(Background: When a local group wanted to start a new school some years back, they asked me to write a proposal. Here is that proposal, which anyone may use for ideas and inspiration.)

A new private school is coming to your neighborhood. You can be involved with the school in several ways—parent of a student, investor, donor, volunteer, and community support. To create something we can all be proud of, that's the goal.

AlphaAcademy serves boys and girls in Grades K-9. The overarching concern is preparing students for success throughout life. The school favors a traditional curriculum and classical methods but energized by an important modern concept: education should be fun.

K-12 education is viewed as a systematic process. Children must master the basics, which in turn become the foundation for wider, deeper study. Finally all students can become fully educated citizens.

The school places great value on safety and serenity. The Greek concept of striving for excellence in all things (Arête) is an inspiration.

The central problem in American K-12 is that experts demoted academic achievement in order to pursue social engineering. Public schools are often handicapped by inferior methods such as Common Core, Constructivism, Sight-words, and a casual acceptance of mediocrity. Behold the “dumbing down of America.”

The proper goal of a school system is to lift every child to each one’s potential. Today, our country is sub-educating millions of children, even though we can easily teach 99% of children to read, do arithmetic, find Antarctica on a globe, and understand all those thousands of elementary things that define our civilization.

School is not only about learning. It's also about character. We encourage honesty, honor, and self-discipline. Parents are expected to be involved with their child’s development and with the life of the school generally.

Please call for more information….

ADDENDUM: This proposal is simply an amalgam of my top dozen favorite ideas. The main thing is to reflect on what is emphatically NOT in this proposal: no sight words; no common core anything; no cooperative learning; no constructivism; no learning styles; no social emotive learning; no CRT; no hostility to phonics; no contempt for direct instruction; and no opposition to memorization and the acquisition of fundamental knowledge. The Education Establishment plays a destructive game where they concoct bad ideas and pull everybody into discussing the merits of the bad ideas. Warning: there are no merits. The road to improvement is to eliminate entirely all the bad ideas that have been introduced in the last 75 years. Get back to what has always worked. You will find these traditional ideals throughout the best private schools.