ADAMS: Let’s go back just a little bit. You talked about funding and I think the conversation usually ties into this because public schools are always “needing more money.” Give us more money, we’ll do a better job.
Well, if you look at history, in the last ten years, and you see that more and more and more funding goes into these schools every year…that’s the sell to the parents. But the reality is, that funding doesn’t get to the students, it doesn’t get to the classroom, it’s not even going to the teachers. It’s going into the whole administrative class where there are layers and layers of administration.
Fundamentally, what those people are doing is working under the mandates of the federal department of education and collecting and gathering data on our children. Everything that happens, all the testing, all the redirects and the counselors' offices—all of that is about collecting data on children.
That’s where the funding is going. That’s what they want more and more funding for. And that’s not just happening in K-12, that’s happening at the university level and on and on. We need to understand that better funding doesn’t necessarily make a better school. Good schools are all about leadership and curriculum that leads to truth. And oversight to make sure it’s properly run, administered, and that the students’ needs are being addressed, that those children are being equipped as they ought to be.
We’re not going to paint everything with a broad stroke brush because there’s always wonderful exceptions, but that is a reality and we sometimes see that even in private schools. It’s not just a public or a private issue, it’s a leadership issue more than a funding issue.
I want to go back on that theme too—I think it’s important, as you were talking about parents having a say, parents need to understand what’s going on in their schools—I want to say: I don’t care where your children are in school. Public, private, or any other place. Parents ought to be doing that. Not just if they’re in public school.
If the parents are engaged, heavily active, and aware students always do better and every teacher I have ever met, if I ask this question, they affirm. Our students do better when their parents are involved.
KEATON: Absolutely.
ADAMS: End of story. So, parents, you want your children to thrive in school? Get involved.
Involvement takes some real commitment. It’s about the commitment and the responsibility of ownership. The reality is, that always costs. It costs in time, it may cost in financial resources—but at the end of the day, all of that is an investment into our children. If parents aren’t willing to make that investment, at the end of the day, it’s the kids who suffer.
KEATON: And to be perfectly honest with you, the number one problem in Chrsitian education is lack of parental involvement.
I went to a school recently: it has 1,600 kids in the school. I was going to speak to the faculty and staff. They said, “We want you to speak the night before to the parents.” Because it was such a huge school, Christian-wise, I said, “I don’t need to coach them on how to get parents there.” I show up and they have 25 parents show up at a school of 1,600 students.
They were embarrassed. I didn’t care. I spoke my guts out to the parents, but at the end of the day they were like, “Uh.” I said, “I didn’t coach you guys because I thought you were such a large school that you would know how to do this.
It’s literally the number one most difficult thing to do, to get parents to come out, to get parents involved in training. This is one of the reasons we have a church and family division that is led by a guy you know, Dr. Josh Mulvhill, because it’s the church’s problem too.
Here’s what parents want to do: they want to say, “I’m dropping my kid off at school and the school will do all the educating. I’m dropping my kid off at Sunday School and the church will do all the religious education, etc.” It’s backwards. The parents are fully responsible for the education of their child from A to Z. They might delegate that authority to someone to teach calculus, or somebody to teach history or English, or whatever it is.
But at the end of the day, God’s going to hold us, as parents, accountable for how our kids are trained. I think there’s a great parental crisis and that's one of the things Doctor Mulvhill did at the church who first met him at—Grace Church. He went in and changed the paradigm, which, in the church and family division, is what we do at RenewaNation. We go in and rebuild the family ministry program. We now have a family ministry cabinet that’s really cool.
We help pastors and family ministry leaders in a church go from the attractional entertainment approach to where we’re training and equipping parents and grandparents to train children at home. Unfortunately, many of the leaders in the teacher’s unions in the public system absolutely think parents have nothing to do with educating their children, and that’s a big part of the problem.
Parents have bought into that, so we go, “Okay, we’ll go work 40 hours a week, you go educate our kids 40 hours a week, and we’re off the hook.” I think that’s completely unbiblical—again, that’s not God’s good design, therefore it’s not working out well in the real world.
ADAMS: That is so important. I have often talked to school board members and told them, “Listen, one of the problems we have even in our government schools is that the school is trying to do too much. We’ve got all your transportation stuff—and I realize some of these things are essential, some of these things are even mandated by law—but you’ve got your transportation issues, you’ve got your feeding programs, you’ve got your healthcare provision…you’ve got all of these things.
But at the end of the day— we talk about schools. In some sense, there are no failing schools, there are failing communities. When the family is broken and the community is broken, we put our kids in these schools and we expect the schools to turn them into marvelous…whatever. Occasionally a diamond pops out of the rough. But the reality is, the home, the community, the culture that that child grows up in does more than what happens, to some extent, even at school, to shape that.
