Today is Friday, January 17, and this is William Michael of the Classical Liberal Arts Academy as I worked through the accreditation process over the past couple of years, one of the main points of the standards that cognia looks for is to see whether the institution has the well being of students as its primary focus, and when it talks about the well being of students, it is explicit that it’s not referring to only academic well being, but also general well Being or non academic well being.
And the standard asks, does the institution, does the school operate in a way that has the well being of the learners, of the students as its primary focus? And I’m always challenged by by thoughts about that standard.
I appreciate the challenge.
And as I think about modern schools, modern education, the way schools operate today, especially private schools and colleges and universities.
I don’t understand how these institutions can say that they operate with the well being of the student as the primary focus.
And there are just so many layers to this.
And this is, this is really, I would say, the main thing that I struggle with, that I wrestle with as I think about reforming Catholic education, I ask myself about everything that we do every day, every question I receive, everything we do, I ask myself, does this have the students well being as its Focus, or are we getting lost in our own educational talk, our own career pursuits, imitating modern businesses and the ways that things are done being influenced by the marketing appeals of business services that that are trying to get us to adopt their products or services.
Are we just lost in all of these other considerations, or are we staying focused on the well being of our students? And it’s really difficult.
It’s difficult because every question I receive, every email, every message, the question will come in, and contrary to what one would think, most parents are not actually thinking of their students well being first.
They themselves have other interests, other concerns, other priorities, and so I’ve always got to be careful to pump the brakes before I respond to questions or requests and ask on behalf of the students, does this have the students well being in View? My wife recently had to clear up some enrollment time confusion at Catholic University where she’s studying, and we were paying attention to how the university handles contacts from students and following the ways of modern institutions.
My wife wrote with a relatively simple question, and it took three or four days to get the issue resolved.
Actually, I don’t think it’s resolved yet.
But it took three or four days, and it bounced around to four or five different administrators, and you can quickly see that the university is this massive system with this complex administrative system that that’s made up of all of these different full time positions, and we’ve Got 345, employees handling a single contact from an individual student.
And while Now, here’s where things get confusing, many people would look at this and say, Oh my goodness.
Thank you so much.
Thank you for all of this attention.
What great support you offer.
What great service, what great care you give to your students.
That when a student writes with a problem, this whole team of highly paid administrators all get to work and help to come to some resolution.
Oh, this is so, so nice.
And you see that’s, that’s the shallow thinking in not only in education, but in business in general, the shallow thinking that lots of attention, layers of activity, all kinds of levels of escalating contacts and getting people involved and collaborating and forwarding messages and getting back and forth.
That’s what good service is really about.
That’s what customer care is really about.
That’s what it means to put the students needs first.
But that’s a very shallow view of this situation and and I would argue that this is why the schools are failing.
This is why the schools are struggling, why they can’t come up with a financially responsible plan for education.
Because if we judge customer care as it were, let’s just talk about the schools as a business.
If we judge customer care based on the quantity and quality of feedback and communication, if we look at it in a shallow way, we can think that lots of attention, lots of involvement, lots of collaboration, is a mark of great customer service.
But there’s a problem with this shallow view.
The problem is that all of this activity, this isn’t charitable work.
All of this activity is being billed to the students.
The salaries of these administrators is simply passed on to the students.
And if we find that, you know, oh man, these administrators, they’ve been they’ve been so busy, they’re overworked.
You know, what we need to do? We need to reorganize these offices, these administration offices, and we need to hire more people.
We need to create even more full time positions.
And the the administrative positions in schools just continues to multiply and multiply, and it’s never accountable to any long term benefit of the students, as long as everyone keeps looking at the shallow interactions and judges the quality of care by how much attention you receive, while totally ignoring the ballooning costs of attending these schools, things look to be okay, but when we when we zoom out and think more broadly, more thoroughly, we say, Hold on a second, this school is charging over $3,000 per course in.
For students who are seeking to study theology for use in ministry in their local parishes, as faith formation teachers and catechists, these are volunteer positions.
These are not paid offices at the parish level.
My wife works in faith formation.
She doesn’t get paid to do so.
So her pursuit of graduate level studies in theology is for her charitable work.
