Aclassical charter school that was preserved after Republican-backed candidates took over the local school board just posted the top state test scores in the district. Students at Merit Academy, a 3-year-old K-11 public school that opens its 12th grade in 2025, also posted the best scores among the four districts that families in the Woodland Park exurb of Colorado Springs can choose from under open enrollment.
While test scores scratch the surface of student and school academic quality, these do help vindicate Teller County parents dissatisfied with extended school lockdowns, an increase in screen-based schooling, and creeping politicization of taxpayer-provided education. Due to these frustrations, this group of parents started a new public classical school in 2021 and took over their school board that fall to keep Merit open and growing. Merit nearly doubled in size the year after that. Charter schools are public schools run by independent boards that can be closed if students perform poorly.
The Denver Gazette offers a data visualization tool for state English and math tests. It shows Merit Academy’s top standing in the Woodland Park Re-2 district on both measures of academic performance.
The below graph that Merit Academy Headmaster Gwynne Pekron sent to parents, teachers, and staff last week shows the classical school’s test scores at No. 1 compared to the Woodland Park School District, Manitou Springs, Park County, Colorado Springs Early College, and Colorado Springs District 11.
The state scores for the last school year, 2023-24, came out for specific schools and districts on Aug. 29. Like their counterparts across the United States, Colorado children are still struggling to overcome lockdown-caused learning declines. This year, some grade levels of Colorado children performed as well as the same grade level in 2019, but many average results remained below pre-lockdown levels.
High schoolers have particularly shown less recovery of lockdown losses than younger students. Math scores are especially abysmal. Here are two graphs illustrating Colorado high schoolers’ PSAT results, from Colorado Public Radio.
Merit’s high schoolers — it had no eleventh grade in 2024 — also outperformed these state averages on the PSAT, a college entrance prep exam.
“We are extremely proud of these results and the work they represent, but aren’t done striving for improvement by a long shot,” Merit Academy founding board member John Dill told The Federalist.
The school board majority has publicly pledged support for high student achievement and parent choice at all Woodland Park schools, and points to Merit as an example of the effectiveness of their leadership on behalf of all local taxpayers and students. In the last three years, the board has raised teacher pay 16 percent and instituted performance-based raises.
Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist. Her new book with Regnery is “False Flag: Why Queer Politics Mean the End of America.” A happy wife and the mother of six children, her ebooks include “Classic Books For Young Children,” and “101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation.” An 18-year education and politics reporter, Joy has testified before nearly two dozen legislatures on education policy and appeared on major media including Tucker Carlson, CNN, Fox News, OANN, NewsMax, Ben Shapiro, and Dennis Prager. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs who identifies as native American and gender natural. Joy is also the cofounder of a high-performing Christian classical school and the author and coauthor of classical curricula. Her traditionally published books also include “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books.
The Washington Post’s Valerie Strauss is at it again: amplifying far-left partisans in their war on quality education for American kids. On June 8, she wrote about a report claiming schools that use a classics-based curriculum are vanguards of “right-wing Christian nationalism.”
Schools that emphasize personal virtue, English grammar, classic literature, patriotism, original source-based history, traditional and rigorous math and science, and classical artistic training are “designed to attract Christian nationalists with specific imagery and curriculum,” Strauss slanderously claims. I’m not making this up: She and the report claim the American colors of “red, white, and blue” and pictures of the American founders are racist dog whistles.
Such imagery on the schools’ websites is “designed to attract White conservative families,” Strauss says, citing the report. The implicit bigotry is appalling — assuming some people wouldn’t be interested in patriotic ideas simply because of their skin color. Who’s the racist: people who think American patriotism has a skin color or people who don’t?
Strauss and the report she’s citing also attack schools that promote virtuous behavior to their students, because “values” and “virtues” “stand as shorthand for quoted scripture.” We can’t have kids learning about the deep religious beliefs that created their unprecedented equality, liberty, and opportunity, now, could we? That would be horrible! They might, you know, shovel driveways for the elderly, stay faithful to their spouses, and donate their time and money to charity!
