Broy: Straight Up, No Chaser

Jed Wallace 0:01

Andrew Broy, welcome to CharterFolk Chat.

Andrew Broy 0:05

Thanks Jed. Great to be with you.

Jed Wallace 0:09

Great to have you with us. I mean, I've been doing this now for six years. I've had you on some other chats where we had a group of colleagues with you, but we haven't had a one on one. And you know, I'm thinking about this as Broy straight up, no chaser. Something that we should have been doing a long time. A lot of developments in the landscape. Can't wait to hear what your latest thinking is about stuff.

Andrew Broy 0:31

Yeah, it's an exciting time. A lot of challenges in the field. Those of us who do work in big complicated cities I think are challenged in ways we haven't been before. But I think there's opportunities still everywhere and we have to figure out a strategic way to realize that potential.

Jed Wallace 0:50

Awesome. Well, that's exactly what I want to dive into. Let me remind everybody that this is a CharterFolk Chat and if you can subscribe to the CharterFolk Chat, if you can hit likes and all those subscribes on YouTube or our channels. That helps us a great deal and we're actually building some nice momentum these days. So thanks for everybody who's already been doing it. Andrew. Let's just dive in. Most people know who you are, but also even people that know you well don't know all of your background as it relates to this. So can you just refresh our understanding? How did Andrew Broy get into all this mischief making in the first place?

Andrew Broy 1:30

Sure. It's actually, I think, a telling story. I didn't set out to become an education reformer historically. But I was in the early cohort of Teach for America in the early 90s. Like many of my colleagues, I spent three years teaching in North Carolina. I was a high school English teacher, football coach and baseball coach. But my real aspiration was to go to law school and become a civil rights lawyer. So in nineteen ninety-eight. I went to law school and I graduated in two thousand one. Clerked for a federal judge for a year, and then went to a big firm in Atlanta, Georgia, where I specialized in civil rights work. So I did a litigator, I did school finance, litigation. Deseg work, voting Rights act cases. Immigration work, things of that nature. And while I was there, I was approached by a partner of mine and he said, hey, there's a guy on the east side of Atlanta has got an idea of building A school and a grocery store and mixed income housing. And he thinks this new law that passed charter school law might be a vehicle. And so I was a young, eager associate at the law firm and I went about studying this new model of a charter education. And I wound up becoming the pro bono counsel for the initiative that became the Drew charter school in East Atlanta. Which became kind of a model of how you develop a neighborhood around a school. They built a brand new YMCA, built the first grocery store in 30 years in the neighborhood, mixed income housing. And it really transformed that part of Atlanta. And I thought to myself. Huh, this is an interesting idea. This idea of an independent school. Publicly funded, no tuition, no admissions criteria, open to all, with a very strategic focus on serving low income students freed from the bureaucracy of the district. And I thought. Like, let me think more about that. And I became, because of that work. Kind of the de facto pro bono council for charter school in Georgia for a number of years. And then after I left the law firm. I went to become the charter school division director at the Georgia doe. And going from a high performing private law firm into a huge bureaucracy was a challenge for me in some ways. Subsequent to that, I became the deputy state school superintendent and was in charge of a bunch of different divisions. And here's my charter conversion story. We were running education reform through policy, through curriculum change, through initiatives. The governor just passed a math and reading initiative and I watched my group of PhDs try to implement it. And it took years and years and years to get any traction on just drafting the regulations. Meanwhile, my 20 person charter division at the DOE was granting applications, opening schools in 12 months, and students were being educated immediately. I thought to myself, like, I can either boil the ocean over here on curriculum statewide or I can think about new schools, whole school reform from the ground up. And I've since developed a real preference to say, look, the way to fix a low performing school is not to tweak the math curriculum. It's designed around a whole new approach with a new leader, a new vision, a new focus. A flexible autonomous schedule, thinking about how to meet students where they are and drive results. And that's how I became a charter convert.

Jed Wallace 5:00

Awesome. And you took that from Georgia. You've come to Illinois, you've really just put INCS in the pantheon of most effective advocacy organizations in the country. So it's awesome to have seen your progress and it's good to be reminded about what your origins are here.

Andrew Broy 5:23

Well, it didn't start out that way. I came home to Chicago in twenty ten and took over the job at INCS And I spent my first couple years trying to pass ambitious legislation in Springfield and ran into the proverbial wall. I couldn't get a committee hearing, I couldn't get 60 votes in the House. And I went to my board and I said, you know, if we want to pass a student centered, aggressive agenda that removes policy for students, we've got to build up our advocacy house. And that means in Illinois, having a PAC endorsing candidates. Having a 501c4 social welfare organization, having an associated political entity and an IEC. And then in twenty fourteen. We started doing politics intentionally around charter school majorities in the House and Senate. And that's when our legislative efforts really took off and we're able to pass meaningful big legislation over the course of the next 10 years in a state where it's difficult to do so well.

