15 What Are Christian Education Outcomes?

Watching her child at the Christian school’s graduation ceremony overwhelmed Lisa with pride, appreciation, and emotion. Lisa and her husband had moved their child from the public schools to Christian school several years earlier, when they began having grave concerns over the school curriculum and school relationships with which their child was struggling. Until the issues arose and worsened, Lisa and her husband, although Christian, had never considered Christian school. The move to Christian school, though, had been everything that they had hoped and much more. And the proof of it, their graduating child, stood on the stage right in front of them during the graduation ceremony, poised, confident, aware, sound of character, and full of faith. Several times, Lisa had to wipe the tears of joy from her eyes.

Outcomes

Outcomes matter in any corporate program, whether a school program, government program, or nonprofit or business initiative. When organizations operate, they generally do so with purposes, missions, or goals. Then, to determine whether the organization is meeting its goals, the organization’s leaders and managers study program outcomes. The more objective, clearly defined, and measurable an outcome is, and the more closely related the outcome is to the goal, the more reliable the outcome can be to assess the organization’s progress on its goal. You can think about the enrollment of your child or children in school, whether a public school or a private Christian school, in the same way. Your family surely has goals in sending your child to a particular school, beyond satisfying truancy laws that require school enrollment. Consider in this chapter whether the following Christian school outcomes match or approximate your family’s goals for sending your child or children to a particular school. 

Faith

The primary outcome of Christian schools, readily measurable over the longer term, is graduates’ enduring and abiding Christian faith. Rigorous longitudinal studies indicate that students attending private Christian K-12 schools in the Protestant tradition retain their Christian faith into adulthood at a significantly greater rate than students attending other schools, even when controlled for the faith of parents. Whether you are a professing and practicing Christian or not, if you send your child to a Christian school in the Protestant tradition, where your child receives a deep, broad, joyful, and immersive faith experience, your child is significantly more likely to retain that joyful, enriching, and balancing faith throughout life. The more intense, in-depth, engaging, and comprehensive that Christian faith experiences are when an individual is young, the more likely that Christian faith will persist long term, through college and beyond into mature adulthood. Christian K-12 school programs provide that satisfying and enriching immersive faith experience. Send your child to a Christian school in the Protestant tradition, and your child may well love God and love Jesus Christ for the rest of your child’s life. 

Academics

Private Christian K-12 schools generally produce strongly favorable academic outcomes, well beyond those one would expect from other schools. Rigorous studies indicate that students attending private Christian K-12 schools attend and graduate from college at twice the rate of students from other schools. You double your child’s likelihood of earning a college degree when sending your child to Christian school. Earning a college degree, rather than dropping out (as half of college entrants do these days) likely with significant debt, correlates with huge lifetime benefits. Earning a college degree, rather than merely holding a high school diploma, is associated with a more than fifty-percent increase in average annual earnings, a fraction of the poverty rate, significantly longer life expectancy, and far lower unemployment rate, divorce rate, and single-parent birth rate. If your child earns a college degree, your child’s children (your grandchildren) are also far likely to be healthier and better educated. The academic and life outcomes for children attending Christian K-12 schools are staggeringly better on average. Send your child to Christian school if you desire those academic and life outcomes for your child. 

Character

The prior paragraphs show that Christian schools strongly positively affect graduates’ lifelong faith, academic achievement, and life outcomes. Christian schooling also strongly positively affects a child’s character development and behavior. Multiple studies show that children attending Christian school are less violent, less disobedient to parents, less often involved in gangs, and less likely to steal. Children attending Christian schools are also more racially tolerant and harmonious. They are also less likely to exhibit any truancy and more likely to consistently meet academic program requirements, leading to higher grade-point averages, greater aspiration for higher education, and more years of higher education completed. Teenagers who express a strong Christian faith have far lower rates of smoking cigarettes, smoking marijuana, drinking alcohol, cutting class, facing school suspension or expulsion, getting C-or-below grades, watching R-rated movies or too much television, or having their parents say that they have bad temper or are rebellious. Send your child to Christian school, if you want your child to avoid bad behavior and exhibit good character. 

