Weekend greetings, CharterFolk.
I was planning to write about another topic this week.
But then this news came through.
And I consider it a development about as emblematic of the larger trends shaping the next era of chartering – and public education – as any we have seen of late.
As Mollie reminds us every quarter …
… CharterFolk remain on the move.
This past quarter, we published the largest On the Move post we have ever run, showing that CharterFolk continue moving into positions of ever-greater influence at least as much as they have in the past.
But this one is different.
Karega Rausch is one of the most respected leaders in the national charter school movement …
… as reflected by the fact that he won one of our Brian’s Voice Awards last year.
And NACSA is one of our seminal organizations.
My own connection to NACSA goes back to its beginnings and includes years of close partnership and service on its national advisory board, so I understand deeply the importance of quality authorizing and the role NACSA has played in strengthening it.
It is why I find Karega’s shift so fascinating.
And look, I understand that there are some idiosyncratic aspects to this story that should caution us against reading too much national significance into it.
Karega is a longtime resident of Indianapolis.
He cut his teeth working in the city’s Office of the Mayor.
So one could argue that this is simply a person with deep community roots coming home to an opportunity that happened to open up in the place where he continues to live.
But in another sense, it is impossible not to look beyond the individual and consider the organizational roles between which this leader is moving.
From a national organization supporting authorizers that regulate charter schools, to a first-of-its-kind organization that will seek to hold all public schools – charter and district – to the same standards through essentially the same processes.
To me, the moment bespeaks a passing of the baton for the entire charter school movement.
Not a baton being passed away from NACSA, whose work remains essential and whose next chapter can be a thriving one, whatever direction its board and leadership choose during this moment of transition.
But a baton being passed from an architecture created for one moment in time to another being built for a fundamentally different one.
NACSA was born of an awareness that the charter school movement would need good authorizing in order to succeed.
Full stop.
Wherever we situate authorizing, we need people to be great at it.
And becoming a great authorizer is much harder than it looks.
How do you properly regulate without suffocating?
How do you create meaningful accountability without rebuilding the same bureaucratic structures that have rendered so much of public education immobile?
How do you give educators genuine freedom while ensuring that the public interest is protected?
These questions stand in sharp contrast to the asphyxiating overregulation of public education that has been allowed to emerge in our country over decades, if not centuries.
And I do not think any of us would say that anyone, including NACSA, has gotten all of this exactly right.
Indeed, many rightly point out that a great deal of authorizing today has become smothering enough to keep charter schools from generating the degree of innovation they produced during the movement’s early years.
That notwithstanding, in the aggregate, there can be no doubt that NACSA has made an important contribution, helping the practice of authorizing grow stronger over time.
And the need to support great authorizing remains as strong today as it has ever been.
But NACSA was also born within a very different moment – one in which encouraging school districts to evolve into managers of portfolios of options was considered a viable long-term theory of action.
The idea was that those leading our nation’s school districts could eventually be convinced to cede the direct operation of schools to others.
Neerav called it relinquishment.
Robin and Paul called it the portfolio approach.
Gates spent the better part of a decade attempting to get charter schools and school districts to enter cooperative compacts.
All of it was driven by the idea that school districts would continue evolving toward becoming regulators overseeing portfolios of different providers while managing functions such as facilities, transportation, enrollment, and the allocation of public resources.
But at some point, the viability of the portfolio approach became fundamentally compromised.
People attribute that breakdown to many different things.
For me, I tend to point to the same development I always do.
The end of the charter school beginning.
By my calculation, the beginning ended in the summer of 2017, though it had been disintegrating for years before that.
Its end was officially consecrated in the NEA’s new charter school policy.
That was the moment when the strongest status quo interest in public education let the word go out that it would no longer be possible for Democrats to be supportive of charter schools while continuing to enjoy a productive partnership with teacher unions.
Stopping the charter school movement shifted from being among the unions’ highest priorities to becoming their absolute top priority.
That change rippled across the landscape in profound ways.
Democrats like Gavin Newsom and Joe Biden, who had once been at least decently supportive of charter schools, buckled.
Afterward, vast swaths of other Democratic leaders buckled with them.
Another ripple was the end of the viability of portfolio approaches.
Status quo interests were simply no longer willing to participate in them.
