Thales Academy Moves to Expand to Middle and High School Levels in Franklin, Tennessee

Thales Academy, offering schools a high-quality private education at affordable rates, is planning to expand from its elementary school in Franklin, Tennessee, to two new buildings for the middle and high school levels.

Robert Luddy, the founder and chairman of Thales Academy, told The Tennessee Star the expansion in Franklin is “off to a really good start because we have one campus open.”

“We’ve purchased land near there, where we can build two more schools, and we’re also looking at other opportunities,” he said. “So we’re hoping to grow another hub in the Nashville area. Not just in Nashville, but in those surrounding counties.”

Luddy, who is also the founder and president of CaptiveAire Systems, the largest company in the commercial kitchen ventilation system industry in the United States, established Thales Academy school locations in 2007 in North Carolina, and has since expanded in Glen Allen, Virginia, and Franklin.

Luddy said the same principles of running a company identified as a top industry leader can be applied to education – how to deliver the highest quality product at an economical cost that can be accessed by as many people as possible.

When his attempts in the late 1990s to “help out” in public schools in North Carolina proved unproductive, Luddy said he opened a public charter school in Wake Forest, which is still operating on three campuses with 1,650 students and a waitlist of about 1,800. A few years later, he opened an independent Catholic school in Raleigh – St. Thomas More Academy – with about 250 students in grades 6-12.

“Fast-forward to 2006, I started thinking about a private school network,” he said. “So, Thales opened in 2007 in our corporate office with about 30 kids – I think it was K-1. And over the years, it progressed to K-5s, K-8s, and 6-12s, depending on the location.”

Luddy detailed the central focus of the Thales Academy philosophy.

“So there’s two primary ideas: one would be to serve the students and families that come to our schools,” he said. “And that includes direct instruction in K-5, and the classic curriculum in 6-12.”

Luddy appeared as a guest last week on Steve Bannon’s War Room, where he explained more about Thales Academy, direct instruction, and the need to consider alternatives to public schools.

“Direct instruction,” the central teaching method in the elementary grades, is a model created by Siegfried Engelmann, who, as Luddy explained, started in the advertising business and was tasked with how to better sell products to young people.

Engelmann ultimately considered how we teach children about anything, in general, Luddy continued:

And, so, he did this project called direct instruction and, essentially, it’s all protocols which have developed, now over 50 years. So, it starts with pretty high-level discipline. And when the teacher begins, she will say, “Ready.” The ready position is both feet on the floor, both hands on your desk, looking forward. So, she’s going to get your attention first. And the teacher’s required to maintain that attention throughout the entire lesson.

“Direct instruction moves very quickly,” Luddy explained, adding:

Students are asked to point and look in their reading books or spelling books, and they have those individual choral responses. They go up and down columns, back and forward. And the teacher calls on students as she sees fit rather than students raising their hand. In that way, she engages more students, or all students, all the time.

“So, it’s a whole methodology of teaching reading, math, phonics, reading comprehension, spelling,” Luddy continued. “And the idea’s by the time they get through the fifth grade, they’re good readers. They have a high level of focus. They know how to learn. They have a high level of discipline. And the kids like it because they do a lot of things that are fun.”

Luddy observed some of the public schools have said they use direct instruction for children with learning disabilities.

“The response from Engelmann and his group is to say, ‘Wait a minute, if it works really well on kids that are slow, how do you think it will work on kids that are really bright?’” Luddy chuckled.

When students at Thales Academy move up to the sixth grade, they begin the classic curriculum, which Luddy calls “Learning from the Masters.”

“So, from Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, John Locke, they learn from original books, the Masters,” he explained. “They learn Latin, rhetoric, writing. And it creates individuals that can think, can write, and can take on issues.”

Luddy observed he instructs teachers not to get mired in teaching everything is “relative,” and to know that, in many areas, Thales wants to teach students “what to think.”

“If something’s absolutely true, like we don’t say gravity is something you make up your own mind on,” he noted. “We teach them that gravity is gravity – period.”

A comprehensive overview of Thales’ K-12 curriculum can be viewed here.

Principles of the Thales Academy philosophy include:

• Human Dignity
• The Ultimate Resource – The ability of humans to solve perplexing problems.
• Julian Simon – The optimistic view of the world.
• Binary Gender
• Climate change as it has existed from millions of years
• Judeo-Christian traditions
• Thinking, verbal, writing skills
• Personal leadership and financial skills
• Vocational & Academic Know-how

What is missing from Thales are the following concepts the Academy “rejects,” but which are now embedded in the culture of government schools:

• Malthus & Population Control
• Man-Made Climate Change
• Critical Race Theory
• Evolution as a theory denying God
• Black Lives Matter
• Modern Gender Theories
• Modern Monetary theory / Keynesian Economics
• NY Times 1619 History
• Popular culture
• Social Polarization

Luddy referred to the teaching of the concepts of systemic racism, equity, and forced diversity in public schools as “completely wrongheaded.”

“Most Americans go out of their way to help minorities, poor people, etc.,” he asserted. “So, it’s completely wrong in thinking, and what those individuals need, and if they’re coming from poor cultures, is a really good education. That’s how you overcome biases, prejudice and lack of ability to access the American way. So that’s what we focus on.”

