Forever Young: Reinvention, Elders, and the Next Generation – CharterFolk Chat with Caprice Young

Jed Wallace 0:00

So, Caprice, welcome to CharterFolk. Terrific to have you here. Thank you for making time. Always look forward to talking with you. You know, you do the eye roll. You know, I always introduce you as Caprice Young. You know, we are keeping us forever young. We want a young charter school movement. You've been such a great contributor through so many decades now. We all want to promise— we all want to pretend that we're as young as we ever were, but somebody who brings the spirit of young no matter how old we get, it's you, Caprice Young. So thank you for all that you've done and thank you for making time for this conversation today.

Caprice Young 0:34

My pleasure, Jed.

Jed Wallace 0:36

So, Caprice, I'd love to just— you're in a new chapter, and I think if there's anybody in our movement that's reinvented herself over and over again, to find ways to make great contributions to our movement, whether or not that's in advocacy, whether that's serving on the, on the board of LAUSD, whether it's having that close relationship with Riordan, taking a big role at Knowledge Universe, helping the Arnolds get their early philanthropy going, taking on the CEO role at ICEF when we had a crisis there, and Magnolia Public Schools, and now Navigator Schools. And I'm probably leaving out like six or eight of them, but really in terms of someone that's just committed again and again to really big challenges and leaving things in better state— stead every time you've moved on, you're doing it again. My question for you right now is, and certainly we can dive into your last chapter, I'm eager to hear about that as well. But across the unique mix of things that you have been involved in charterland, what do you think you might be able to see at this vantage point that perhaps, you know, others who haven't had as many entry points as you've had might be able to see?

Caprice Young 1:48

Well, there is something about being old, and, when I actually looking back on my career, the thing that has struck me the most lately because of all of the Olympics furor happening here in Los Angeles is that my, one of my first jobs out of college was as the budget director for the Transportation Authority here in Los Angeles. And the executive director there created a diagonal slice of the organization. He called it the diagonal slice, and it was the thirty-year planning team. And it had, you know, somebody from each level, somebody different mode of transportation. And I was the low person on the totem pole with that one. I was pretty green around the ears. And my job was to put everything in Lotus 1-2-3 and WYSIWYG. And as the rest of the design team created the thirty-year plan for transportation for Los Angeles. Well, that was nineteen ninety, and it's now been more than thirty years, and so it's pretty wild to be able to look back on it and see what we thought would get done versus what actually did get done. And, you know, in nineteen ninety, that was pre-internet, and at that point, you know, cell phones were even kind of a new thing. You had car phones, but not so much cell phones. And it was so long ago that when we had to put something in the plan for what would be in the last decade of the thirty-year plan, we had no idea what the technology would look like. So we had, you know, we had line items for what was going to be happening in twenty fifteen, but we called it like Star Trek Transporter Room just because we needed a placeholder. We had something that said Electronic Jitneys. Well, that's a lot like Uber and Lyft now, actually, if you think about it. And you know, with the charter movement, it's kind of been the same thing in the sense that, you know, when I got involved, it was nineteen ninety-eight, nineteen ninety-nine, the year before and when I ran for the school board. And at the time, you know, we had a cap on the number of charters that could be granted in California. We still have a cap, but it's, you know, it's one hundred per year as opposed to one hundred period. And the jury was really out about whether or not this even mattered. It was something that everybody said, well, this is a way for school districts to experiment.

Jed Wallace 4:46

Learn to— yeah.

Caprice Young 4:50

And yes, exactly. And, you know, and school districts did use it to experiment, but I, as Joe Lucente and Yvonne Chan liked to say that they were the troublemakers inside the school district, so they kicked them out and stuck them out in the far hinterland of the valley and said, yeah, you go do you out there far away from us. And of course, you know, like crabgrass spreading, the Northeast San Fernando Valley became, you know, shoots and more and more grass and shoots and more grass until we had generations of charter leaders. And I think we've seen that nationally in that what was supposed to be a small experiment has turned into an opportunity for educators and families and communities to try new things. The challenge, of course, is that every year that we exist, the amount of flexibility that we have gets smaller and smaller.

Jed Wallace 6:00

Yeah.

