Good day CharterFolk,
Today we are pleased to share a Contributor Column from Thibaut Delloue, Senior Policy Fellow at the Florida Charter Institute.
We provide a bio for Thibaut below.
Thibaut Delloue is a Policy Fellow at the Florida Charter Institute, the state’s premier hub for charter school support and research. He began his education career as an ESOL teacher with Education First in both China and the Boston area, where he taught students of all ages. Following his teaching years, Thibaut served for five years as a Surface Warfare Officer in the U.S. Navy. In 2020, after completing his military service, Thibaut re-entered education and led operations at a charter middle school in Nashville, TN and a K-8 Public School of Innovation in North Charleston, SC.
His writing about education has been featured in publications including Education Next, The 74, Real Clear Education, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute’s Flypaper, and The Orlando Sentinel. He holds an undergraduate degree in History and Philosophy from the University of New Hampshire and a master’s degree in Policy, Organization, and Leadership Studies from Stanford University’s School of Education.
Knowledge, Virtue, and Choice: The Growth of Florida’s Classical Charter Schools
Old school is new again in the Sunshine State. Spurred by dissatisfaction with the education establishment, Florida parents are increasingly turning to classical charter schools. They’re drawn to an educational model oriented toward academic rigor and knowledge-building that may harbor answers to our educational woes.
Classical schools are characterized by an emphasis on content-rich curriculum—organized through the lens of Western history and philosophy—and on cultivating virtue in young people. Their educational model is built on the classical concept of the “trivium,” which organizes the stages of K-12 learning into three stages: grammar, in which students learn knowledge and facts; logic, when students learn to think critically and apply that knowledge, and rhetoric, in which students learn to express their ideas effectively.
Nationwide, independent classical schools are exploding in popularity, and have experienced a nearly five percent growth rate every year from 2019 to 2023. In Florida, the movement has merged with the increasing hunger for school choice to produce one of the largest and fastest-growing sectors of classical charter schools in the country. According to data from the Florida Department of Education, of the state’s seventeen classical charter schools, ten have opened since 2020. Although they are independently operated, classical charter schools—like all charter schools—are considered public schools under Florida law and are funded by public dollars.
Florida’s classical charter schools have received a direct boost from recent state policies. Florida was the first state to approve the use of the recently developed Classical Learning Test as an entrance exam, alongside the SAT and ACT, for its public universities, and has created a special pathway that makes it easier for teachers in classical schools to earn their certification. The growth of classical charter schools has also been accelerated by Hillsdale College, a small liberal arts institution in Michigan that supports the development of such schools nationwide—including through the use of its own K-12 curriculum.
It would be difficult to find someone more emblematic of charter schools’ promise than John Moran, the founder of three classical charter schools on the southern tip of Florida’s space coast called Pineapple Cove Classical Academies. “Mr. John,” as he is affectionately known by the students at his schools, initially founded Pineapple Cove as an early learning center and was urged by parents to continue their children’s education. After repeated rejections by his school district, Moran was on the brink of abandoning his charter project—until a determined Pineapple Cove parent put him in touch with an educator at a local college who developed a new, and this time successful, charter application. In 2015, they opened their first campus, one of the only classical charter schools available in Florida at the time.
In his gruff, Long Island accent, Moran, who found success in other ventures in the early decades of his career, says he found his second calling in education. “It goes back to culture,” he explains, “that’s what makes us very successful. Palm Bay is not a wealthy area; it’s a hard-working, blue-collar area, and we have teachers that love what they do.” From the start, Moran and the rest of Pineapple Cove’s founders referred to their community as “Mayberry”—a nod to the idyllic fictional town featured in the 60s sitcom The Andy Griffith Show. He has built an inner circle of dedicated educators who have been with Pineapple Cove Classical Academy since the beginning, and their efforts have paid off. Pineapple Cove schools are now highly rated by the state report card and outperform nearly all other public schools in their area.