Asked how Thales Academy fares when it comes to students who might have a learning disability or behavior issue, Luddy responded, “somewhere in the 95-plus-percent of students we can educate.”

“There’s an awful lot of children in public school that have IEPs [Individualized Education Programs], labeled LD [learning disabled], that are just simply behind – they’re not LD; they’re just way behind,” he said. “And we can fix that.”

Thales Academy earned recognition for being one of the first schools to open for in-person learning after the government-mandated COVID-19 school shutdowns.

“By carefully and consistently evaluating and adapting COVID policies and safety protocols, all of our campuses have remained in full operation, and families express gratitude at the continued education we have allowed our students during this challenging time,” the Academy’s 2021 Year End Report notes.

Tina Hodges, chair of the Thales Academy-Franklin Advisory Committee, spoke with The Tennessee Star about her first experience with Thales and the current plans to expand the program in Franklin.

Hodges said several years ago she and her husband visited the Thales campus in North Carolina.

“And, immediately, after just learning all about their story, we realized it was a great model to try to expand, and so they’re wanting to expand to Richmond, expand to Nashville, and so we joined in those efforts,” she explained. “And now, yes, we are ready to purchase some more property, and start expanding a middle school and high school.”

Asked if the exodus of families and teachers from public schools has been a factor in the expansion of Thales, Hodges said parents are looking for other options.

“Even in Williamson County, in Tennessee, which is the best school district in the state, by many measures, people are still looking for other options, to teach their children what they’re getting in this classical education curriculum,” she said. “And, so, that’s why I think it’s going to be such a huge success.”

As Kerry McDonald, senior education fellow at the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) told The Star News Network last week, the pandemic school closures “accelerated over the past couple of years” the exodus that had already begun from government-run schools.

McDonald explained more families are responding to alternatives in education, including homeschooling, microschools, faith-based schools, and other private schools, despite increased funding to public schools. She said the combination of greater school-choice policies and education entrepreneurship and innovation is providing those options for families to move outside of public schools:

We’ve seen increased funding at every level in education over the past couple of decades, and it hasn’t improved education outcomes or education quality, and, so, just simply adding more billions of dollars to the education budget is not going to make a big difference. And I think parents realize that and that’s why they’re increasingly looking for alternatives to an assigned district school and wanting a share of that K to 12 education funding, so that they can make the best education choice for their child.

Hodges explained Thales is now providing an education that many public schools no longer offer.

After having gone through Thales’ elementary schools, where the focus has been direct instruction and the fundamentals of reading, writing, mathematics, along with the development of character and confidence, students then experience the classical curriculum in the middle and high school programs, she said.

“And you start that critical thinking, reasoning, problem-solving,” Hodges noted. “They start debate in grades five through eight, and so they’re really preparing them in the lower school to move to that middle school rhetoric phase of their education.”

Hodges described the value of the private education children experience at Thales as “a steal”:

I was born and raised in Nashville. And the habit of a lot of families has been to move to a surrounding county to try to avoid private school to get a little bit better education, because they can’t afford the private school. But now we have a private school that, in elementary, is $5,500, and even in sixth through eighth grades is only going to be $6,200. And, so, that is really reasonable for many families.

Hodges said the high level of organization at Thales not only helps students and their parents, but teachers as well, who knows what to expect when they begin instruction.

“And, so, it’s just got to be so much easier for a teacher than sometimes going into the chaos of a new school,” she said. “The type of education, the direct instruction, the classroom structure – all of that tends to be a more organized and efficient day for the teachers and the students. And, so, I think they’re surprised that it’s just calmer than a public school would be.”

Hodges agreed Americans now have a real appetite for school choice:

There will be more states that pass whatever they call their flavor of voucher programs. So, I think that people are starting to see that families should have choices. They shouldn’t be forced into a failing public school. And, so, I think that schools like Thales are just going to continue to explode and grow.

A RealClear Opinion Research Poll published on February 28 surveyed more than 2,000 registered voters and found 72 percent of respondents support school choice, compared to 18 percent who oppose the concept.

That outcome includes 68 percent of Democrats, 82 percent of Republicans, and 67 percent of Independents in support of school choice.

The findings also represent substantial increases in support for school choice since the pandemic, when teachers’ unions insisted that schools remain closed.

Overall support for school choice jumped 8 percentage points, from 64 percent in April 2020 to 72 percent in 2022. Democrat support rose 9 percentage points, from 59 percent to 68 percent, while Republican and Independent support increased 7 percentage points, from 75 percent to 82 percent, and 60 to 67 percent, respectively.

“After 30 or 40 years of continuous experimentation, endless political propaganda, and complete lack of discipline and character development in the schools,” Luddy asserted, “the idea is to bring really good basics to K-12 education.”

Disclosures:

Michael Patrick Leahy, CEO of The Star News Network, is also a member of the Thales Academy-Franklin Advisory Committee.

Tina Hodges is the CEO of Action 247, which is an advertiser at The Tennessee Star.

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Susan Berry, PhD, is national education editor at The Star News Network. Email tips to [email protected].
Photo “Thales Academy” by Flowers Plantation.