Caprice Young 6:17

And that's certainly a challenge. I was at dinner once, I guess about two years ago, with another charter school leader, and we were talking about how she was really worried about all these non-classroom-based charters, about how they were gonna just ruin the movement. And that was at the time, I think, when LAUSD, when there was a very high-profile crash and burn where somebody who really needed to be in jail, not running charter schools, was messing things up for everybody. But in the same conversation, we were also talking about how it feels like every year there are more and more restrictions put on charters. And sometimes it's as well-intentioned as, oh, now we're going to have LCFF money, which is this huge amount of new money that came in California, and charter schools are going to get that money too, but they're also going to have to do all of the same compliance as everybody else. And so what was supposed to be charter schools having the deal be you get to use the money flexibly and you get held accountable for results, but you don't have to do these million categorical reporting blah blah blah every year for the last thirty years in the name of equity and charters should get what everybody else gets. We've gotten money but also gotten more, you know, more compliance and less freedom, and that's a challenge. So the I guess the punchline of that story is that after a long conversation, I think I was able to convince her— I like to think I was able to convince her, actually— that probably the next charter that she's going to write will be a non-classroom-based charter, because that's still the corner of the law in California where you actually do have some flexibility. Because it, you know, with traditional charter schools, you get money based on how many minutes a kid's butt is in the seat. And with a non-classroom-based, you get money based on how much work the kid does, how much they show, they're showing their work and what they're learning. And then you get the freedom to use time the way you want to use time. You get the freedom to use or not use facilities the way you want. And I do think that there still are some corners of the movement where you can do really creative things that are so good for kids and that really meet the moment. But it's tough.

Jed Wallace 8:52

Yeah, well, it's been fascinating to watch what's happened in California, and the change in law that happened in twenty nineteen was very harmful. And despite that, California charters have continued to grow. I get different numbers, you know, from Myrna and the CCSA crowd as they're updating their things. At one point, I looked at the numbers and they basically were equal to Texas. In terms of growth in the last three years. It looks like this number— it's a little bit less than Texas, but still among this, among the fastest growth states in the country still.

Caprice Young 9:30

Hey, right.

Jed Wallace 9:46

Now, a lot of the growth is coming from the non-classroom-based, the so-called non-classroom-based schools that provide less than 80% of their instruction within a classroom setting. In California, you get called non-classroom-based. But these also, I mean, so the growth is there. This is what parents are demanding. There is the kind of freedom to be able to do innovation and stuff like you're talking about. The other piece that Elizabeth Robitaille and the crowd at CCSA show is that the non-classroom-based schools in terms of academic performance is catching up to, if not surpassing, the classroom-based schools now. And that is not the dynamic that there was, that there was, say, you know, ten years ago, for sure.

It will. No, I think, I think that's true, but that, I think that has everything to do with what, you know, what a lot of us learned during COVID is that you don't have to be face-to-face to see a lot of learning happen. But also it's true that the non-classroom-based programs are not necessarily without being face-to-face, right? That's really a kind of a critical piece of it. And I ran a non-classroom-based program, Learn4Life, and it was brilliant. It still is brilliant. They're doing tremendous work. Now that the moratorium is over, they're going to be able to grow again, thank goodness. And they've grown in other states in the meantime. But what it means is that you can fit the school to the kid instead of the kid to the school.

Yeah, well, yeah.

And that, and that makes such a huge difference. And I do think that's why we're going to see higher academic growth in the non-classroom-based schools. Been in the facilities-based schools, one of the things that I worry about from time to time is that we're losing our edge. I do worry about that because when The Accelerated School first got started, for example, way back in the late '90s, they kicked everybody's you-know-what because they were doing phonics-based reading early, right, early. And they, as LAUSD started using a phonics-based program, yeah, they started catching up, right. So I think it's incumbent upon all of us in charters to be constantly thinking about the next and the next and the next and how do we do better, right, instead of saying, oh look, everybody else is at 40% proficiency and woohoo, we're at 47% proficiency. Well, that's still more than half the kids that are not at grade level, right? And even, you know, even some of the really high-performing charter schools like the Navigator Schools that I used to lead, they, you know, they, their kids are making it up into the 60s, right? So 65%, 67%, by the time they get to 8th grade, up around 80%. But wait a minute, if we're talking about five point eight million kids in California and 20% of them are still not making it, right? That means that there's still a lot of work to do and we can't sit back on our laurels. And that's a challenge because it's hard, you know, because it's hard and it's really tough to innovate at the same time as keeping the program that you have high quality.

So we're in this— I would describe it as a period of malaise. As not necessarily within the charter school movement, but within education generally. It's, you know, Tim Daly writes about being in education depression. People talk about the NAEP scores imploding. We see the kind of financial crisis that's happening in school district after school district, and a sense of either disinterest or hopelessness. It might be a function of, people think that the other problems in the world are so much bigger that we don't have the luxury of worrying about education anymore. I'm not sure what it might be, but there's this sense of kind of purposelessness or directionlessness in education. And it's my sense that anything that maintains a strong sense of direction in contrast to that malaise is going to be the narrative driver for public education. And right now there's a bunch of stuff in red states around vouchers and ESAs, and we'll look back and see, did kids, new kids, really end up being served by those schools? Well, we'll see. Maybe not. I'll leave the, I'll leave the verdict open on that one for a little while. But what I do know is that I feel like charter school is continuing to grow amid all of this, around one hundred thousand kids a year nationally. It's on the verge of being the one thing in public education with forward momentum, but I feel like one hundred thousand is kind of this question mark number. And if we could erase the question mark and put an exclamation point above it in terms of enrollment growth, like, hey, we got a couple hundred thousand kids a year, we got two hundred fifty thousand kids a year, we can like, we can see five million. That's not that far away, six million kids. And by the way, to your point, academic, academics are clearly improving. And hey, some of these historical unfairnesses around educational redlines, broken accountability within the traditional system— hey, public people are starting to listen to charter schools more and more. Look what's happening in Indianapolis right now. I mean, I think that's the most important story in the United States right now. I feel like we could be having dozens of Indianapolis's across the country right now, but it's we ourselves that aren't just giving ourselves that extra oomph of energy. And if people like you and me, you know, focus too much on that though, and are not sensitive to the amount of challenge that there is at the school level, and don't you know, Jed, how hard it is, and don't you know what I'm putting up with, and don't you know, you can really come across as just plain tone wrong. So what advice do you have for me, or what are your thoughts about how do we, how do we talk?

