Being Part of a People: Ridgeview Classical Schools and Civic Education. AEI Program on American Citizenship. Policy Brief 16

This policy brief is the sixth in a series of in-depth case studies exploring how top-performing charter schools have incorporated civic learning in their school curriculum and school culture. The brief reports on Ridgeview Classical Schools, an integrated K-12 public charter school in Fort Collins, Colorado. The school contains an elementary, middle, and high school, with all classes taking place on one relatively small campus. Students at Ridgeview master a body of literary and philosophical texts, language skills, and mathematical and scientific knowledge that begins in the lower grades with a curriculum based on "Core Knowledge," then expands to include more advanced works in grades 9-12. The school adheres to a classical approach to education, utilizing a Socratic method of discussion-based classes. It makes demands on students' intellects and on their characters, and those demands are inextricable: you cannot build the kind of intellectual community that Ridgeview strives to be without training students in good character and citizenship, nor can you train their characters without developing their minds.