New Hope School conducts a project-based learning component as part of its overall education program. Project-based learning focuses on teaching students key knowledge and understanding as well as success skills, such as critical thinking/problem solving, collaboration, and self-management.

To please and to teach have been standards of good literature, both fiction and non-fiction, for more than 2000 years. Pleasure may refer to the style, while teaching refers to the moral content of a work of art. Great literature, such as Shakespeare's plays and Dickens' novels, are written well and have obvious moral or ethical themes.
We encourage young people to read because they can enlarge their experience of people and places, as well as the enjoyment of the written word. As students experience good literature they can learn to empathize with characters beyond those they encounter in their daily routines.

"If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational
performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war." This famous quote from the 1983 study entitled A Nation at Risk is only partially true today. With charter schools and other strategies to improve PreK - 12 education, there are bright spots on the educational landscape. However, there is still a fundamental failure to educate the whole child, rather than merely improving test scores.

​"3 out of 4 Americans are lonely, says a UC study" reads the headline in the San Francisco Chronicle. There are complex reasons for loneliness: fragile families, disappearing communities, and individuals striving for success. And there are also complex remedies. An obvious cause of loneliness, however, is something that offers immediate remedy: lack of civility.

Every teacher knows that how parents impact their children directly affects what can be accomplished in the classroom. "Spare the rod and spoil the child" is one recipe at home for the punishment-oriented classroom. Allow the child as much freedom as possible at home, and the classroom becomes a playground. Parents and educators struggle to find a formula that will produce intelligent, responsible, happy children at home and at school.