A boss once told me I should never bring him problems without also bringing him a solution. I have recently been very critical of the politicians in Juneau and how they have failed to address the challenges facing public education in Alaska. I believe the various education bills being considered in Juneau this session are too expensive and fundamentally flawed. Alaska’s legislators appear to be trying to solve education problems in an old-fashioned way: by throwing money at them until they disappear. So, in the spirit of my old boss, here is one solution to the public-school funding challenges we face. It is less expensive and will provide a better education for children. It involves a new private Christian classical school in Homer called Revive Academy.
No matter how hard our politicians work to save it, the old brick-and-mortar public education model is dying. Existing public schools are expensive and provide an education that many parents find undesirable. This isn’t just my opinion; parents around Alaska have recognized the deficiencies in public schools and have responded by removing their children from them. In the 2023-2024 school year, there were more than 23,000 home-schooled students in Alaska, a roughly 46% increase from the number reported in the 2018-2019 school year. This amounts to almost 20% of the children attending school in our state.
Many parents have abandoned public schools and chosen homeschooling for their kids, but this isn’t the perfect solution for many, as not all kids thrive in an environment where a parent is their full-time teacher. Additionally, if a parent wants to provide an education based on religious principles, local homeschools affiliated with an Alaska school district restrict that opportunity. A better way to educate kids is needed.
Here in Homer, a new school called Revive Academy is being set up to meet those needs. Revive is a hybrid model of education – envisioned as a school with small 16-student maximum class sizes, holding classes in a local facility three times a week to provide a structured learning environment with high-quality teachers. However, it will also ensure parents have flexibility and high involvement in their children’s education, like homeschool does.
The new school is the vision of Cat Cushway, a former teacher in the Michigan public school system, who is leading the effort to set up this new academy. Cushway recently moved to Homer from Michigan. When choosing a school for her children, she recognized the need for a better local alternative than what she found in public education.
So, Cushway decided to set up a school that provides an education focused on classical studies, including Arithmetic, Grammar, Logic, Language, History, Geometry, and Latin. She believes in teaching children to think for themselves, instead of accepting the liberal dogma and indoctrination taught in public schools.
Revive Academy will open applications for enrollment at the start of 2026 for the 2026/27 school year. In the first year, it will accept students in grades K-8, with the vision to eventually enroll students through grade 12.
Educating kids at Revive Academy will cost about $5,500 per student each school year. This is a bargain compared to the ~$23,000 per school year that it costs the state government to educate children at Alaska public schools. Through the time-tested model of classical education and the focus on rigorous, high-quality instruction, Cushway will achieve better educational results for about a quarter of the cost of public schools.
The union didn’t sue to stop private school funding to benefit Alaska’s children. They sued because student departures from failing public schools are a direct threat to their union members.
If the state were to promote shifting students into this less expensive form of education, it would be possible to realize a dramatic cost savings, making the education system in our state more affordable. However, this savings is both an opportunity and a challenge alternative schools face. Back in 2014, parents began a drastic shift away from public schools when legislation was passed that allowed public funds to be used to pay for education at private schools.
The education lobby quickly recognized that the 2014 funding law was a direct threat to their influence and power. Allowing students to depart public schools for better alternatives would quickly end the public school system, which has benefited schoolteachers and their unions. Last year, members of the education establishment sued to stop the 2014 legislation. They cited Article VII, Section 1, in the state constitution, which states in part, “No money shall be paid from public funds for the direct benefit of any religious or other private educational institution.”
Last year, the Alaska Supreme Court ruled that homeschoolers could continue using allotments for private educational purposes, but the case has been revived and legal battles will play out this year to decide the fate of state homeschool allotments moving forward.
The most notable feature of that lawsuit is that it was funded by NEA-Alaska, the state’s largest teachers’ union. The union didn’t sue to stop private school funding to benefit Alaska’s children. They sued because student departures from failing public schools are a direct threat to their union members. This essentially amounts to the teachers’ unions holding children hostage in bad schools for their own personal gain. The unions apparently don’t care if kids are harmed, so long as they protect the jobs of their union members.
