This National Charter Schools Week, we should learn from charter schools and the ways in which their model helps students succeed, especially when it comes to bureaucratic management.
May 16, 2026
Why Charter Schools Have Succeeded Where Traditional Public Schools Failed
IW Features • Neeraja Deshpande
When schools are weighed down by bureaucracy, children often pay the price—but the post-pandemic success of many charter schools points to another possibility. For families and educators longing for schools with conviction, coherence, and room to recover older wisdom, this piece offers a hopeful glimpse of what can happen when freedom is joined to high expectations, moral seriousness, and a clear vision of formation.
IW Features
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Coby Dollof was a ninth-grade student trying to avoid the reading when a classical school teacher assigned him Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton. There was no shortcut, no SparkNotes page, no easy way around the book. So he opened it and something opened in him. What began with Chesterton became a doorway into wonder, beauty, humility, and the great questions of life. Years later, standing before Michelangelo’s Pietà in St. Peter’s Basilica, Coby found himself moved by something larger than he could explain. He was being drawn into a story bigger than his own. Now a writer and teacher at Pepperdine University, Coby helps students ask the questions that once found him: What is wisdom? What is virtue? Why do truth, goodness, and beauty matter? What is vocation? And what kind of life is worth living? This is a story about classical education as awakening. The kind of awakening that forms a person and helps them become fully alive.
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What does beauty have to do with the spaces where we learn, teach, worship, and gather? In this shared bonus episode of Composed and Forged, Christine Perrin speaks with Brian Williams about Templeton Hall, the home of the Templeton Honors College, and the deep work of making a place that feels whole, hospitable, and human. Their conversation moves from architecture and furniture to poetry, asking how beauty forms us before we can fully explain what it has done. This is an episode about attention, creation, community, and the grace of places that help us to belong and to overcome the rootlessness of our times. Brian reflects on the making of Templeton Hall at Eastern University as an act of stewardship, one that honors the old while creating room for students and faculty to dwell together in the pursuit of the true, the good, the beautiful. Christine and Brian consider why beauty is not a luxury, why material places matter to Christian formation, and how the experience of a beautiful space creates harmony. The episode closes fittingly with Hopkins’s “Pied Beauty,” a poem of praise for the dappled, particular, and creaturely world.
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What does it take to remain fully human in an age of distraction? In this conversation, Christine Perrin speaks with Dr. Jeanne Schindler about attention, technology, homeschooling, civic life, and the quiet disciplines that help us fight for what is real. Together they consider how modern devices flatten experience, weaken our sense of place, and make presence harder to practice, while also pointing toward a better way, one rooted in community life, embodied friendship, serious thought, and shared public spaces. This is a conversation about recovering the habits that make a human life deep, relational, and truly lived. Drawing from her own intellectual formation, Dr. Schindler reflects on childhood influences, her shift from history to political theory, her decision to leave tenure and devote herself more fully to home and family, and the rewards of lifelong learning through homeschooling. She and Christine also explore AI, the limits of technology, the strain placed on civic discourse, and why restlessness should not always be medicated by screens, but instead received as a summons to seek truth, communion, and a richer form of life.