Then, if the school is tapped into that local community as well, you have all this brokenness that’s trying to make something well. It just doesn’t work. You have to go back to the foundations. That’s what you were talking about in that worldview component. You have to go back to the foundations and fix the foundations.
I’ve encouraged school boards to do private/public partnerships with your local community. They are all kinds of faith-based and community groups that can do all kinds of things that can help families. At the end of the day, if a child comes to school and hasn’t eaten at home since they left science yesterday—and that happens, unfortunately—a child comes to school, they don’t know if they’re going to stay at their mom’s, their dad’s, and uncle’s, a grandma—they’re just tossed around, their life is total chaos…that child is in no position to learn and grow.
That child needs a support structure built around them that’s foundational. This is a basic, universal principle. This is not just something that is public school or private school or anything. It goes back to the foundations and those foundational principles of society. If we build those things well, it gives our children a much better opportunity to succeed.
KEATON: Again, it goes back to: if you live according to God’s good design, good things happen. If you violate God’s design, horrible things happen. When the family has broken down—the fundamental core of any community is the family unit.
I had one of my nieces—one of your nieces—who is 32 years old, I think, say to me, “Uncle Jeff, there are already seven kids from our church and school—not all of them went to our school, but some of them did (Chrsitian school)—already seven of the kids I grew up with are divorced.” I said, “Really? Name them.” She named every one of them. Six of them came from a broken, messed up home.
Here’s the problem: public schools and Christian schools are trying to fix problems that only the family can fix.
ADAMS: Yeah.
KEATON: I actually have a speech I’ve been giving lately called “Saving Our Families in a World Gone Crazy,” and I make a statement in there: I have concluded, after 30 years of ministry, that the young people that I could not reach—and that breaks my heart. I look at the ones that we really didn’t seem to be successful with—getting on a fantastic path, loving Christ, changing the world (and we’ve had many, many, many of those.) but the ones I had the hardest time reaching are ones who came from homes where the family was not what it should be, in a significant way.
There’s no perfect family. Nobody has a perfect family. But moms and dads—there’s a tremendous responsibility laid upon them by God Himself to raise their children well. When we don’t raise our children well, when we’re selfish, when we don’t stay with our spouse, when we don’t provide, for our kids, food—God forbid—then we’re not going to have healthy adults. They’re going to grow up with a messed up view of the world.
We need to be there to help those kids that are in that position—because there are millions of them in America—we need to try, as schools, churches, and communities, to help those kids. At the same time, we’ve got to go back and train young men and women how to have good families so that they can raise good children.
Otherwise, the school cannot fix the broken family. That goes to the realm church and that goes to the realm of the community to say, “What can we do?” And this does get into laws and stuff, Melvin. There are laws that are passed that encourage women to have babies outside of marriage. How dumb is that? What we’re doing is violating God’s good design because we have kids with no daddies. Those kids who don’t have a father—it’s proven. Some people say as much as 75% of all men in prison grew up without a healthy father.
It doesn’t work! Do it according to God’s good design and good things happen.
ADAMS: Yep, that’s true. When a kid doesn’t have a healthy home, they’re much more likely to drop out of school—
KEATON: Oh yeah.
ADAMS: If you look at the statistics and follow it out, a kid who drops out of school before they graduate highschool—that ratio, 20 years later, becomes your prison population. That’s proven, that can be tracked.
It’s in our best interest to invest now in the foundations that help our children get a good start so they can finish well.
So, let’s switch gears just for a second, Jeff. One of the big issues in education—and I think this is true across the board, but is certainly true in public education because of some of the breakdowns that have been happening. And again, not broad-stroke brush because not all schools are like this. It’s about leadership, really.
But so many schools—teachers don’t feel safe. They feel threatened. The violence, the kids are in charge in the schools, too often. Bullying and total inability to have control in the classroom. Everybody’s afraid they’re going to get sued, so nobody does anything. All of that kind of chaos.
On top of that, you have sometimes policies that are passed down—whether it’s through agencies, or whether it’s the administrator, or however that happens—and you have people who are saying, “Look, my training, my expertise, my passion is math and you’re telling me I have to put up certain flags in certain months and I have to promote this and promote that. Wait a minute. I don’t believe in that, furthermore, that’s not what I got hired to do.”
What we’re seeing is this massive exodus that’s going out of our schools. That’s one of the number one crises that our schools across this country are having: lack of teachers. Almost every school district in the public system has a shortage of teachers. So let’s talk to the teachers for a little bit. The reality is, there are some dud teachers in probably most schools, right? But there are also some wonderful men and women out there who care deeply about our kids.
They made a life-decision to make a career of investing in children and helping those children become responsible adults and healthy members of our society. But honestly, many of them are very discouraged today. Talk to them.
