachers with similar doctrinal beliefs, and that seek only students from families and churches with similar doctrinal beliefs. "Christian schools" of a more ecumenical nature, which hold other doctrines, or have more "open" admission policies are not in this discussion.

Michigan Blueberries

This morning I took my four children to our annual July extravaganza: Blueberry picking! The five of us picked nearly 31 pounds of blueberries, with most of those now resting comfortably in my freezer. My children think blueberry picking is fun; I enjoy it also.

Someone who lives in Florida questioned why I would go out into the heat to pick my own blueberries. That's a good question, and I have several good answers.

1. The weather is beautiful. It is July in Michigan—a far cry from the oppressive humidity of a July day in Florida—and this morning was a particularly beautiful day even by normal standards. Fresh air in the open fields is good for us, no?

2. It's a great activity for the kids. They enjoy it, and it gives them a pleasant taste of the work world. It is good for children to learn how to accomplish tasks and to enjoy the reward of their labor; if they can learn this in an enjoyable environment, so much the better.

3. It's a great activity with the kids. Parents, especially fathers, should spend time with their children. This is a super way to do it.

4. Fresh blueberries are, quite simply, awesome.

5. I'm supporting the local economy, and in Michigan, how can that not be a good thing?

Pro-Life Free Speech Denied in California!

According to this news article (pictures included), a seventh-grade girl in California was made to change her shirt when school administrators, at the very beginnning of the day, noticed that it contained a pro-life message. That day, April 29, had been designated as "National Pro-Life T-shirt Day" by the American Life League.

A picture is worth a thousand words, especially in this case. You can view pictures of the T-shirt here.

The storyline is the usual plot: Student wears T-shirt disdained by left-wing school administrators, is rudely told to change it (and does). Parent threatens lawsuit (and in this case, lawsuit goes forward).

There are two main issues to note here. First, anyone walking around a typical middle or high school today will notice a variety of T-shirts with advertising slogans, sports teams, brand names, artwork, and other content on them. Most of them are not the least bit offensive (not liking some other kid's sports team does not count!), but quite frankly, occasionally they are. They might contain images of some perverse "artist" or "rock star," or encourage behaviors that are unwise, rebellious, or immoral. [Note: Schools generally ban—as they should—T-shirts which promote activities that are illegal for minors, such as smoking or drinking.]

A T-shirt containing two photos of living human beings and which implies that abortion kills them is neither offensive nor inaccurate. To ban such a T-shirt while allowing so many others is hypocritical, and constitutes allowing "free speech" for some students and not for others. [Note #2: I would have no problem if a school decided to ban all T-shirts or even all T-shirts with any kinds of words/messages; this is consistent, and part of an appropriate dress code.]

The second and greater problem is the realization—still present in America after all these years—that there are those who hate the pro-life message and want to kill it. Free speech does not interest these people except to the extent that it allows them to speak. They care not for what is right and good.

The article concludes with this insightful quote by the mother's lawyer:

First Amendment attorney William Becker, who represents Amador, disagreed that the shirt could be seen as containing inappropriate messages.

"The message of the T-shirt is that life is sacred," he said. "One would be very hard pressed to find anything wrong with that particular idea, except that some people do object to the political message."

A Great Posting About Parents and Schools

Over at the blog Michigan Blogger I read this great post this evening about how "Parents Need To Step It Up To Help Schools." Here are a couple of its excerpts:

I encourage you to read the entire post; it's a great one!

More days and longer hours seem like a good idea but it won't help until we fix the biggest problem with the schools.

The biggest problem with schools is parents. Yes, parents. Ask any educator and he or she will tell you - for the most part - that the best students have parents interested in their childrens' education.

There are too many parents letting their kids get away with too much by not disciplining them. Why should a kid behave in school when there is not only no punishment for bad behavior but the kid gets a sense of encouragement when the parent defends the improper actions.

