Transcript
I’d like to share a message with anyone working in private school administration—especially Catholic school administration—who is looking at the state of affairs in Catholic private schooling, examining their own school, and realizing that there are problems that need to be fixed. If you’re interested in discussing what the solution to those problems might be, this is for you.
The problem is, if we’re honest—and it’s difficult to have an honest discussion in these circles, because there’s usually so much pressure on administrators or school boards to just keep things going, just keep things floating as it were, treading water constantly—it’s hard to face the reality. That reality is that in modern private schools, there is a structural fatal flaw. There’s a structural flaw that we’re either going to fix and eliminate, or we’re going to allow this flaw to take down private schools. It’s just that simple.
I worked in a private school for almost a decade, spending time both as a teacher and as an administrator, and I saw the structural problem firsthand. It’s what actually led me to leave private schooling, because I knew that the problem was too significant and that it was just a matter of time before the private schools became dead men walking—unless this gets fixed.
And what the problem is, this: Modern education is dependent on faculty. Modern education is dependent on teachers. Think about what teachers do. Think about what teachers are asked to do, expected to do, for the schools to be successful. The teachers, in many cases, decide what books to use. The teachers prepare the lesson plans. The teachers actually execute the lessons they give—the lectures, the activities they direct. The teachers create the assessments. The teachers do the assessing, the teachers grade the assignments, the teachers record the grades, the teachers communicate with the students, the teachers communicate with the parents. The whole school community depends on teachers.
And we can be romantic about that. We can talk about how important teachers are and how great a vocation teaching is. But that’s all fake. That’s all dishonest, because there is a fundamental problem with this system of schooling. And the problem is that the number of teachers, the quality of teachers, and the quantity of those teachers is nowhere close to what is needed to staff private schools.
And the greatest challenge, the greatest limitation for private schools, is that they’re local. By their very nature, they’re local. So it’s not just that we need great, dynamic, charismatic teachers to make the schools work—it’s that we need to find all of those teachers in one geographical area. They need to live there. Maybe we can recruit them from other places, but they’re going to have to live where the physical school is. And the number of quality teachers simply doesn’t exist.
You can get people with bachelor’s degrees and teaching certificates. You can even get people with master’s degrees. But that has nothing to do with the issue of quality in the work that the teachers do—and we all know that.
So the problem, the structural flaw of private schooling, is that it is a system that depends entirely on a large army of highly skilled teachers—and that army of teachers is a myth. It simply doesn’t exist. And so if we actually look at the private schools, what we find is a faculty made up of people who are not qualified teachers.
You can try to get everybody excited and give the rah-rah back-to-school speech to the faculty, but it’s not true. The people who are employed as teachers are not these charismatic, dynamic, exciting, clear, articulate, intelligent, admirable people. They’re not. And we all know that they just don’t exist. There isn’t a significant number of them to man the private schools.
Not only that, but even on top of that—which makes things even worse—if you look at research, 25 to 35% of school faculty turns over every year. 25 to 35% of school faculty turns over every year. And what that means is that if the schools are dependent on the work of teachers, and those teachers are turning over—they’re coming and going at a clip of 25 to 35% per year—the entire school is in this constant state of change, constant reinvention of its curriculum, constant change in the content of the instruction, the assessments, the standards. Everything is constantly changing. It’s just a terrible plan for education.
And we have to be honest: There is a serious structural flaw in the whole philosophy of private schooling. It doesn’t work. It cannot work.
Did you know that today, half the number of students are attending Catholic schools than were attending in 1960? Half the number. The schools are closing. Schools are diminishing. The tuition at the schools is going up, and Catholic parents are looking at these schools saying the school is basically offering a public school education with a private school tuition. It just makes no sense. The plan, the model, makes no sense.
I received an email this morning from a school administrator, and he said, “Our school enrollment is declining. The school is obviously struggling, and we would like to transition to classical education, because we believe that that can generate some interest and grow the school.”
And my response is: Look, you can find another program, another band-aid, but you’re not addressing the cause of the disease. The cause is this flawed model of private schooling. So when you say, “I’d like to transition to classical education,” it’s not a matter of changing the books. This is a common error in thinking, and it’s promoted by publishers who all they want is for you to change the books. But it’s not going to address the problem. There’s a real structural flaw in modern schooling, and if it’s not addressed, we’re just keeping the boat floating while we know it’s full of holes and it’s sinking.
Now, historically, where this school model came from was public schooling in the 1850s. If you study the history of compulsory education and the public school movement—people like Horace Mann and then getting into John Dewey in the 1900s—the idea was that we could create these schools to provide this democratic workplace-readiness education to American citizens, and just bill it to the American people. Just bill it to the state. Bill it to the federal government.
