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By Elizabeth Hunter

In her work overseeing ACSI Global Core Standards, Dr. Debbie MacCullough has brought a unique combination of personal experience, enthusiasm, and vision for establishing ACSI’s influence on the worldwide Christian schooling movement.

ACSI created the Director of Global Core Standards role in 2022 as part of a restructuring effort to enhance its global outreach and missional alignment. The job’s primary responsibilities were straightforward, but not simple—develop, implement, and evaluate biblically based core standards for global implementation and ongoing assessment.

Looking back, you can see the ways God has prepared Dr. MacCullough for this role throughout her life. As the daughter of Christian educators—her father was in higher-ed and her mom was a teacher trainer, both at Cairn University—Dr. MacCullough also grew up attending Christian schools and graduated from Plumstead Christian School in Pennsylvania. Early in her career, she taught elementary, middle, and high school mathematics at several Christian schools in the area, including Plumstead which, incidentally, is an ACSI member school.

“When I finished my master’s degree in math education, I joined a mission and taught at Faith Academy in the Philippines for five years,” she said. Before returning to the U.S., Dr. MacCullough was given a fully funded opportunity to earn a doctorate in curriculum and instruction in mathematics education thanks to a grant from the National Science Foundation.

“As I was finishing my doctorate, I took a position at Cairn University as a mathematics professor. My father had passed away, and my mom was by herself. I figured it was a really good time to support my mom, so I took a job there and loved it. I learned so much about training teachers.”

In addition to teaching mathematics and mathematics education, Dr. MacCullough also served as the Dean of the School of Education at Cairn for three years. During that time, she regularly attended international conferences for Christian educators, where she met Mike Epp, who served in Brazil for 19 years and is now Sr. Vice President of ACSI Global.

“He invited me to be a part of a team to help develop a teacher training program in the Democratic Republic of Congo.” Together with faculty from three other American universities and two professors from DRC, the team developed a teacher training program, known initially as The Elephant Project. In 2014, they went to Kinshasa, DRC’s capital city, to present the training and begin the process of handing it over to the Congolese leadership.

Dr. MacCullough returned to her status as a missionary, which allowed her to serve as a Higher Education Consultant to ACSI Global. For several years, she worked on a project to train leaders on school improvement in under-resourced regions, followed by another teacher training program that is now active in 14 countries.

“At the same time, things were changing at ACSI—from being an American organization that works internationally to becoming a global organization based on its core structure,” she said. This shift opened the door for Dr. MacCullough to become ACSI’s first Director of Global Core Standards in 2022.

“It’s a unique, fun position to be in because I get to work with people from literally everywhere,” she said. “You know how God sometimes develops us for a position or a role that He has for us … I feel like all of my life experiences have really fed into this project.”

“I've always had a heart for the national Christian school movement, ever since I was in the Philippines,” Dr. MacCullough told us. “I always wanted to see [how I could] help the movement. And it was during that time in Kinshasa that the Lord really laid on my heart—now is the time to do this.”

The task of establishing core standards for Christian schooling in a global context has centered around three principal areas—teacher certification, school improvement, and leadership training.

With defining teacher certification as the first objective, Dr. MacCullough worked with ACSI’s divisional directors to identify two or three teacher training experts from each of seven regions. “I got a committee of 12 people together from around the globe and we looked at the question, ‘What does every Christian school teacher need to know and be able to do?’ And we came up with five standards that are called the Global Core Standards for Teacher Certification.”

The standards needed to be relevant across cultures but consistent, such as meeting their country’s requirements to be a teacher, demonstrating Bible knowledge, and understanding how to develop lessons with a biblical worldview. The resulting certification helps standardize teacher training around the world and allows recognition for the teachers who have been trained.

Defining school leadership certification was a similar process but with a different committee that ended up using six standards and is currently going through a three-step approval process. “With the teacher certification and the school leadership certification, we would like to see those launched around the globe at the same time,” Dr. MacCullough said.

The focus for the third set of standards, school improvement programs, is similar to the American practice of accreditation. “That's kind of the gold standard of school improvement programs here in the U.S.,” MacCullough said. The goal of the next committee will be to write standards that are biblically founded, applicable in every culture, and that will lead to how a school flourishes and becomes fruitful.

When it comes to developing global standards, Dr. MacCullough says it is important to remember that these aren’t American standards created for the rest of the globe. “It’s funny how even within the ACSI world, we sometimes forget that we’re part of the globe,” she said. “What makes us stronger together is that we aren't alone. It's everyone doing everything together.”

Implementing every aspect of the global core standards is an ongoing process, but Dr. MacCullough hopes this holistic approach to Christian education will create a unity of spirit, despite cultural differences, for Christian schools around the world.

“In my view, success will be when we start seeing that it doesn't matter what part of the world you’re in – Kingdom education is culturally appropriate, but it's similar,” she said. “What I mean by that is, in a west African country, the school may be meeting under a tree with two teachers for the entire village of kids, but the kind of teaching that's happening is the same kind of teaching that's happening in Europe in a Christian school where they have all of this funding.”

The standards allow the schools to be unique and yet on the same mission for hopefully seeing more children come to know and serve the Lord well where they are, Dr. MacCullough said.

“One of the dreams I have for the global core standards is that we see more and more … Christian schools coming together and saying, ‘These are our points of unity. Let's do our task in a way that the community around us doesn't see us as competing with each other but sees us working together.’ I think that would speak volumes in any country.”