Weekend greetings, CharterFolk.
I would say the year is off to a positively Dickensian start.
A tale of two states …
… getting out of the gate this year with headline-grabbing proposals affecting public education.
From my standpoint, they make clear that we are living through the best and worst of times when it comes to education policy.
States going in diametrically opposed directions …
… and generating unmistakable evidence of what is the wiser way forward.
At least for those who want to see.
That caveat matters.
In one state, policymakers appear unwilling to confront the consequences of their own decisions. Rather than reassess, they are doubling down blindly, leading the state further into dysfunction and fiscal peril.
In the other, policymakers seem prepared to learn from evidence, from experience, and from their neighbors, and to finish the work they began years ago.
Reform Versus Preservation
Over the course of a generation, Mississippi has pursued reform.
Over that same period, Vermont has pursued preservation.
Vermont remains one of the very few states in the country with no charter school law. It has resisted nearly every mechanism designed to increase achievement and expand parent choice.
Nearly everything Vermont has done over the past two decades is better described as system protection than system improvement, and the results of that folly are now impossible to ignore.
A state that once ranked among the highest achieving in the country has seen its performance implode.
Meanwhile, Mississippi, once among the lowest achieving states in the country, has seen its results surpass national averages.
If you had said a generation ago that reading levels in Mississippi would exceed those in Vermont, most people would have thought you out of your mind. And yet, here we are.
And it happened, despite the fact that Mississippi schools see per pupil funding rates …
… that are less than half of Vermont’s.
Preservation is Not Reform
What is forcing Vermont to act today is not educational urgency. It is financial meltdown.
It is a crisis that flows directly from Vermont’s unusual and deeply flawed approach to funding schools.
For decades, small townships were able to set local tax rates in ways that induced the state to provide additional resources from a pooled, statewide fund. The benefits of higher spending were local and immediate. The costs were diffused across the entire state.
Over time, communities learned how to exploit the system.
Then enrollment began to fall. And fall sharply.
Vermont is now experiencing one of the steepest declines in public school enrollment in the country. Fixed costs dominate. Per-pupil spending explodes. The system teeters on the brink of insolvency.
Faced with this reality, policymakers are doing whatever they can to keep the system afloat.
But rather than questioning the theory that produced the mess, they are entrenching it.
The state is proposing to consolidate hundreds of locally controlled townships into a far smaller number of regional entities under much stronger state control.
Historically, families living in towns too small to support a public school had the ability to use public funds to pay tuition at private schools. That right would technically remain, but because so many small communities would now be folded into much larger districts that have some public option somewhere, most families would lose meaningful access to it, even if their children must endure long daily bus rides.
This is the logical consequence of the preservation mindset that policy makers are mired within.
Eliminate exit. Keep dollars inside the system. Centralize authority. Standardize budgets. Protect incumbents.
Call it what it is.
Not reform.
Preservation.
Preservation of a system that has been moving in the wrong direction as acutely as any in the country.
Mississippi Learns, then Acts
Mississippi, meanwhile, is headed in the opposite direction toward something that genuinely deserves the name reform.
For years, Mississippi focused on top-down instructional improvement. The state imposed literacy-based retention requirements. It aligned curriculum and instructional materials. It strengthened accountability. It invested in teacher support and coaching. Those changes mattered. They produced real gains, especially in early literacy and among historically low-performing students.
But Mississippi had not yet completed its theory of action.
Until now, its charter school movement remained relatively nascent, limited in scale and geography. Structural reform lagged behind instructional reform.
That is what is changing.
And critically, Mississippi did not reach this conclusion in isolation.
It learned from its neighbor.
The Louisiana Example
Louisiana began from an even lower baseline than Mississippi. Yet it matched Mississippi’s gains in fourth-grade reading …
… and exceeded it in eighth-grade reading …
… fully closing the gap with national averages, and reaching parity with Vermont, whose eighth-grade scores fell off a cliff.
Louisiana shows what happens when instructional reform is paired with structural reform. Not just pressure on traditional public schools to improve, but real freedom for new providers to enter, for failing schools to be replaced, and for successful models to scale.
Leading the way in Louisiana has been New Orleans.
A city that restructured its system, embraced charter schools at scale, and demonstrated that improvement does not have to stall after the early grades. The gains in New Orleans did not merely raise the floor. They carried into the middle grades, where reform is hardest and where most systems falter.
Mississippi’s current agenda reflects learning from the example next door.
Mississippi Completes its Theory of Action
Mississippi’s new proposals move beyond improving practice inside the traditional system and add structural reform. The state is expanding charter authorization so that high-quality charters can operate statewide. It is introducing education savings accounts and vouchers, giving families direct access to alternatives outside the district system. It is also strengthening public school choice across district lines, allowing families to access better public options without having to move.
This is what a coherent theory of action looks like.
Constructive pressure on traditional public schools to improve, combined with structural freedom so that all schools can operate with greater flexibility, higher expectations, and clearer accountability.
Just as important, Mississippi is acting responsibly on funding.
Unlike Vermont, it is not trapped in a broken finance system that makes caps and cuts non-negotiable acts of desperation. Mississippi is in a position to add resources while accelerating reform, not because it ignored fiscal reality, but because it respected it.
It’s one of the most compelling examples we have in the national landscape.
An example of reform becoming, in fact, vision.
A Tale of Three States
So call it a tale of three states.
One producing the worst of times.
One producing the best of times.
And one producing even better times.
With policy agendas now aligned accordingly, the paths forward are plain for all to see.
At least for those who want to see.