Over the years I’ve kept a short list of assertions that often occupy the minds of students and parents alike. The power of these assertions tends to wax and wane from one decade to the next, but in general, each has staying power in our social imagination.
The inclusion of technology is essential. By 2014 the majority of Americans had a smartphone. That was not the beginning, but rather the climax of the push to chase technology in the classroom. This was the same year that Google Classroom hit the market, a development that sought not only to make educators’ lives more efficient, but also to control how curriculum is shaped and delivered. I routinely fielded questions from prospective parents who thought our “tech-lite” policy was ill-conceived. Ten years later, I no longer get the question. Parents intuitively know that chasing technology for its own sake is unwise; most do not want their children in front of screens for any significant amount of time; and current neuroscience research is backing this position strongly. New Covenant has been phone-free for more than a decade and judiciously commits to technology when there is a clear mandate to do so.
Classical, Christian education is only for the elite, and ignores the non-liberal or common arts. This assertion was more prominent twenty years ago. It stems from the fact that classical education was the default curriculum tradition for nearly all of America’s elite preparatory schools and Catholic schools in the 18th – 20th centuries. Returning to this tradition, after wandering for a century in the wilderness of progressive educational models of John Dewey, seemed a bit stuffy and perhaps mildly elitist. It doesn’t have to be this way. Mortimer Adler of the University of Chicago quipped that “the education that is good for the wealthy is good for everyone.” He was a strong proponent of the idea that public education should return to this tradition. In the Christian expression of classical education, greater attention is given to embracing the whole person. At New Covenant, we strive to aid those who might need help gaining such an education through a robust tuition assistance program. Additionally, recent programming adjustments at the high school level (J-term offerings) allow for the exploration of the common arts.
Students will have more friends and more opportunities in a larger school. This assertion is more complicated because it entails more variables. It may be true that students who fail to make friends in a smaller context have “no place to go to find them.” After nearly 30 years at New Covenant, however, I would affirm that this is generally not traceable to school size, but to a variety of factors in play within interpersonal relationships. Viewed another way, a school the size of New Covenant actually expands opportunities. Average athletes who would be recruited over in a bigger school actually get playing time. School-wide activities are possible because of manageable numbers. What academy can take its entire high school by charter bus to Washington, DC for an overnight excursion of the city every year? New Covenant can do such things and a dozen others that are not options in larger contexts. While the larger school may in fact have many choices, students realistically cannot take advantage of all of them all.
Advanced Placement (AP) is the gold standard for education. The College Board is a private organization that has long behaved like a cartel in the field of education. It controls the PSAT/SAT exams, drives college admissions processes, publishes AP curriculum for high schools, and engages in political advocacy. Moreover, AP courses tend to inform and drive curriculum courses and pedagogy. For example, the current pace of AP Latin requires 18 lines of translation per night, likely more than an hour of homework in one discipline. This alone drives out significant reflection upon the text because the pacing is breathless. AP Biology is prohibitively dense, and countless more examples abound. We therefore severely limit AP offerings.
Furthermore, when looking at the data from ISM and other sources, college admissions offices are so inundated with competitive student transcripts that AP is only one small snapshot on a student record. Colleges are routinely looking for students who stand out: enter the classical, Christian student and a college guidance program that knows New Covenant Schools. In the college admissions world, applicants who take the highest level courses that their school offers are the golden key, not AP or even dual enrollment (more below). Additionally, college admissions representatives are continually impressed with our program and our students through regular campus visits to our school.
Dual Enrollment is the wave of the future. There is no question that colleges are facing the great student “drop-off” in the next decade and are responding according to their bottom line. Fewer students are choosing to go, and the total number of available students is slowing due to population decline. Many university models are recruiting younger ages by offering college credit while a student is in high school, establishing themselves as another institution that dictates curriculum and testing at the secondary level. Moreover, colleges monitor and evaluate high school teachers, curriculum, and pedagogy. However, liberal arts education is to form the individual as a whole person in age-appropriate ways. Reaching down to high school and accelerating students through college-level material circumvents true learning. Students desperately need age-appropriate instruction, predictability, and support structures to learn optimally. New Covenant features personal teacher attention and availability, working with students through each stage and year. This process cannot be fast tracked.
A new analysis released in October 2024 by the Community College Research Center (CCRC), tracked what happened to every high school student who started taking dual enrollment classes in 2015. Almost 30 percent of the dual enrollees earned a bachelor’s degree in four years, but 58 percent had not earned any college degree or any post-secondary credential within this four-year period. Arguably, dual enrollment credits are not making a huge difference in time to completion, on average. The credits do not always transfer favorably, or, more importantly, count toward a student’s requirements in a major, which is what really matters and holds students back from graduating on time.
New Covenant Schools
Unique among the offerings in the greater Lynchburg area, New Covenant remains the premier classical, Christian program of the region, firmly established and vetted over three decades. According to ISM (2023), schools like New Covenant are a prime feature in the market who “design a truly independent, mission-and core values-based curriculum.”
