From the Executive Director: First Questions

I have lived in a few places in the U.S. over the past 25 years. During each transition my family has made to a new zip code… a new culture… I have viewed it as a bit of an ethnographic study. We have been extraordinarily blessed, in each place, to meet and do meaningful life and work with phenomenal people who laughed with us, sometimes cried with us, and formed us, really. What I came to realize is that in any place, one can discern the most important value of that culture by the first question people ask.

For example, when we first moved to Boston, it felt like we met every Christian in Eastern Massachusetts in 30 days. Now, the number of Christians in that area is NOT overwhelmingly large, but let me just say there were enough cocktail parties to meet a lot of people. At each of those parties, and through the subsequent years, I would consistently be asked first, “Where did you go to school?” For most, it was a one-word answer: Deerfield. Nobles. Exeter. Harvard. Princeton. You get the drift. Your formal education matters a lot in Boston. While it was not the highest value for these incredibly faithful and purposeful Christians, it revealed the cultural reality.

When we moved to Georgia much later, we quickly realized that college football was more than a pastime. “Who do you cheer for?” was very often the first question, and when we’d respond with the Minnesota Gophers, it would almost bring a sympathetic laugh to the conversation. Now, I am not at all supposing that the colors one wears on Saturdays in the fall was the most important thing for these Christians (maybe second, though), it did reveal a cultural reality – your college football allegiance is highly valued in the South.

So I wonder, what is your first question as you approach the myriad daily decisions that impact your mission delivery in large and small ways? Because if we are educating for today’s trends, we are educating not only for the past, but even more importantly, we have asked the wrong first question. Until we can honestly and coherently answer what Christian education is for, we will continually miss the target of the work we care about so deeply. This is the first filter we must use for our decisions.  This will be the first in a series that examines how we might be able to use the right first questions to guide our decision-making, and ultimately, strengthen the Christian distinctiveness in our schools.

What We Are Actually For

Recently, I had the pleasure of joining a global network of Christian school leaders from 15 countries in the West and the Global South to discuss how we can work together to ensure more students know Jesus, love His word, and serve His people (this is my paraphrase of our purpose). Most of you would, at least loosely, agree that these are appropriate goals of Christian schooling, but each school has a distinctive mission and, more practically, should have a well-thought-out and widely held philosophy of Christian schooling rooted in our theology. Everything we do in our schools should serve those goals. Our pedagogy should deeply reflect our mission and philosophy of education, and we should see coherence between them. But often, even when we have these solid foundations in place, we skip the first question — which leads to dissonance between what we say and what we do. This will be the first in a series that examines how we might be able to use the right first questions to guide our decision-making, and ultimately, strengthen the Christian distinctiveness in our schools.

What Happens When We Skip the First Question: The AI Question

Let me play this out with one of the most pressing examples in front of us right now: artificial intelligence.

AI has arrived at the doorstep of every school and home, and it is in every pocket or purse. The pressure to respond is real. Board members are asking about it, parents are emailing about it, teachers are experimenting with it, and students are definitely using it in more ways than we might even realize. And school leaders are being pulled in a dozen directions at once. So what are the first questions schools might be asking?

“What is everyone else doing?”

“What platforms are you using?”

Or perhaps: “What policy do we need to put in place — and fast?”

Or even: “How do we prevent students from using this to cheat?”

Now, I want to be careful here, because none of those questions are wrong. They are practical, they are pressing, and they deserve thoughtful answers. But they should not be the first question. And when they become the first question, we have already ceded the ground that matters most.

The right first question is the one that flows directly from your mission: What does faithfully forming students in the image of God require of us in an age of artificial intelligence? Indeed, what does it mean to be made in the image of God?

That question changes everything downstream. If your school exists to cultivate wisdom — not just knowledge — then AI integration isn’t primarily a policy problem, it’s a formation opportunity. If your school believes that students are made in the image of a Creator God, then the arrival of generative AI raises profound and beautiful questions about creativity, authorship, and what it means to make something. If your school’s philosophy centers on virtue and character, then the question of how a student engages with AI matters infinitely more than whether they are allowed to use it at all.