Jed Wallace 6:21

I have a similar path to getting to CCSA and having that same moment of just frustration, realizing that C3 only advocacy was not going to be what gets us across the finish line. Created the political infrastructure and for a long time were really ahead of the rest of the country. I considered you brother from another mother. I still kind of do. And yet let's see where we can disagree here. You know, because we agree on a lot of stuff, but some of our disagreements might actually be really interesting ones. But I, you know, I just feel like when people ask me where, you know, has my view on the landscape come from? I don't really attribute it to any acumen, any over smarts, anything like that. It's just being in the seat where I was for 10 years, one block away from the California Teachers association, that was just beating on us mercilessly and demonstrating strategies and capacities and just an overall approach to the work that I actually think was a big thing for us to learn from. And so just sitting there for 10 years, oh. I've seen some things along the lines. It occurs to me right now where you are in Chicago, no one has the perch that you have as many years as you have in advocacy focus on C3, C4 stuff with the CTU and the blowback on CPS unlike anything else, or at least as pronounced as we see anywhere else in the country. What do you see from your perch there at INCS? That proximity to the story in Chicago that maybe the rest of us in the country just can't see because we're too far away from it.

Andrew Broy 8:19

I think people make a mistake when they position CTU or their local union as the enemy. They're certainly an impediment to good policy, but they're not the enemy. The enemy is a pervasive feeling that low income students of color can't achieve academically at high levels. Like that's the enemy. And 25 years ago we didn't have real compelling evidence that a great school could change the life trajectories of students in that category. Now we've got abundant evidence and appealing evidence that we can create great schools and change those life outcomes for students of limited means. I've said to our allies in Springfield repeatedly that you don't have to choose between being a charter supporter and being pro union. You can be both. And most of our allies in the Democratic caucus in Illinois are both pro labor and pro charter. How we do that is we make it very clear what we're focused on, which is students being impacted in communities across the state. Now we've had battles with CTU at the ballot. Fox and Springfield on legislative matters, but again, they're an obstacle, not the enemy. The enemy is this notion that many people still hold that low income students can only do so much. And we're here to stand in opposition of that and say no. We have evidence. Now the only question is how do we scale that and get that to extend to more students and more communities?

Jed Wallace 9:51

I hear you. And I also think we're in a position pretty different a now. There's like pre Covid, there's Covid. There's immediately after Covid. And I think we're in the first couple years in the after Covid. Where the punch bowl is being pulled back. Where declining enrollment is happening at whole new levels and where we're seeing whether it's the teacher union or it's a broader phalanx of status quo protectors taking positions now that just seem so extreme and holding in fixity. Schools that clearly are far underperforming are, as you say. In essence refusing the message of, hey, we can actually generate better outcomes with kids, especially historically underserved kids. The what we see in California right now with the campaign from CTA to consciously use strikes to put school districts, you know, on the very. On the very foot, on the footstep of financial collapse to me is like one of the most aggressive things I've ever seen them do. I can't imagine that the additional resources that they're need, they're going to need to make those agreements affordable are ultimately going to emerge. And when they don't. The school districts across California are going to go into another level of chaos, dysfunction. And it's not exactly the same in Chicago. But there is a kind of doubling down. There is a kind of the teacher union literally runs one of their own employees for mayor and a kind of aggressiveness in Chicago that seems reminiscent of what we're seeing in California and perhaps other places. Are you seeing something different than what I'm seeing?

No, I think that's right. Brandon Johnson, who is our current mayor in Chicago, was a former CTU staff member. His approval ratings are historically low. They're in the 20s at best from polls I've seen the polls we've commissioned. I think that's because the public recognizes some of the positions he's taken as rather extreme. Just on the education side. For instance, we had a very robust way of gauging school performance for many years called the school Quality Rating Plan. Sqrp. Brandon Johnson's hand picked board repealed that entirely. So now when you ask a parent, how's the school doing? And there's not a summative ranking system that's based on student growth over time, proficiency, graduation rate. Concrete output data, it's now all this input gobbledygook no one can actually decipher. Yeah. Or there's the state report card, which is so general as to be not helpful. So now parents aren't equipped with those same level of transparency. And that was their goal. They don't like schools being graded on academic growth. We do. As a fundamental policy difference. And guess what? I think we win that battle in the end. Because when you ask parents what they want from school, they want their students to learn academically and grow over time, be prepared for the future. And so there's a dozen examples like that. Whether it's school funding, Title 1 distributions, enrollment systems. Making them more kind of difficult to navigate, et cetera, that I think we're on the right side of history on. We have to keep making that point with the public, with our parents and with the community at large.

Yeah, I mean, I guess that becomes then a point of agreement then. I do not think that the teacher union is the enemy here. I think the enemy is public education system that's been set up to be neither fair nor fabulous. What those things are that get in the way of fairness and schools being fabulous is what we should be setting our sights on. It seems to me just right across the state line in Indianapolis. We may have one of the boldest reform efforts ever to have happened. And for the city. Indianapolis's schools to now be fundamentally restructured. Structured. I like to say that the school district has been reformed into the biggest CMO in town. That's a little bit of an overstatement. But not that much. I mean, they have an authorizer now that's going to look at their performance. Every five years they get their facilities just like charter school do. They're going to be funded exactly like charter school are. They're going to have funding rules and budgets and audit procedures which are going to be identical to charter school is this registering at all across the state line or might it. You know, just be in another planet someplace? No one's even paying any attention.

