In District 12, which encompasses the Parkchester/Soundview community of the Bronx, approximately 2,000 students begin ninth grade per annum. Stunningly, only seven percent of these students graduate from high school ready for college. This means that four years after starting high school, 93 percent of students either dropped out along the way, or if they did earn their high school diploma, they still could not do math nor reading without remediation if they were to enter community college.
In low-income communities across the country similar to District 12, the lack of school choice makes it virtually impossible for families to find high quality options to escape these dismal outcomes. Even more difficult is to find a school offering a content-rich curriculum that uses classic texts to cultivate wisdom and virtue. A conventional belief seems to be that an education designed to impart the good, the true and the beautiful, is a luxury that, for these communities, must be abandoned for one that helps students struggle to achieve basic proficiency.
Moreover, at a time when superficial characteristics like a contemporary author’s race or gender are prioritized over the literary value of their work, some of the greatest writers in the Western canon are being excluded from high school curricula. Indeed, in an effort to “decolonize” the curriculum of authors that contemporary educators deem “outdated” and “irrelevant” because of their race and gender, school districts debate whether to eliminate or reduce the influence of “dead white men” like William Shakespeare or Homer.
What makes these misguided initiatives so tragic is that they deprive the very students who would benefit the most. They further disadvantage deserving young people likely to have the least access to an education that cultivates moral character and transmits the knowledge most worth having.
It does not have to be this way. There is an alternative, empowering approach. This essay echoes the wisdom expressed nearly a century ago by the great University of Chicago President Robert Maynard Hutchins who declared that “The best education for the best, is the best education for us all.”
In the preface to The Great Conversation: The Substance of a Liberal Education, Hutchins laid out a vision that a high-quality liberal education, centered on the classics, should be universally accessible, instead of reserved for an elite few. “Until recently, the Western world regarded it as self-evident that the road to education lay through great books. No man was considered educated unless he was acquainted with the masterpieces of Western literature. There was never much doubt about which the masterpieces were; they were the books which had stood the test of time and had continued to be acclaimed as the finest creations, in writing, of the Western Mind.”
To influence collegiate minds, in 1930, Hutchins and philosopher Mortimer Adler introduced the “Great Books” curriculum to first-year students at the University of Chicago — an educational experiment rooted in the idea to democratize access to the words and worlds of human understanding.
Inspired by this educational breakthrough, St. John’s College adopted its Great Books curriculum in 1937. Today, St. John’s College in Annapolis and Santa Fe carries on this tradition, requiring all students to read the original writings of great thinkers across 3,000 years of history. More broadly, in 2023, the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal identified 48 Great Books programs at public and private universities in America, from Thomas Aquinas College to the University of Texas at Austin Thomas Jefferson Center.
While there appears to be a healthy array of choices across institutions of higher education for students to obtain a classical education, what of K-12 education, especially in areas like District 12 in the Bronx?
Below is a list of the top ten fiction and non-fiction books taught in the programs identified by the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal.
Sadly, many of these great books are rarely available to low-income students across the country. The good news is that classical education is one of the fastest growing segments in public, private, and parochial education, including models from homeschooling to micro schools.
In February 2024, Arcadia Education conducted a market analysis of Classical Education in the US in grades PreK through 12th grade. The chart below represents an estimate of the number of classical schools and students in the 2023-24 academic year, by school type.
As is evident, the vast majority of the nearly 1,600 classical schools and students fall in a religious Christian or Catholic category or are in smaller home or micro school environments.
Arcadia’s forecasted growth of classical schools to 2035 predicts there will be a wonderful increase in even more religious and micro/home school environments in which a classical education can be accessed.
What the analysis reveals is the opportunity to create a commensurate increase in the number of classical schools that reach large numbers of public school students in low-income communities. Our challenge is to stimulate additional educational offerings, especially in the category of new classical public charter schools, or affordable private classical (religious or non-religious) schools, that are more likely to reach students where high-quality classical education is currently virtually nonexistent.
From a state policy perspective, one step would be to advocate for the elimination of legislative barriers that “cap” the number of public charter schools in a given state. For example, in New York State, a regional constraint bans the creation of new public charter schools in the five boroughs of New York City but would allow the opening of nearly 100 charter schools outside of NYC. Another step would be to introduce reform in those localities that have weak charter laws, but are possibly more fertile ground for expansion, such as the state of Virginia, which has only seven charter schools in a state that educated nearly 1.3 million public school students in 2023-24.
From a federal policy perspective, the Educational Choice for Children Act (ECCA) was signed into law on July 4, 2025, and set to launch in 2027. Under this legislation, each Governor must opt their state in, allowing individual taxpayers to receive a 100% federal tax credit for donations up to $1,700 made to nonprofit Scholarship Granting Organizations (SGOs). SGOs can then pool these donations together to support students in the form of tuition for private school, tutoring for public school students, and other eligible uses like buying great books!
An analysis conducted by Education Reform Now estimates that ECCA could redirect more than $24 billion nationally each year to SGOs.
With the magnitude of these philanthropic contributions, new markets could be created to attract high-quality providers to open new classical schools. For example, Great Hearts Academies, a public charter school network, recently launched Great Hearts Christian Academies. a separate, faith-based non-profit organization that is committed to creating the best Christian academies that provide a classical, liberal arts education. In Arizona, these private schools are made accessible to all families by their use of state funded Empowerment Scholarship Accounts or Tuition Tax Credits.
Outside of these legislative and funding tactics to create more classical schools and to make them tuition-free or at least more affordable, another way to create greater access is to shine a light on and replicate classical schools already making a difference with underserved communities. Three such classical schools of note, delivering high quality education in varying ways are Atlanta Classical Academy, Classical Charter Schools, and Vertex Partnership Academies.