When we start with why our school exists, the conversation shifts. Rather than asking “should students use AI?” we begin to ask “what habits of mind, what practices of discernment, what theological anchors do our students need in order to use any tool — including this one — in a manner worthy of their calling?”

That is a richer question, and it is also a harder one.

The Tyranny of the Measurable

Here is where we face our second challenge,  and it is one that confronts every school leader I know, regardless of how clear their philosophy may be.

We have a deep and understandable tendency to optimize for what we can measure.

Test scores, college acceptance rates, AP results, enrollment targets, and financial KPI’s. These are not bad things. In fact, they are necessary and genuinely useful tools for understanding the health of our students and our schools. But they are a very particular kind of useful — they are useful for measuring what is easy to measure. And the danger, as any serious educator knows, is that what is easy to measure is rarely the most important thing.

Think about what you actually believe about Christian education. You believe, I suspect, that your schools exist to form students who know and love God and love their neighbors. You exist to shape young people who will have the academic preparation, moral clarity, and courageous imagination to live a life of impact that honors God. You believe that how a student treats the cafeteria worker matters as much as how they perform on their college entrance exams.

None of that is easy to measure. And so, subtly, over time, the unmeasurable things get crowded out. Not because anyone decided they didn’t matter, but because the measurable things come with spreadsheets and dashboards and accountability structures, and the unmeasurable things require something slower and harder: trust, relationship, time, and the willingness to wait on outcomes that may not be visible until long after a student has walked across your stage.

This is the tension that lives at the heart of Christian schooling, and it is not new. But AI has intensified it dramatically.

Let me be direct: a student who can skillfully use every AI tool available to them, but who has not learned to think carefully, to sit with difficulty, to acknowledge what they do not know, and to seek wisdom from God and community has not been well-educated, regardless of what their transcript says.

The Encouragement

But here is what I genuinely believe, and why I am hopeful: Christian schools are uniquely positioned for this moment.

Not because we have all the answers, because we don’t; and not because we are ahead of the curve on technology implementation, because we are not. Some are further along than others.  But because we should have something that no amount of AI sophistication can provide: a foundation. We have a first question that is already answered before the cultural pressures arrive, and one that our culture desperately needs today and in the future.

When your philosophy of education is rooted in the belief that every student bears the image of God and that our goal is to form students who love and serve Him, you have a lens. And that lens changes how you evaluate every new tool, every new trend, every new pressure that comes knocking.

So the invitation I want to leave with you is simply this: before your next board meeting on AI policy, before your next curriculum review, before your next professional development day on technology integration, before your next disciplinary conversation with a student,  before your next donor meeting, pause long enough to ask the first question. Not “what are other schools doing?” Or even, “what do the data say?” But: what are we for?  What if, together as a network,  and in every decision we made on our campuses, we were asked the first question: how will this decision help or hinder our children’s ability  to grow in the likeness of God?

That is, I believe, the great privilege and the great responsibility of Christian school leadership. And I have never been more convinced that the world needs us to get it right.

Katie played a role in CESA’s founding and served as its original Director of Academic Advancement. In that position, Katie co-wrote the original CESA standards and helped develop the initial institutional review process. She also played a major role in organizing the early CESA symposia and heads retreats.

She has served on the faculties of Wheaton College, Boston University, Gordon College, and Kennesaw State University, and currently teaches in graduate programs at Baylor University and Taylor University. She also serves as Fellow with the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia, is a Research Fellow with Cardus, and is a research scholar at Baylor’s Center for School Leadership.

Katie also has extensive experience in K-12 Christian schooling, having served as an administrator and faculty at several private Christian schools. She has her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of St. Thomas, and her doctorate from Boston University.

Katie can be reached at kwiens@cesaschools.org or you can use the button below to schedule a virtual appointment with her.