I think it creates a small echo across the line, but not much of a sound. Maybe sound signifying not much. At the end of the day. What I think is happening in Indianapolis is really a structural change to a low performing, historically challenged district. But keep in mind the whole enrollment there is on the order of 40 thousand students or something. You know, we've got more than that in Chicago. Charter school by 50%. So the scale is much different. I think there was a feeling among reformers. Say a decade ago that if you could just get to 50% market share of independent, nonprofit run schools in districts. That would be a tipping point and opposition would either fall away or be weakened sufficiently to allow a more aggressive agenda. I'm not sure that's the case. Whether it's Detroit or D. C. Or Indianapolis or Newark, places that are bumping up on 50% don't see that kind of result. The other thing I think we're wrong about 10 or 12 years ago was taking the model of common accountability. Common enrollment, common funding, et cetera. Presumed the world in which you had good faith actors working together in collaboration. We had that in Chicago in the race of the top a for sure. Yeah. But when we agreed to common enrollment, we had certain requirements. Like we would get a back data points from them. We could audit the numbers. We could look at the numbers as they came in, as new CEOs came in. All those agreements we made on paper weren't followed through. And now enrollment's a fight. And the district does kind of evasive action to make it harder for charter school students to be enrolled in charter school. Right. Make it harder on the website. Make it a double click through, require a double signing of a letter when you get enrolled in a school. All these like, subtle ways to make chartered enrollment barriers much higher. That's not in good faith or keeping with our agreement we structured 10 years ago. So I've always said in Springfield. Implementation eats drafting all the time. And how you implement that new policy in Indianapolis over time will determine whether it succeeds to the scale we hope it will.

So I very much agree with you that we have many cities now across the country that are approaching 30, 40, 50% of students in charter school and then our theory of action kind of runs out on us. And what I think we've done is forgotten some of the lessons that came out of New Orleans. New Orleans, in my view. Did not get all the way to 100% system through a storm. It got to the 30, 40 or 50% level through the storm. And then they use a different strategy to finish the job. And Indianapolis, in my view, is one of the first cities that's really said. Hey, let's finish the job through innovation schools. Converting schools one by one, but then coming up with an answer for what the entire rest of the system should evolve into. And I really see our struggles in many other places being a function of our own flawed theory of action. I mean, what else? What would you be saying to cities in the 30 or 40% category? Is there something new we need to be doing here?

So I think we have to return to our first principles of the charter movement. In my view, chartering was also always about two things. First, creating great transformative schools for students who need them right now, not five years from now, not ten years from now. Not after a policy paper gets completed, but rather now. And secondly. Creating a model of education that's independent, autonomous. And helps other schools innovate more dramatically in response. So in Chicago, we've got 15 year history of pioneering programs in charter school that wind up in district schools. And not like a way to teach reading, but rather a focus on college access, persistence and completion. Or using EPAS gain scores to judge student high school performance or autonomous governance and high powered boards or facility adoption that's new and innovative. Or for us in Chicago, how charter school respond to violence. We had a brief three years ago on how charter school focus on gun violence prevention in Chicago and how other schools can learn from that. Had a phenomenal event with the mayor. With two Congress people at Malcolm X College where charter innovation on gun violence prevention became spread to other public schools in Chicago. That's innovation. So the question for me, when you have a 30% market share. 50% market share, is not how do we get to 60%? It's what are the other schools doing in response to that and are they improving? And I would love a world in which you have 40% market share for charter school but the other 60% of schools are improving dramatically over time to serve students. Well, that's a win for the city, it's a win for both sectors, and it's a win for the charter school movement directly. The question is, what's going to lock in that paradigm for the long term?

That's why over time, you've got to build sufficient political theft such that you can influence leadership at the legislature and the mayor's office substantially. If you don't do that, you're right, you wind up getting leftovers. The wrong question charter proponents always ask is. Is the mayor, is the governor, is the chairman of education supportive of charter school I respond to that. To say the right question is. Do you have sufficient influence and power such that the people in those seats have to consider you a meaningful participant in the structure of the school system? I mean, I'm speaking from Chicago. Where we have 40 high schools with fewer than 200 students. Yeah, 40 of them. And just consider that for a moment. That means you have 50 students per grade. Try to staff a school to give a student four periods of English, four periods of science over four years. Two years of foreign language, et cetera. You can't even offer a curriculum sufficient to qualify for a diploma that gets you into U of I school at some of these high schools. That's a crime I've been talking about on panels for years. And we've let it happen as a city. And no one wants to talk about those hard truths. Which is if you're losing enrollment over time and you have structural challenges. You gotta be smart in terms of replacing buildings, in terms of smart consolidation, etc. The other issue that I've talked a lot about is that during COVID we had this unprecedented infusion of resources into public schools across the country. I mean, just unbelievable amounts of resources. And I used to wonder to myself, is there any amount of funding that could persuade the more money crowd that the answer to every problem is more money. And the answer is no. You have proof because I mean there are places that actually double their per pupil annually. And what did they do? Many of them took one time Covid relief money and hired full time staff members. And now the bill is coming due and there's a funding crisis. Well, that crisis is of your own making if you simply hire additional staff instead of doing compensatory work, high dosage tutoring. All the stuff designed to respond to the pandemic specifically. But other people see it as an opportunity to feather bed a little bit and wind up creating this problem. So the lack of smart governance and political pressure creates these untenable systems in big cities.

