Are Religious Schools in America Losing Their Religion?

In 2012, Pope Benedict XVI said, “The spiritual crisis overtaking the West is the most serious since the fall of the Roman Empire near the end of the 5th Century.” Two hundred years ago, 85 percent of the population regularly attended church. That number has dwindled to about 20 percent today. It doesn’t take a proclamation from the Pope to recognize the place we find ourselves as a nation. Our seemingly accelerated moral decay is no longer the elephant in the room no one wants to talk about. It’s the elephant in the room everyone (including some Christians) seems to

Why Common Core’s Lack of Literature Is Setting Kids Up for Failure

Recent research shows the average 12th grader reads at a 7th grade level. This finding isn’t terribly surprising. According to Renaissance Learning, developer of the popular Accelerated Reader, in 2015-16, the most frequently tested fiction book for grades three through seven was Diary of a Wimpy Kid. Categorizing the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series as fiction requires a certain elasticity in the definition — along the lines of categorizing the Sunday comics as literature. Nonetheless, this is problematic considering first year college textbooks have complexity levels of 13.8 (one year and eight months post-secondary), and the same research found

Michigan Catholic Diocese Ditches Common Core

The Catholic Diocese of Marquette, Mich., announced that their schools are experiencing success implementing a classical curriculum in place of the Common Core standards that have become prevalent at school districts across the country. “While we respectfully understand that other private and Catholic schools may discern to adapt or adopt the standards for these and other reasons,” Marquette Bishop John Doerfler said in a statement, “we do not believe that such actions would benefit the mission, Catholic identity or academic excellence of our schools.” The diocese began implementing the new curriculum in the last school year, and reports are that the