Well, I think it— Yeah, you gotta have some empathy for those of us in the trenches.

How do we acknowledge the great work that we're doing and also the urgency we need even more?

And I say that lovingly, given that I've just made the decision to step out of a CEO role while I consider what I wanna do next. But, you know, the folks who are running the schools right now really do have their hands full. And, you know, part of it is so many parts of the country, even major parts of Texas, where it used to be like, oh, grow. Also, they're seeing declining enrollment in some significant parts of Texas. Plano is shrinking like crazy. And so when you have that declining enrollment, you have kind of a different dynamic when it comes to growth, right? Because in the past, it has been there's been so much, so much growth on the part of kids, right, having more and more kids. And this was pre-twenty ten, there was, we were at the, what was it, the bubble of the bubble from the post-baby boom. And when I was head of the school board in Los Angeles, we had seven hundred thousand, more than seven hundred thousand kids in our schools. And that wasn't counting adult education or early childhood education. And now they're down below four hundred thousand. So the dynamic for charter school leaders is not just, hey, come to our schools, we have great schools, but you actually have to, you actually have to go out and convince families who just sort of the normal course of business is, what's my neighborhood school, to switch and come to your school. And that is a heavier lift, and it actually changes the financial dynamics of a school too. So I was talking with another charter leader who says they're spending a thousand dollars in digital marketing per new enrollment. Okay, think about that. That's— and that's money that's not going into the classroom. It's going into getting the kids into the classroom so that they can have a great education. But it's a— but it's a change in the financial model and it's a change in the dynamic. And that's happening at the same time as there's a whole new generation of folks in the movement who take charter schools for granted as just another form of public school. I mean, a generation ago it was like, we're the revolution. And now it's like, well, do I want to go teach in a charter public school or a traditional public school? And there's kind of an acceptance in some places that that's part of the choice, but there's not necessarily part of the dynamic of the culture of we're here because we fought to get here. And we have to fight to keep being here, and we have to constantly both improve our outcomes and convince families that we have better outcomes at the same time. That I don't see that happening quite so much, except in a couple places where the authorizers are starting to do a whole lot of baloney, and then all of a sudden your community gets educated real fast when you think to your traditional authorizer and they say, oh yeah, we see your test scores are better than ours and oh, your kids are outperforming ours, but yeah, no, we don't need you, you're not doing anything.

Yeah, I saw this.

I mean, we were proposing to do a charter in Monterey County, and our kids in Watsonville were the very same demographics that we were prepared to teach in Salinas. There was person after person at the microphone saying, oh, well, you have a science of reading-based program, we have that. Oh, well, you have professional development teacher coaching, we have that. And none of them said, oh, and you have great student outcomes, we have that because it wasn't true, right? And they were making the case that because we were doing a traditional model and executing really well, that somehow that meant that we weren't needed because we weren't doing anything different. When in fact the outcomes were measurably different for our kids. And so you have to keep fighting. And sometimes it takes that kind of a rude awakening to realize that you have to keep fighting.

Yeah, well, when the changes in twenty nineteen specifically blessed school districts citing their own financial impact as the reason for denying a new charter, which was exactly the NEA's public policy on charter schools approved in twenty seventeen, these are the ripple-through effects that happen. I think, I wonder, I mean, you've been on the CharterFolk board for a long time, you've been a big CharterFolk supporter, and I appreciated that all along. And as a board member, you probably watched Howard Fuller's Thanksgiving video. You might have missed it, but, you know, he was just so— Howard's always— you don't miss a word of Howard Fuller when you have an hour with him.

Oh yeah, no, I didn't miss it.