Founded in 2014, Atlanta Classical Academy (ACA) is a K-12 public charter school open to students who reside in the Atlanta Public Schools district. It is a Hillsdale College Member School that “offers an education for the mind and heart so that students may live not merely as productive workers, but as knowledgeable, virtuous citizens.”
Among its distinguishing characteristics, ACA assigns its graduating seniors a capstone project, a 12-15 page essay on an essential human question of the student’s design. Each student chooses at least one text from the ACA curriculum and at least one extracurricular text to make an argument responding to that question. In April, seniors must present their thesis during an hour-long defense in front of a panel of three faculty members, family, and friends. This Senior Thesis project offers students a final opportunity to reflect on the wisdom and to practice the skills their education has fostered: close reading, logical writing, and clear speaking. Rather than an extended exercise in research where students explore a darkened corner of the academic universe, the senior thesis asks students to expound on something old, significant, and truly worth exploring.
Founded in 2006, Classical Charter Schools (Classical) is a network of K-8 public charter schools located in the South Bronx. While Classical is not a traditional classical school, it is committed to the concepts of “semper melius” (always better) and “semper crescere” (always growing), underlying their dedication to continuous improvement. As a result, the network has the honor of being a four-time National Blue Ribbon Award Winner whose “students become liberated scholars and citizens of impeccable character.”
Among its distinguishing characteristics, Classical has a focus on debate and teaching Latin. Because Classical educates a large population of English Language Learners, Latin instruction is required in grades 3-8. Latin provides a vocabulary foundation by teaching Greek/Latin roots (over half of English words), helping students decode complex vocabulary, understand grammar, and boost overall literacy. Classical’s Latin curriculum features stories set in the outer reaches of the Roman Empire. Students experience life in Roman Egypt, Spain, Gaul, or Germany, and learn how these cultures interacted with the mainstream culture of Roman Italy. This deepened, historical understanding from a different era allows students to rethink social questions and human dilemmas of the present, and to consider cultural issues and ethnic differences from the perspective of our common humanity.
Founded in 2022, Vertex Partnership Academies (Vertex) is an International Baccalaureate public charter school located in District 12 in the Soundview community in the Bronx. Because of its focus on moral formation, one of its distinguishing characteristics is that the school is organized around the four cardinal virtues of Courage, Justice, Temperance, and Wisdom. Each morning, students and faculty orally and in unison recite “I Statements” for each cardinal virtue, underscoring both the individual and collective commitment to prepare for the responsibilities of citizenship in a democratic republic and a commitment to the common good.
Courage: “I reject victimhood and boldly persevere, even in times of uncertainty and struggle.”
Justice: “I uphold our common humanity and honor the inherent dignity of each individual.”
Temperance: “I lead my life with self-discipline because I am responsible for my learning & behavior.”
Wisdom: “I make sound judgments, based on knowledge of objective, universal truth.”
In its 9th and 10th grade Lower Academy, Vertex’s Classical Core curriculum is designed to teach timeless truths in pursuit of the good, the true, and the beautiful. All students train in the seven classical liberal arts of the Trivium and Quadrivium, with explicit instruction and practice of logic, grammar, rhetoric, and philosophy. Students choose between Spanish and Latin and trace the development of the Western Tradition.
In its Upper Academy, Vertex extends this classical core into the IB Career-related Programme, a unique fusion of classical formation with modern career pathways, including giving juniors the option to pursue a two-year credentialing course in Computer Science and CyberSecurity. In doing so, Vertex is pioneering an approach that merges ancient intelligence with emerging artificial intelligence, ensuring students not only grasp timeless truths but can apply them with technological fluency and moral clarity in the contemporary world.
These are just three examples of schools bringing classical education to students who otherwise might never get the opportunity to deeply absorb the philosophical underpinnings of the society they live in. As Brandan Hogan, associate professor of philosophy at Howard University, argued in his essay Why Study Dead White Men?, “engaging with the Western tradition allows students to gain an understanding of their place in a country whose morality, political systems and evils are deeply indebted to Western philosophical thought.”
We owe young people today the privilege and promise to participate in the metaphorical Great Conversation that University of Chicago President Hutchins described decades ago. Towards this end, it is our responsibility to ensure the wisdom of the ages is inherited by the rising generation, making the best education for the best, the best for all.
Ian Rowe is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, focusing on education, upward mobility, family formation, and adoption. He co-founded Vertex Partnership Academies, a virtues-based, International Baccalaureate high school in the Bronx, and the National Summer School Initiative, serves as chairman of the board at Spence-Chapin, and is a senior visiting fellow at the Woodson Center.
Following the publication of his book Agency: The Four Point Plan (F.R.E.E.) for All Children to Overcome the Victimhood Narrative and Discover Their Pathway to Power (Templeton Press, 2022), Mr. Rowe leads AEI’s FREE Initiative. The FREE Initiative cultivates a deeper understanding of how family, religion, education, and entrepreneurship weave together a moral fabric that shapes and develops agency in children.
The Vertex model with its fusion of classical liberal arts and IB career pathways is intriguing. Merging Cicero with cybersecurity credentialing sounds contradictory at first but actually makes sense, especially when thinking about how ethical frameworks inform tech development. I taught debate at a charter school in Detroit where we struggled with similar questions about whether great books were "relavant" to kids facing immediate economic pressures. Turns out close reading Aristotle improved their argument construction way more than contemporary policy briefs ever did.
The educational funnel is broken. So few students advance to higher ed or meaningful careers. We need better outcomes for our children. Ian’s work is a critical part of the solution.