In Classical Schools, Kids Don’t Test For Weeks And The Quiet Ones Can Shine, by Joy Pullmann

Three-decade public-school educator Phillip Schwenk remembers an April day that crystallized for him what an American classical education means. It also epitomized the political climate in which parents are seeking them.

On this spring day in the Toledo, Ohio classical public school he helped start, Schwenk saw a second-grade student and a 73-year-old teacher of different skin colors on stage together. During the daily all-school assembly at Northwest Ohio Classical Academy, the two were reciting the poem “Harriet Tubman,” by African-American poet Eloise Greenfield. Listening were students of every hue and family income. …