Yeah, I think sometimes our Dems are just not keyed into how broken our big urban systems are. And so if you try to dump a ton of resources on something that is so broken, they're going to use those resources in the most unwise way possible and drive themselves into the ditch. And now that's what they've done right now. And so I actually think that in the scheme of things. The pandemic surge of funding is going to be seen as something that actually led to a faster collapse of systems in many different parts of the country. And I mean, it's a shame, but that's what we find and I think in Indianapolis right now. And what is one thing, do you think Indianapolis is a one off or do you think it is, you know, something that perhaps is a pattern that other red states might be able to learn from? Or is it something that might have something to offer even in blue states as well? Because I hear some blue state advocates saying, okay, well it's great that they made progress in Indianapolis. But the politics are so difficult in my state and I just got to keep my head low and stay on defense and save my chits. And so Indianapolis again feels like it's on another planet altogether.

Well, I think that's a mistake, respectfully. I think that if you're only playing defense, you're not doing it right. We always have an offensive agenda and that helps both meaningfully advance concrete policy for students. It also is helpful when you're debating at the end of session and horse trading. You've got some bills that are live and they've got some bills that are live. You can wind up cutting deals, etc. But you got to play offense. The other point I'd make is that I do think there's a chance in blue cities in blue states for aggressive governance reform. That's not just charter school governance reform akin to Indianapolis. But I think it creates a. It needs a certain number of conditions to meet to be viable. One, it's got to be a smallish district. You're not doing takeovers of New York, Louisiana, you know. Chicago, et cetera. It's just not viable and it's not even manageable. Second, if there's a precipitating event of fiscal malfeasance or implosion coming up, it forces the hand of the state legislature to do something which is always helpful as a precipitating event. I don't think, regrettably, in my view, that low, persistently low academic performance is sufficient for politicians to look around and say we have to intervene. It's just too common and regrettable in my view, but not seen as an emergency. And then third, if you do have a situation like Indiana does, where you have a red state and a blue city, it makes it all the easier politically implement something like that. Now the question is whether it's a state takeover or a governance takeover. What model is best equipped to deliver the kind of results we want? And the jury's out on that. I mean, I worked at the State Department's deputy state superintendent when we took over a small district. And let me tell you, when the state says we're here to fix it, they don't have a big plan sometimes. And so why are state bureaucrats better positioned? They might not be now. Local citizens, local governing board. Local governance, mantle shifting the district, doing like back office support. Transportation facilities, food service. That's intriguing to me. But we need a couple proof points to make this thing work. It reminds me actually of where the charter movement was 20 years ago. Just getting started. Seeing what happens, made some mistakes, learned a lot. We're far better for it now. Maybe the same trajectory and iteration happens out of Indianapolis.

Yeah, we'll see what happens. There are some ambitious takeovers happening, obviously. Houston and Texas is one of them. We're now seeing something go forward in Memphis. The entire Shelby county takeover looks like it's going to happen. I'm also with you that I'm skeptical that the state turning around an entire system like that is going to prove successful. It may be that smaller systems are better. I also think, though, that there are inevitably going to be moments when the states are going to get involved in very large school districts. And it would be better for us if we had a playbook. We can't. It's not going to. You're not going to reform the entire system in that moment, but you might evolve significant chunks of the district toward a longer term North Star that will make progress in the near term, but also when the system ultimately comes back to local control again, is a step forward over a multi decade timeframe. Any thoughts about that? Just when these moments of dislocation occur, I think we have to have better ideas. Try this direction. Here's a systemic approach.

Yeah. The lesson from Chicago over the past 30 years is that we had mayoral control for the vast majority of that time. So we had Paul Vallis, Arne Duncan as long term superintendents under Rich Daly, then we had Rahm Emanuel. And during that time period we had very substantial academic gains for the city, broadly distributed. Despite the critiques where it says all about selective enrollment schools, it wasn't. I mean we saw third grade reading scores skyrocket during that time period generally. Yeah. Since the transition to a hybrid board which is part appointed, part elected, and the full election of all 21 members which will happen this fall, we've seen dramatic slowdowns in student growth and we haven't seen much recovery from the pandemic dips. Right. So the jury is out on whether this governance model can work on behalf of students in a way the previous mayor of control did. The benefit of mayoral control is if the person running the city is incentivized to make sure the district performs, he or she will pull the levers needed to make the politics be minimized. I remember distinctly three years ago in Springfield during a committee hearing about the elected school board in Chicago. My testimony was are you sure we need 21 more politicians in Chicago? It was pithy statement, but I said, look, you want to introduce politics. You're going to get expensive elections, more divisiveness. Less cohesion, more difficulty sustaining a path. And I say this all as a group whose organization will be heavily involved in the school board races because we have to be. But our testimony back then three years ago was it's a bad idea. I still think it's a bad idea in terms of the transition.

Let's talk a little bit about our advocacy readiness. This is something you and I have been talking about for a long time. We were on a consultancy last week with state association CEOs. There's real reason for encouragement. I mean, I think it wasn't so long ago people would say there were three. Four, six high performing state associations across the country. I think the discussion now is around is it 12 or 15 and we may be on a trajectory for even more than that. And we're seeing membership dues coming in from schools that reflect a higher level of investment, a higher level of confidence. INCS is certainly leading the country in this direction. All really positive. And now at the same time, though, we're seeing that these state associations are getting drawn into these city based discussions in whole new levels, such that we got to be great at both state levels and at. Levels. And INCS is one of these organizations that the vast majority of the charter school have been in Chicago. So you've been great at city and state stuff. Just talk to me about what you think our level of readiness is in charter school advocacy to take on the mix of state and city challenges that are coming to us.