But that one in particular has just lived with me, and you know, that what I came away with that was that the newcomers that are coming in aren't just going to naturally get it. We have to go back and tell the story again. This is why charter schools exist, and we exist because there are problems within the traditional system. And while we may be coached and it may be good political advice to temper our criticism of school districts in the public sphere within our own base. When we just say, we're just another form of public school, there's nothing different or better about our design than what there was in the traditional system. Over time, year after year, you start to find that the people that are coming in don't really understand what our world's all about. And Howard's like, Jed, look, you're gonna be in this charter thing longer than me. You gotta be working hard. Our people need to know. They need to know. I'm just looking at right now, like the ACLU in Los Angeles. Did you see this? They just came out and said that they're going to defend the LA Unified against some ridiculous issue regarding integrating schools. And yes, the effort that's coming against LA Unified is a far right-wing nutjob attack on, you know, on what LA Unified is doing. But the ACLU goes back through and like tells the story of racism and, you know, and segregation built into Los Angeles Unified Schools going back to the '30s, being sustained all the way through the '90s and thereafter, and never critiques how the system itself is responsible for this. And so now what does the ACLU do? It comes in and it defends that legacy system that still has those fingerprints of unfairness cooked into it. And so I think Howard's experience is we need our people to know this history and to be able to recognize the fingerprints that are still there. And my own personal experience in, a lot of different cities when I've been able to get CharterFolk together. And we start and we're a little bit beleaguered and everybody's like, oh my gosh, it's so difficult these days. But you start talking about the unfairness in Atlanta. Let's go back through what Ramona Edelin was talking about in DC. Let's talk about Howard Fuller and his critique of Memphis. And you— and your people just start sitting up and they sit up there, wait, that's why we're doing this? That's why I'm putting it with those. Sign me up. Okay, I'm exhausted, but I'll work through this stuff. I just, I feel like this stuff is what injects our movement with octane. And if you take the octane out of it, well, there are all sorts of, you know, things that flow thereafter. So, I mean, can you just respond to Howard's, you know, take and my recapturing it? Am I getting it right? How would you describe it differently?

Well, I think Howard is right. I think you're right that we need to keep telling the stories. And, you know, Yvonne Chan, was the person from the previous generation that told my generation the stories. And Don Shalvey, I mean, we would have these conversations because a couple of us figured out that Don Shalvey, who was the head of Charter Number One in California and the founder of Aspire, we knew that he was driving from Oakland out to Stockton every evening where he lived. And so that was a, you know, that was a cool ninety minutes to two hours that we all knew we could get him in the car and get his advice and insights. And he and Yvonne and others have constantly told us the stories of how it began and why it began and what we are there for. And we do have a responsibility, I think, to not just to tell those stories, but to tell our stories of, you know, protesting so that we wouldn't lose our facilities money. And the success of those, right? And the need to be able to get out and walk door to door and talk to families in their native language about their children on a continuous and ongoing basis, that it's not gonna happen from just digital marketing, that it's all about personal connection, right? And that it's really important for us to be teaching our students to fight. And to fight, and to, by fighting, I mean to use the democratic levers that are out there. That just because something happens to be a law now doesn't mean it's going to be a law in the future. And I mean that in good ways and bad ways, right? We have that responsibility. And it's also true that there's a whole generation right now that's having their own experience, right? Right? So our telling the stories and our truths, we need to be careful that we don't use them to discount or discredit the experiences that the charter leaders of this generation are facing and experiencing because they're bringing their whole new take on it. I mean, there are— I think of the sort of the charter school movement in a couple of different phases. Right? The early phases were the folks who were leaving school districts or who were internal reformers in school districts and became charter leaders to get better.

Our Mavericks.

The mavericks, the district mavericks that were kicked out into the charter school movement. And then there was a whole generation of community organizers who were all about community cohesion and community organizing. And there was that organicness to creating community-driven charters, right? And then we started seeing the Teach for America folks who would be doing their Teach for America stints and then realize they didn't wanna stay in that system. And so we would get them after, you know, after they graduated from Teach for America, but they came in with also sometimes a lot of technocratic training, right? And I don't mean technocratic in a bad way, but I mean more like scientific and evidence-based and so on. And so the community organizers became the evidence-based folks of that next generation. There's a generation I think that we're just coming through now that is a whole generation focused on authentic leadership from the kids who grew up in the neighborhoods. And a lot of them, a lot of them are people who actually went to school in charter schools in the first place.

Right, yep.

They had their own education in charter schools and now they're growing up, they're adults and they're starting their own charter schools. And they're doing it with a kind of trust-based authentic ownership of it. And with some of the folks in this generation, I've had conversations where they, you know, where they talk about sort of hearkening back to, say, Brown v. Board of Education, which, yes, it integrated the schools, and it led to a lot of Black women being kicked out of being able to teach, and the closure, and the closure of Black-led schools. With the— in the context of ending segregation and that— and that there was damage that was done to communities in that process that's gone unacknowledged.

Right.

And so this new generation, they have their own stories and their own fights. And— and they're going to have their own innovations also. I'm so excited to see what's going to happen with AI in schools. We were doing a bunch of experimentation with AI at Navigator from the perspective of, well, this is here, you know, we're, you know, let's see what we can do with it. And it has tremendous potential to do really cool stuff. The most, you know, I think some ways the most important of which are going to have a huge impact on the use of time. Particularly in schools after kids have learned to read, right, after they've learned basic reading and numeracy, which is, which is still kind of the gatekeeper to being able to use technology independently. Then from that point on, it's going to be, it's going to be, I think, a massive change in the curriculum from learning stuff to analysis and invention and curiosity. I'm very excited for five years from now to have schools, particularly middle schools, that are going to be curiosity-driven instead of compliance-driven. And right now, I think middle schools are the things that are the most broken and have the most potential. So I guess that's my diatribe around look, yes, we need to be constantly saying we've got to fight and we need to continue to fight and we need to grow and we need to continue to grow and we need to tell the stories of each of the multiple generations. And as sort of, dare I say, as elders, I can't believe I'm calling myself an elder in your movement, we need to have respect for this new generation and find, and find ways to take all of the, all of the handouts and hand-ups that we got and make sure they get them.

