Weekend greetings, CharterFolk.
It’s never any fun being the bearer of bad news. But I think it necessary to start today’s post with an international publication releasing a long-form article about the scope of the education challenge emerging in the United States right now.
This is how observers see us from a distance:
America’s problem with learning started before Covid and extends beyond the school system. What really sets it apart is the pace at which those who are struggling are falling behind.
“Really the top half is pretty much flat and the bottom half is dropping dramatically,” says Malkus at the AEI.
In fact, the gap between the top and bottom performers in the US is growing at the fastest pace in the world, based on comparable data.
“It is not really only in America, but it is by far, far the worst in America.”
Malkus’s analysis shows that the gap between the lowest-performing quarter of students and the third quartile (ie the quarter just above the half mark) grew by 10 points for maths between 2012 and 2022.
This was 10 times the average across OECD nations. In science and reading, the gaps in the US rose by 24 and 30 points respectively.
David Steiner, the executive director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy, says: “It’s a very, very serious situation. That speaks to a society which is bifurcating.”
What they see is a profound unravelling that is happening in public education in the United States today.
Occasionally, we find stateside observers making the point ourselves.
More frequently, though, we see the opposite.
This week, the College Board erased universities’ ability to scan for high-achieving, low-income students.
It’s solving a problem by pretending that it doesn’t exist.
It’s against this backdrop that we approach our next round of elections. In the past few weeks, I have had several readers reach out with variations on the same question:
If Dems are so out of step with voters on education matters as has been reported repeatedly …
… why don’t we see them evolving their positions on charter schools, which many voters support?
It comes down to a topic I have written about several times here, which is whether teacher unions think they have over played their hands since the pandemic.
My answer has been that in red states the answer is undoubtedly yes. Teacher union recalcitrance since the epidemic has sparked the Republican party to embrace private school choice, and that is resulting in seismic change happening in those states.
In blue contexts, though, I have said that it’s a very different story. Thus far, Dems’ calculation has been that their hold on power is so unquestioned in blue states that they don’t really need to pivot on education issues. They’ll be able to keep winning without making any adjustment at all.
The New York mayoral race is case and point.
In recent days, charter school leaders have announced plans for a rally in response to Mamdani’s campaign reiterating it’s opposition to charter schools. This time campaign representatives added in that they think we siphon resources away from public education.
Now they are going so far as to suggest that former Congressman Jamaal Bowman – one of the most aggressive anti-charter school spokespeople in the nation …
… would make for a good Chancellor of New York City Public Schools.
Former Chancellor Joel Klein penned a great piece this week at the Free Press about the stakes for NYC education in the upcoming election.
Similar dynamics are at play in Denver, which is soon to host another round of school board elections.
There, the head of the teacher union went on radio this week to say that the grand solution to the public school battles in the Mile High City is for ed reformers to realize that they were wrong all along.
This is what happens in cities where charter school academic performance is widely recognized to far, far exceed district performance …
… and where reform efforts have been described to be “among the most successful in history.”
I would call these but two representative examples of the status quo believing they don’t need to make any pivot whatsoever on education matters to keep winning elections in blue contexts. The feel no compunction to do so even in places like New York and Denver where charter schools have proven themselves able to deliver student outcomes that are unquestionably better than what was available before.
The place where it is conceivable we would see status quo interests pay a price for staying the course is in potentially close contests like the governor elections happening this year in New Jersey and Virginia. Dale Chu, writing at Fordham, surfaced this as a dynamic to be watching for this year.
But thus far we have seen little, if any, significant public re-positioning coming out of either Dem candidate. Their calculus seems to be that staying quiet on education matters while projecting opposition to all-things-Trump is their best path to victory. And recent polling information appears to be confirming their strategy.
It’s a situation that sums up the public education status quo’s positioning on education matters generally right now. Though their work is education, they are essentially saying nothing about education. Meanwhile, they megaphone loudly on other matters where they oppose Trump.
Diane Ravitch’s blog has been a good example of this of late. This week, I checked her site and saw that the front page had not one education issue on it, but consisted rather of one long scroll of expressions of outrage against other non-education matters coming out of the Trump Administration.
Ravitch seems to be taking her cue from the NEA’s positioning at its annual conference this summer which was similarly silent on education matters.
It’s a corollary to Klein and Thompson’s Abundance book which talked about the need for Democrats to fix brokenness in category after category of public policy, but avoided any discussion of public education.
It seems fairly obvious that the status quo’s strategy right now is to stay silent on education matters because they don’t feel a need to say anything.
So the question then becomes for reformers:
What are we going to do to make them take a stand?
Yes, op-eds from the likes of Joel Klein help, as do rallies like CharterFolk are planning in New York.
But as I wrote in April, no one is going to write abundance for us.
Public education’s abundance story is, in fact, ours to write.
Not in a best seller.
But in a policy agenda – one that charts out a course for an era where public education becomes far better and far fairer than it’s ever been before.
And just like Klein and Thompson’s first chapter, the first chapter of our book must begin with a forbidden truth:
Scarcity.
We must name the circumstance from which we start.
Not just scarcity, but scarcity consciously chosen.
The Telegraph’s story is a rendering of the scale of education scarcity that is occurring in our country right now. It’s enough to risk a full-scale unraveling of our status as a superpower.
But to usher that reality into the public square prominently enough that the education status quo is brought to account is going to be very difficult.
No one likes being the bearer of bad news.
But that’s the destiny we must embrace. Not just for this post, but more broadly.
And it’s not something that we’re going to be able to get done overnight, or in the weeks or months leading up to the next election.
In fact, it’s going to take two things:
First, it’s going to take proactivity.
Working years in advance to get policy proposals out into the landscape such that the status quo has to work publicly to block them, which will finally bring their scarcity agenda out where we need it.
Into the light.
Teacher unions and other status quo interests are advancing their scarcity agendas every day.
And they get away with it because they do their work in the dark.
Embedded in district bureaucracy. Obscured in budget inscrutability. Shrouded by arcane policy no one understands.
But one of the few benefits of living in an era of declining enrollment is that district brokenness is finally becoming more visible. Never before has it been easier to draw the public’s attention to the fact that school districts across the country subsidize what is not working by siphoning away resources from that which is working.
Chicago’s but one example.
What we need is a new generation of policy proposals that protects families who are having funds siphoned away from their schools by central bureaucracies whose prime motivation is not the well-being of students, but the well-being of the bureaucracies themselves.
Policy proposals unlike any that our world has brought forward in the past, but which are now our destiny to advance.
Which surfaces, then, the second thing we need.
Something that forces us to get real.
Because, CharterFolk, really:
Why do you think Klein and Thompson chose not to include education in their abundance book?
Because they didn’t have the courage to.
They knew how radioactive it would be.
They knew how much they would be risking to say the forbidden thing.
So they ducked it.
Like almost everyone ducks education matters these days.
Solving problems by pretending that they don’t exist.
Such that the only people who can speak the truth about what is happening in education in our country are people on the other side of the Atlantic.
The advocacy challenge of the charter school movement in the years ahead is to bring the critique back home.
To become even more willing to say the forbidden thing.
To propose the forbidden abundance agenda.
It’s going to require something from us all at whole new levels:
Courage.