Well, it's finally dawned on us after many years of ignoring it. That city and state work is interchangeable and dependent on each other. So if you want to equalize charter funding, that is normally a statewide funding reform play. So if city charter school care about equal operational funding, they've got to have heft in the state capital. Yeah. Also, if you want local capital dollars to flow to charter school that's mostly a city play. Aldermanic, city council. Mayoral play. The two things together are what happens. There's a reason why every time I send a letter to an alderman in Chicago or a state rep, I lead with on behalf of the 64 thousand students in our member schools, comma, because they need to know we represent a movement. We're not just an ed reform group of six staff members that has like five policy ideas. We actually have members in communities across the state. And advocacy is how you leverage them. Those people, those communities and those resources to put pressure on elected officials to make the right decision on math of students. And so whether it's at the city or state level, you've got to do both equally, but you've got to really highlight your membership base and get them active and invested. They make a huge difference in terms of authenticity. Engagement, and ultimately results.

Now, on the city state readiness piece. I mean, I think it's one of the biggest trends that we saw come out of the matrix we discussed last week. It's California. Frankly. This is after I. I have nothing to do with this. But it looks like the charter school association is essentially going to convince the entire membership, or significant chunks of the membership, that it needs to have both a state and a regional capacity and that it has been structurally underfunding or just simply not having the funds necessary to. To do the regional work. So it looks like a significant percentage. Clearly, well, more than 50%. 2/3 of members at least, are going to be agreeing to $11 per kid increase in dues. And to me, this speaks to the degree to which our state organizations can build greater proximity on the regional issues. I mean, I think this is what teacher unions have learned. If you have just one big state teacher union in California, are the, are the teachers going to pay the same dues of course not. That's why they've made all these substructures. You know, utla, Oakland Education association, stea. Is this a natural evolution that we're going to be going in as well. Or do you see a few other wrinkles here?

I think so. The question is, do the charter school association have the capacity to do both state and city work and how messy does it get? Yeah, sometimes we're our own worst enemies. We stand up new groups in response to perceived deficiencies, never harmonize the movement together. And then you got rivalries among ed reform groups internally. I mean, one of the things I've tried to do here in Chicago is help people understand all of our schools and say, look, you don't have to do everything. But you got to do something. And one thing that's lost on some people is that some of our smaller community based charter school punch way above their weight on advocacy. Back when Arne Duncan was CEO, he granted charters to long standing community groups in neighborhoods and they've built up authentic grassroots connections. Leveraging them is different than leveraging some of our bigger CMO networks that are more prominent. The question is not how do you make sure they work together, it's how do they fit into the puzzle piece? What's their contribution to the movement, how they best able to serve and then they leverage that talent and that's what works. I think over time maybe the CMOs have more heft fundraising and with the donor base or with elected officials. But maybe the Aldermanic caucus or the Black Caucus responds to this outside charter school network. There's only two campuses. The question how do knit that movement together, minimize division, set an aggressive agenda and then go after it relentlessly?

Yeah, I know in Los Angeles there have been different cmo, only advocacy organizations that have been set up and then single sites and then the different ones and none of them have proven viable. And in the end I think they're coming to a realization that across all of Los Angeles. We need all the schools together. I don't know if you know the Leonard Cohen famous lyric, every heart to love will come, but like a refugee. I feel like every charter school movement. Every state, will come to advocacy coherence. But like a refugee, we have to try every other mistake first and then come to, okay, we need to have these kinds of structures set up. If the state challenges are so pronounced that you can't be good in the different cities. Well, you're going to make substructures that are going to be able to focus and how those substructures are set up, are they separate 501C3s. Are they business units within the C, within the state association? I don't know. But we just have to understand that the advocacy needs at state, city, state and national levels are different. And we need organizations maniacally focused on getting great in each of those three levels.

Yeah, I like the famous Donna Brazil quote that politics is about addition, not subtraction. And we're trying to build heft. You're trying to add people to your coalition. Does that make it challenging and fractious? Sometimes, yeah. But that's why you have family discussions and say, look, here's the agreed upon goal. Equal charter operational funding, a creation of a state charter facilities fund, a 10 year renewal for charter school renewals. Like we got all that done through a coalition approach over the past number of years where everyone knows that's the goal. Working together on it. It makes a huge difference. I'll be one anecdote, please. There's one bill going through Springfield this year which would try to sunset our charter appeal route. And we have one school in particular very affected by that. The CEO of that school is directly connected personally to a very important legislator who represents a portion of that area and sits on a key committee. For us that matters. The fact that representative is directly connected will take a call anytime from this leader makes a difference. Multiply that by 150 times, you can cover the legislature and have your people directly connected to people when they need to have calls. And that makes a huge difference. The personal connection.

Yeah.

And every charter school association should think about how do they map the power structures they've got? How do they make sure they have coverage for the most important key legislators that make your life either great or very challenging. The state House.

That's great. I think we've gotten to the point where there are enough state associations that are getting stronger that when I travel the country there's a recognition. Hey, I know I don't know exactly what happened in New Jersey. But New Jersey's gotten a lot better. I don't know exactly what Starley did in Texas, but dang, the Texas association was great. And I can't tell you how many times I've heard people say what do I got to do to get an X in my state? And obviously there's a lot of great stuff that you've done. Your personal leadership is great. I also though, bring it back to economics. And your members now are contributing per student at a Level that some states just can't believe it. It's literally 10 times higher than some of our states, certainly four or five times higher than many of our states. If there are any viewers from other parts of the country who have a state association that's being funded at 5 or 6 or $7 per kid, I mean, what would you say to charter school leaders in those other states about the wisdom of supporting their association at higher levels?