She’s pursuing it for the sake of her students, and for some projects that we may be undertaking with our parish in the future, she’s seeking to serve the church generously, being well formed In the teaching of the Church, understanding the mind and intentions of the bishops.
That’s why she’s seeking to study at Catholic University.
And she receives very friendly responses, very friendly care.
And I’m really not criticizing the people working there because they’re very nice, they’re very friendly, very helpful, and my wife loves them, and I don’t blame her, but again, that’s all zoomed in and very shallow, And as friendly as the people may be, as kind and generous as the administrators may be, when we zoom out, we find a system that’s not sustainable.
It’s not considering the well being of the students or of anyone really, even of the school in the long term.
And I think this is the problem, the real problem that needs to be addressed for Catholic education to be reformed.
We have to stop talking about things in such irresponsible and shallow ways and realize that a plan that’s not sustainable, a plan that just continues to balloon in expenses that can’t be afforded, that really doesn’t make Any sense to have a $40,000 degree program for someone seeking to serve as a volunteer in faith formation really doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, especially in the 21st century, when technology is so Great, and I should add that this $40,000 program is almost entirely online.
So yes, experientially, everything is great.
Experientially, everything for the student, for my wife, is great.
But that’s only because we’re not looking at the big picture and considering whether this is sustainable.
And I should mention that the university is struggling to keep the program open, that my wife’s in for these kinds of reasons, no one’s going to pay $40,000 to study catechesis.
Very few people, I should say so.
This is the problem.
There’s no question that the teaching is good.
There’s no question that the professors and the other students are great.
There’s no no question that the administrators are helpful and friendly.
But the big picture is not sustainable, and it’s just going to continue to swell and swell until it finally pops and the thing crashes.
And that’s what’s happening in Catholic education, we can focus on an individual school, let’s say, and show all the cool stuff that’s going on at the school.
We could say, “Ah, look at this high school, this Catholic High School. It’s got 500 students enrolled. They’re doing great on their SATs. They’ve got good sports programs, music and theater. They’ve got great art classes. The culture is really nice. What a great school this is.”
Yes, unless we ask some more questions like: well, how many kids are in the area?
Oh, there’s 10,000 Catholic high school age kids in the area.
How many does the school hold?
Five hundred.
So it’s a good experience for a very small number of the Catholic high school population. Where are all the other kids? Do they have a good experience? Is a good experience available for…?”
“Ooh, no, no. They’re in public schools. Some of them are in Protestant schools. Some of their parents have chosen to home school because they don’t want to send their kids to public schools or Protestant schools, and so this, this height, this Catholic school is publishing all of its good news in the newsletter and pictures on social media by while ignoring the fact that it’s really not designed to serve the needs of the Catholic population, and the prices are exorbitant.”
You can have a Catholic day school (that means the kids are just there during normal school hours, from eight to three or so), and the tuition can be $16,000-$18,000, per student. And you look at this and you say, is this plan for Catholic education realistic? Is this is this plan serious? Do people really think that this is serving the needs of the Catholic population? Why are we ignoring so many of the students.
Why are we creating this model of schooling in the name of Catholicism that’s only accessible to wealthy people? Is that the message we hear from Pope Francis? You can see there’s this practical disconnect between all of the social justice messaging that we hear from the church clergy and the actual projects that the clergy organize and administer. The two things don’t go together.
Here where we live out in North Carolina, we have a huge parish. There’s no Catholic school in our entire county. There are thousands of Catholic kids. Not a single Catholic school.
We live in a society where education is not a privilege for the elite, but actually required by law. So we live in a society where education is compulsory for all children, and we’re not going to provide for their education as Catholics, and the reason that we give for not providing for it is that it’s just too expensive.
And if we ask, “What exactly do you mean? Is too expensive? What’s too expensive?”
The answer is, “Well, running a school is way too expensive. It costs millions and millions of dollars a year to have a school.”
And the assumption there is that there’s only one way to run a school. There’s only one way.
And it’s this principle that I talk to my wife about all the time as we manage the CLAA; it’s that the adults working in education grew up going to school in the 80s and the 90s, And they’ve basically taken their experience into the 21st century, where things are so different in terms of technology and resources, and they’re just lazily, complacently doing the same things, more or less, that they experienced when they were in school, and they just sort of sprinkle in some technology, just to tip the hat, to to that technology.