That's not to say there aren't other problems with the school because there are. I will get into those issues another time. For now, we need parents to get behind the teachers and put the proverbial foot in the proverbial behind of their kids to make sure they get an education.

How Bad Is It? 29-year-old has 21 children by 11 women

Alas, tis so. Examiner.com tells us:

As if Octomom wasn't bad enough, a Tennessee man, 29 year old Desmond Hatchett has now fathered at least 21 children he can't support. Hatchett was in child support court again last week. His name appeared on the dockett 11 times in one day, representing 15 of his children.

Hatchett says he wasn't out to set a record. He says he never intended to have this many children, "It just happened." He fathered the children by at least 11 different women and he claims all of the mothers knew about his large family. The children range in age from newborn to 11 years old.

This is a sad story at all levels. The children cannot be supported by their father, and likely have no good male role model (since their daddy isn't filling that position). The women are reaping the consequences of their sin by, among other things, having to support these children without a father. Since Desmond only has a minimum wage job, and since only 50% of his income can be taken (by law) for child support, and since it has to be split so many ways, some of the women get just a few dollars a month. The taxpayers, of course, will be saddled with massive costs related to the upkeep of these children (and probably their mothers, too).

Desmond should be put in jail if he ever fathers another child out of wedlock.

News That Should Concern You

This story comes from Brian Dickerson of the Detroit Free Press (link here). While I admit the ignorance of the dad to the product in question is hard to believe, it is believable. Not everyone keeps up with everything. But the outrageous response to his ignorance should scare any of us who happen to make a mistake in the parenting of our children.

If you watch much television, you've probably heard of a product called Mike's Hard Lemonade.

And if you ask Christopher Ratte and his wife how they lost custody of their 7-year-old son, the short version is that nobody in the Ratte family watches much television.

The way police and child protection workers figure it, Ratte should have known that what a Comerica Park vendor handed over when Ratte ordered a lemonade for his boy three Saturdays ago contained alcohol, and Ratte's ignorance justified placing young Leo in foster care until his dad got up to speed on the commercial beverage industry.

Even if, in hindsight, that decision seems a bit, um, idiotic.

Ratte is a tenured professor of classical archaeology at the University of Michigan, which means that, on a given day, he's more likely to be excavating ancient burial sites in Turkey than watching "Dancing with the Stars" -- or even the History Channel, for that matter.

The 47-year-old academic says he wasn't even aware alcoholic lemonade existed when he and Leo stopped at a concession stand on the way to their seats in Section 114.

"I'd never drunk it, never purchased it, never heard of it," Ratte of Ann Arbor told me sheepishly last week. "And it's certainly not what I expected when I ordered a lemonade for my 7-year-old."

But it wasn't until the top of the ninth inning that a Comerica Park security guard noticed the bottle in young Leo's hand.

"You know this is an alcoholic beverage?" the guard asked the professor.

"You've got to be kidding," Ratte replied. He asked for the bottle, but the security guard snatched it before Ratte could examine the label.

Mistake or child neglect?

An hour later, Ratte was being interviewed by a Detroit police officer at Children's Hospital, where a physician at the Comerica Park clinic had dispatched Leo -- by ambulance! -- after a cursory exam.

Leo betrayed no symptoms of inebriation. But the physician and a police officer from the Comerica substation suggested the ER visit after the boy admitted he was feeling a little nauseated.

The Comerica cop estimated that Leo had drunk about 12 ounces of the hard lemonade, which is 5% alcohol. But an ER resident who drew Leo's blood less than 90 minutes after he and his father were escorted from their seats detected no trace of alcohol.

"Completely normal appearing," the resident wrote in his report, "... he is cleared to go home."

But it would be two days before the state of Michigan allowed Ratte's wife, U-M architecture professor Claire Zimmerman, to take their son home, and nearly a week before Ratte was permitted to move back into his own house.