And so financial concerns were taken away by taxation, the fact that these were government schools. And so this model was designed with no real concern for any financial sustainability. It was really just a theory. It was a political idea, sort of a dream of this utopian educational society where everyone would go to school and it would be free. It’s just a ridiculous, unsustainable idea.
And today we see America spending hundreds of billions of dollars on public schooling and having terrible results that we all know are not anywhere near worth the value of what’s being spent on education. But it just keeps going and going, and there’s just a constant complaint that we just need more money. We need more teachers. We need more of this failing system. We just need more of it, and that will solve the problem. But we all know that’s not true.
The real problem is that there is a structural flaw in this philosophy of education, in this model. And if we don’t fix this, it’s just never going to change.
Now, what’s even worse is that over in the private school sector, if we look at the history of Catholic parochial schools, we’ll see that they just followed the public schools. They saw what the public schools were doing, saw the new model, wanted to be up to date with their school model. So they imitated the public school—without the benefit of government funding, as crazy as that is.
So the Catholic parochial schools set themselves up according to the model of the secular public schools, and they were able to survive. If we look at the historical time period, they were able to appear to succeed, because it was a time of historic immigration, where Europeans were coming to America, and many of those Europeans were Catholics, and many of them were religious.
And so we had entire communities of nuns and sisters and religious brothers coming into America and running these schools. And so we had this extraordinary army of religious teachers available. That was totally unnatural, totally unsustainable, but it gave an appearance of success to the Catholic parochial system.
And ever since that immigration wave has calmed down, the Catholic schools have just declined. Like I said before, the number of students attending Catholic schools today is half of what it was in 1960. The tuition is constantly going up. The quality is comparable. We can say that the quality of parochial schools is better than public schools, but we’re talking percentage points. We’re not talking significant difference, and it’s also not a fair comparison, because the Catholic school gets to pick and choose its student body, and it’s a private school student body, whereas the public school gets whatever—whoever—is dropped off at the front steps.
So we’re often comparing apples with oranges when making these comparisons. And the difference is just a few percentage points, a few SAT points, maybe an extra 50 points in average SAT score—something like that. The numbers are insignificant. We can’t justify private school tuition. We can’t justify the costs of private schooling by looking at the results, because it’s structurally, fundamentally flawed. It’s a bubble, really.
It was an idea that was supported by an unnatural and historic immigration phenomenon that has ended, and now we’re left with schools staffed by lay people. And we all know that the quality of that staffing is very low; it’s very unstable. Turnover is very high, and the whole school system depends on this body of teachers—which, first of all, doesn’t exist in sufficient number to allow the school to be successful, and secondly, is constantly turning over and creating institutional chaos all the time.
And you know, as I said, I experienced this as a teacher. I sat and watched. I consider myself to be a good teacher who’s in education for the right reasons—very serious about study, very serious about my subject and instruction and my students. And I watched every summer as the school went into this desperation phase and started hiring people to fill teaching slots that were totally unqualified. I watched the teachers come and go, causing all kinds of trouble and chaos. I watched the school constantly changing—constantly changing programs, constantly trying to get better books or do this or start this program or go after this fad—all the while ignoring this giant red flashing signal that there was a structural flaw, a fatal flaw, in this school model that was not going to be overcome by any gimmicks.
And so as Catholic educators, we’re faced with this challenge: We’re either going to address this structural flaw and find a solution to it, or it’s just a matter of time before these schools fail.
I mentioned before getting a message from a school administrator talking about wanting to transition to classical education, wanting to grow his school. And all the language in the message was about the institution, about the school, about the number of students—and you can just see how the entire mindset of the school administrators is just lost at sea.
Do you think that John Bosco, who is a patron saint for us in school administration and Catholic education—do you think he ever sat around evaluating the size of the student body or the facilities and things like that? Or was he just concerned with a certain standard of formation for individual children and then providing that standard to as many children as possible?
There was no concern for the institution, as if the institution is the end of education. The end of true education is the formation of individual children. That’s the end of education. And so we can just see that the whole mindset in modern private schooling is just lost, lost at sea.
So what the administrators have to do is come up with gimmicks and plans that please as many people as possible, so that we can have a sufficient number of students enrolled to pay tuition, we can have a sufficient number of donors giving money to support the school. And it’s just a giant mess. It’s really an institution that’s lost at sea with no real direction.
Now, I’m not here to criticize private schooling. I worked in private schooling. I know that there are lots of people who are sincere and who want to do good and are driven by the right motives and so on. But what I’m saying is that the model is the problem. We don’t need to be revved up. We don’t need motivational speakers. We don’t need more money to pour into this broken system. We don’t need different gimmicks or programs to move around. We don’t need different books or to decorate the school differently. None of that nonsense is going to address the problem.
We’ve got to reorganize private schools so that the model of the school itself is not dependent on teachers. That’s the fundamental flaw.