But what we’re not doing in education, what we’re not doing, especially as Catholics, you know, the public schools, they can, they can choose to be in a fashion inefficient. They can choose to be ineffective, because they just keep drawing more and more tax revenue. They don’t care. They’re not accountable. They’ll get billions and billions of dollars more.
But the Catholic schools are so foolish and acting like they can just keep going with the public schools down the same path, and we’ve got to shake them out of their stupor and say, “Hey bro, you don’t have the resources that they have, you’re going to end up broke. They can afford to be prodigals, because they’re billionaires. If you don’t make good use of your money, if you don’t have a sustainable plan for what you’re going to do, you’re going to end up in the gutter.”
And we see this in modern Catholic education.
We see Catholic schools closing, not because they’re being replaced by new schools, but because they can’t be sustained, the bishops will announce a school closing, and they’ll talk about it as if it’s just some inevitable, necessary step with the same language that they use to talk about the so called vocations crisis, and all of these failing endeavors are spoken of as if they’re all just inevitable, as if we’re doing things the way they’ve always been done.
“We’re doing things creatively and prudently, we’re thinking outside the box to find solutions that serve the mission of Catholic education, but there, it just doesn’t work.
And that’s not true.
It’s not true the Catholic schools and all of those involved in Catholic schools, whether it’s a Catholic elementary school or a Catholic University, if we were to ask them, Where did you learn this model of education? Where did you learn to organize a school like this.
Where did you learn to manage a school, to manage student affairs, to organize the curriculum, to organize these grade levels and classes and organize the faculty like this? Where did you learn the design of a facility like this? Where did you learn this was it? Was it Catholics that worked all of these things out? Did they work all of these practical applications out from Catholic principles, or has the Catholic Church simply try to keep up with the Joneses and pretend that the Catholic Church as an institution is just so big and powerful and old and wealthy that it can walk alongside the American government schools, which have a an almost bottomless treasury of resources.
And my argument is that the Catholic schools, I believe, have have really been negligent in just lazily irresponsibly trying to play public school with no long term plan for how they’re going to pay the bills, and they’re just going to keep going and keep going as they as they watch these schools continue To close and these programs continue to close, and colleges continue to struggles.
Monasteries and convents empty and close.
They’re just going to keep going and keep going, ignoring all of the red flags, until the thing finally closes and they’re.
Going to say, well, oh, well, the school’s closed off.
We go to something else.
The teachers will go get jobs at other schools, public schools, private, non Catholic schools.
They won’t care.
The bishops will just close the schools.
Priests will just shut down the schools and everyone will just go on as if education is is some kind of luxury service or extra credit.
And again, we live in a society unlike any medieval society.
We live in a society where education is compulsory.
The kids have to go to school, the kids have to be educated, and we’ll often find priests, bishops, many Catholic families scoffing at home schoolers without acknowledging that even if we all said we would like to send our kids to school, it’s not possible.
The school tuition is $10,000 $15,000 close to $20,000 it’s just not it’s just not realistic.
And when parents, I would argue, honorably, take things into their own hands and say, Well, you know what, we really want to focus our children’s education on the Catholic faith that’s more important to us than the other benefits of schooling that’s more important to us than social activity, because we can find social activity by other means.
It’s not it’s more important than sports.
We can participate in sports in non academic organizations.
We’re really not sending the kids to school for these extracurricular benefits.
We’re really concerned about the kids being in a Catholic environment, where they’re immersed in Catholic culture.
That’s what we would hope the Catholic school would be.
And with that not available to us, we really don’t want to send the kids to a place where there’s no Catholic culture, and we’d rather keep them home, maintain a focus on Catholic culture and just figure out how to string together all of the other issues.
And I think the parents that do that are commendable, and yet they get scoffed at as if they’re just freely choosing to live like crazy people when they’re actually trying to do what the priests and the bishops are acting as if they don’t need to do.
And so the question that I think we should be asking is, if there are 5000 Catholic kids in a parish area, how can we provide for the Catholic education of All of those kids, and if we don’t do that, if we don’t take up that question, we’re really not taking responsibility for the kids in the parish, the kids in the area.
You think about our Lord using the image of a shepherd as a model of a Christian minister.
And the bishops are literally the shepherds of the church.