Future

Christian schooling also strongly positively affects a child’s character development into adulthood. Longitudinal studies of adults who attended a Christian K-12 school in the Protestant tradition for at least four years, as much as fifteen to twenty years earlier, still show their significantly improved character-related outcomes, when compared to adults without that Christian schooling. Christian school graduates show greater philanthropy, give more to their church, are much more active attending church, study the Bible and pray far more, are more likely to take religious leadership roles, and participate more often in missions. Christian school graduates are also much less likely to have pre-marital sex, more likely to be married, less likely to cohabitate outside of marriage, likely to have more children, and much less likely to get divorced. They are also more respectful of properly constituted authority and more likely to allow scriptures’ commands, directions, and principles to govern their personal conduct. Send your child to private Christian K-12 school, and as a mature adult in mid-life many years later, your child is likely to continue to exhibit the kind of good character that makes for a flourishing life. 

Outlook

Christian education also affects the outlook of children into and through adulthood. Studies show that adults who as a child attended a private Christian K-12 school are more optimistic about their future. Christian schools teach a biblical perspective and worldview. That perspective, grounded in the salvation of Jesus Christ, is above all extraordinarily optimistic and hopeful. The biblical perspective construes challenges and suffering as preparation and refinement for future success and eternal glory. That perspective keeps an adult Christian from falling into bitterness and self-pity, while instead responsibly striving, enduring, trusting, growing, and persevering. A biblical worldview also turns an adult Christian from an inward-facing narcissism to an outward-facing and other-centered generosity of service and spirit. That turn, fostered, nurtured, and confirmed in Christian K-12 schooling, leads an adult Christian into sound, stable, and secure relationships and a fruitful, joyful, and successful life. If you want that outcome for your child, send your child to Christian school. 

Parents

The Christian education of a child also has outcomes for parents. Of course, the greatest outcome that parents would most appreciate is to see their child gain the outcomes described in the above paragraphs of this chapter. Yet the parents of a Christian school child can enjoy their own outcomes, too. When parents enroll their child in a private Christian K-12 school, they soon form vital new friendships with other parents involved in the school. Those friendships can last a lifetime, long after the children have graduated from the school. Parents also gain the rhythms and resonance of the extraordinarily hopeful and missional Christian school community, with its daily schedule, periodic celebrations, and seasonal shifts. Parents also gain volunteer opportunities and network connections, referrals, and resources. Many Christian school parents find their lives organized, enriched, and rotating around their child’s Christian school. If you appreciate and desire that opportunity for yourself and your spouse, then send your child to Christian school. 

Family

Christian education can also have positive outcomes for your family. Your child has individual interests, just as you and your spouse have individual interests. The above paragraphs of this chapter show that Christian education can strongly promote the individual interests of your family members. Yet Christian education can also promote the collective interest of your family. Families having a child in Christian school find a comforting and reassuring safety net of school prayer, care, and support. That comfort and reassurance exists whether the Christian school family needs to draw on it explicitly or not, simply in the daily greetings, checkups, thoughts, interest, and prayers. Yet a Christian school community can truly swing into supportive action when one of its families suffers a crisis. Prior chapters have described the generous service, abundant material resources, and devoted spiritual support that a Christian school community and its church or churches can provide for a family facing crisis. Suffice it here to say that having that safety net, and devoting your family to being an active supporter of it, is an outcome that many families would deeply appreciate and earnestly pursue, if they knew how to do it. Sending your child to Christian school is the way to do it.