According to these anti-American, anti-Christian partisans, who clearly reject the founding American statesmen’s views about the purpose of public education, there’s absolutely no room for teaching children virtue, morality, or religion in public schools. What an interesting message to Christian parents from the people who control public education.
The report makes sure to target highly successful networks of classical schools, including those run by parents trained at and given free curriculum from Hillsdale College (my alma mater), the Great Hearts Academies, and Liberty Common in Fort Collins, Colorado, a model for many other classical schools. Strauss paints it as nefarious that a guy who wrote in The Federalist noticed such schools exist for the “purpose of forming young minds,” as if every single school in existence doesn’t form the minds who enter.
What she really means is that only the left should be allowed to shape people’s minds. That’s what this report and article are really about: boxing out of public education anyone who doesn’t think exactly like politically extremist teachers union leaders do.
This is another illustration of the reality that today’s left doesn’t believe in sharing the public square, public funds, or anything else with people who don’t parrot their views. This is why leftist-run schools don’t educate, they indoctrinate: You can’t educate without conversation.
Monologues are not conversation. Conversation is not shouting down ideas, banning them, or slandering them. That’s why suddenly conservatives are the only ones who believe in free speech, honoring our country’s fathers and mothers, and educating without indoctrinating: The left has abandoned these common goods in the pursuit of political power.
This report is the work product of the Network for Public Education (NPE), founded by Diane Ravitch, who used to believe in educating kids about their American heritage with original source documents. I’d bet you her U.S. history book is on the shelf in many of the schools this report targets because it is in my kids’ Christian classical school.
But Ravitch has subjugated herself to leftist ideology as she’s become more professionally dependent on corrupt teachers unions. She now seeks to foist a similar intellectual degradation on innocent kids. It’s a shame.
Given this connection, it’s no surprise NPE is financially, ideologically, and professionally connected to the nation’s largest teachers unions, which are gigantic, far-left political operations. The Chicago Teachers Union gave NPE and its political action fund, Network for Public Education Action, a series of grants that look like a startup endowment, according to CTU’s own website and its tax forms. From 2014 to 2016, the union’s foundation gave NPE $265,000, according to its tax forms.
CTU is a large affiliate of the massive national American Federation of Teachers union. It is notorious for extremist behavior, including shutting down Chicago schools in 2022 in defiance of elected officials’ decision to restart school post-Covid.
CTU takes in $32 million a year, and the AFT takes in more than $200 million a year, according to their public tax forms. CTU has something like $60 million in assets, and AFT has $140 million. Each has multiple other arms that also rake in millions each, as well as functioning as distributing houses for all the public money they collect.
The NEA, by the way, takes in $600 million a year, and has more than $450 million in assets, according to its tax records. Teachers unions are essentially giant political money laundering operations and among the top donors to the Democrat Party.
NPE says it has also received money more recently from the Schott Foundation for Public Education, which Peter Cook says received more than $1.3 million from unions between 2011 and 2019, according to their disclosures to the U.S. Department of Labor. Schott itself discloses AFT and National Education Association union funding on its website.
Like teacher’s unions, which strongly support political extremism such as teaching small children about gay sex and hiding kids’ gender struggles from their parents, NPE is an ideologically far-left organization. A conference attendee noted the organization considered canceling or moving its 2016 conference in North Carolina after the state passed a law requiring men to stay out of women’s bathrooms. The report’s retired journalist coauthor is a longtime school choice opponent and teachers union mouthpiece.
So, it’s quite rich for an organization connected to some of the biggest leftist political organizing operations in the United States to complain about politics in public education. What they’re really complaining about is competition, which is gaining steam because of how badly these far-left union activists are mangling public schools.
Union money goes all across the country to target any education innovations that threaten their control of the system. Classical schools are one of those threats.
Lots of parents aren’t happy with the current results of unions’ giant political influence operations masquerading as public education. Instead of responding to parents’ concerns about the lack of quality in their kids’ schools and the proliferation of extremist politics, the interest groups making billions off public education belittle concerned parents as Nazis. (Obviously, “white Christian nationalism” is to them a synonym for “Nazi,” a deeply offensive slander that is somehow OK for the left to throw at anyone who disagrees with their politics.)