And Jesus clearly teaches that the model of the shepherd is that the shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.
He says, if there are 99 and one goes astray.
So if the shepherd is responsible for 100 sheep, does he choose to pick his favorite 20 and ignore the other 80 and just publish in the the shepherd’s newsletter all of the achievements, how fat and full the 20 are that he’s chosen to care for, as if he’s not responsible for the other 80.
No, Jesus says he’ll even leave the 99 for the sake of the one who’s lost.
And so there’s a responsibility for one.
100 sheep.
You don’t get to pick how many you’re going to care for and just leave the other I’m a father of 10 children.
All of our family resources are divided among 10 kids.
I could easily raise two kids and send them to Harvard.
I but I’ve got to raise 10, and I’ve got to make sure not that two of them get my attention, the ones that I like, and the other ones, I just toss them some bread every couple of days.
I’ve got to provide for all 10 of them, and my plan in managing the education and care for my kids is a plan that works for all of the children, not just the strong ones, not just the pretty ones, not just the ones I like, but all of them a father can’t choose to care for two of his kids and just ignore the other six and say, Oh well, oh well.
You know the van only holds or the, you know, the sports car that I bought, I should say the sports car only holds three people.
So, you know, the other six kids, they’ll just have to stay home, because only me and my two darlings fit in the sports car.
The other kids can go kick rocks, or they can run.
They can they can walk if they want to.
But what can I do? The car only fits three well, you bought the car genius and you didn’t need to buy the three seater that no one can fit in that doesn’t serve the needs of your family.
You chose to do that you weren’t issued that by destiny.
You went and bought a car that doesn’t serve the needs of your family.
I, on the other hand, have a big, ugly, beaten up old van that our families used for the past almost 15 years, because we’ve got to transport 12 people, or we used to, at least.
But I just feel that.
I just feel that the Catholic leaders, whether that’s clergy or leading laity, they just don’t take responsibility for the actual need.
We’ve got this overly supplied school that serves a very small portion of the students in need of an education, and the others, they just have nothing.
And yet, this is the clergy that’s going to lecture us on all kinds of social justice issues like wage disparity, the need to care for the poor, and all of these things, and it’s just not manifest in any way in practice, in the church’s own institutions.
Now I’m not being negative and critical, because I know that these things are complicated, and the institutions that exist have been established for in some places, almost a century.
But the reform isn’t an option.
The reform is a necessity.
It should have it should have started long ago.
The reform is a necessity.
And what’s needed for a reform is not cosmetic.
It’s not just some friendly, nice guys walking around, smiling, shaking hands that are going to change things.
There are, there are deep changes needed at the level of educational infrastructure, how schooling is actually organized, how education is administered.
Catholics really have to cut the fat and ask, what are the priorities? What is the one thing necessary? And we have to make sure that we do that before we start meddling with extracurriculars that we don’t need to do at a Catholic school.
We have to ask whether school itself is even the right approach to education.
We’ve got to distinguish schooling from learning, schooling from teaching.
They’re two very different things, schooling a.
Assumes the need for kids to study in schools, and I could make the argument very strongly that there’s really no academic need in the 21st century for schooling.
There’s need for learning, there’s need for teaching, there’s need for tutoring, but there’s really not a need anymore for schooling, and yet, all the resources are being spent on schooling while we neglect teaching and learning, because the learner is not the focus of the work.
The learner is not the focus.
Now, when I started the Classical Liberal Arts Academy , I wasn’t a home schooling advocate.
I worked in private schools.
I worked in an expensive private school where I was the Upper School classics teacher.
I worked with all the rich kids in town in Charlotte, which is a wealthy city to begin with, but it started to gnaw at me that these kids that I was investing myself in were already well off.
And if you if you would remove me from their lives, I said to myself, they’ll all be fine.
All these kids that I’m with every day, they’re already well provided for.
They’ve already learned more than they need to learn at their age to be well off, and meanwhile, there are kids all over the county who have no Catholic education at all.
And it started to grieve me thinking about what I was doing and how, how I was wasting my ability, my opportunities, and not putting them to use for the good of the whole Catholic community.
And so when I went into the work of the Classical Liberal Arts Academy , as I said, I wasn’t a home schooling advocate.
I didn’t even intend to create any kind of home school program.
