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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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.
What makes a place, a school, or a daily life feel truly human? In this conversation, Christine Perrin and Timothy Patitsas explore beauty first living, the “quality without a name” described by Christopher Alexander, and the patterns that help people feel at home, at ease, and fully alive. Together they consider paper routes, classrooms, liturgical seasons, friendship, motherhood, teaching, and the built world, asking how living patterns form the soul and why beauty is not an ornament to life but one of its deepest truths. This episode is an invitation to notice the forms of life that nourish wonder, awaken desire for the good, and help us belong more deeply to the world. Their conversation moves from childhood memory to architecture, pedagogy, eros, ritual, and community. Along the way, Timothy reflects on the difference between potent information and quality information, the role of stories in shaping desire, and the kinds of educational practices that help students encounter truth not only analytically, but with their whole persons.