Well, I hear you on elders and, you know, on the new generation, and I think the infusion of new talent is great. I've also, you know, I've, you know, look, I love Larry Rosenstock. I love Don. I love, you know, Howard, all of these, you know, first people, Yvonne. They're incredible. They're incredible. But every generation has always said, oh, what are we going to do? We don't have, you know, up-and-comers that are as good as that first generation. The next generation comes and they're incredible. And I think this next generation, the question is whether or not we're cultivating them. Will we, will we grow them as well? And will we support them as well as have been there before? Will they give them purpose? But if those that have come before do our work right, I think the next generation will be even more impressive than those that have come before us. I do, though, think— and I wonder if this is true, because you're now in a transition moment— I think there were a lot of CharterFolk around fifty or early 50s, maybe mid-50s, and they left their leadership roles.

Early 60s. Early 60s.

To do a next thing, or just because it was time— that was just exhaustion, pandemic, whatever it may have been. But I think there are a lot of people that are in their mid-50s who are coming back. And it— and it could be— this is not like trying to push back out, you know, young leaders or whatever. There's just so much leadership that's needed. And I just feel like there are just so many people in our movement that in their 50s through, you know, late 60s, even longer— look at Howard, dude's like eighty-six or whatever. I mean, it's the longevity, it's the— it's, you know, my dad was so broken by public education, you know, you know, when he— a maverick principal. I mean, an uncle passed away with a little bit of money, it was just enough for him to retire early, thank goodness. He was an insomniac, he was being broken by the system, right? I've got other— we've got friends here in Sacramento. The dude, I mean, a really close friend, he was a principal. He retired at the same age, fifty-six years old, just like my dad did, right? I think, you know, we had some CharterFolk in their 50s, you know, for different reasons, feeling like maybe I should, you know, exit. I think a lot of them were coming back, and I think when they do come back and they reinvent and when they realize that the charter— they already know it, but when they re-realize there's no place to make as much progress as there is within charterland, as broken as it is, as difficult as it is, as much of it's evolved to be less innovative than it was before, it's still the most hopeful place to work. I mean, do you see that elsewhere? I mean, am I the only one? I mean, you've done this over and over again. I think you're going to do it like two or three times more. I don't know.

If I'm lucky, yeah, if I'm lucky, if people don't say, oh, she's too old to lead.

How do you think about this? Oh, heck no. I mean, how do you think about this, like, just longevity of work within this, you know, this movement and all of that?

Well, you know, I do think that what some of what I've seen from some of the charter leaders who are my generation, so, okay, I just turned sixty last year. There are a whole bunch of us who are in our 60s now that are still actively leading schools. And charter management organizations, and who are saying, okay, I can't cling to this incredible model that I created twenty years ago, 'cause guess what? It's not working anymore, right? And so there's a level of humility that's starting to creep in of, 'Okay, I created a model that worked really well for kids between twenty ten and twenty twenty, and now there's something— there's something different that's needed.' And it's not, you know, it's not just the science of reading. It's going to have to be something that is much more creative and evocative and empowering of the students themselves and of the teachers themselves. And so then the question is, what do I do about, what do I do about the five to ten schools that I created that I think are not quite what I want them to be anymore?

Yeah.

Do I push them to evolve when in fact I've just barely trained them to do what was originally planned correctly? Or do I start something new and take those along with me who want to do something new? That's part of the, I think part of the conversation that's happening for some folks. And I'm not sure how that's all going to turn out or what it's going to look like. But I think that's exciting. I'm super thrilled about other leaders that I've met in their 50s and 60s who are saying, yeah, I've been doing all of this, but now I want to do that. And I'm still going to use the charter law to be able to have that flexibility. But the— it's almost impossible to use the traditional charter law because it's become so calcified, and you kind of have to use the non-classroom-based law in order to do the kinds of creative things that you want to be able to do, to use time differently, to use place differently, to have cross-curricular kinds of projects. It's, it really is a different thing, I think, that some of us are starting to look at. And it doesn't mean that what already exists isn't terrific. It's just, if you're an innovator, you're an innovator. And sometimes you even have to innovate the stuff that you thought was innovative, that was innovative then, but it's not innovative now. So there have to be new ways of thinking about how we use technology in education, and what was innovative ten years ago may still be great, may still be working, maybe even is worth replicating, and in some cases, we have to be the ones that are pushing to the next level. To stay on my soapbox for a minute, some of the school districts are doing some really exciting work.

