According to Gallup’s weekly survey only 33% of employees are actively engaged in their work while another 25% are actively disengaged. The data regarding teacher and student engagement is equally as discouraging with engagement rates that have plummeted in the past ten years to levels not seen since the early 1980s. As I work in a school, work with other … Read More
Marketing Research for School Innovation
All change involves risk. Change that is truly innovative requires understanding and awareness. Research helps minimize the risk inherent in the decisions around innovation. For the school leader or educator, research provides the intelligence to make informed decisions based on real needs and parent expectations. Awareness of what parents (and students) want allows us to respond to those needs and … Read More
Christian Education and the City: Leaders, Givers, and Planters
We began this series by giving cultural, missiological, and visceral reasons why engaging the city is essential for the future of K-12 Christian schooling. Why have we chosen to highlight the city in particular? While most American cities have been growing steadily over the last twenty years, Christian schools in the city have been disappearing, and fast. Between 1990 and … Read More
Welcoming Disability in Christian Schools
Recently I was talking with an administrator who has long been supportive of inclusive Christian education for students with disabilities, and he reflected on the attitude of parents of students with special needs. “Every time they come, it’s a question of ‘won’t you please include my child?’ Why is that? Their child belongs here; we are incomplete without students with … Read More
Bright Promise Fund and Chicago: An Innovative Approach to Fundraising in the City
In an introductory entry for CACE on the topic of Christian schooling in the city, Dan Olson highlighted the cultural, missiological and visceral reasons why urban Christian education will continue to grow in importance. His piece presents the foundational reasons why cities need Christian education. This entry in the discussion focuses on the issue of affordability and sustainability in urban … Read More
Peace Preparatory Academy and Atlanta: Pursuing Shalom in the City
Atlanta is a historic city. A city that has been the center piece for major movements in the Civil Rights era, a city considered to have the most African-American wealth in the country, and a city in the top 20 of cities visited by international travelers. Yet it is also a city that has the largest rich and poor divide … Read More
Restoration Academy and Birmingham
In 1983 the five funerals in his first year of planting a church were too much. Dr. Anthony Gordon, a young African American pastor, was weary and broken from burying teenaged boys from his community- casualties of gang and drug violence. He recognized that his Sunday morning and midweek services could not compete with the predatory forces devouring his community. … Read More
A School and a Church at the Heart of a City
From the author Beth Green of Cardus: My editors have confirmed that certainly you may reprint the blog with the following accreditation at the top of the piece: “This article was originally published by Cardus:” What is it that makes a city? Judging by the ones I’ve visited lately—London, Abu Dhabi, Chicago, Sydney—it is global finance and skyscrapers. When people … Read More
Boston Trinity Academy and Boston
Boston Trinity Academy educates students from diverse backgrounds in an academically demanding, Christ-centered community, inspiring them to lead lives of faith, integrity, and service. The school’s motto is Via, Veritas, Vita, the way, the truth, and the life, which in our curriculum becomes the integration of faith, learning, and service. We believe that faith alone can be ignorant, that learning … Read More
The City School and Philadelphia
The city is not as it seems. I moved to Philadelphia as a boy in the late 1980s. My father had been pastoring in rural Ohio, but he grew up in the Philadelphia suburbs and my grandfather grew up in South Philly, so I think my family thought this move was going to be some sort of a homecoming. The … Read More