My intention in the Classical Liberal Arts Academy , my intention was to offer tutoring to kids who couldn’t go to the private schools, so that they could have not only Catholic education, but classical education in a way that was convenient for their families.
And the interest in it spread quickly, not only locally but but also remotely.
And that’s what led me to move things online.
And then the whole online program developed in my work became primarily a work that served homeschooling students, but that was never a plan, and yet now in 2024 17 years, 16 years, 17 years after or 2025 actually 17 years after founding of the Classical Liberal Arts Academy .
I would never think of starting a brick and mortar school because it’s completely unnecessary again, before Catholic schools might have responded to home school programs and said, Well, we’re accredited.
Our school is accredited.
We’re subject to accreditation standards.
We have accreditation evaluators come in and evaluate the program we offer our students diplomas and transcripts that are accredited by a prestigious international accrediting agency.
So we have certain things that we’ve got to do because of the high standards that we adhere to.
The problem with that is that in 2025 that no longer has anything to do with a brick and mortar school, it no longer has anything to do with the big facilities and the faculty and all the grade levels and the busses and the parking lots and the football fields.
Accreditation has nothing to do with any of that.
As you.
Know, the Classical Liberal Arts Academy , which I run with my wife.
We run it by ourselves.
The tuition is $25 a month, an online program that teaches everything from elementary reading all the way up to metaphysics and theology, including classical languages, on and on courses and subjects you can’t even get at the local Catholic school.
Our program, which operates entirely online has the same accreditation.
I can show you emails from MIT Princeton, Cal Tech Duke on and on with admissions directors.
Inviting us to send our students, assuring me that our diplomas and transcripts being accredited are acceptable, despite the fact that we’re entirely online.
Our students, working online, have the same opportunities as the kids in the $20,000 a year private schools.
That’s what I call educational reform, to come to a point where we’ve offered or made available to our students the same benefits, the same outcome for A minute fraction of the cost.
That’s educational reform, and it’s beginning now to work itself out, and the fruits of it are beginning to be born in 2025 and they’re going to continue to be born.
And the prices are not going to grow.
The costs are not going to balloon, because it’s an actually reformed system of education that has the students well being as its focus.
It doesn’t allow people to treat it the school that is.
It doesn’t allow people to treat it like a prostitute, to pimp for their own profit.
It’s not a source of jobs.
It doesn’t exist to fund an administration.
It doesn’t exist to make architects and engineers wealthy.
It’s an institution for students, and that’s what is required for educational reform, and I thank the accreditation agency for challenging us on that standard of focusing on the well being and the needs of the students, because it really led us to examine all the different things we did, all the different options that were presented to us and make difficult decisions that, in the long run, made the reforms possible.
What’s interesting in recent news locally and I mentioned this in another talk.
What’s interesting locally is that the local Catholic schools here in Charlotte, in the Charlotte area, have actually chosen to move away from the cognia accreditation, which is the largest international accrediting agency in the world.
They they work with over 40,000 schools.
They’ve chosen to move away from that accreditation and turn to a specifically Catholic accreditation program that’s run by Catholic University of America, and the talk that comes from the schools is intended to sound very religious.
You know, we have to make sure we’re raising kids for.
Heaven.
We have to make sure that we’re faithful Catholic institutions.
Nothing is changing.
The cost of the school is not changing.
The structure of the school is not changing.
The actual long term problems of the school are not changing.
The accreditation is being downgraded, and this is being justified by appealing to zeal for the Catholic faith.
But nothing is substantially changing.
And the parents in the diocese, the parents are going bonkers because they’re paying $17,000 a year and the tuition checks they’re writing are not for faith formation.
They’re paying $17,000 a year to have their kids prepared for admission into selective colleges and universities prepared for entrance into a competitive market, and the school is talking about Catholic schooling as if It’s a glorified faith formation program that’s going to continue to cost $17,000 and the parents are saying we’re going to sue, because you’re basically pulling the rug out from under us in this Catholic school, and There’s no way we’re interested in paying $17,000 a year for a glorified faith formation program that follows a school model of the public and private schools, it makes no sense.
We’re not going to pay for this downgrade that’s being promulgated in the name of the Catholic faith, and we can see that this talk of reform sprinkled with religious language and good intentions, I trust, is really no reform, because the outcomes are not improving, the outcomes are being reduced.