“[T]he classical/right-wing sector is rapidly growing. Forty-seven percent of the schools we identified opened since the inauguration of Donald Trump in 2017,” the report says. It includes zero reflection about how the rise in leftist extremism since Trump’s tenure may have contributed to this rapid exodus of parents from conventional public schools.
If more parents get better schools that don’t happen to force teachers to launder billions of dollars to the Democrat Party through mandatory union dues, this entire multibillion-dollar power-mongering racket is in danger. This is not at all about the best education for kids; it’s about money and power.
Merit Academy’s vision: students prepared for success in a free society, promoting civic responsibility, and contributing their talents in a flourishing republic.
It seems a lifetime ago when The Federalist introduced you last fall to Merit Academy in Woodland Park, Colorado. It’s a no-politics public school designed and overseen by local parents, opened in just one year of intense planning and work. These past seven months have seen this public contract school grow and flourish, despite many challenges.
“When you think back to where we were a year ago, it is surreal,” says Gwynne Pekron, Merit’s director of development and chief action officer, beaming. “This was a dream for many, but a vision to us.”
Merit Academy is a classical, Core Knowledge school that opened on August 23, 2021, to 184 full-time students and more than 80 part-time homeschool students. The parents and community members who built Merit sought an education that would challenge children and build lasting friendships, without the controversial politics often found in public schools.
“Merit Academy is a shining example of our virtues of valor, goodness, and perseverance,” reflected local parent Heather Scholz. “It meets the demand of parents who have given up on the direction of modern schools.”
When we last checked in with Merit Academy, they were working hard in the classroom basement of Faith Lutheran Church, which generously opened its doors to Merit when the school’s board struggled to find a space big enough to accommodate parent demand. Where are they now? After calling both Faith Lutheran and Mountain View Methodist churches home, Merit Academy is now in its “start-up Bear Den” at a re-purposed hardware store in a local strip mall. Outside recess space was kindly offered by neighboring Our Lady of the Woods Catholic Church. Classroom walls are portable, lined with sound blankets to alleviate noise. From these walls hang children’s artwork and school projects, ranging from idioms to drawings of George Washington to designs of engineered future cities.
“For the first time, my son doesn’t ask for a ‘sick day,’” says Tarin McNeese, a sixth-grade parent. “This is not to say it’s easy—he works at it—but when challenged, his teachers guide him. I personally appreciate the school’s transparency with what is taught.”
The Merit Bears study science, English, history, reading, mathematics, Latin, language lab, and writing. In the halls, one hears lively songs of the upcoming spring performance, recitations of numbers study, and discussions of what it means to be valorous, one of the five Merit virtues. The classes are driven by Merit’s vision: students prepared for success in a free society, promoting civic responsibility, and contributing their talents in a flourishing republic by pursuing beauty, truth, and good.
The desire for choice is stronger than ever, not only in this beautiful mountain community but across the nation as charter school enrollments climb. In November 2021, this school district had its first contested school board election in more than a decade, and Merit’s existence, school choice, and critical race theory were all on the ballot. All four school-choice candidates swept the election, but their change agenda faces fierce resistance from the defeated minority. The new board majority is addressing the taxpayers’ concerns about district facilities operating at approximately 50 percent capacity. They are committed to stopping the 20-year trend of severely declining enrollment and family exodus.
The local school district was losing families who decided to live elsewhere or place their children in public and private schools outside Teller County, a picturesque rural location encompassing Pike’s Peak and adjacent to Colorado Springs. To bring families back, the new school board members support a parent’s right to know what is being taught. They support Merit Academy and school choice for parents. They plan to increase staff salaries and right a ship that has been listing for 20 years.
While holding her two-year-old, Nicole Waggoner, one of Merit’s founders, said, “Merit adds educational choice many people want. These families appreciate our virtues, our curriculum, and our school, so our enrollment numbers are through the roof. We’re drawing families up the pass [from Colorado Springs], which contributes to a thriving community.”