And if you think nothing so ludicrous could happen to your family, maybe you should pay a little less attention to who's getting booted from "Dancing with the Stars" and a little more to how the state agency responsible for protecting Michigan's children is going about its work.

Doing their duty

Almost everyone Chris Ratte met the night they took Leo away conceded the state was probably overreacting.

The sympathetic cop who interviewed Ratte and his son at the hospital said she was convinced what happened had been an accident, but that her supervisor was insisting the matter be referred to Child Protective Services.

And Ratte thought the two child protection workers who came to take Leo away seemed more annoyed with the police than with him. "This is so unnecessary," one told Ratte before driving away with his son.

But there was really nothing any of them could do, they all said. They were just adhering to protocol, following orders.

And so what had begun as an outing to the ballpark ended with Leo crying himself to sleep in front of a television inside the Child Protective Services building, and Ratte and his wife standing on the sidewalk outside, wondering when they'd see their little boy again.

A vain rescue mission

Child Protective Services is the unit of the Michigan Department of Human Services responsible for intervening when someone suspects a child is being abused, neglected or endangered. Its powers include the authority to remove children from their homes and transfer them to foster parents who answer only to the state.

By law, CPS officials are forbidden to discuss the particulars of any investigation.

But Mike Patterson, Child and Family Services director for the Wayne County district that includes Comerica Park, said that in general his agency's discretion is limited once police obtain a court order to remove a child from the parental home -- usually authorized, as in Leo's case, by a juvenile court referee responding to a police officer's recommendation.

"Once the court has authorized a child's removal," Patterson told me, "we cannot return the child to the parental custody" until the court has OK'd it.

But that doesn't explain why CPS refused to release Leo to the custody of two aunts -- one a social worker and licensed foster parent -- who drove all night from New England to take custody of their nephew.

Chris Ratte's sisters, Catherine Miller and Felicity Ratte, left Massachusetts at 10:30 the night of the fateful lemonade purchase after the police officer who'd reluctantly requested a removal order told Ratte the state would likely jump at the chance to place Leo with responsible relatives. But when the two women arrived at the CPS office early Sunday, a caseworker explained they would not be allowed to see Leo until they had secured a hotel room.

The sisters quickly complied. But by the time they returned to CPS around 10:30 a.m., their nephew had been taken to an undisclosed foster home, where he would remain until a preliminary court hearing the following afternoon.

By that Monday, April 7, when Ratte and his wife returned for a meeting with Latricia Jones, the CPS caseworker assigned to their case, no one in the family had been able to talk to Leo for a day and a half.

More investigation needed

At a hearing later that day, Jones recommended that Leo remain in foster care until she had completed her investigation, a process she estimated would take several days. It was only after the assistant attorney general who represented CPS admitted that the state was not interested in pursuing the case aggressively that juvenile referee Leslie Graves agreed to release Leo to his mother -- on the condition that Ratte himself relocate to a hotel.

Finally, at a second hearing three days later, Graves dismissed the complaint and permitted Ratte to move home.

Don Duquette, a U-M law professor who directs the university's Child Advocacy Law Clinic, represented Ratte and his wife. He notes sardonically that the most remarkable thing about the couple's case may be the relative speed with which they were reunited with Leo.

Duquette says the emergency removal powers of CPS, though "well-intentioned" are "out of control and partly responsible for the large numbers of kids in the foster care system," which is almost universally acknowledged to be badly overburdened.

Ratte and his wife have filed a formal complaint with the CPS ombudsman's office.

"I have apologized to Leo from the bottom of my heart for the silly mistake that got him into this mess," Ratte wrote in the complaint. "But I have also told him that what happened afterward was an even bigger error, and I would like to be able to say to him that institutions, like people, can learn from their mistakes."