The schools’ rigorous academic program works hand-in-hand with Pineapple Cove’s community-based culture. “When we talk about virtue here,” Moran explains, “It’s the way we dress every day. It’s the way we treat each other every day. Students go through the list of virtues every day; they know it by heart.” He laughs as he recalls a moment when a young student, asked by the principal why he’d been sent to their office, responded by echoing one of the school’s virtues: “Well, I wasn’t very courteous.”
Pineapple Cove’s reference to a 60-year-old sitcom is apt, as there’s something unmistakably old-school about the classical approach. Lindsay Randall, who in 2020 founded Cornerstone Classical Academy, the first classical charter school in the Jacksonville area, likens it to “your grandparents’ education.” She winced when I referred to public district schools as “traditional.” “We call ourselves traditional,” she explains, “regular government schools are not traditional—I’m trying to take back the word.”
For Randall, that means teaching students not what to think, but how to think. “We’re not making anything up; we’re not reinventing the wheel. This model really works,” Randall says. “When I talk about that with parents, when I mention that we teach cursive handwriting and how to read an analog clock—their eyes are opened.”
Anne Corcoran is another trailblazer of classical charter schools in Florida. She started Classical Preparatory School, just north of Tampa, over a decade ago, and now donates her time to the school. “Parents want an education for their children that is commensurate with the worth and dignity they have as humans,” she says as she describes why parents gravitate to classical education. “Parents don’t see their children as cogs in an economic machine. A child has infinite worth and value and potential. An education should reflect that—which is what a classical, liberal arts education does better than any other model.”
Sara Iglesias, whose two young daughters attend a Pineapple Cove campus, tells me there’s a saying among her school’s tight-knit group of parents: “Came for the curriculum, stayed for the community.” The school’s rigorous course of study is challenging even for her nine-year-old daughter, who is learning material well above her peers in district schools. “My child has gotten the perseverance award three years in a row, because she does have to work harder,” Iglesias tells me, “but I don’t see that as a bad thing, because even though she has to work harder and the school is rigorous, the school is supportive.” And compared to public schools across the country, where layers of district and school board leadership are often swayed by education reform fads, classical school students benefit from the consistency of the curriculum. ”Every year she’s just building upon the knowledge that she has, and it gets stronger and stronger,” Iglesias says of her oldest.
Iglesias also lauds the ways in which virtues like perseverance, self-government, and courtesy are enmeshed in everything students do at Pineapple Cove—“from the way they treat their peers and school property to just the way they walk in the hallways.” Parents are an integral part of that. Students receive daily “character cards” that parents must sign and return to their teachers, and families are required to volunteer ten hours of their time to the school each year. “Overall, it’s about creating decent little people,” Iglesias says.
Meghan Applegate’s six children attend Jacksonville Classical Academy, another classical charter school which serves a diverse student body near the city’s downtown. She set her mind on homeschooling when she witnessed the lowered expectations that COVID-era online schooling forced on her children—until a family friend introduced her to Jacksonville Classical. Applegate immediately recognized something “intuitive” in its approach. “There’s this broad body of knowledge out there that students need,” she says, one that JCA’s curriculum brings together into a coherent whole. “You can see the big picture of how this knowledge is interconnected, how the Enlightenment was leading to this type of literature, which was leading to this type of philosophical thoughts. My kids are so much smarter than I am because of it.”
Critics have expressed concern that classical education, in the form of charter schools, masks a Eurocentric worldview inside the public education system. Though classical schools may be anathema to the progressive education establishment, they speak to the average parent’s inkling that something is not right inside the modern-day schoolhouse—a belief substantiated by American children’s continued academic decline and mental health crisis. A recent survey of Floridians released by EdChoice, a school choice advocacy organization, revealed that Floridians consider “core academic subjects” the foremost goal of K-12 education. Public schools at large, in their embrace of asset-based pedagogy, have decidedly gone the other way in recent decades.
In fact, the science underlying the classical model is far from political posturing. A substantial body of research points to the importance of background knowledge in learning academic subjects. Psychologist Daniel Willingham, a leading figure in the science of learning, has laid bare the false dichotomy often advanced by critics of classical education that an emphasis on learning facts weakens students’ ability to think critically. Critical thinking, Willingham points out, is not an isolated skill, but depends on having knowledge in the first place—simply put, you cannot think about what you don’t know.