KEATON: I’m kind of on the other side of that coin because a lot of those public school teachers are coming into Christian education for the very reason you spoke of. They’re taking 20, 30, $40,000 a year pay cuts because, the fact of the matter is—and this is very complex and we won't get into all the details—but Christian schools can still kick kids out. They can still expel kids and they don’t have a lot of red tape to deal with. Private schools in general do that.
That’s why you can maintain control of your school body. I had a woman from a local public school system, where I live, come to me one day, and she was a single woman. She could only afford to teach in public schools because she couldn’t afford to come to my Chrisitan school. But she had had a football player, the other week, pick up a desk, throw it across the room, break out the windows. In the classroom.
She came to me and she said, “I am petrified. They took him out of my class for one week. Never suspended the boy from school and one week later put him in the front seat and he sat there and glared at me all day. I went to the principal and I said, ‘I’m scared to death of this kid.’ And she said, ‘Well, maybe you’re just not a good fit for our school system.’” She said, “Did you report to the police what he did?” And she said, “The principle looked me in the face and said, ‘No, it will make us look bad.’”
There’s no doubt there’s a crisis of control and authority in many, many schools today. But again, it goes back to where we’ve abandoned truth. We’ve abandoned discipline and instruction and demanding something from our [kids] and the expectations for our children.
At the end of the day, what I want to say to the teachers real quick is, I remember the name, the look, the smell of my first grade teacher. I remember my second grade teacher. I remember almost every teacher I ever had. I remember that they formed my thinking. They shaped me into the man I am today, to a great degree.
If you’re teaching in the public school system, let me say this to you: specifically if you’re a Chrisitan, your mission there—that is your mission field. It’s getting more difficult. I talk to public school educators all the time and they’re telling me that it’s getting more difficult, especially when it comes to the transgender and the pronouns and all that. Some of them are getting fired because they won’t do it. But just keep in mind that every single one of those children sitting before you was created in the image of God.
I don’t care what school system you’re in. They were created in the image of God. God stamped His ability to think, design, plan, create, and communicate upon these children. Your goal is to help them see themselves as God sees them and to inspire in them this desire to go into this world and make it better and to change this world for goodness. And to help them understand they’re not just a clump of cells, they’re not a cosmic accident.
Even if you’re a Christian, you can let them know their ultimate value. And if you can slip it in occasionally, tell them, “God created you to be somebody, He’s given you a tremendous purpose!” I know your work is difficult. I know it’s thankless, often. I know you don’t see the long-term impact of your teaching every single day.
But I’m telling you—I say to Chrisitan educators all the time because I speak to them a lot of times—I get up and say, “It is my honor to stand in your presence because no one in this world is doing anything greater than passing on the truth to the next generation.” I know it’s tough. I will say this: I know the public school system is creating their own messes in the places where they’re not supporting their teachers or demanding discipline.
I know there are smaller community public school systems where they still demand respect, they don’t let the kids run the school. And there are teachers staying there for 10, 20, 40 years. But I’ll say this to any public educator or administrator: if you’re not willing to support your teachers and you’re not willing to demand that kids respect their teachers, respect each other, and behave, you’re going to gut your school.
A local school system close to where I live, one of the FCA guys told me a year ago last Fall that they’re losing 40% of their teachers. You know why? That’s the same system where that lady had that guy throw the desk across the classroom. First of all, students can’t learn in that environment, and teachers can’t teach when they’re scared for their life.
The other thing they’ve done—and this is a whole different subject—but when they demand that they teach to a certain test or standard constantly and that’s all you do…“we get these tests in April and you’ve got to get them there…” They stop teaching and they start trying to get kids to memorize stuff. We’ve lost the beauty and wonder of learning at that moment. But that’s a whole different subject.
ADAMS: Yep. Couldn’t agree more, Jeff. I know that we think a lot alike and I guess it goes back to worldview.
The truth matters and as Jeff was saying to all of the teachers out there: listen, do the right thing. The right thing is to stand on the side of truth. Love those kids and just hang on for them. If you can’t—listen, there are other opportunities. There is huge growth, as Jeff was saying, in the private schools, in the Christian schools. There are opportunities for you to work there. The homeschool movement, the co-ops…all these things. There are all kinds of opportunities available if that’s a choice you decide to make.
We’re not encouraging people to bail. What we’re encouraging is for people to keep holding on for principles and truth, because, at the end of the day, that’s what builds up kids. You know that, so just stand strong on those points.
Now—
KEATON: Melvin, can I just add one thing?
ADAMS: Sure, sure.
KEATON: Let me say this too: I spoke at a very large place with a few thousand people not long ago. There were probably 150 public school educators in that building that day, all the way from the superintendent of schools of that community on down.