ALASKA WATCHMAN DIRECT TO YOUR INBOX
While our legislators here in Alaska continue to put band-aids on a failing education system, states around the country have recognized the benefits of private schools and have implemented voucher systems to help parents pay for them. Almost 1 million kids in the United States attend private schools funded with public education dollars through voucher programs or the equivalent. At the same time, here in Alaska, the educational lobby fights tooth and nail to prevent that from happening.
Just as Elon Musk’s private company SpaceX can launch rockets with more reliability and less cost than government-run NASA, a private school like Revive Academy can better educate children than a government-run public school. It is time to change state law to allow state educational funding to follow the child, and it is time for parents to seriously consider school alternatives like Revive Academy.
If you are the parent of young children looking for an alternative to public schools, I suggest you do two things. First, call your legislature and ask them to consider implementing an educational voucher system in Alaska that provides the full Base Student Allotment (BSA) amount to each parent to be directed to the school of their choice, with no limitation on whether it is a private or religious school. Secondly, if you live in Homer or the surrounding area, consider enrolling your child in Revive Academy. To learn more about Revive Academy, contact Cat Cushway by emailing her at cat.cushway@reviveacademyak.org or visit their website.
The views expressed here are those of Greg Sarber. Read more Sarber posts at his Seward’s Folly substack.
16 Comments
Most public school teachers are not interested in teaching kids to actually think, because you can’t give what you don’t have. Rote learning has its place, but Classical Education is read education that will last a lifetime. When the US quit teaching history and instead started teaching “social studies,” it was the end of real education and the death of the public schools.
My brother and his wife run a Christian school in Oregon with the same credentials and around the same cost. “focused on classical studies, including Arithmetic, Grammar, Logic, Language, History, Geometry, and Latin.”
Please take your kids out of these Woke- unsafe schools. Before it’s too late, while your kids still respect you and others.
My brother and his wife run a Christian school in Oregon with the same credentials and around the
same cost. “focused on classical studies, including Arithmetic, Grammar, Logic, Language, History,
Geometry, and Latin.”
Please take your kids out of these Woke-unsafe schools. Before it’s too late, while your kids still respect
Sarber. Conservative parents have long claimed that they want vouchers for charter and NON RELIGIOUS schools. You just tipped your hand. Smart, well educated PhDs like me are products of the public school system. It works. If you want to indoctrinate students with fables of talking snakes, virgin birth and life after death, do it, but do it at home or in church. I want public dollars spent on science and reality not the supernatural nonsense.
Straight out of the playbook of Gramsci.
“ [his] ‘Prison Notebooks’, which introduced groundbreaking ideas on cultural hegemony, historicism, and the role of ideology. In maintaining class dominance. Gramsci argued that cultural and ideological structures were as crucial as economic factors in sustaining power. . . . His work remains a cornerstone of Marxist theory. And has influenced disciplines beyond political theory.”
Cook. You quoted, “Gramsci argued that cultural and ideological structures were as crucial as economic factors in sustaining power.” That is quite applicable to the MAGA phenomenon. MAGA does not like gays, gay marriage, trans, abortion rights, feminism, any religion besides Christian, any race besides white. Those are “cultural and ideological structures” and important according to your quote. As far as the economic side of class dominance, look at what Trump has done with his Tariff-O-Mania and his grossly incompetent cabinet heads. Attempting to live up to the terms you and Gramsci describe does not make Trump a disciple of Marxism. It makes him a dictator, an agent of pain and chaos and the catalyst for the ruin of America.
According to 100 Years of Nobel Prizes a review of Nobel prizes award between 1901 and 2000 reveals that 72.5% of all the Nobel Prizes in Chemistry, 65.3% in Physics, and 62% in Medicine were either Christians or had a Christian background.
You’ve tapped into one one the maddening contradictions of being human. I’m my world, I am guided only by the scientific method, nothing supernatural, religious or spiritual. These two ways of understanding reality cannot exist together, so when I see a statistic (according to author, the percentage is 64.5% not 72.5%, but still) like you’ve cited, I am flummoxed. My scientific brain cannot understand how we can land on mars and send home dazzling photos from 140 million miles away and still believe virgins can give birth.
