Teaching 'Mockingbird' on the education frontier

High school meets in what used to be the supply closet. Younger students share a one-room schoolhouse in the backyard of a house in a remote Phoenix suburb, writes Chandler Fritz in Harper's. Refresh Learning Center, a Christian microschool in an outer suburb of Phoenix, charges $7,000 for annual tuition. But it's free to students who have a $7,500 voucher from Arizona's Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) program. Which is everyone.

Walnut Grove children attended a one-room schoolhouse in "Little House on the Prairie"

A former teacher, Fritz set himself up as a tutoring company and taught a summer reading course to eight students between the ages of 12 and 17. Parents paid him out of their ESA accounts. He taught To Kill a Mockingbird.

Refresh draws several dozen students, and is growing, he writes. Only one of the four teachers is certified, but they like the Christian values, the small size and the four-day-a-week schedule.

"Come this fall, almost half of all American schoolchildren will be eligible to leave public schools with assistance from the state,"Fritz writes. "In recent years, microschools, 78 percent of which are unaccredited, have boomed across the country: they now enroll roughly the same number of students as all Catholic schools combined."

Refresh was started by a dairyman/pastor and his teacher wife, who also run their evangelical church from their home.

"The school day starts with the Pledge of Allegiance and prayer," followed by chores, such as mucking out the chicken coop, Fritz writes.

Academics are organized by achievement rather than age. "There is a thirteen-year-old in second grade and a thirteen-year-old in high school."

Students spend four hours on math, science, English, and history, then have a reading period in which they choose from "a vetted assortment of books." Students won't learn how to have oral sex, but they might pick up a book "with chapter headings like how can we use dinosaurs to spread the creation gospel message? (Answer: by 'using the true history of these missionary lizards.')"

Fritz started the Mockingbird course with a discussion of Scout's first day at school. "Miss Caroline" is annoyed because Scout can read, "failing to meet her expectation of country-bumpkin ignorance."

Students had plenty of experience with teachers who didn't like them and public-school classmates who exiled them to the "weirdo table" at lunch for reading the Bible. (One girl said she misses her gay friends from the table for misfits.)

“My first-grade teacher . . . made me sit alone in a corner, away from other kids, so I had nobody else to talk to,” said Aaron, a sixteen-year-old boy wearing a trucker hat and a lightly affected pencil mustache. He went home and told his mom that his teacher had sat him in a back corner facing a wall for the entirety of the school day.

The teacher told his mother he was a disturbed child. He was homeschooled until the microschool opened.

Aaron, who is dyslexic, found confidence and pride in the workshop, writes Fritz. "At Refresh, a student like Aaron sees his skills valued at school — sees them, quite literally, in the school’s shelves and desks, which he built." He plans to take welding classes this fall and hopes to be an Air Force mechanic.

Fritz is refreshingly respectful of students of faith and their families, something I don't often see in mainstream media. But he worries that Arizona is not trying to set any curriculum standards or measure whether ESA-using students are learning.

“The philosophy of the legislature when they passed universal ESAs was that the accountability will come from parents,” state Superintendent Tom Horne told Fritz.

Parents love their kids. But are they able to judge whether they've mastered reading, writing, 'rithmetic and science? What about those missionary lizards?