And here was my challenge to them, and this is a little bit straightforward, but I’m going to say it: don’t try to stay so long that you end up endorsing evil. What I said to those public school teachers and administrators in the setting was, “Listen to me: stand up and fight.” Because, I said, “If you stand by while they tell a fifteen year old girl she ought to have her breasts removed, castrate a fourteen year old kid, or start pumping into their body—that’s child abuse. You are a party to that if you are saying nothing just to keep your job.
There’s an appropriate way to do that. But the bottom line is, I’m saying to the public school educators who are listening to this show today: stand up and fight. Don’t be afraid. If you are faithful to God, faithful to truth, and faithful to those precious kids…!
You know, the detransitioners are coming out now and they’re suing hospitals. I read a girl—she’s now in her twenties, late twenties—she said, “When I was fifteen years old, they took my breasts off. They kept telling me that if I took the hormones and took the next treatment I would find myself and find the happiness I was looking for.” She said, “Now I’m utterly miserable.” And she said, “Why didn’t somebody stop them?”
I’m very passionate about this point. I’m talking to public school educators right now: I’m saying if you believe, if you’re a Christian—or if you’re not a Christian but you believe this is wrong—stand up and fight! Don’t be afraid of losing your job because if you do what is right God will honor you.
ADAMS: Let me just add this too: the vast majority of parents are on this side.
KEATON: Absolutely!
ADAMS: The vast majority and it doesn’t matter—I was with some school board candidates this weekend, and they’re finding great support in the Indian and Hindu community, in the Muslim community and on and on.
Why? The reality is, even with other religions, these principles are still true. Truth is truth. When it comes down to these issues and these concerns over their kids, the parents don’t want this stuff. It’s somebody outside that is forcing this stuff down. Let’s stand together: parents and educators and let’s get this right. We can do it if we’ll stand.
So, Jeff, as we wrap up, maybe share with everybody how they can learn more about your organization and some of the resources they can get there. I know that in some states there are scholarship opportunities and so forth. Just run through a few things and we’ll try to put these things in the program notes. Maybe we can communicate with you guys and get some of that stuff.
At the end of the day, we want to make sure that people are resourced, that they have the tools so they can act on what they hear. Share with us briefly.
KEATON: First of all, our website is RenewaNation.org. RenewaNation.org. That’s a good place to go and learn more about us.
Let me just mention two or three really helpful resources to parents and grandparents. One is, we have a relatively new book that’s just going bonkers called 50 Things Every Child Needs to Know Before Leaving Home. If you have children or grandchildren, it’s a workbook, it’s a guidebook, it’s powerful.
Especially if your kids are not in a Chrisitan school where they may not be getting that daily training, this book will help you teach them everything from how to introduce themselves to conduct a Bible study, essentially. So it’s powerful and Dr. Josh Mulvhill wrote that.
We also have a book called Biblical Worldview: What it is, Why it Matters, and How to Shape the Next Generation. It’s written for parents and grandparents. Tremendous resources for churches, schools, whatever—obviously, Christian schools.
And let me just say this, Melvin—again, your ministry is to support those who God has called to be missionaries in the public schools, and that’s great. But the number one group that’s calling us to launch Christian schools right now are public school teachers and administrators. I’m just going to be honest with you: it’s no longer the church calling as much. It’s public school teachers and administrators who are launching Christian schools all across America.
And the transgender issue has been the final straw for many of them. So if somebody’s listening to this and God has laid that on your heart, we have a wonderful program. We bring a coach into your life, they will walk you from A to Z, if God ever called you to do that. Or if a pastor is listening to this and feels like that is what God is calling them to do.
There’s a lot of other things we have to offer, but I thought I’d mention a couple of those. For grandparents, Dr. Josh Mulvhill has written many wonderful books on grandparenting. But we have kind of the classic book just called Grandparenting. It will help you to understand that God has called you, as grandparents, to be highly engaged in the development of your grandchildren. So if you’re a grandparent and you want to see what—it’s all from Scripture—what is God’s design for grandparenting?
Those are just a few of the many resources that we have that I think would be helpful to some of your listeners.
ADAMS: Excellent, Jeff. Thank you for spending time with us today. Our listeners have a lot to unpack. I really appreciate you spending time with us and sharing your heart with us.
KEATON: It was my privilege, Melvin, and keep up the good work. Let’s take over every school board in America and let’s see what will happen.
ADAMS: There you go! So all of you out there who have been listening: thank you for joining us. We have our weekly podcast, so follow if you like it. That way you’ll be able to tap into all of those podcasts. We also have a blogcast that puts out all of our blogs and turns those into audio, if you like those.
We have a lot of resources on our own website, Noah Webster Educational Foundation. Our website is NWEF.org. NWEF. org. Thank you for staying with us and thank you for all that you do to change the world where you are.