Investing in Classical Teacher Training Can Reverse America's K-12 Education Decline
Source: Helen Raleigh. "Recovering US Education Begins With Teacher Training Like This." September 24, 2026. thefederalist.com
The Gist
The author argues that America's declining school test scores aren't a lost cause because a free teacher training program from Hillsdale College is showing promising results. She points to teachers who left the training excited and better equipped, and to one Hilldale-affiliated school with excellent test scores, as evidence that better teacher training leads to better student outcomes.
Conclusion
If more schools invest in teacher training like the free Hillsdale College seminars, America's K-12 education future will be brighter than current declining test scores suggest.
Premises
- National test scores (PISA, NAEP) show American students' reading and math performance has dropped sharply, with 15-year-olds' scores at decades-long lows.
- The Hillsdale Center for Teacher Excellence offers free, content-rich professional development seminars that many other paid programs fail to match in quality or affordability.
- Teachers who attended the seminar reported gaining practical, immediately applicable teaching methods and renewed inspiration and purpose.
- Schools using the Hillsdale classical model (content-rich core curriculum, phonics, Latin, great books, Socratic discussion, virtue/citizenship focus) attract parents seeking rigorous academics and character development.
- Hillsdale Academy itself has achieved strong measurable results, placing in the 97th-99th percentile on Iowa Tests and producing National Merit recognition.
- Some teachers attending these seminars work in public charter schools, showing the model's benefits are not confined to private education.
- The contrast with Nikole Hannah-Jones' daughter's experience in an underperforming school illustrates the cost of ideology-driven schooling choices versus academically rigorous alternatives.
Assumptions
- Teacher quality and training are the primary drivers of student outcomes, more so than funding, socioeconomic factors, or systemic issues.
- The classical education model (phonics, Latin, great books, Socratic method) is inherently superior to standard public school curricula.
- Positive anecdotal reports from a small sample of seminar attendees are representative of broader effectiveness across diverse school contexts.
- Hillsdale Academy's test score success is generalizable to other schools that adopt similar teacher training, rather than being partly attributable to selective student populations.
- The current K-12 system treats teacher excellence as 'an afterthought,' implying systemic neglect that Hilldale's approach corrects.
- Scaling a single day-long seminar model to enough schools could meaningfully move the needle on national test score trends.