Now, I left private schooling in 2008 because I saw this. I saw not only the problems in private schooling, but I saw the direction that education was moving with emerging technology—even at that time, in 2008, and it was very crude at that time—but I saw where things were going. And to be perfectly honest, I said to myself: Homeschooling is going to annihilate private schooling as this technology develops, because everything is going to become accessible to homeschool students. There’s going to be no more need for children to go to the local school in order to have access to all of the learning materials and study resources. The number of resources is going to multiply over time, and the private schools are just not going to be able to compete with homeschooling.
And we see that now developing at the college level, where small colleges are closing because they can’t function—because the larger colleges are just offering online degrees and online programs and wiping out the value of local, smaller, less selective colleges. It’s just being eliminated.
We see the same thing happening with the rising number of homeschoolers. The reason why private schools have been able to survive is because the homeschoolers just don’t know what they’re doing, and so they’re pulling the kids out of school, taking care of education themselves—but they’re basically running the private school model at home and having equally unsuccessful outcomes.
You know, the parent imagines that they’re going to replace the school teachers. The whole system is just again dependent on the teacher, and the outcomes suffer for it. Mom is pregnant. She can’t be relied upon daily. Mom doesn’t know the subjects. Mom is sick. There’s stuff going on; the family’s moving. They’ve got to—it’s all dependent on the teacher again. And the thing fails for the same reason private schools fail. It’s the model itself that’s flawed.
So I came out of—I left private school work and said: I’m going to devote myself to finding a solution, or building a solution, for this problem. And I started the Classical Liberal Arts Academy.
What I knew was that a program needed to be developed that was not dependent on teachers. It was not dependent on teachers. So if a school installs this program as its core, as its curriculum, it is not dependent on teachers. Teachers can come and go. We don’t need these charismatic, dynamic, super teachers.
There’s a great article called “The Great Teacher Myth,” which I recommend you look for if you’d like to read about it. But the school doesn’t need great teachers. It needs a great system. It needs a great system. And all of this romantic talk about the great teacher—we need to put that stuff behind us as just romantic storybook stuff. It’s not real life.
What we need is a great, stable system of education: a stable curriculum that supplies all the study materials, has all the courses already prepared, has assessments prepared, provides all of the grading, all of the standards for the grading, keeps all the records, does all of the administrative work, provides all the curriculum work, all the administrative work, all the assessment for the school—so that the whole core, the whole foundation of the education offered by the school is standardized and stable and permanent.
Now imagine building a school around that kind of a foundation. The people working in the school are not the sources of the course material themselves. They’re not the sources of the assessment. The school doesn’t depend on them. The kids don’t depend on them. The system provides for an orderly progression, a progressive development of the children through the entire curriculum, and it can include courses that you’re never going to find teachers to teach. There’s really no limit to the content that can be made available.
But the school is built on this permanent, unchanging foundation. The whole community changes. The school actually now serves a purpose. The school actually now has an identity. The school actually now can say to the parents and students: “This is what we offer. This is what we study.” The kids who graduate—they can come back in five years and see that the students are studying the same courses and things that they studied. We can build a culture. We can build a community that shares an educational experience. The school actually has an identity, because modern schools don’t have an identity.
What I’ve built is that system: that system of both curriculum and philosophy, of lesson materials, of assessments, grading, record-keeping—all of that administrative work, all of that real educator work that schools depend on, which is currently expected from teachers but can’t be provided by teachers. It’s provided by our system, and so a school can be reoriented to have a foundation, to have a core operating system that is actually capable of working.
It’s worth noting—and I don’t want to get too long here, but it’s worth noting that back in the time of the Jesuits, just to give you a vision of how this works—back in the 16th century, 17th century, when the Jesuits were working to reform and preserve classical Catholic education—people often compared the Protestant schools at the time with the Jesuit schools.
And the Protestant schools had favor because they had these sort of celebrity Protestant teachers working at the schools. And so people would be running around after the celebrity teachers—who would come and go, of course—but they had this cult of personality or celebrity culture in Protestant circles, and the schools would boast of their teachers.
And then in the Jesuit schools, they were being run by Jesuits who didn’t consider themselves very impressive—relatively boring, religious men who were working in education. But everyone knew that the outcomes of the Jesuit schools were better than the outcomes of these Protestant schools.
And the Jesuits explained that the strength of their school program was the program itself. It didn’t need these dynamic, charismatic, celebrity teachers to make it work. The system itself—which was explained in their Ratio Studiorum (you can read a copy published in 1599)—that system of education was the strength of Jesuit education. It’s why it was so effective. It’s why it could be spread everywhere. Because there actually was a system.
And in the Protestant schools, there was no system. It was just celebrity individuals getting people excited—the same kind of thing we see today. But the system is what makes for effective education.