Well, I would say it's essential. You've got to have recurring consistent revenue as foundations come in and out of this movement to sustain your organization and grow to a scale of staffing to be effective. I think we're all underpriced and I think we're underpriced. Frankly. And I'll describe the economics of it here in a second. So in twenty fifteen, we established a three year goal of trying to equalize charter school funding in the state. The current, the then current law permitted charters to receive 75% of what the district spent per pupil. We were able to raise that floor to 97% in state statute in twenty seventeen. The net result of that was the charter school got that year $3 thousand more per pupil per year going forward. Multiplied by 60 thousand students. That's $180 million in new money into the movement that year. Our dues then was, I think $10 or $15 on a student. So they were getting 3 thousand more and we were getting fractions of that, right? Yep. So you got to make the value proposition clear to say, look, here's the value of the organization and here are the policy goals we're both achieving and defending and we're doing that for you. But if you don't have a tightness with your membership. You can't ask that. I mean, it frustrates me in no way to hear my colleagues say I don't think they would accept a five to ten dollar dues increase. And I'll say to them like, then they must not think much of your work because if they want to accept that, you've got to explain it better. You have to detail and be ambitious about the goal. It might take a few years, but set a vision and try to drive your movement towards it. Don't sit back and worry about defense all the time. Like having to have a perspective on where the movement's headed and then lead the troops there. Yeah.

well, we get to a chicken and egg issue too, where we have some state where we get 40% of 45% of schools that are members and they're paying six bucks a kid. And of course the advocacy is terrible. They have no capacity whatsoever. And so the resources, the lack of resources contributes to the problem. I just. The thing that I think we can say now though is we have enough state associations on the right path that we're not cookie cuttering it. It's not the exact same in every place. Obviously. We've just been talking about how INCS is so much different from ccsa. From, you know, from Georgia, from New Jersey. But there are patterns that we are learning. And my sense is that we know that if state associations. I'm sorry, state members fund their state associations at different levels and we hire and we make good hires and we're making good hires right now. I mean, our posse is getting to be. You know, pretty formidable people here. There's going to be a positive ROI on these investments coming from schools. It's not like 15 years ago where we had no template or anything like that. Put the. Put the support into your association and you will see it get stronger.

I think that's right. I would encourage any CMO leader or single site leader that is listening to this podcast to become part of the solution if there's a problem with the association. Like join the board, be active, get donors activated. Because the model of a association representing all the member schools in the state, paid for by dues. Respected in the state house, respected with the press, respected with the member schools, that can achieve much more than one off coalitions or nodes of schools working together. I mean, there's no doubt in my mind that's the case. We just got to make sure we explain it, demonstrate it, and then build the capacity locally so schools buy in.

Yeah, I think we're all almost at the point where if the state associations aren't evolving into C3, C4 structures and getting really aggressive on the advocacy focus. I think we're seeing some states where people just, you know, just so frustrated, they're like going to push on and make it get done one way or another. Right. So my sense is do that investment within your state association right now. It's likely going to work as long as they want to run a general play like INCS has done. And if you have people resisting running a play like that. Well, then your constructive pressure and your involvement at the board level and with funders and others will likely result in the overall advocacy in your state getting to the coherence that you need.

Yeah, I've been an evangelist for the idea of building out tandem political organizations for a long time. And I tell people, you don't have to go from zero to 60. Just get started, host a fundraiser for your allies, get involved in one race. Get involved in two races next time, but get going. I mean, you can study the problem forever, but if you don't get going. You're not going to learn. And from twenty fourteen to twenty sixteen. Those two cycles, we learned enormous lessons about how to do effective political campaign work, canvas work. Digital direct mail. Persuasion calls, using text messaging. We learned a lot. And now we have a machine that's much more efficient, much more effective. And by the way, when you have that and put woods on the board. Fundraising, it's much easier. Yeah, I mean, imagine going

to fundraising. I turned $4 million of political money into $300 million of recurring operational funding for the Charter School movement going forward in perpetuity. Yeah, right. That's 120x. So I mean, let's talk about how you leverage that investment for policy. Wips, talk to me a little bit about csp, the charter school program. We had this change in statute almost a decade now. I think it was in twenty seventeen. 16, it might have been, where state associations were allowed to become stewards for these grants. And we're now seeing several states where the state association is doing it. INCS now has a CSP grant. It certainly seems like we're learning a lot about how much better the grant can be administered by state associations. Any thoughts for your colleagues in other states about the degree to which they should be encouraging their state associations to become the steward of the CSP grant?

Sure. And first, I want to give the alliance credit, the national alliance of Public charter school for making this possible. I've always thought the state departments were a little bit slow and bureaucratic in their administration of the CSP program. We want to grant three or four years ago now $25 million to grow the number of charter school in Illinois. We've given out, I think 12 or 13 grants of a million five each roughly to fund growth. It's been great to see our schools embrace the challenge in declining enrollment, districts that enroll more students. And there's an ability for the association to withhold some funding for administration of the cost. You can actually wind up paying for a staff member and additional support at the same time. So I tell all my colleagues, apply for it. It helps remember schools out, helps you grow. It's self funded in the sense you can retain 10% of the grant for self administration. So I think it's a real boon. And I'll tell you having done this once in the State Department, we had a grant. We had to manage the team that managed it and doing it now. It's much easier on this side because you're more connected to the schools. You can forecast growth. You know the regulations already. You get money out the door much more efficiently.

