Gov. Bill Lee has proposed 50 new charter schools in Tennessee affiliated with Hillsdale College, a private, Christian school in Michigan - and in a way, Hamilton County is at the forefront of the effort.
Skillern Elementary, set to open this fall, uses a Hillsdale curriculum and is part of Hillsdale's network. But Skillern predates the governor's initiative.
Skillern's founders say their curriculum is entirely secular and they do not plan to use the most controversial aspect of the Hillsdale curriculum, a course of civics lessons based on American exceptionalism.
Skillern Elementary is to be a feeder school to Ivy Academy in Soddy-Daisy, an existing public charter school that serves grades six to 12.
It's named after Soddy-Daisy businessman and former Hamilton County Commissioner Fred Skillern and his wife, Betty Skillern, and will enroll 64 kindergarten and first grade students when it debuts in August. By 2026, the school plans to serve 408 students in grades K-5.
Organizers say what makes Skillern unique is its fusing of a classical education with an outdoor education, which includes indoor and outdoor classrooms.
"Students want to be outdoors," founder and CEO Angie Markum said in a phone call. "They love it when they can see their science happening firsthand, rather than just seeing a picture of it in a textbook. They love it when they're outdoors in the elements and they can learn about weather because they're in it. Most children's literature, if you look at it, so much of it takes place outside. And so, it's a wonderful place to explore literature when you're sitting in a setting that is similar to what you're reading about."
Skillern has plans for a campus at Booker T. Washington State Park and a second in Soddy-Daisy. Until they are ready, the school is renting classroom space at the Daisy Church of God, near the Ivy Academy campus.
Plans call for Skillern's outdoor classrooms to be equipped with screened walls, tin roofs, exit doors and whiteboards - plus, of course, desks and chairs.
In today's age, children spend too much sedentary time indoors in front of screens, Markum said.
"Outdoor education gives opportunity for engagement," Markum said. "It gives opportunity for health benefits."
No religious affiliation
Hillsdale is a Christian college in Michigan that has created its own K-12 classical model.
Skillern has adopted the Hillsdale Classical Curriculum, making it part of Hillsdale's network of more than 50 affiliated classical schools across the country. They all use textbooks and lesson plans compiled and developed by Hillsdale through the Barney Charter School Initiative, the college's outreach program devoted to the recovery of excellence in public education through K-12 charter schools, according to Hillsdale's website.
On that website, Hillsdale defines its mission as maintaining "the immemorial teachings and practices of the Christian faith" and touts itself as a "trustee of Western philosophical and theological inheritance tracing to Athens and Jerusalem."
Due to the school's religious ties, the American Civil Liberties Union of Tennessee filed an open records request Feb. 28 with Lee's office, the Tennessee Public Charter School Commission and the Tennessee Department of Education to investigate the financial relationship between Hillsdale and the state.
"Gov. Lee's plan raises serious constitutional concerns," the ACLU said in making its request.
ACLU officials told the Chattanooga Times Free Press in an email they had no comment about the open records request.
Emily Stack Davis, director of media and public relations at Hillsdale, said that while Hillsdale is a Christian college, the curriculum has no religious agenda.
"By law, charter schools are public schools with no religious affiliation, and it would be illegal for them to be religious," Stack Davis said in an email. "The public charter schools we advise are no different, and religious schools have never been a part of the Barney Charter School Initiative."
Markum said Skillern has been mislabeled as having a political and religious agenda due to its affiliation with Hillsdale.
"I'd love to give you accurate information on this particular set of curricula. So far, every media piece that I have seen about it has published something in error," Markum said by email. "We hope to teach our students in such a way that diversity of thought is welcomed, not shut out or disdained, and not politicized for whoever's purposes."
A classical education
At its core, a classical education aims to cultivate a student's moral, intellectual and civic virtues through the study of liberal arts, Hillsdale says on its website.
"It pushes back against the notion that the goal of education is to turn out productive cogs in the machine of society," Head of School for Skillern Laura Day said by email. "Equally important, students must receive the inheritance of the classical tradition, which dates back to antiquity, because that tradition, rich with history, literature, science and the fine arts, is a culmination of the best that has been passed down to us."
Skillern's first grade program guide includes literature like "Cinderella," "Rumpelstiltskin" and "Aesop's Fables" along with an introduction to many religions, including Judaism, Islam and Christianity - all before the ages of 6 or 7.