Please do.

And I think it is because of charter schools and competition from charter schools that they are being able to have this internal innovation, right?

Okay, give me more reason for hope.

So, well, I mean, over the last decade, for example, charter schools were the ones that were first doing early college education programs.

Give me a few examples of district excellence.

Now, a lot of school districts are doing early college, right? They're partnering and getting college courses into the high school environment. Charter schools were the first to do really true project-based learning. Now we're seeing a lot more of that in traditional public schools to great benefit. And also specialized schools like dual language programs.

Two more.

You know, twenty years ago, a dual immersion program was rare, and now it's de rigueur, you know, and I think that that's really cool. And in San Benito County, for example, where we have a Navigator school, there's another charter that came in as a high school charter saying, we're going to do all of these really cool career pathways stuff. And, you know, what the internal innovators in the school district told me was, we've been wanting to do that for so long, we'd written the memos. We think that the charter actually came in and stole our memos. But now that the charter is saying they're going to do it, our superintendent is finally willing to take it seriously, right? So the competition doesn't necessarily mean that school districts are saying, oh, we saw a charter school that was really cool, so we're going to do it. It's that, uh-oh, the charter school is doing that, we're going to do that to compete. And that definitely is happening. But then beyond that, we're just seeing some cool stuff in traditional school districts that are exciting. And the thing that I worry about more than anything is that traditional school districts have a tough time maintaining those models, right? So for example, the Science Academy in North Hollywood, which is brilliant, which one of my buddies, Carlos Lauchu, created, and they consciously said to themselves, are we going to do this as a charter or are we going to do this as a traditional public school? And it wound up being a magnet, a traditional public school magnet school. And now that he has left there, he's recently retired, the question comes back to, well, how long is it going to take for the school district to screw it up? Who's going to make sure that it has longevity? Who's going to protect and defend it now that he's not there? Because it is really pretty common for really successful things in school districts that when the founder leaves, the political support leaves. So exactly, it's the blob, it's the blob.

Yeah, Larry used to describe this as being sucked back into the miasmic oneness. So, yeah, like there it was with Jonathan Raymond. I mean, he's leading Highlands Charter and, you know, the whole drama and story there. Well, hopefully John is doing well there, but I can just remember he was just super excited about some priority schools in Sacramento. There were about a dozen of them that were in some of the highest-need communities. He really invested a whole heck of a lot. And I would meet with him and he would ask me, you know, what should I be doing next? I was like, take those schools that you've made such great progress in and get them into a charter. So there's some kind of way to make your progress longstanding. And he just wasn't able to hear that. And less than a year, less than two years after, you know, he was gone, it's all, it's all erased. So I guess, I mean, it's nice to hear your optimism. It's nice to hear your, you know, your citing of positive things within the, within the district system. I tend to see things getting much worse, not better. I think there are pockets of places where things can get better. I think that California is among the places where it's sadly most broken. And I think why it's, why it's of interest to people elsewhere in the country is because the extremity of action that is happening here and the visibility of it allows you to see what you wouldn't otherwise see if you put that California lens on and look at— let's look at Nashville. Let's look at Philadelphia. You know, let's look at other places of excess. California helps you see the brokenness that you might not otherwise see. And I think the problem for a lot— for us is that we're just not willing to say the thing about the brokenness. And we're not willing to talk about how it doesn't align with our values. I'm in Sacramento. I, you know, and I encourage people across the country, write about your own schools. You know more about your schools. I mean, I try not to write about Sacramento all the time, but I also try to model. Look, I'm watching what's going on in my hometown closely. And as it turns out, the brokenness in Sacramento is just an abject tragedy. And it's a tragedy in ways that we see in so many other places. We've basically, you know, had a teacher union that just said, we are going to drive these schools over the financial cliff, and we are going to dare policymakers in Sacramento to not fund them. And by the way, thank you for giving us financial incentive to drive our schools over the cliff, because if you're on the verge of a cliff, you're not allowed to have any charter schools in your area. It's the perverse incentives that we've created, you know, for school districts like this. But the way that the robbery happens, the theft that happens, is we borrow from the kids of the future. We steal from the kids of the future to pay for the educations of the past. And, you know, our districts are so broken, they're not allowed to go bankrupt. The state must bail them out for their unfunded liabilities, for the promises that they've made for healthcare or whatever. How is healthcare being paid for by Sacramento Unified? It's being paid for by the kids of today to provide the health benefits for those that taught twenty years ago. And I've got friends, they're the office managers of small elementary schools in South Sacramento, and they're like, there's no money here, there's no materials here, we can't buy anything, it's squalor, where's all the money? And what do they do? They will say, well, they blame it on charter schools or something. But any independent analysis of it would say, I'm sorry, it's heartbreaking, but the money's been spent on the kids that used to go to school here, right? And we won't tell these stories.

Well, yeah.