Image courtesy Merit Academy.
Seeing smiling faces in the “Bear Den,” one may wonder what challenges Merit Academy has overcome. “Starting a school is not easy,” reflected Pekron, “but it is worth it, especially when you hear your kids talking about the War of 1812, how a cat’s eyes adjust at night, or how they acted responsibly that day. It’s worth every breath.”
So, what are the biggest challenges now? Pekron paused, then said: “No matter how deep the vision and how detailed the plan, the biggest challenge is being at the mercy of others.” Glancing out the window, she continued, “As a contract school, grant foundations did not understand we were cut from the same cloth as a charter school, but different. Most said, ‘Come back when you are chartered.’”
Despite those financial disappointments, the most touching and inspiring funding came from grassroots contributions and encouraging words from supporters all over the country following the September 2021 Federalist article. To you, Merit Academy is deeply grateful.
One of Merit’s house mottos is “Fortune favors the brave.” This spring, Merit Academy has had greater financial support, with grants and donations totaling more than $400,000. Merit board member Mary Sekowski said, “It’s wonderful to receive these blessings of needed financial support that support start-up expenses.”
Seed funding isn’t the only thing start-up schools struggle with. “The facilities piece has been more difficult,” said Waggoner. “There are few available spaces for demanded growth.”
Woodland Park lies west of Colorado Springs at a stunning 8,500 feet elevation. As in most mountain communities, few existing buildings could house a school. Merit’s facility challenges landed it in an old hardware store, one of the only large-enough spaces open.
Pikes Peak as seen from Woodland Park, courtesy of Gwynne Pekron.
While many would view Merit’s experience as a struggle, the newly elected school board recognized a community need to charter Merit and sought a win-win solution for Merit’s space needs. The district’s declining enrollment leaves district taxpayers with a hefty burden to maintain partially empty buildings, costing more than $2.6 million annually.
“The more you spend on buildings, the less you spend on students,” noted Sekowski. “Taxpayers prefer their tax dollars support an increase in staff salary or a boost in student programming rather than pay for half-empty buildings.”
Due to declining enrollment, the district’s building space is at approximately 51 percent of functional capacity, according to a Denver consulting firm the district hired last fall. The capacity is forecasted to decrease to 32 percent at the middle school building and 35 percent at the high school in four years. The taxpayer cost of operation and maintenance for these two buildings alone exceeds $1.5 million per year.
Recognizing Merit’s need for space to grow as a new district charter school, the district explored the possibility of offering Merit space at the half-capacity district middle school, which would decrease district facility expenditures and honor high community support for Merit Academy.
“With Merit paying the building expenses, district funds will be redistributed to students and staff, not spent on underutilized building space,” Waggoner stated. “Besides saving taxpayers money, it honors previous community commitments to learning by using these spaces for their original intent — the education of children. This is especially timely with district consultants discussing school closures.”
This idea generated resistance from a minority in the community that closely resembles nationwide opposition to newly elected conservative school boards. This group has posted vitriol on social media, saying things like “F— Merit” on Facebook, protesting at local school board meetings, yelling at and heckling the newly elected directors, using public comment periods to call directors “racist” and accuse them of trying to establish religion, and identifying with national efforts to stifle charter schools and school choice. One of the new school board directors even had his truck keyed during a board meeting.
Image courtesy Merit Academy.
In March, students celebrated Dr. Seuss, wearing mustaches and reading Dr. Seuss books. As if written for Merit Academy and all parent-initiated schools out there, Dr. Seuss advised, “If you get a chance, take it. If it changes your life, let it. Nobody said it would be easy. They just promised it would be worth it.”
Yes, it is worth it. Despite its many challenges, Merit Academy thrives, with steadfast community support. The school opened in fall 2021 with nearly 200 students and a large waitlist. Its 2022-23 enrollment is forecasted to grow to more than 370 full- and part-time students, with additional students on its still-large waitlist.
“We are no longer just a hope or a dream,” Waggoner reflected. “Merit Academy is the school many families have hoped for.”
