Weekend greetings, CharterFolk.
Last week was a fascinating one. I started out on Monday recording a chat with Alan Bersin in San Diego. We had it ready for distribution on Friday. All week long, so much of what he had to say echoed in my mind.
Yes, we had the chance to laugh and remember some good times.
But the bulk of the conversation I would describe as sober. Some of it startlingly so.
Not about long term prospects. Alan remains as optimistic as ever that we’ll ultimately push through to something better, with charter schools being a big part of the solution.
But about the immediate term? About what is happening right now within our current public education paradigm?
His words echo:
I come away with the conviction that absent an elimination of the influence that the NEA and the AFT have over American education, we will not be able to reform systematically public education in this country.
Quite a conviction, indeed.
Other words that stayed with me were his comments that reforms of school districts cannot be sustained, and his agreement with my central premise that a great beast is slouching toward our Normal Streets to be born.
Perhaps most telling was his description of the power dynamics that hold school districts in their place of fixity. He said that teacher unions use school boards as their tools by which to maintain control. I have this link teed to that moment in the interview. Check it out.
But what made Alan’s comments echo most is how they combined with news about urban education in California this week.
The pace at which the beast slouches is quickening, CharterFolk.
The Pattern in California
In recent posts I have been writing about the financial dysfunction and admissions illegality on display in Sacramento.
This week, the superintendent threw in the towel.
She had started out as a hire that the teacher union celebrated, a sharp contrast to her predecessor who the union detested.
“We have been looking for a collaborative employer relationship for a long time, and that had really been impossible under prior leadership,” confirmed [Sacramento teacher union president] Milevsky. “Long-term educator Lisa Allen has made a big change in how the district has approached working with us. We think that has made all the difference in the world.”
A year and a half later she’s gone.
For the record, that leaves the district without a superintendent, and with its top budget official under investigation.
A similar dynamic is playing out just down the road in Livermore.
Not long ago a new superintendent was welcomed with excitement. Now just barely a year later she’s gone, with her unpardonable offense being that she suggested that the district might have to close some schools in order to balance its budget.
Depending on how quickly they can make the hire, Livermore will have seen either four or five superintendents in the past four years. No word on whether the district’s chief business officer, who came with her, will be going too.
The biggest education story in California this week has been the implosion happening in San Francisco.
A teacher strike is scheduled for tomorrow.
We will see whether the district’s superintendent, the fourth that it has had in five years, and the district’s chief financial officer, who has been on the job for just four months, can find solutions their predecessors could not.
The leaning tower that is public education in San Francisco is a theme I have returned to often during my years writing here at CharterFolk.
Now the tilt’s grown worse.
The Chronicle’s editorial board essentially got it right, calling out poor academic performance and the district’s own unwise financial decisions.
Why does the district still have a deficit? Because it spent an influx of COVID funds to temporarily cover promises it couldn’t afford to keep. That money has run out. Last year, the district made $114 million in cuts, but that wasn’t enough to patch the hole.
David Crane at Govern for California put a finer point on it, citing the amount of today’s funding the district is directing to pay for educations of the past.
Twenty years ago, the district spent 7% of its budget on pensions and retiree health care. Today it’s 20%. The unfunded OPEB (“other post employment benefits”) liability (the costs from the past the district is foisting upon the kids of the present) is $649 million. Over the decades, the district has put approximately $32M toward those promises it made to teachers. It leaves each student in today’s generation holding the bill for $13,000 in historic costs.
In Fresno this week, we saw the school district capitulate on its long effort to protect students from such inter-generational theft.
Over the years, the district has set aside about $80M for the promises that it had made to teachers. It left unfunded about $720M – about $10,000 per pupil. For a while, it looked like the district was going to show the resolve needed to make that number grow smaller. Last week, sadly, we saw that it is now set to go higher.
The state’s “leader” in OPEB profligacy, of course, is Los Angeles, whose $8.9B in unfunded liabilities leaves each student holding a $17,000 bill. This week, The 74 reported that the Los Angeles and San Francisco unions appear to be on similar paths.
Politico presented it as even bigger than that …
… describing how the California Teachers Association is embarking upon a statewide effort to use strikes, or threats of strikes, as a means of extracting greater immediate term benefit from school districts.
All told, more than two dozen unions representing about 77,000 teachers around the state say they are at an impasse in negotiations over new contracts.
That’s about 25% of the state – 25% of the state’s 5.8M students – at risk of teachers going out on strike.
What, reportedly, got the teacher unions headed in a more aggressive, unified direction was the “success” that the teacher union had in West Contra Costa Unified, a district serving Richmond, which is located just north of Berkeley.
There, in December, the teacher union’s five day strike led to district capitulation.
Last month, the district finalized the new agreement, which provides 8% raises and a move to a new health insurance plan where the district pays 100% of premiums for employees and their families.
Even before finalizing the deal, the district began bringing forward the first of many cuts that will be needed over the next three years to pay for its capitulation.
It’s this pattern played out over and over in school districts across the state that results in California, as reported by the NEA …
… having the highest paid teachers in the country …
… with average salaries now exceeding $100,000/year.
It also explains how the state has the 4th largest class sizes in the country, and has the absolute fastest growing class sizes.
Thus far, it looks as though WCCUSD’s new superintendent, hired in June, will weather withering criticism from the teacher union and will continue in the role. But the district’s chief business officer, who was subject to a no-confidence vote from the union, will not.
It leaves the district’s finances to be driven by an “Acting Associate Superintendent of Business Services.”
This is what CTA’s We Can’t Wait Campaign …
… is designed to achieve:
An instability in leadership in the central offices of school districts across the State of California so profound that it can push through whatever it wants.
Coupled with, as the Politico story showed, a policy agenda aimed at creating even greater financial instability.
Along with writing the playbook for the mass strikes, Goldberg said the union will also push legislation this year to roll back a requirement that districts set their budgets in three-year cycles. Such long-term planning is difficult and, Goldberg said, leads districts to be too stingy.
Five years ago next week, the Chronicle deemed California’s schools a national scandal.
Since that time, they have only fallen further into disgrace.
They are being led there by parties who believe that such disgrace is actually national leadership.
This is what we are contending with, CharterFolk.
So-called national leadership accelerating public education toward the brink of national scandal.
The New Combination of 2026
It’s one of the boldest bets that has ever been made in the history of public education – the notion that forces protecting the status quo can consciously speed school districts toward financial oblivion.
And then count on policymakers to bail those districts out because they believe there is no alternative.
When our movement is showing that, in fact, there is another choice.
Entire city school systems reformed.
Historic progress at scale in cities across America.
With our own world more deeply understanding that our ability to transform whole systems depends not on some tragic storm but on our willingness to simply pursue our own North Star.
And it is the combination of those two things – the wanton recklessness of status quo interests causing unprecedented damage, and the increased capacity of the charter school movement to bring forward systemic reform – which explains why a rough beast is slouching toward our urban school districts to be born.
Call it The New Combination of 2026.
One that recognizes that the worst surely are full of passionate intensity. We all see that.
But are the best – as the Yeats screed goes – “lacking all conviction?”
It’s clearly the assumption – and the bet – that lies at the heart of the We Can’t Wait agenda.
A bet that there aren’t Folk on the landscape ready to build amid the wreckage that is being wrought.
A wise one?
We will see, CharterFolk.
We will see.