And then our own people, you know, our own people, they may feel like they should have the same compensation. They may expect the same reckless financial management of our schools. But if we do that, of course, what happens to us? We go out of business altogether. But because we have been able—

Oh no, yeah, no, I, yeah, I live that. And the truth is I do think that we radically underfund education in the United States, and I have thought about how cool it would be, for example, if we could pass a special tax in Los Angeles, for example, that would give, that would give certificated employees, teachers, principals, and so on, a significant bonus, like thirty thousand to forty thousand dollars a year bonus on an ongoing basis so that teachers could make a ton of money and so that there could be competition in the hiring of teachers so that people would want to go into it, that it would be a career that people would really like, and know that they were going to get enough money to be able to actually live in the same town where you teach, that would make a really big difference. I mean, to some extent we can whine about how irresponsible school districts have been, and they have been. There's— I'm not arguing that they have consistently overspent their means, and the teachers union has been right there by their side urging them on, in fact threatening them if they don't, but also promising, hey, you know, give us the raise, we're going to go to the governor and get you the money for it, so don't worry. And often enough they've been successful at that if you're a school board member, you don't want to, you know, you don't want to go against them because actually a lot of times they are successful at doing that. But to some extent, money is part of the answer. And the thing that I think is a big challenge is money needs to be part of the answer and change needs to be part of the answer, right? So, you know, talking close to home in Los Angeles, there's an elementary school not far from my house that was built for over a thousand kids after it had been expanded. And at one point had year-round calendar. So it had kids going one hundred sixty days a year on three different shifts, twelve hundred kids. And that school now has two hundred fifty kids in it. And it's basically one grade level per— I mean, one classroom per grade level and a ton of empty space and a charter school down the street that can barely afford to pay for, you know, its bungalows on the church.

Meanwhile, you passed Prop 39, and, you know, charter schools are supposed to get a reasonable equivalent, and, you know, of course they can't get an iota of space.

Yeah, doesn't happen. No, but there hasn't been any serious consideration until LAUSD very recently on— wait a second, how do we right-size schools in a way that's going to be able to use resources most effectively? And for decades I've been saying, let's get the charters and the non-charters together and let's plan. Let's plan together. Let's plan where the growth is going to be. Let's plan. We could actually consolidate schools now to a point where there wouldn't have to be any co-location because there is that much space. And you can have some, one school in neighborhood that's a charter and another school in the neighborhood that's not a charter, and they don't have to be sharing space. They can just be two different choices. And there is space for that now. But no one really wants to get together, right? And that's what needs to happen is everybody needs to get together, but the politics are so bad that to even say, hmm, we should sit down together, would be enough for somebody to face the teachers union trying to get them out of office. Because even to talk to charters now is considered a major crime.

Yeah, I hear you on money, and obviously we want, we want ample resources to support public education. I just feel like what we're experiencing now though is going to be a moment of going in the opposite direction. The punchbowl of COVID is being pulled away, and I don't think that people thought through how broken our big school districts are in giving them this huge amount of money and telling them, don't spend it on recurring expenses, make it one time. And none of— very few of them did that, right? And so now they have basically committed themselves to things that they'll never be able to fund once the punch bowl is gone. And good.

And it's— and it is gone, and it is gone now, you know. I mean, the last year that we had COVID money, it all had to be spent by September of '24, which basically meant '24-'25. '25-'26 was excruciatingly difficult year. And '26-'27 is when all of the big deep cuts are starting to be made. And it's very painful for everybody. You know, I think there was some ambition that if Biden had won the election, he would have made the federal increases permanent. Right, so that there, so that there wouldn't be a COVID cliff. There would be a generational shift in funding, and obviously that wasn't the case.

Yeah, I'm not sure what the intention was to begin with. I just know that we're living through now what is the aftermath? And I think that a lot of people that just don't understand the brokenness, they haven't been within Beaudry like you've been, you know, and you just see how pervasive it is. These brittle organizations are not able to handle responsibility like other organizations can. So you put a ton of money in these organizations all of a sudden and you tell them, here are the rules. It doesn't matter what those new rules are. They're going to fund— they're going to fund things consistent with their brittleness. And it just so happens to also happen at a moment when, while we may not have vouchers and ESAs in a lot of blue states, there is a big different feeling that every state has about public education and what people can expect.

Yes, that's true. That's definitely true.

And they're not going to put up with something that they don't like. And when they see the trauma of their— and the drama and the brokenness in their local school districts resulting from this, you know, funding pullback, I don't really know what's gonna happen. I don't really know what's gonna happen. All I do know is— Yeah, I'll put, I'll put a link to that in the notes.

Well, it's already happening. I mean, so we're talking about Howard Fuller and one of the speeches that, and one of the books that he recommended that I think everyone should read is around the power to exit. And that, you know, that you really— yeah, maybe because you can't have systemic change unless you also give people the power to exit.

Yeah, that's a great— thank you.

