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By Alan Gottlieb
When Bobby Jones retired as a Naval Commander in the fall of 2023 after 26 years of active service, he knew his next step would be to get involved in public education.
Among his many duties, he had taught at the Naval Academy in Annapolis. And as he neared retirement in 2021, he was assigned to run the ROTC units at Morehouse College and the Georgia Institute of Technology in his native Georgia.
What he saw among the young people, and particularly young men, in his charge, made him determined to stay in education after retirement.
“It became very apparent that these kids were completely different than I was at that age. The resiliency was not there. If something was hard, they would literally just quit,” Jones said. What he needed to do, he decided, was start an all-boys charter middle and high school to help build the kind of resilience the military built in him.
That school, Greater Atlanta Prep, is slated to open in the fall of 2026.
Though no one has conducted a study to measure how many military veterans, like Jones, have launched charter schools or work in senior positions in charters, anecdotal evidence suggests it is a growing trend, and this intuitively makes sense.
As veterans themselves will tell you, holding a command position in the military entails educating a steady stream of new recruits. The military is nothing if not mission-driven, and charters appeal to education-minded vets because the best schools, too, are driven by an unwavering eye on the prize.
In Jones’ case, that mission is building up the character and resilience of young men.
For Andy Johnson, a retired Army major who runs the Sage International Network of schools in and around Boise, Idaho, it’s preparing students to participate in and sustain democracy.
For Steve Lambert, a retired Air Force colonel who runs the American Classical Schools of Idaho network, it’s upholding his oath to support and defend the Constitution by “raising up the next generation of citizens who will be good stewards of our republic and our constitution.”
For Bruce Sims, a retired Marine who served, among many other duties, as a weapons training officer for an unmanned aircraft squadron, it’s “human formation” – developing and shaping students as human beings, in addition to providing academic education.
Sharing the stories of how these four career military men came to see working in public education as the next logical step in service to their country helps shed light on how and why a military-to-public-charter-school pipeline makes sense, on both sides of the equation.
Bobby Jones
A gifted student and athlete, Jones attended the exclusive Westminster Schools in Atlanta, one of only 13 Black students in his class. From there, he attended the U.S. Naval Academy, and received a Master’s Degree in National Security and Strategic Studies from the United States Naval War College.
Those experiences, where he frequently was one of just a handful of Black students, taught him the value of learning “how to step outside of your comfort zone,” Jones said. “I guarantee you, if you see a successful black person in America, in a boardroom with the CEO, or they are the CEO, they had to step out of their comfort zone at some point.”
That proved to be a blessing for him, Jones said, because it reinforced and strengthened his innate resiliency. That in turn, made him a successful military man, because stepping out of your comfort zone happens regularly, especially during combat deployments.
It’s precisely that vital attribute of resiliency, he said, that he sees lacking in many of today’s young people, and young men in particular.
He developed the idea of opening a boy’s charter school while in his final years in the navy, when he was in charge of ROTC at two colleges. In his spare time, he helped coach the football team at his old high school, Westminster. He found it a discouraging experience in some ways.
“These kids were completely different than I was at that age,” he said. “The resiliency was not there. If something was hard, they would literally just quit. I watched them quit in the middle of a game, and I lost my mind.”
A parent of one of the boys on the team, a graduate of Westminster and West Point, noticed how the team quit. “We started talking and agreed that we needed to do something about this. This was terrible, unacceptable.”
The idea they came up with was to open a charter high school for boys. The school, Greater Atlanta Prep, is still in the planning stages. But Jones has a clear vision for the school. First of all, it needs to be socioeconomically and racially integrated.
“A certain percentage of kids at this school need to come from Buckhead, the nicest section of Atlanta,” Jones said. “That is essential. Why? Because just as I shattered stereotypes at Westminster, we need to shatter stereotypes in both directions at Greater Atlanta Prep. If we’re talking about putting young men into society, they’re going to be heads of households, heads of businesses, and potentially heads of governments. They have to understand that the world is not the bubble that they’re in, whether it’s a criminal bubble or an affluent bubble. That is why that cross section is necessary to me.”
Second, the school has to push its students out of their comfort zone. While obviously a school can’t put kids through a military boot camp or basic training, where the goal is to break down the individual and then build him back up, there are other effective ways to push kids into healthy discomfort, Jones said.
One is to create groups of 10-15 students, give them educational tasks they have to complete by the end of the week, the month, and the semester, then assign a few students to lead the section and figure out how to meet those goals, without a teacher to hold their hands.