Your state of being flummoxed (what you are experiencing/feeling because of what appears to you to be some sort of philosophical paradox) is likely because you are expecting that there be some sort of proof of the cause behind existence (God or other associated names in the case of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and various denominations or flavors there-of) presented or available to you in the same manner as you would describe or prove a table sitting in a room in front of you. You are needing/requiring the use of the wrong vocabulary. You can’t use the physical laws of the universe (matter, energy, space, time) to explain or prove something that exists outside of that existence construct (or better yet, behind it or even better yet something existing because of its purpose to exist). My suggestion is to read up on what Aquinas philosophized regarding “ipsum esse subsistens”. It is a Thomistic term, meaning “being itself subsisting.” Aquinas derives this as a description of God from Aristotle (through Avicenna) and also from Exodus 3:14. Basically, it is the distinctive characteristic of God in Aquinas’s metaphysics: All created beings are composite in their essence and existence (esse). Thomists call this “the real distinction.” This means that what creatures are and the fact they actually exist are not identical in them. In God, however, what he is and the fact that he is are truly identical. God is his own existence or act of being. Thus, God can be described as ipsum esse subsistens.
What is maddening, Mr Mullen, is your emphatic—even fanatical— faith in “science”. I wonder, how do you prove induction through induction? Or is this a matter of faith? And what of the principle of cause and effect? Science has no explanation, save infinite regress, to explain the first cause.
It appears your sectarian zealotry and impassioned faith know no bounds. This same boundless parameter may perhaps be applied to your hypocrisy as well.
Short list of Christians in STEM. People in this list have their Christianity as relevant to their notable activities or public life and have publicly identified themselves as Christians or as of a Christian denomination: Hildegard of Bingen, Robert Grosseteste, Nicholas of Cusa, Otto Brunfels, Francis Bacon, Nicolaus Copernicus, Nicolas Steno, Galileo Galilei, Blaise Pascal, Gottfried Leibniz, Emanuel Swedenborg, Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Antoine Lavoisier, Alessandro Volta, André-Marie Ampère, Augustin-Louis Cauchy, Bernhard Riemann, John Dalton, Michael Faraday, Charles Babbage, Joseph Lister, James Clerk Maxwell, Lord Kelvin, James Prescott Joule, Lord Rayleigh, Giuseppe Mercalli, Wilhelm Röntgen, Louis Pasteur, Gregor Mendel, Alexis Carrel, J. J. Thomson, Guglielmo Marconi, Max Born, Gerty Cori, Emil Theodor Kocher, Georg Cantor, Werner Heisenberg, Pascual Jordan, Philipp Lenard, Arthur Compton, Robert Andrews Millikan, Ernest Walton, Karl Landsteiner, Lise Meitner, Arthur Leonard Schawlow, Kurt Gödel, Wernher von Braun, Antonino Zichichi, Stanley Jaki, Rosalind Picard, John Polkinghorne, Don Page, Robert Wicks, James Tour, Colin Humphreys, Martin Nowak, Francis Collins, Fred Brooks, Werner Arber, Peter Agre, Gerhard Ertl, Brian Kobilka, John Gurdon, Charles Hard Townes, William D. Phillips, Peter Grünberg, William C. Campbell, Juan Maldacena.
Non-exhaustive list of Christians in STEM. People in this list have their Christianity as relevant to their notable activities or public life and have publicly identified themselves as Christians or as of a Christian denomination: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Christians_in_science_and_technology
My kids grew up 9in AK public schools, and benefitted greatly. Christians – if you don’t want public schools pay on your own for it.
I already pay on my own for it for my kids. Since that is the case, I want ALL the money back that I have paid through taxes over the years for your kids to attend public school.
Parochial: I don’t have kids so I want ALL the tax money I’ve paid over the years to support education returned to me.
Thank you for a great article! I give kudos to Cat for creating this new alternative solution to Alaska’s failing public school system.