And so the great progress we had seen in places like Washington, D.C., Newark, Denver, and many other cities became a never-ending slog.
Many of those places – often large urban school districts – were members of NACSA.
They had previously signed up to become better at managing portfolios of public school options.
But once the end of the beginning had occurred, their posture shifted.
Their authorizing moved from a portfolio mindset to learning new ways to play defense.
To prevent charter schools from growing.
And indeed, to take enrollment back, which seems the prime motivation of most urban school districts in this era of declining enrollment.
All in hopes of getting back to what the status quo clearly considers its nirvana:
A reestablishment of its position as monopoly provider.
For those of us, though, who believe that school districts operating schools while also authorizing them present an unavoidable conflict of interest – indeed, an absence of checks and balances reflecting one of the gravest aspects of public education’s misdesign – there has always been another coherent end state toward which they could evolve.
Not relinquishing the operating function, but the regulating one.
Rather than evolving toward becoming regulators, school districts could give up their regulatory role and become pure operators regulated by someone else.
In a sense, this gets us to something very much like the portfolio approach originally envisioned.
Just by a completely different means.
A public system composed of multiple operators, all overseen by an independent entity responsible for ensuring quality, fairness, and accountability.
To me, this has always been the more organic way for school districts to evolve.
It does not require the elimination of existing institutions or employment relationships.
Districts get to continue operating schools.
Teachers get to continue in their current positions.
Schools get to continue playing their roles in their communities.
And it allows our posture toward school districts to change.
Rather than carrying a “go away” message, as we too often default to, we can say something very different:
“Please come.
Join us.
Become more like charter schools.
Accept having an independent third party that genuinely holds you accountable.
Access equitable funding and facilities.
Give up patently unfair attendance boundaries and selective admissions.
Benefit from a reduction in the smothering overregulation that holds back all of public education.
And in making that transition, become even better positioned to do great things for the kids and communities you clearly care so much about.
Just leave the authorizing to someone else.”
For many years, that vision seemed like a pipe dream.
Until today.
Until the formation of IPEC – the Indianapolis Public Education Corporation.
The entity Karega will now lead.
An organization that will become the authorizer while Indianapolis Public Schools makes its transition toward becoming the equivalent of the biggest CMO in town.
This is part of the architecture that will define the era beyond the charter school beginning.
And it is now being led by an organization and a person who are clearly up to the task.
Surely, status quo interests will do all they can to prevent this new chapter from emerging.
Of course.
So our need to develop North Stars and build strong advocacy organizations is as urgent as it has ever been.
But the stakes extend beyond our movement.
This is the direction toward which all of public education must evolve if it is going to prove viable in this era of AI, declining enrollment, and parents wanting something new.
Not just one city – Indianapolis – discovering a new way to oversee public education.
But a model that could be adopted by cities and states across the nation.
Public education cannot continue suffocating beneath layer after layer of regulation.
Much of that asphyxiation comes from state departments of education and other bureaucracies operating almost entirely from a compliance mindset.
Their practices are set in concrete by the other Large Language Model threatening public education today:
Education codes whose immensity cannot even be estimated by LLMs.
And then we wonder why schools struggle to innovate or respond to rapidly changing circumstances.
What we need instead is the posture that NACSA, at its best, has always aspired to bring to authorizing.
A posture grounded in the conviction Karega himself articulated in his CharterFolk Contributor Column:
Innovation and accountability must go hand in hand.
Being uncompromising about results while remaining disciplined about everything else.
Establishing clear expectations, intervening when schools persistently fail, and otherwise resisting the temptation to tell educators how to do their jobs.
Recognizing that the public interest is not served by eliminating all risk.
It is served by distinguishing irresponsible risk from the calculated risks without which meaningful innovation never happens.
This is the new balance public education needs.
One that fully realizes the potential that chartering represents.
Because if public education is going to survive, we are going to need to find a way to oversee it without suffocating it.
Which is what makes Karega’s move so fitting.
CharterFolk remain on the move.
But this time, it is not simply an individual leader moving into another position of influence.
It is the movement itself advancing toward the governing architecture public education will ultimately need.
Not one in which only charter schools receive the great authorizing they deserve.
But one in which all schools do.
Authorizing for All.
A North Star for the era beyond the charter school beginning.