"It's an open-source curriculum," Day said in a phone call. "There's absolute transparency. Absolutely it teaches about major religions. What kind of an education would ignore that?"
Markum said the outdoor classical model arose out of two needs. First, Hamilton County parents wanted healthy, active learning opportunities for their children, and second, there was community demand for sixth graders to be better prepared to meet grade six to 12 academic standards.
"The presence of a constant core set of texts is missing in the sixth to 12th grade school," Markum said. "Teachers choose their texts annually as an extension of their teaching art, but the struggle to implement the model of teaching the Tennessee State Standards with fidelity through outdoor immersion and integration without a constant core set of texts is an ever-present endeavor."
After extensive research, she determined that a Hillsdale classical curriculum was the way to go, she said.
"When it came down to the particular set of texts as a whole, which were approved in our charter application, Hillsdale College has already been providing a planning guide to public charter schools for these texts," Markum said. "For a school that implements lessons outdoors, the planning guide instantly provided a means for us to go ahead and write the outdoor lessons to complement and deliver the Tennessee State Standards quarter by quarter to match the seasons."
According to Hillsdale's website, key characteristics of Hillsdale Classical Schools include: A curriculum that is content-rich, balanced and strong across the four disciplines of math, science, literature and history; study of the American literary, moral, philosophical, political and historical traditions; the study of Latin; and an approach to instruction that acknowledges objective standards of correctness, logic, beauty, weightiness and truth.
"This is a collection of secular text," Markum said. "And Hillsdale, all they did is put together the planning guide and help schools be able to utilize a great set of secular texts because it does such an awesome job of educating students."
History curriculum
Hillsdale also offers its own civics curriculum, dubbed the 1776 Hillsdale Curriculum. The 2,425-page document offers in-depth lesson plans, activities, quizzes and idea guides for K-12 history and civics units.
It's a derivative of the 1776 Report produced under the administration of former President Donald Trump and cites the report as recommended reading for teachers.
Compiled by an 18-person commission, chaired by Hillsdale College's President Larry Arnn, the report promotes "patriotic education" and outlines a "pro-American curriculum," Trump said in a September 2021 speech at the White House.
It was developed, Trump said, to combat "decades of left-wing indoctrination" in schools and stop the teaching of critical race theory, "a Marxist doctrine holding that America is a wicked and racist nation." Trump also called critical race theory a "form of child abuse."
Critical race theory is an academic framework dating to the 1970s that centers on the idea that racism is systemic in the nation's institutions and that those institutions maintain the dominance of white people. The theory is a way of analyzing American history through the lens of racism. Those opposed to critical race theory say it divides society by defining people as oppressors and oppressed based on their race. They call it an attempt to rewrite American history and make white people believe they are inherently racist.
Several states, including Tennessee, have passed laws banning certain ideas stemming from critical race theory in K-12 classrooms, and the Hillsdale 1776 curriculum offers alternative ways to teach about race.
According to the curriculum's documentation, "This curriculum rejects many fashionable ways to make decisions about what students should learn. Such trends include basing what students learn on political ideology and activism; corporate interests for preferred kinds of consumers and workers; the interests of higher education, standardized testing and textbook corporations; and the color of one's skin."
But Skillern's leaders say they will not use Hillsdale's civics curriculum. Instead, they plan to use history and geography curricula from the Core Knowledge Foundation, based in Charlottesville, Virginia, to teach history, civics and social studies.
"Core Knowledge history and geography curricula includes specific treatment of slavery beginning in second grade," Markum wrote in an email. "The topic receives more extensive treatment in third grade and receives even more complex treatment in fourth grade. Core Knowledge publishes its own annotated edition of (abolitionist) Frederick Douglass's original autobiography that students use at the appropriate grade levels. The other schools using this text are not incurring these types of judgments."
Day said slavery and racism are essential topics in any education.
"How could you teach an accurate history without talking about race?" Day said. "That's impossible. The thing above all that we do not do in history is to start with an ideology and then pick what history we're going to use that supports our ideology. That is not real history."
Skillern educators say they are committed to students, not politics.
"Our school is a marvelous opportunity for students to receive a classical liberal education and to cultivate a love of nature," Markum said by email. "In the end, if we do not promote what is good for students, we are hurting our communities."
Contact Carmen Nesbitt at cnesbitt@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6327. Follow her on Twitter @carmen_nesbitt.