“You have to develop executive functioning skills, which kids today do not have, and you have to learn how to motivate your classmates, some of whom are going to say ‘this is too hard, I don’t want to do it.’”
In his years in command positions in the Navy, Jones learned that motivation has to be tailored to each individual, and that’s a lesson he wants his students to learn at an early age. “I learned that I can hold everybody to the same standard, but I don’t treat everybody the same because everybody takes things differently. I can yell at one kid and it clicks. If I yell at another kid, they’ll shut down. But I still expect this same standard to be met,” he said.
Jones also envisions internships and shadowing opportunities to give students early exposure to real-life experiences in places where standards are unfailingly high.
Third, and perhaps most important, students at Greater Atlanta Prep will learn that the world isn’t and shouldn’t be me-centered. “You learn in the military that you have to have a crew and a cause,” Jones said. “We will give them a crew – close friends that they go through thick and thin with, and a cause – a reason to drive towards something, a goal. Young men need that more than any other group out there. It helps them become more disciplined.”
Andy Johnson
Andy Johnson “only ever wanted to be a soldier,” and enlisted in the Army at age 17. His 22-year career included five years as an enlisted soldier, an interlude during which he got a college degree and was enrolled in ROTC, reentry into the Army with an officer’s commission as an artilleryman. After commissioning, graduated from Ranger School, the Army’s strenuous tactical leadership experience. He also graduated Army Airborne School at Fort Moore, GA, attended language school, saw combat in Iraq, served in overseas U.S. embassies.
He retired in 2007 with the rank of major. But the educational experiences he had during his military career stuck with him. “There’s probably no finer small unit Leadership School in the Army than Ranger School, and one that truly pushes you to the far ends of your mental and physical abilities,” Johnson said.
On-the-ground education was even more revelatory. “That year in Iraq, towards the end of my career, was transformative. I had the responsibility to stand up, train, equip, and lead a whole branch of the Iraqi police forces that were stretched from the Kuwaiti border all the way to north of Baghdad. It was very good work. It was very dangerous. I got blown up multiple times, lost a couple guys. But I think everything I had trained to do in the Army up into that point kind of keyed together in that year.”
When he decided to go into education, Johnson said, much of what he learned during his service transferred directly into working in schools.
“The Army is a place animated by mission, animated by the sense we’re going to do things as a team,” he said. “I always say mission first, people always. Schools are set up to be that way. They’re not always that way, but one of the things I have loved about working in charter schools in particular is that the good ones are truly mission-driven, and have a mission that animates the work at their heart, and that really resonates with me.”
Johnson said that in his work at Sage, a network of two International Baccalaureate schools, the focus on mission helps set a roadmap that educators can follow, even when things don’t go according to plan.
“I tell teachers you should be able to look at the mission statement and see what’s explicit, and then decide what’s implicit in it, and you’ll probably make the right decision in your classroom,” he said.
“The Army is built on that idea. Combat is a pretty chaotic and complex place, but if you know what you’re supposed to do, what should be accomplished, when it is to be accomplished, then in the moment when the plan changes, you can make a different plan and still arrive at the same objective without being told what to do. And I think that’s what great teachers can do.”
The Army is also adept at navigating different cultures, and those lessons have been directly relevant to work in schools, Johnson said. “In every school you’ve got 500 kids, 1,000 parents and 100 teachers. They come from different communities, faith, backgrounds, and they all have a different value around what you’re offering in the school. And so being able to listen and navigate is a skill I got from the Army.”
What new realities does a military veteran have to navigate in public schools? Johnson said civilian culture is vastly different in key respects. In the Army, he said, people are expected to stay and do a job until it is complete, regardless of how long it takes.
In a school, as dedicated as people might be, “they are civilians. They have regular hours. One of the things that I’ve had to learn or temper my expectations around is the work that we’re doing is super-important, but we have to plan it and do it in such a way that we can get most of it done between eight and four.”
Steve Lambert
Steve Lambert graduated from the U.S. Air Force Academy in 1990, and had a varied, 24-year military career, retiring as a colonel.
During his career, Lambert taught at the Air Force Academy. He and his wife also homeschooled their four boys. Lambert, the son of European immigrants, received a classical education in Europe through eighth grade, and he and his wife believed they could deliver the kind of schooling they wanted for their sons, rather than placing them in new schools every time Lambert was reassigned and the family moved.
“That (homeschooling) was great training for what would come afterwards,” he said.