And, you know, for my generation, the power to exit looked like kids dropping out. I mean, dropout rates for my generation were much higher than they are now. And a lot of high schoolers just, after 10th grade, they were done because school wasn't relevant for them. And so the power to exit had very profound life consequences. Now, with charters, at least you have the power to exit to get into a charter that may be much more personalized for you, that may, like a Learn4Life charter school, be able to mold itself around you instead of you around it. And so that power to exit's important, but more and more we're seeing the traditional public school system closing charter schools, and if not closing them, then holding them to kind of compliance things that make them similarly brittle. And so there's less of a power to exit. That's kind of the thing that makes me I mean, there are lots of really good reasons to live in California, and I like being in a blue state for a whole lot of reasons. But, you know, I covet the kind of flexibility that we're seeing in some of the other states. And some of the other states that are taking the administration up on the ability to waive some federal rules around how funding gets used to be able to be more creative. To be able to address kids' needs earlier. And so from a policy perspective, the more that we can do to make it so that families are not locked into the, you know, the choices or lack of choices that they have, the better, right? The better.

So let's wrap it up with two reasons for hope. So I think there's hope that runs through like a ribbon everything we've been talking about. I personally think, you know, kind of sadly, but the brokenness of the public system and the challenges we're going to see in the years ahead is going to result in people exiting to charter schools at whole new levels. And thank goodness that charter schools are here, because what our society would do were we not, you know, in a place where the charter school movement can now serve four million kids and could reasonably, if we like really put the pedal to the metal, serve five, six, seven million. Yeah, we can do this. We could do this. And I think it will happen. But let's— you and I turned sixty in the same year. So tell me two things. What's the— you know, you turn seventy. What is Caprice Young's experience been through that decade? And then turn it to, like, charter schools. You turn seventy and you look across the charter school landscape. What have we accomplished? And what makes you feel like we have risen to the challenge as we would have wanted for the moment? Take them in either order. You want to go with yourself first and the movement second? I don't know.

Well, Jed, I just, I appreciate the fact that you have confidence that I'm gonna get to turn seventy, so hallelujah.

Oh my gosh, come on!

No, you know, as a cancer survivor, I'll tell you, every single moment, every single moment is a blessing.

I know, I know.

But I actually think that we're at the beginning of something really cool. I think that we have, I think that we may have an opportunity over the next three to five years to see a whole new generation of creativity in the development of new schools and new programs.

Mm.

And the challenge that we have is we're going to have to do it without the kind of philanthropy that we had a generation ago, right? A generation ago, when we started the California Charter Schools Association in two thousand three, I could guarantee to any reasonably competent person who was starting a charter school that I could get them a quarter of a million dollars of startup funding. I can't guarantee that now. That's not necessarily in the cards. And from what I've seen, it's at least half a million to a million dollars to start a new charter school these days. When you think about like the legal fees to have somebody reviewing your charter, to the time that it takes to do it, some of which you can have as sweat equity, but some of it has to be professionals, to being able to do the marketing that you need, to do the convincing that you need, to the facilities, for goodness sake, and even facilities in the context of a non-classroom-based school. It's really expensive to start charters. And yet I think that we're gonna see a lot of new models come forward. And I also think that we're going to see states like California and Texas that have been in the lead in growth fall behind because we're not gonna be able to offer the kind of flexibility to the innovators and the kind of community engagement and community cultivation that some of the other places can offer, unless we do it consciously, right? Unless we really consciously focus on it, and maybe we will, but I think it's gonna happen one way or the other because parents are not going to continue to put their kids in schools that are harmful to them.

And your personal role in all of that over the next decade, is that where you want to be yourself, helping those new models start to flourish on the landscape?

I think so. I'm trying to figure that out right now. I'm allowing anybody who wants to plan my life to plan my life. I have been— I have already started doing some interesting consulting, particularly in the AI and virtual reality space. And talking to young innovators, not even young, some old innovators, new innovators, old people with new ideas based on the experience, who are doing some incredible stuff that I get to be able to be a thought partner with. And I just love that, love that. But yeah, if anybody who's hearing this podcast wants to plan my life, they should feel free to do so.

Well, listen, I'm going to end where I began, and it's kind of wherever, whenever I am responsible for introducing Caprice Young, it's about the miracle that you are, Caprice. And you've just led an amazing life rebuilding, rebirthing yourself. And you seem like a person that is forever young, and you help our movement remember that we too need to be forever young. We have to be rebuilding. We have to be doing new things. We have to bring the spirit of youthful optimism to what we're doing. And I don't know, you call yourself old, you don't seem very old to me. You still seem as young as I ever remember you. So I just thank you for all that you've done and can't wait to see what you do next.

Well, right back at you, right back at you, Jed. And I really appreciate CharterFolk. I look forward to getting it, and that's part of how I'm learning about all these new leaders. I just really love reading about what people have to say and hearing their new voices. It's exciting.

Well, thanks for giving me youthful leadership to aspire to, and I know we're going to be staying in touch a lot. So thank you very much, and thank you for spending this hour with us today. Bye-bye.