Today EdChoice runs the last installment in my series on the future of education and school accountability in a pluralistic society. I argue the contemporary challenge can be met with a focus on school choice, local polity and – perhaps hardest and most important of all – a new description of what education is and is for, something reformers are uniquely positioned to provide.

I particularly stress the need for the school choice movement to go beyond – without repudiating – its rhetoric about markets and competition:

The most important argument for letting parents hold schools accountable (through choice) is that parents are allowed to know what is true, good and beautiful. The whole point of education is to cultivate the power to achieve and appreciate these transcendent things. The whole challenge of education in a pluralistic environment is that we disagree about them, so there are major limits to government’s ability to act upon them. Empowering parents does not by itself make the whole problem of pluralism go away, but it must be at the center of any viable solution…

Schools of choice are allowed to know what they believe, and can therefore have both freedom and community. This is why federal data show private schools already outperform public schools dramatically across a wide variety of measures of school culture, including cooperation among staff, shared understanding of school mission, consistent enforcement of rules, administrative support of teachers, lower ethnic tension and satisfaction with working conditions…

Establishing a strong connection between parents and schools is another key benefit. This is probably a major factor in a notable fact that researchers struggle to explain: School choice produces very impressive increases in important outcomes that are non-cognitive and character-related—like high school graduation rates—even as test score improvements, while consistent, are more moderate. In one of the most important educational books of our generation, sociologist James Davison Hunter shows how the formation of the child is critically hindered when children perceive a disconnect between key authority figures in their education—especially parents and teachers.

This series has been a big challenge but a lot of fun to write. As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Not really, no. But at The Green Room I kick off a new blog series with some thoughts about how Greg Thompson’s paradigm of three inadequate models of the kingdom could be used in a new way:

Each of these types exist because it is responding to a real and important theological impetus. For this reason, each type has strengths that are theologically and missionally important. However, because each type tends to pay attention to its own pet concern to the detriment of other concerns, each type develops characteristic weaknesses.

Doesn’t this point a way forward? What if, instead of running around in circles trying to build a perfect church in the sky, we focused on the concrete models of godliness we find in other kinds of churches around us?

The disadvantage is, nobody gets to say they invented the new model of how to do church. The advantage is, we actually get the new model!

As always, your thoughts are much appreciated.

EdChoice has posted Part 4 of my series on education and pluralism, in which I focus on the individual, the family and the American experiment:

What is distinctive about pluralistic education is the view that the individual does not make the fullest use of these capacities unless he or she is aware of multiple possible alternatives – different visions of what is best and highest in human life – and free to pursue the ones that seem best to him or her, but responsible to choose rationally and wisely, not just on a whim or in obedience to raw emotions. We hold this view because we have a particular understanding of human nature, one that has always been central to the American experiment.

As always, your comments are welcome!

This is just unbearably sad. I’m not sure which would be worse, if this were coming from her or from her parents.

Please, please, for the love of God, I’m begging: Grow a soul and walk away.

The GOP, after years of gradual but strong growth, now dominates all levels and branches of US government. And it now stands for nationalism (the polar opposite of patriotism), Peronism, and at minimum the quiet toleration of racism, misogyny, anti-Semitism and shameless corruption.

Meanwhile, the Democrats will almost certainly purge themselves of the filthy Clinton machine, and have the opportunity to rethink the wisdom of identity politics rather than “doubling down” on it (as Jonathan Haidt is warning them not to do). One of the lessons of Trump is that if identity politics is sauce for the goose, it’s sauce for the gander. Some of us have been jumping up and down trying to warn our friends on the left about this for generations. Perhaps now they’ll listen.

And somewhere in America, an aspiring fascist dictator who is not buffoonishly un-self-controlled or totally lacking in political talent is watching carefully and taking copious notes.

As for me? All the confident predictions I made about what Trump would do in office will now, against all my expectations, actually be tested. So all the credibility I built up by standing against Trump may well be squandered.

Conservatism, I fear, may be dead. There will be no living in the same house with Trump and his slaves now, not without accepting the collar. And if even a sizeable minority of “conservatives” accept the collar, conservatism will become a word without meaning.

But God is not dead, and there is still much of the raw material of goodness in this country.

I’m grateful to Evan McMullin for trying, and for giving the rest of us the opportunity to do the same. Well done.