School

Sending your child to Christian school also enables positive outcomes for the school itself, although that interest need not be your concern or the concern of any other family when deciding whether to send your child to a Christian school. It simply bears mentioning that larger interests, including the interests of the school, benefit from your decision to do so. A Christian school has a vital mission. A Christian school’s leaders have the responsibility to attend diligently to the school’s mission. A handful of families desiring Christian schooling may not have the numbers and resources to open a school. A few more families might. Make your decision whether to send your child to Christian school based on your child’s needs, your family’s needs, and your best discernment guided by prayer and Christ’s Spirit. Yet also appreciate that your affirmative decision to have your child and family join a Christian school community enables the school to carry on in its vital mission. Send your child to Christian school, and the school will benefit, just as you, your child, and your family benefit. 

Church

Sending your child to Christian school also benefits your church and other churches. Again, when deciding on Christian school, you need not concern yourself with school or church interests. Make your decision whether to send your child to Christian school based on your best discernment regarding the interests of your child and family, and the Spirit’s leading in prayer. Yet know that sending your child to Christian school benefits the church as the body of Christ. You’ve seen in a paragraph above that Christian schooling as a child leads an adult to continue to participate in church life, take leadership roles in church, and give financially and in service to church. The church, as the hands, feet, voice, and representative of Christ in the world, benefits when it has faithful members like those who, as children, received an immersion in faith in a private Christian K-12 school. Your decision to send your child to Christian school substantially increases the likelihood that a church years from now will have another adult member, your grown child, enjoying and supporting the church’s profound ministry. 

Community

Sending your child to Christian school also influences community conditions and outcomes. Communities depend on sound, stable, responsible, respectful, resourceful, and generous citizens. A single badly troubled and depraved citizen can, over a lifetime, cost a community untold financial and social resources. Every citizen who either contributes or detracts from the community’s fabric affects the fabric’s quality and design, either positively or negatively. Christian children and adults make sound and solid citizens. Indeed, they carry communities, producing an extraordinary spiritual and material excess, while making that excess generously available for needful others in the community. Sending your child to Christian school very likely means that the community in which your child settles as an adult will have gained another resourceful, contributing, and solid member. Your community will benefit when you send your child to Christian school now, and your child’s own community, when your child is an adult, will also benefit. 

Divinity

Sending your child to Christian school has another outcome that no one should ignore, even though the outcome is easy to overlook when evaluating various conditions, costs, benefits, and factors. What you, your child, and your family gain or lose from sending your child to Christian school is plainly important. Yet what may be more important to a deeply devout Christian is what God gains or loses by the decision. After all, Christians, above all others, ought to consider God’s commands and desires. If God says to do something, one should look less or not at all at inconveniences and costs. One should instead do it. Of course, discerning what God desires and commands in any one instance is up to the person making the decision. Yet you may find in the scriptures, the advice and counsel of your pastor and Christian friends, and your own prayers abundant evidence that God prefers a Christian education for his children over an education where school authorities bar even the mere suggestion of his name, no less instruction in his holy word, prayers to him, and celebrations of his goodness. Sending your child to Christian school may please God, which may just be enough for the decision, notwithstanding other interests and considerations. 

Reflection

What outcomes do you desire and expect from sending your child to Christian school? In a perfect world, in your best dreams for your child, what kind of education, vocation, family, faith, and community would your child attain and experience? Do you want your child to have enduring faith into adulthood? Do you want your child to have enduring good character and conduct into adulthood? Do you want your child to have a sound, stable, and fruitful marriage and family life? Do you want your child to be a contributing and responsible member of society? Would you like to see your local Christian school flourish? Would you like to see your local churches flourish? What do you perceive to be God’s desire regarding the education of your child? 

Key Points

• Christian K-12 education generally has very favorable outcomes. 

• Christian K-12 school positively influences faith into adulthood.

• Christian K-12 school has strong college and other academic outcomes.

• Christian K-12 school positively influences behavior and character.

• Christian K-12 school positively influences adult life outcomes.

• Christian K-12 school produces adults with optimist outlooks.

• Christian school has positive outcomes for parents and families, too.

• Sending your child to Christian school helps the school community.

• Christian schools produce solid citizens for their communities.

• Sending your child to Christian school may also please God.

Read Chapter 16.