To learn more about Merit Academy or support it, please visit https://merit.academy.
John Dill is director of the Merit Academy school board and a retired lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Air Force.
If there’s one lesson to be learned from the red sweep in Virginia this week, it’s that politicians, schools boards, and education administrators shouldn’t mess with parents, especially on the well-being of their children. Many more school districts across other states still have to learn this lesson, and to that end, one Wisconsin parent is enlisting the help of attorneys to go after her son’s public school.
On Wednesday, counsel for the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (WILL) sent a letter to the school district of Kenosha, the scene of violent riots last summer and the site of the ongoing trial of Kyle Rittenhouse, threatening legal action if the Kenosha Unified School District does not allow a concerned parent to observe her son’s class as required by federal law.
It started when the mother of a student at the Kenosha School of Technology Enhanced Curriculum, a public charter school, became concerned about her son’s dropping grades. According to WILL, the student had reported a bevy of classroom disruptions that contributed to his struggle, including fighting, profanities, racial epithets, and property damage, as well as a new math curriculum that does not involve homework nor a textbook.
In September, the mom decided to take action, figuring the best way to help her son succeed would be to observe and understand his learning environment. She requested access to see his classroom for herself, but both the school district and the school reportedly denied her requests multiple times, giving her inconsistent rationale as to why she couldn’t enter.
For instance, Bill Haithcock, the chief of school leadership for the district, allegedly told the mother that an in-person observation by her would serve “no educational program,” ignoring the school’s charter contract, which says, “Parents are important partners in the educational program at KTEC.” Haithcock reportedly further noted that he didn’t think it was the “best idea right now” to “expos[e] the class to an outside visitor.”
However, as the WILL letter notes, the district’s policies and social media pages indicate that many other types of visitors such as mentors, chaperones, and nonprofits are welcomed.
Other times, the school district allegedly told the mother that as a parent, she was “not connected to the educational curriculum” and that allowing her to visit the classroom would open the floodgates of other parents wanting to observe. WILL hopes Kenosha schools change course and “view parents as partners in the education of children.”
According to federal law signed by the Obama administration in 2015, these denials are illegal, as WILL argues in its letter. Under the Every Student Succeeds Act, public schools must have systems in place that involve parents in educational settings, meaning the Kenosha district must have a policy that grants parents the “observation of classroom activities.”
This is just the tip of the iceberg of parents’ rights in their children’s education. They also have a right to access curriculum, see progress reports, engage in communication with staff, schedule yearly parent-teacher conferences, and participate in their kid’s classes.
The Kenosha school district does have policies in place for parent involvement and “classroom visits,” yet it has so far stonewalled this concerned parent.
In response to The Federalist’s request for comment, the Kenosha Unified School District’s Chief Communications Officer Tanya Ruder said, “KUSD is aware of the WILL letter and is working with legal counsel to review the matter at hand.” The Kenosha School of Technology Enhanced Curriculum did not respond to a request for comment by press time.
WILL said it hopes Kenosha schools change course and “view parents as partners in the education of children.”
“Public school classrooms should not be a ‘black box.’ Parents have the right to know what is being taught in classrooms,” said WILL Deputy Counsel Dan Lennington.
This controversy over whether parents are partners in their children’s education or whether they should be staying out of schools has shown to have remarkable electoral significance this week, especially in the Virginia gubernatorial race. After candidate and former governor Terry McAuliffe said, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach” and doubled down on keeping parental involvement out of public schools, Republican candidate and parent advocate Glenn Youngkin won the race in the same state President Joe Biden won by 10+ points just one year ago.
“Federal and state laws impose simple and straightforward transparency requirements on public schools such as allowing parents to sit in on classes and the right to view curriculum,” Lennington told The Federalist. “But if public schools continue to treat parents as adversaries by concealing what’s going on inside school buildings, they face the real risk of an electoral backlash, like we just saw in Virginia.”
Kylee Zempel is an assistant editor at The Federalist. Follow her on Twitter @kyleezempel.
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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