Yep. Well, let's talk about growth just generally. I want to come back to just the city story one more time and just our policy agendas. But before we get there on just growth generally, how do you think we're doing? I mean, we're going to get to 4 million kids in charter school though. If we really look at who we would count in the 4 million. There are a lot of charter and name only schools that are included in there. I think that if we actually did a deeper dive. We'd probably be around 3.6 million. Something like that. Growth seems to be around 100 thousand kids per year right now. It's not nothing in a declining enrollment. It's maybe all the more impressive. But my sense is that we've got to figure out a way to grow more rapidly. I'd like to see us making a movement goal of getting to 5 million kids, adding that additional million or 1.4 million, whatever it is far faster than we added the last million or the last 1.4 million. Obviously very tough in this declining enrollment environment that we're in. To what extent do you think we should be really accentuating needs for faster growth?

Yeah, I think growth is a moral imperative because we don't have enough students in great schools today. If you look back 15 years ago, the growth was mainly in urban centers around the country. New York, Chicago, Louisiana were growing rapidly at the time. Today it looks very different. Those enrollment declines in those districts making growth more difficult. And we've had the rise of the Southeast, whether it's the Carolinas or Georgia growing more quickly. Other states like Texas, growing rapidly. But there's also a lot of undersold stories about growth happening in blue cities. Yeah, we gave out four CSP grants for charter enrollment growth this year. The four schools are going to add many hundreds of students. So it's not like it was during the two thousand eight Renaissance. Twenty period. We were adding 15 new charter school a year. But we're seeing steady growth while the enrollment declines overall. So an overall share of the student population is going up even though growth seems slow. Even California. Which has out migration challenges like Illinois does to the state. Is seeing growth. Right. Because parents are still looking for something great for their students. As long as that's the case, I think we have to keep pushing our growth. I remember being on a panel with Karen Lewis, the late leader of the ctu, years ago. And we were debating charter growth in Chicago. Her perspective was it comes at the expense of neighborhood schools. My perspective was we have education. Deserts need more schools. That's generally the point. And I remember saying, I said, look, I can explain for you a way to stop charter growth tomorrow. And then the audience said, well, what's the answer? I said, just convince parents not to send their kids to charter school. But we have wait lists and there's a reason why now we have great district run schools in Chicago all over the place. Not just selected schools. We have great neighborhood open enrollment schools, but we don't have enough of them and they're not fully distributed across the city. So that's why, if you look at a map of our city, most of our schools are located in places where the educational need is greatest. Now it's intentional by design. We have to keep focusing on that and keeping growth happening in those places.

Let's turn to. We'll bring it back closer to home here. I have to ask this question about fundraising, though. I mean. You're just known as the master of fundraising, and it's incredible what you've done in Chicago. My own sense on this is that I put some of the blame. Blame. I mean, there's a perception of like, we've lost a generation of funders and some people want to get irked with the funders. And I put a lot of the. The challenge on the advocates that we ourselves are not really creating the aggressive aspirational plan for the future that unlocks the next generation of philanthropy. I think you've done this amazing job in Illinois of not only having enough time and building the relationship and being in Chicago and there being a civic community, but I think being on offense. Having an aspirational vision for the future has been an incredible part of your success. How much should we be pushing our colleagues here in different cities and different states to come forward with more aspirational visions for the future for the sake of kids and for our movement generally, but also because it probably postures us well to recruit the new funders we need for the movement?

Well, our economic model has shifted dramatically over the past 10 years. Ten years ago, we were heavily foundation funded. But I always knew that foundation support phases in and out. They shift priorities and they go away from school choice towards early childhood or higher ed reform or wetland preservation for that matter. And as they shift, you've got to be ready for alternative economic models. So I've been doing individual fundraising for a long time. You have to do it to feed political organizations because by definition. Nonprofits can't fund PACs and C4s and so forth. So we've built up an individual donor base that's inspired by our vision. To your question about how do you set a vision like you work with your members and say, what's the most important two things we should do on the policy front in the next three years? And we've always had that North Star. Like right now we're focused on over the next three years having a statewide alternative university based authorizer that would be in addition to local authorizing with a. Not just a direct appeal, but an initial application there. Is that easy? No, but it inspires people to say when they're dealing with the bureaucracy of a local district authorizer that shifts to be anti charter like CPS has in the past 18 months. Oh yeah. That's why we're focused on this thing. And we saw this coming. Right. Like part of the work of a great charter school association leader is to say. See around corners. Right. Skate where the puck's going to be. Find out where the movement's headed and get ahead of it and be ready for it. So that when your member school say I can't believe we have this problem, they remember. Oh, but yeah, INCS was talking about this last meeting we had in the summit last fall. Okay. That's why they're doing it now. And your job is to get around there. The other thing I'd say about fundraising is that to do it well with individuals, you got to put the time in. Yeah. And it's not scalable. Like the relationships you have with high net worth donors are one on one generally. And so you go from 1 to 5 to 10 to 15 to 20. It's a lot of coffees, a lot of dinners, a lot of meetings, a lot of that. But if you're not doing it well, you'll never be well capitalized on the political side. And one of the structural barriers we've got in this movement is the unions can generally use their dues for political purposes. We can't. We can't. So we have to fundraise that additionally to make sure we're well fortified for the fights ahead politically.

