Weekend greetings, CharterFolk.
And happy Father’s Day to all the dads in CharterLand.
I find myself up before the crack of dawn this morning trying to get this one out before a Father’s Day trip into the city to see a World Cup game, and then a flight to New Orleans for our national conference.
So Father’s Day and World Cup-ness are intersecting themes in our family this week.
Which brings me back to a story that Amy and I have carried with us for more than three decades.
Amy and I met in our teacher credentialing program in the summer of 1993, though we didn’t start dating until a few years later. I taught at Hooper Avenue, near Slauson and Central in South Los Angeles. She taught at 118th Street, about seventy streets farther south in Watts.
At the end of our first year of teaching, Los Angeles was hosting the World Cup. Amy had been given complimentary tickets so she could take a group of her kindergartners to a game.
After school on the day of the match, she needed to make a home visit before picking up the kids and heading to the stadium. As she pulled her car out of the driveway afterward, two young men stepped in front of her car. One came up beside the driver’s side window, pointed a gun at her head, and told her to give him whatever she had.
She threw her wallet and belongings onto the ground, and the men let her go.
A few minutes later, gathering herself in the school parking lot, she glanced at the dashboard.
There were the World Cup tickets.
Right where she had happened to place them.
She called a friend, who lent her twenty bucks for parking, and then she went right back into the streets surrounding the school to pick up the kids for the game.
When she returned to school the following Monday morning, a bag was waiting for her. Inside were her purse and her belongings.
Later, a teacher’s assistant told her:
“It wasn’t right what those boys did to you. They didn’t know you were a teacher.”
Over the years, as most CharterFolk do at different points in their careers, I have passed through what you might call crucible moments.
Moments that test you.
And through them all, I have had at my side a woman who had tickets on the dashboard and never wavered.
Need I tell you that she never wavered in her support of me during tough moments either?
It is the kind of presence that, over the decades, has helped me become a better Folk.
And a better father.
Which is a pattern I can identify across the many great fathers I have come to know.
Almost without exception, they have remarkable people around them.
So on this Father’s Day, I extend my salute to all the great fathers out there.
And to the people around those great fathers who have helped them become who they are.
Together, they remind us never to lose sight of the deeper mission:
Making sure all kids get the tickets to the World Cup they deserve.
The Buses that Await
Knowing that I was planning to write about Providence this week, Amy sent me this link:
Fans from Scotland, many spending life savings to make the trip, came to the United States to cheer on their team. They learned that staying in Providence would be much cheaper than staying in Boston. And they found that the most affordable way to get to the match was to rent school buses.
So 21 buses set out together, heading north up I-95 to see Scotland win its first World Cup since before the charter school movement was even born.
Quite the story.
Quite the metaphor.
World Cup tickets on the dashboard times a thousand.
A reminder of what the yellow school buses of public education are supposed to achieve:
Delivering people to dream destinations.
And while we would all admit that this is not uniformly the case across all charter schools in the United States, in Rhode Island there is no question:
The charter schools of Rhode Island are providing World Cup tickets to thousands of students every day.
Much better opportunity than is available in the district public system.
Indeed, that system has been shown over and over again to be fundamentally failing its students and its community.
It is the kind of track record that left impartial observers literally in tears.
Meanwhile, the success of Rhode Island’s charter schools has led to overwhelming public support for their further growth.
And yet, despite all that, Rhode Island’s governor – a person who has previously championed charter schools – signed into law this week a moratorium on new charter schools and a reduction in the number of schools allowed to operate in the state.
It is a situation that confounds so much of the common sense that informs our own intuition about what should empower our movement to achieve its potential.
The idea that great academic results will protect us.
The idea that the brokenness of the current system will itself provide the moral argument for change.
The idea that the general public being with us will translate into policymakers not being willing to cross us.
None of that, CharterFolk, sadly, is true.
In fact, if anything, charter opponents nationally see Rhode Island as a harbinger of what they hope will come next.
Back in 2017, when the NEA approved its new charter school policy – its first in nearly two decades – it studiously avoided calling for outright moratoria.
Don’t get me wrong, CharterFolk. The outcome they sought was the same: stopping all charter school growth as a first stage of attack, allowing for the closure of existing charter schools thereafter.
But they pursued that goal through indirect means – saying that the only authorizers of charter schools should be local school districts, and that those districts should be able to deny new charters and process renewals while taking into account the fiscal needs of the district itself.
Despite all the blowback that has come against charter schools since that time, schools have continued to grow. And to get new authority to grow.
So now we see charter opponents dropping the subterfuge and going directly for what they want.
A moratorium.
And their hope is that this now becomes the default position of the Democratic Party as we prepare to enter the 2028 presidential cycle.
Because what are we to take from the 33-6 vote count in the Rhode Island State Senate, and the signing of the bill by a former charter school champion, but that one part of the Democratic Party is rejecting any real embrace of an education abundance agenda and is instead doubling down on scarcity and uncompromising protection of the status quo?
Look at other policies that have passed in Rhode Island in recent years.
A hold-harmless clause for district schools.
A witch hunt against parents wanting to homeschool their kids.
And a return of the Providence school district to local control despite all its failings.
So it is entirely credible to assume that status quo interests will try to turn Rhode Island into something larger.