Being an officer in the military, Lambert said, “is really about education and training. It is about teaching others that are following in your footsteps, because you’re perpetually replacing yourself.”
As he neared retirement, Lambert knew that whatever came next had to carry some deeper meaning than earning a living. “It would have to have a similar kind of calling to something bigger than myself, and it had to be more than just a J-O-B,” he said.
Lambert said he could have made “bags of money” as a commercial airline pilot but decided that education was his calling.
“I’m a first generation American, and I felt a strong calling to continue to live up to the oath that I took, except not by wearing a flight suit and leading others into war, but rather by raising up the next generation of citizens that would be good stewards of our republic and our constitution, who will, hopefully, preserve our 248-year-old-republic.”
Lambert was drawn to the classical education offered by schools in Hillsdale College’s Barney Charter School Initiative. He worked first for a classical academy in Atlanta, then, in 2019, launched the Treasure Valley Classical Academy, a K-12 charter school in rural Idaho.
That school proved such a success, and the demand for a classical education proved so strong in Idaho that Lambert formed the American Classical Schools of Idaho (ACSI) network, which currently oversees three schools with plans to open more.
People with a military background tend to have highly developed logistical skills, which helps them navigate the complexities of getting a school open. “When it comes to facilities and school safety and busing and food service and compliance, people in the military come from a pretty disciplined, systems minded-background,” Lambert said.
“You have to build procedures. You have to follow those procedures in order to be successful as an organization. We do all of this to support the most important thing, which is teachers and students in classrooms.”
Long-serving military veterans also tend to have significant leadership experience, which translates well to a school environment, Lambert said. “You have a lot of opportunities to lead, to evaluate, to coach, to mentor, to shape, to train, to educate other human beings,” he said. “K through 12 is not that different from high school through mid-career. It’s just people with different maturity levels, and so it’s all about learning how to guide them, mentor them, lead them, sometimes discipline them.”
Like Andy Johnson, Lambert said adjusting to managing people in a civilian context took some time. “It takes some time to shift that mindset. And there’s a few times I caught myself just getting into ‘get it done no matter what. Bang your head up against the wall until you punch through and solve a problem.’
“Then I’d look around and realize everybody in the room is looking at me like I’m crazy. And you think, okay, slow down. You’re no longer in a squadron. You’re no longer in going-to-war mode.”
Bruce Sims
Bruce Sims serves as assistant principal at the newly opened Idaho Novus Classical Academy, part of Lambert’s ACSI network. He came to the network after 21 years in the Marine Corps, where he served in a variety of roles, including military police, avionics instructor, and a weapons training officer for an unmanned aircraft squadron.
It was in that last position that Sims came to realize he wanted to be an educator. “I enjoyed being given the ability to help someone learn something at a faster rate or an earlier time than I was able to attain that knowledge during my career,” he said. “That’s really what did it for me, being able to have the authority as an instructor pilot, to teach all of my air crew different things that maybe took me longer to learn.”
Spurred by that knowledge, Sims, upon retiring, earned a Master’s Degree in education and obtained a teaching credential. Soon thereafter he met Lambert through a veteran’s organization in Idaho, and visited the Treasure Valley Classical Academy. That approach to education immediately appealed to him.
“I was impressed by the level of joy that the students had, the level of decorum,” Sims said. “And the level of knowledge that was being conveyed in the classroom was just amazing. And it wasn’t just knowledge, it was also human formation.”
Seeing that human formation, Sims said, helped him realize there are commonalities between the military and public education. “They are both very humanistic endeavors,” he said. “Both are devoted to the development of human beings. In the military, it has a different purpose. It takes a different shape and a flavor, but it’s still concerned with being able to provide leadership, encouragement and development.”
In his position as assistant principal, Sims is responsible for much of the logistical support that allows teachers to do their job. He said his military background left him well suited to the job. “I can make sure that the professional educator who’s been hired to serve on our faculty has all of the things that he or she might need to be successful in educating that child,” he said.
“That might take the form of supplies, that may take the form of coaching and mentorship. But at the end of the day, when it comes to leadership for the faculty and staff, that’s what we need to be, and that transfers extremely well from the military. Just that idea of servant leadership. We’re going to take care of the people who are doing the mission.”
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Alan Gottlieb is a Colorado-based writer, editor, journalist, communications consultant, and nonprofit entrepreneur who owns Write.Edit.Think, LLC. He founded EdNews Colorado, which later merged with Gotham Schools to form Chalkbeat. He does consulting work for Bluum, an Idaho-based non-profit education group.