And modern Catholic schools, modern private schools—they don’t have a system, if we’re honest. As administrators—and I know what the schools do—they don’t have a system. They don’t have the foundation that they pretend to have. It’s this big facade of orderliness and standardization. They give this image to the public, but it’s a facade. It’s not real. Behind the scenes, under the covers—it’s chaos. And that’s the real structural problem with not just Catholic schools—I don’t mean to pick on Catholic schools—but with private schools, especially, and even public schools.
The model is flawed. It was an experiment in the 1800s funded by this endless source of government tax money. The Catholic schools had an appearance of success because of an aberration in immigration that caused there to be this appearance of success that wasn’t sustainable.
But there is a structural flaw in modern schooling, and the good news is that we can fix it. We can fix it.
So if you are a school administrator and you listen to what I say, and you know that it’s right—you know that this is the flaw, this is the elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about—and you want to improve a school, you want to really provide children in your community with the best education possible—I’d like to work together to make that possible.
I’d like to explain it in practical detail how to do it. I’d like to show you all the resources. I’d like to make the resources available. I’m happy to let you use them at no cost, or do whatever is necessary to help you see and implement it—because I think that once school administrators see what can be done, what should be done, and what can be done—once they see it—they’ll see, I wouldn’t say all of the problems in their schools resolved, but many of them, the most important of them.
And then it will open the door for all kinds of good things. Like, there are great people in our communities—charismatic, dynamic, devout individuals who we would love to have involved in the formation of children as they come through school. They’re not necessarily academic teachers. They don’t necessarily have time for assignments, grading, and making assessments and doing all this administrative work. We just want them to influence the children personally.
The schools can allow that if the system is in place that takes care of all the real hard work of education. So it not only solves the problems and eliminates this structural flaw, but it creates the opportunity for real culture to develop and for beautiful school culture to develop. So we’re not dependent on all these fads and imitating public schools to try to have some goofy appearance of school culture. We can have real school culture.
And we can employ a small number of the best people, because that’s all that will be necessary to run a school that has a system that largely takes care of itself. And plus, the work that we do in the Classical Liberal Arts Academy will all be at your service to help you in the management of your school.
So if you’d like to talk about implementing our program to solve this structural problem—you know, we’ve been working on this for 17 years now—so I don’t recommend trying to do it on your own. I don’t think you’re going to make something better than what we offer. And our situation is financially stable, and we’re able to be very generous in working with schools, because we want schools to succeed.
But the schools need to understand their mission. The mission of schools is no longer to bring education to a community. Everyone has access to education directly through all of the technology and resources available. That’s no longer the fundamental mission of a school—to bring learning into a community.
The fundamental mission now is to develop culture, to provide culture. That’s the fundamental purpose of a private school in the 21st century. But in order to serve that purpose, you have to have your educational system permanent and stable and effective—because if your school depends on teachers, it’s just a matter of time before it fails.
So again, my name is William Michael. I’m the director of the Classical Liberal Arts Academy. It’s a program that was developed to bring this stable idea of education directly to individual students—which is why we primarily serve the homeschool audience. But it’s also arranged so that it can be employed by schools and serve as the core administrative system of private schools.
And I would love to discuss all of the implications of this. So if there’s a thought, “Well, what if we could transition to classical education?”—don’t listen to the fake classical education people who are just going to sell you books and gimmicks and leave the problems in place.
If you want to talk about real classical Catholic education, you need to talk to the Classical Liberal Arts Academy.
And you might say, “Well, what about accreditation? You know, we’re a modern school. We’ve got to get kids…” The Classical Liberal Arts Academy is accredited by Cognia. So all of that talk of accreditation and modern application—it’s all baloney. The Classical Liberal Arts Academy, the program that I developed and run, is accredited by Cognia.
So if you’d like to talk, I would be happy to get into all the practical details. I know exactly what you face as an administrator. I know what needs to be done. I know what the problems are, and I think that we can develop a solution. And I’m eager to help you develop a solution.
I’m happy to come to your school and hang out and talk about the solutions. I’m happy to get on a Zoom call and talk through things. I’m happy to meet once a week and talk and just continue to chew through this and dig into all the practical details of what the problems are and how they can be changed—because I think we have answers. I think we have solutions.
So if you are aware of the problem and you’re honest to discuss it, and you’d like to dig into a real structural change and improvement in a school, I’m here to help.
So again, the program I run is called the Classical Liberal Arts Academy. You can find us online at classicalliberalarts.com. If you want to get in touch with me, just go to the website—I’m accessible on the website. Or you can write to me by email: just write to mail@classicalliberalarts.com, and we can set up a time to talk, have a Zoom meeting, whatever.
But if you want to fix it, we can—but we’ve got to be honest, and we’ve got to roll up our sleeves and get to work, because what’s being done is not working. We all know that. We need to change it and fix it. No gimmicks.
I hope that’s helpful. God bless.
Mr. William C. Michael, O.P.
Headmaster
Classical Liberal Arts Academy