Good day, CharterFolk.
Over the weekend, I said I would return to offer the three marginal policy changes that would most accelerate the revolution that is coming to public education. Before I get there, though, the news out of Los Angeles provides a telling backdrop.
LA Unified has averted a strike by agreeing to raises projected to cost $1.2B per year. For perspective, the district’s current budget shows the district taking in $15.9B and spending $18.8B. So a district running a nearly $3B annual shortfall has increased it by about a third. Structurally, the district’s costs now exceed its revenues by 25%.
The mayor is celebratory, releasing a video of herself with SEIU after the deal was struck.
The hometown’s editorial page is silent on the deal. The Journal wasn’t, saying clearly the district can’t do math.
The Washington Post equated it to extortion.
It leads to decision making that strains credulity:
LA Superintendent Alberto Carvalho recently said that the district employs more people today than it did years ago when it served 40 percent more students. Now it is paying those people at unprecedented rates.
And what’s its plan for staying solvent?
Blume’s piece says the district plans to “cut internal costs” and “seek more state funding.”
Apparently 25% more funding, as that is what will be needed.
This is the wager that CTA and its allies are now making with their We Can’t Wait campaign: that districts can be pushed over the fiscal edge, and that state policymakers will ultimately step in with higher taxes to keep the whole system afloat.
We will see.
I have said before that this is one of the most aggressive bets the status quo has made in decades, perhaps even more risky than the decision to keep schools closed during the pandemic. And we know how that worked out in terms of maintaining public confidence in traditional public schools.
In my view, it creates the condition for a profound acceleration of the marginal revolution overtaking public education today.
But one that will only happen if we know what to advocate for.
Whatever one thinks of campaigns like We Can’t Wait, one thing is clear: in order to pay for these new agreements while also carrying age-old sunk costs like unfunded liabilities and catch-up pension payments, LA Unified is going to need to move funding wherever it wants to simply to keep the lights on.
That fiscal imperative will come before all others: before program quality, before equity, before common sense even.
That reality reminds me of one of the most revealing observations I have ever heard shared about LAUSD. A friend who must remain unnamed once asked top district financial officials why the district’s budget presentations were so non-transparent and so difficult for ordinary people to understand.
Their answer was direct:
If people really knew how money was being spent, everyone would want to go charter.
Sadly, there is nothing unique about Los Angeles. We over-index on regional variation in public education. In the ways that matter most, Los Angeles is St. Louis is Philadelphia is city after city. One of the central tasks in the years ahead is to make public what officials in systems like LAUSD have too often preferred to keep obscure.
As it so happens, the three policy proposals I was planning to propose coming out of this weekend’s post designed to accelerate charter school growth are also ones that would give us stronger bearings for moments like this in Los Angeles.
They are ideas tailored to three realities of the present moment.
- First, public education is now in a period of profound enrollment decline and fiscal stress.
- Second, in many cities charter schools already serve 30 to 50 percent of students, which means that future growth will increasingly be harder to achieve through simple new-school startup alone.
- Third, many charter organizations are now far more mature than they were a generation ago. They have the capacity, the experience, and the operational strength to grow in new ways.
Put those three realities together, and you begin to see how marginal policy changes could trigger something much larger.
Here are the three.
First, require absolute resource parity between charter schools and district schools.
Not much explanation is needed here. We have been striving for this for years, for reasons we all understand. The nuance worth focusing on, especially in teetering districts like Los Angeles, is the full set of incentives status quo interests are operating under. Of course, they want more money for their own schools and less for others. But that misses another powerful incentive. Above all, they want their own people to believe there is more money available inside their walled garden than outside it. That belief is one of the best ways to keep people captive. If funding is understood to be generally equal, we will already have made significant progress in making the garden’s walls more porous.
Second, make sure your state has a strong charter conversion law.
Not a punishment law. Not a law that treats chartering as a last-resort sanction imposed from above. A voluntary conversion law.
Such a law should make conversion straightforward. It should set a realistic threshold for approval. I like ones that simply state that 50% of teachers need to support a conversion. Nirvana is a mechanism that gives school principals considerable influence, perhaps a few extra ballots in the election. Crucial to the moment, laws should make explicit that a converting school may either become an independent charter or join a high-capacity charter management organization if both sides choose that path. And it should give school communities a place to seek approval other than the district itself, while also protecting educators and school leaders from retaliation if they choose to explore conversion.
It’s the equivalent of providing people within the walled garden a ladder. Now it comes down to what will induce them to climb it.
Third, require that any traditional public school community be able to request an independent fiscal analysis of its school.
This may be the most important idea of the three.
Any school community should be able to ask a trusted third party, whether the state or some other credible entity, to produce a clear report showing two things: how much money the district currently spends on that school, and how much money the school would receive if it converted to charter status.
What would that do?
It would create, across thousands of campuses, a direct line of sight into the financial implications of the status quo. And in many cases it would reveal something explosive: that a school would be financially better off as a charter than as part of the district system. In many cases, as was mine personally working in Los Angles decades ago, the evidence will show that school would be much better off as a charter. Think millions of dollars a year better.
Once that fact becomes plain, the politics around chartering begin to change. The question is no longer abstract ideology. It becomes concrete self-interest at the school-community level.
It’s the equivalent of throwing evidence over the garden wall that there is much more fertile ground waiting outside if those inside use the ladder that has been afforded to them.
Of course, status quo forces will fight all three of these proposals at every turn, and in many places they will succeed. Even if we got them all in place, in the early going, the number of actual conversions might be small. But that would not mean the policy had failed. The real change would be the creation of a massive new incentive structure. History offers plenty of evidence that it is very hard, over time, to suppress choices that are plainly in people’s economic interest. And in the current environment when school districts are going to have to make all sorts of financial decisions that are unpopular to local school communities, if we have proactively given them new options for taking control of their own destinies, we will have set the stage for something very significant.
Now imagine just one bold state, probably a red state first, adopting this package of policy changes aimed at bringing down public education’s walled gardens. Maybe policymakers would add a conversion incentive fund on top of that. Maybe CSP resources could encourage communities to make the leap. Maybe an enterprising governor decides to champion it. Would other red states not follow? Would some blue states not at least begin to pay closer attention?
Of course, CharterFolk, the fiscal mismanagement of traditional public education is a societal tragedy.
But it is also the raw material from which seismic transformation can emerge.
So yes, pass three laws:
- Resource parity between charter schools and district schools.
- Smart conversion laws that let school communities go independent or join existing charter organizations.
- Financial transparency that shows school communities when conversion is in their interest.
Each of these, viewed on its own, might look marginal.
Together, layered on top of a movement that already serves four million students and is more organizationally ready for growth than ever before, they could amount to something much larger.
An acceleration of the marginal revolution happening in public education today.