That may seem like common sense to most parents or any teacher who’s asked a class of teenagers to produce original essays, but the educational establishment continues to fight against the central tenets of learning science. Teacher preparation programs, the vast majority administered by colleges and universities, overwhelmingly fail to teach prospective teachers the basic foundational content that K-12 students need. Once in the classroom, teachers either lack access to high-quality instructional materials or the training to teach content effectively. Carl Hendrick, another noted education scholar, recently exposed the ways in which education pundits subvert established science about how people learn.
No education thinker has been more instrumental in popularizing this educational approach than E.D. Hirsch. His seminal book Cultural Literacy, now four decades old, brought together evidence correlating background knowledge with literacy into a potent call to action for American educators: not only must we center school instruction around knowledge, but around a coherent system of knowledge. Hirsch, never a political ideologue, has contended that our national identity—anchored by our shared American history and culture—was the obvious candidate around which to build a common body of school content. Hirsch argues that public schools, guided by the higher education establishment that trains most American teachers and administrators, have veered away from core academics and toward what he calls “content-neutral” curricula. In a country where the education gap between socioeconomic groups remains vast, ignoring the primacy of knowledge only further disadvantages the already disadvantaged.
Hirsch’s findings led him to spearhead a nonprofit foundation that developed the Core Knowledge Sequence, a preschool-to-8th-grade curriculum series driven by “the specific core of shared knowledge that all children should learn in U.S. schools.” Core Knowledge has been especially popular in charter schools seeking a content-rich educational model for their students and is used, at least in part of their curriculum, by every classical charter school in Florida not partnered with Hillsdale College. Even outside of Florida, research has shown the curriculum delivers results.
Critics of classical charter schools are right to uphold the nonsectarian nature of public education—but they should extend that sentiment to all schools. In truth, classical schools are growing not because they profess an ideological viewpoint, but for two more fundamental reasons: they’re rooted in a scientifically sound pedagogical model, and parents want that education for their children. Over 82 percent of classical charter schools in Florida, in fact, received an A or B grade for the 2024-25 school year as part of the state’s public school accountability system. None received lower than a C grade.
And throughout Florida, classical charter schools are growing in popularity among all demographics and attracting diverse communities. Data from the Florida Department of Education, for example, shows that over one-third of Pineapple Cove’s enrollment at each of their campuses are minority students, and around one-quarter are economically disadvantaged.
Classical charter schools are excelling not just in Florida, but nationwide. A 2023 study examining results on the 2018 National Assessment of Educational Progress, a federal standardized test colloquially known as the “nation’s report card,” concluded that classical charter schools were among the most effective charter school models. “Nearly 70 percent of classical schools outperformed their districts and states in English Language Arts,” the researchers found. “In math, more than 60 percent outperformed their districts and states.” Classical charter schools also demonstrated “impressive gains” with children with disabilities and economically disadvantaged students in ELA and math.
I asked Anne Corcoran, the founder of Classical Preparatory, about the criticisms of the classical model. “Our goal is to elevate the voices who transcend time, place, and economic status,” she explains, pointing to the fact that classical schools don’t just teach about Europe, but about the history of Assyria, Egypt, Babylon, Mesopotamia, and ancient China. “Their stories and ideas have resonated across these mediums and speak to the human condition. We want to ensure our students have heard these voices—philosophers, scientists, artists, authors—to help them grow in knowledge and understanding. That’s where our focus is—on humanity and its flourishing.”
Even classical charter leaders and parents admit their schools are not for everyone—they demand a lot from both students and parents. Yet by cementing academics as the core function of school and reviving the emphasis on virtue, classical charter schools have clearly struck a chord in Florida.
Sara Iglesias, the longtime Pineapple Cove Academy parent, put it best: “People should have equal access to a good education. However, we’ve created a system where we’re not actually allowing that in the first place. So parents have gone and found an avenue to get that—they will find an option or create an option if they don’t see one.”