The accreditation is being downgraded, but the tuition won’t be downgraded, and that’s what the parents are, I think, justly upset about.
But in the Classical Liberal Arts Academy , as much as people will scoff at it because of its simplicity, because of its efficiency, because of its affordability, as much as people will scoff at it, they’re going to have a very difficult time explaining why their big, expensive school ends up with the same accreditation as our simple, efficient, flexible, affordable program, and the answer is, our program provides the children with what they need, and the Modern schools don’t do that.
We’ve put the children first and have chased all of the wine, I mean, the money changers and the vendors.
We’ve chased them all out of the temple, as it were, and said, Get out of here.
This isn’t a place for you to come to make money for yourselves.
This isn’t a place for you to come and earn a salary and benefits and retirement plan.
This is a place for children to learn, and if you not primarily interested in teaching children in a way that has not only their short term academic benefit in mind, but also their long term well being.
And you don’t belong here, and the policies are going to be changed, the methods are going to be changed, the curriculum.
Going to be changed.
Everything is going to be changed.
And when we present this to cognia, as radical and crazy as it may seem, cognia could clearly and easily see that we were satisfying all of the Standards of Accreditation, but doing so in a very different way, and they offered us nothing but support and encouragement.
And I would argue that the Classical Liberal Arts Academy has exposed the falsehood of any attempt, any attempt to make excuses for the expensive, inefficient and really undesirable Catholic schools that exist and serve just a tiny portion of the Catholic population.
There’s no more excuse for it.
And if you’re a Catholic parent, thinking about the education of your children, I want to challenge you.
I really want to challenge you to think of what really is necessary.
What do the kids really need? Are you worried about college admission? Then I can tell you.
All they need is a good transcript and a high school diploma.
They don’t need the extracurriculars, they don’t need the facilities.
They don’t need the school uniforms.
They don’t need any of the smoke and mirrors that the Catholic schools have packed into this package that they sell for $17,000 that has nothing to do with college admission or career preparation.
It has nothing to do with it as far as socialization or extracurricular activities, all of those things are available without enrolling in a school.
There’s just no excuse.
And what are you going to do take on some huge tuition burden upon your family, especially if you have multiple children, and what are you going to do? Send your wife to work to pay the tuition for a school program that’s not necessary.
What are you really going to do? What’s really the best thing for your kids? Are you willing to think outside the box and find a sustainable solution, or are you just going to push the kids out to the bus stop and pretend that what you’re doing with all of the negatives that come along with it, it’s just the only way to do it are you going to use college admission as an excuse? There’s no excuse.
And what I would encourage Catholic parents to think about all parents to think about is how, rather than continuing to keep this old, leaking, crumbling school model afloat by investing hundreds of 1000s of dollars into it, I’d recommend that you move on to a new and sustainable model that actually makes sense in the 21st century, and allows your family to use its resources for other necessary things.
For other necessary things, use the money that you save to allow mom to not have to work, to stay home, to care for the quality of life of the family, to care for the children, to supervise the children.
Take the financial pressure off the family for this foolish private school burden that’s no longer necessary, and think of how in how many ways your family life would improve or could improve.
Imagine having all of that tuition back in your checking account that’s being wasted on private schooling in 2025 where you send kids to expensive schools only to have teachers log them into online resources and.
For them to work with at school, where they boast about giving all the kids laptops and having a Wi Fi driven campus.
Don’t you ever think why we would send kids to a place to have them work online when they can work online at home? There’s a need in our generation to rethink Catholic family life, to rethink household economics, to rethink education.
And what’s ironic about it is that the Classical Liberal Arts Academy , in as much as it promotes classical Catholic studies, authentic Classical Studies in the Scholastic tradition, I would argue it’s actually on the cutting edge of technology and represents the state of the art learning in the 21st century.
We can’t allow short term experiences blind us from the long term consequences of modern Catholic education.
Reform is necessary.
It’s not a dream.
It’s not something we’re talking about.
I would argue that it’s already available in the Classical Liberal Arts Academy , and it’s only a matter of time until its fruits begin to convince people that it’s so.
And I hope you get on board and enjoy the benefits as soon as you can.
God bless you.
Transcribed by Otter.ai.