Cool. I mean, I have one last question that I'll let you wrap with whatever you want. So this comes back to our cities. I mean, I think you're making a pretty compelling argument that we should not be giving up on our big urban school districts. From a philanthropy standpoint. There have been some places like Los Angeles and New York and Chicago that had a real hard time raising money for advocacy. And I think that's changing. Let's see what happens. And I think a part of it is changing because frankly. You're demonstrating that there's reason for hope. Right. But talk to me just about our critique of the traditional system. I hear you. The unions are not our enemy by any means. Our enemy is a way underperforming public education system that needs to evolve, needs to evolve in some way. And yet we've shied away from saying our critique, I think because people believe it might mean that we aren't committed to public education. If we are too harsh in our criticism, how are you striking this balance of sharing your critique of why CPS is just not as high performing as we need it to be without venturing into a level of attack that just seems plainly unfair? Just off putting, what's the right balance for us to strike at this moment?

Well, I found that persuasion requires storytelling. And so what I tend to do is talk in a narrative fashion about the district. So urban districts have superintendents that last between 12 months and three years generally. And every time a new superintendent or board comes in, they have a new strategic plan, a new five pillars, a new four this, a new three this. And they can never sustain improvement long enough to make a difference. The nonprofit board governance that's best envisioned by charter school leadership of CMOs is you can last have leaders 10, 15, 20 years and really implement the plan and keep aggregating the gains. Right. That's just a structural advantage charter school have, and I think it's important. Second, here's the evidence. When CPS builds a high school, a new high school. It costs them on the order of $140 million. We build high schools for 1 thousand kids. State of the art adaptive reuse of using the buildings for 25 or 30 million. I was on a panel the other day and I said, look, that's charter innovation. For a third of the cost. We can build a building that will be adaptive for 40 years. It's got not all the bells and whistles, not an in ground pool. But it's efficient, it's functional, the kids love it. It's open and airy. And so we can innovate in ways beyond curriculum, beyond academics, to show what's possible in the public sector. One of the stories I'll live to tell about the last mayor's race is related to the firefighters union. So in Chicago, there's a big debate about how many firefighters are on a ladder company. And so it's a big political debate now. Structure fires are down 80% in Chicago in the past 50 years. Warehouses used to burn, but because of a combination of required sprinkling building codes, they're down 80% in the past 20 years. Number of firefighters is up 55%. Right? Yeah. And that's. That's not a dig on the firefighters. It's just the reality that urban governance prioritizes things in contracts for political expediency that aren't always necessary or the best service for the public. Yeah. It's our job to call down the public's public education sphere and say, look. We can be more efficient and do this better. That's not a critique of the students in the traditional school system. That's just looking at facts and saying. We can actually do this better. We can manage it more effectively. And we don't need to have a high school with 48 students. You can't offer the courses needed to get a diploma sufficient to graduate and get into a college in Illinois.

Andrew, as ever, I could keep going for another couple beers or however long we would have together. I got to wrap it up here. Here, Bring us home. I'm going to brand this thing Broy, straight up, no chaser. Is there any last thing that we haven't talked about? Is there anything that we're avoiding talking about? Is there anything that you'd want to push our movement on that you haven't brought up so far?

Let me just end with a narrative. Since I just gave the advantage of that. Back when I was in private practice. I was involved in a court case that went to the supreme court called Tennessee vs. Lane. And the issue was on behalf of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights in Georgia. And the issue was about accommodations for disabled people to get into courthouses. And John Lewis, the late, great John Lewis, came to one of our organizing meetings and said, you know, you've got this great brief. You want access for disabled folks. People with disabilities get access to courthouses. But what are you doing to dramatize your issue? And the answer was, the lawyers are doing nothing to dramatize the issue. So John Lewis said. Leave it to me. And so on the morning of the oral argument. He had people with disabilities at the front of the Supreme Court get out of their wheelchair or out of their crutches and try to crawl up the steps and he dramatized the issue in a way that no brief, nothing else could have done. I said to myself, this guy's a master advocate. And I thought to myself, and I still think today, how do you get momentum behind a cause that's not popular? How do you push people out of their comfort zone? How do you think about dramatizing the fact that in Chicago. We still have tens of thousands of students that are in schools with proficiency rates in the single digits? That should be a crime. And we should be dramatizing that in a way that says change is needed. Instead. We focus on the political fight of the day. And so I think back to John Lewis and what he taught all of us about pushing for change and thinking differently and creatively about how to do that.

Well. I'm sure it's heck not going to confer John Lewis status on you. But Andrew Broy in terms of helping a movement get up steps over and over, we're still not up to the courthouse door, but we've made it steps that we would not have made if we didn't have you as an example. So thanks for all you're doing. If there's more I can be doing to support what you're doing, just beat on me mercilessly. But. You know, thank you for the time that we spent together and thanks for. For all you're continuing to do for the charter school movement.

Happy to join you. Jed, thanks for making this forum. Had fun.

Great. Talk to you soon.

All right.