A Lesson From Hezekiah

19 Then said Hezekiah unto Isaiah, Good is the word of the LORD which thou hast spoken. And he said, Is it not good, if peace and truth be in my days?
20 And the rest of the acts of Hezekiah, and all his might, and how he made a pool, and a conduit, and brought water into the city, are they not written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Judah?
21 And Hezekiah slept with his fathers: and Manasseh his son reigned in his stead.
1 ¶ Manasseh was twelve years old when he began to reign, and reigned fifty and five years in Jerusalem. And his mother’s name was Hephzibah. (2 Kings 20:19-21:1)

Most people who are familiar with the Old Testament remember the story about how Isaiah the prophet came to Hezekiah, informed him that his death was imminent, and how Hezekiah's prayer brought about a reversal of plans...and of the sun! (2 Kings 20:1-11) Hezekiah was granted fifteen more years of life (he would live to be 54).

Although the Bible speaks of a number of righteous and faith-filled things which Hezekiah did before the age of 39, it is silent about good deeds in those final 15 years. The verses above us tell us a couple of things, though:

• After the prophecy about Babylon, and how it would come and take his sons away to its palace (20:16-18), he seems rather ambivalent: "Is it not good, if peace and truth be in my days?"
• He had a son twelve years before his death.

Manasseh, described as exceptionally wicked in other passages, may have seen a father who had a reputation for being godly and righteous, but who was really ambivalent (in Manasseh's lifetime) to godly things. Perhaps he perceived his father as a spiritual hypocrite. We don't know for sure. But it certainly seems that Hezekiah had little-to-no impact spiritually on his son...at least, not for good.

And therein lies a lesson for all of us fathers.

Christian Education: The Parents

The parents are the primary educators of their children. This is not an option they can pass off to others; this is a biblical command. It is the parents who are to train and rear (and discipline, as needed) their children. (See Deut. 6 as one of several passages on this subject)

My wife and I have four children; we are the primary educators of our children. That we "employ" professional teachers to teach them the 3 R's or that we send them to Sunday School or Patch Club in no way diminishes our responsibility—we are only delegating that responsibility, temporarily, to another individual. If that individual does not train our children biblically, it is our responsibility to remove the children from that individual's tutelage.

What are some of the necessary qualifications for parents, in order that their children may receive a Christian Education? I offer several (if you have more, please add your wisdom to the discussion):

• Ideally, both parents are saved, dedicated servants of God. While there are many in today's older generation who testify of being brought up in an unsaved but upright home—where the expectations were the same or higher than what we expect of Christian people today—this is very rare today. Even among Christian families, an upright upbringing is not a given.
• The parents must be proactive, determined, and grounded in the Word, with the an attitude of "I'm going to do whatever God wants me to do so that I can rear my children to be His servants." Yes, that means the parents must avoid certain entertainments, and music, and activities, and people who will influence their child against God. Saved, dedicated servants will do those things. (Yes, there are children today who will become great leaders for the cause of Christ—as there have been others in the past—who did not have this kind of parenting. Praise God for His grace and His working in anyone's life!)
• If the parents choose to place their children in a Christian school, then both parents and school need to be on the same page where biblical matters are concerned. They must be standing together on God's Word. Parents must also be prepared to remove their children from the school if the school's philosophy deviates from the Truth. This does not mean the parents have to agree on every jot and tittle of how the school operates. The parents may wish the school had a different lunch program, or that recess were in the afternoon instead of the morning, or that their child took Geometry in 11th grade instead of 10th. These are not issues demanding separation, and parents sometimes need to get a grip on the fact that the school cannot (and need not try to) make everyone perfectly happy with everything. But when the school departs from the Word and does not train children biblically, separation is the proper response.
• If the parents choose to homeschool, they must do so within this same philosophy of Christian Education. Homeschooling is not a frivolous matter, and to do it properly is not easy. The parents need to provide a biblically-based curriculum that is Christ-centered, academically excellent, and well-rounded. They need to provide opportunities for the children to serve God. And, yes, they too need to "separate" themselves from organizations, etc., which do not promote a biblical philosophy of CE.