Not an island, but a model.
Not Rhode Island, but Rhode Nation.
And look, far be it from me, CharterFolk, to sugarcoat this.
This is bad.
Very bad.
And it didn’t happen because of some big advocacy deficiency. As I have written on several occasions, the Rhode Island League is punching way above its weight class, as are other advocacy partners in the landscape.
But don’t get too despondent either.
First, recall that the President of the Rhode Island State Senate is literally the sitting President of the state’s teacher union.
That 33-6 vote?
It is actually impossible to discern how much of it reflects Democrats’ true feelings about charter schools, and how much reflects a need to maintain a pecking order within a political establishment.
For lest we forget, CharterFolk:
Presidents Pro Tem control your staff.
Your office space.
Your committee assignments.
Your access to political funding for your upcoming re-election.
In other words, they control your very destiny.
It makes abundantly clear the power dynamics at play in much of public education today – a circumstance where teacher union positions have become so extreme that they can no longer count on captive policymakers to advance their agenda, but have to get into office themselves so they can directly enact their self-serving nonsense.
How else do we explain the union electing its own mid-level staffer to become Mayor of Chicago?
Or the fact that the school board in Oakland hears from the union that its search for a new CEO has been terminated?
Or that the New Jersey Education Association spent $40 million trying to elect its own president governor last cycle?
And failed.
There is a kind of desperation creeping into the status quo’s protection of itself right now, CharterFolk.
And that desperation is certain to grow in the years ahead as financially mismanaged, union-directed district school systems approach their moments of reckoning.
This week, Families in Action wrote a blistering critique of Oakland Unified’s financial plans as it careens toward a cliff.
In my hometown, the union-controlled school board approved a budget that shows the district running out of cash mid-year.
And many other school districts across the country – especially union-controlled or union-directed large urban districts – face the exact same dilemma.
Unfunded liabilities – the district’s own historical decision not to fund the promises it made to teachers – must now be paid for out of current operating budgets.
The can cannot be kicked down the road forever.
Look at Providence itself.
The school district’s unfunded liabilities are not reported separately, but are embedded in the city’s broader budget. Breaking them out roughly, we can see that the district has unfunded liabilities of approximately $400M-$500M, in the neighborhood of $20,000-$25,000 per student – an amount that exceeds what the district receives per pupil in its annual budget.
In the end, it equates to a need to direct money toward retiree healthcare in amounts that greatly exceed the district’s current budget shortfall, resulting in over 100 teachers and other staff losing their jobs right now.
Thus the desperation.
Thus the need to take the reins of public schools themselves.
And thus the end of the subterfuge, with the status quo moving directly to impose moratoria.
The problem for the teacher unions and other status quo interests is that the problems in public education are becoming so plain to see that many policymakers simply don’t want to hitch their wagons to something headed for the cliff.
Indeed, the Democratic candidate leading the current Rhode Island governor by wide margins in public polling …
… full-throatedly opposes the moratorium that was signed this week.
And leading Democratic gubernatorial candidates in Maine and Colorado continue to present themselves as unwavering supporters of charter schools.
To name but two.
So I would describe the broader situation this way:
It hangs in the balance.
It is uncertain which way this will break.
Which puts the onus on us to do more than we ever have to ensure that the 2028 presidential primary season is very different from the one we experienced in 2020, when literally every candidate was paraded in front of teacher unions to express disdain for our movement.
As I see it, the path forward comes down to four things.
First, we must sharpen and amplify our critique.
This is what Gary wrote about so compellingly last week.
We exist for a reason.
That reason is that our public schools are not as excellent, nor as equitable, as we can reasonably expect them to be.
And refusing to share that critique undercuts our very reason to exist.
Second, we have to keep building our advocacy strength, especially our political capacity, so that we have the influence needed to keep policymakers with us through times likely to be as turbulent as any public education has ever seen.
Third, we must advance the kind of policy agenda that Jorge Elorza called for in his final days as Mayor of Providence — North Stars calling for entire public school systems to evolve toward all-charter or charter-like systems.
Not because we want charter schools for charter schools’ sake.
But because we want a system of public education that is greatly more public than it has ever been.
A system that greatly expands the number of high-quality learning options available in landscapes such as Providence, while devising means of allocating that educational opportunity more fairly, such that all kids finally get the tickets to the World Cup they deserve.
The kind of policy agenda that reflects the actual values of the vast majority of Democratic voters.
And Republicans too, by the way.
And finally, yes, we are going to have to be there for one another in even more committed ways than we have ever been before.
Because filling the thousands of school buses on their way to dream destinations will require that we collectively come through crucible moments beyond anything we have encountered before.
Not just that we support each other to become better fathers.
But better Folk.
Which starts, as my family life so clearly teaches me, with people who look up and realize that those tickets to the World Cup have ended up on our dashboards.
Our job, no matter what challenges come at us in the near term, is to call our friends for the twenty bucks we need for parking so the kids can still see the game.
Knowing that, on the other side, the people closest to communities will see what happens.
They will know how unfair the treatment is that we are subjected to.
And they will make sure that whatever rightfully belongs to us is returned.
With gratitude.
The buses await, CharterFolk.
As do victories bigger than any we have seen since before our movement began.