Weekend greetings, CharterFolk.
I want to start by acknowledging that we have had some website issues in recent weeks that reduced access to some of our latest content. Most things are now back online. So if you missed last weekend’s Mega-Whip-Around or our CharterFolk Chat about New Orleans, I encourage you to check them out.
I plan to return next weekend to the New Orleans story and its implications for the national charter school movement.
Lastly, before diving into the heart of today’s post, I want to extend a thank you to Andrew Broy for his Contributor Column this week.
His framing of our work as designing a new public education delivery model gets right to the heart of the business we are in.
Amen.
Thank you, Andrew.
Shining the Spotlight
This week we saw one of the better pieces of journalism published about our movement in recent years, in part because it does not simply report events. It functions as a spotlight itself, concentrating attention on the parts of the story that actually need to be understood and that are so often overlooked.
The article, from New Jersey Spotlight News, focuses on why so much progress has been made in Camden, New Jersey over the past couple of decades, and why hardly any has been made in nearby Trenton, New Jersey’s capital city.
This is exactly the kind of in-depth portrait we need if we are going to understand charter school impact over a multi-decade timeframe, which is the timeframe that actually matters. The piece narrows the beam. It illuminates policy choices, adaptations, and moments of courage that only become visible when you stop scanning the landscape at a surface level and instead peer deeply into what unfolded over time. There is no firewall. I encourage you all to read it.
What the reporting shows is that Camden made a deliberate choice to use charter schools to help transform its public education system, while Trenton focused its efforts on protecting legacy systems that were already broken.
One city prioritized outcomes for children. The other prioritized institutions.
The piece also surfaces something that should feel familiar to CharterFolk readers. The charter school world in Camden exhibits much of what Jerel Bryant has described as part of the special sauce in New Orleans:
An ability to adapt over time. An ability to maintain an unrelenting focus on improved outcomes while still respecting legacy.
The result has been a true renaissance. In New Orleans, many schools were not simply replaced. They were reborn, such that even longtime alumni can see just how much their beloved alma maters have improved.
At a key moment, as the Spotlight article documents, reformers in Camden adapted again. They proposed Renaissance Schools, the very definition of CABINs, charters all but in name. That move created an entire category of conversion charter schools that became a massive part of Camden’s success story.
Another article this week from the region underscores just how central that decision has been.
The difference maker, as the Spotlight reveals, was advocacy.
A policymaker from the area was willing to use his personal influence to ensure that Renaissance Schools could happen in Camden. At the time, it was entirely possible that Trenton would have been included in the Renaissance law as well. But because local policymakers threw up obstruction, a once-in-a-generation opportunity was lost.
Which brings us to the right question in New Jersey today.
What is new Governor Mikie Sherrill going to do on education now?
She clearly starts from a position of support for charter schools.
Her new lieutenant governor is Dale Caldwell …
… who CharterFolk readers will remember as the author of a terrific Contributor Column here two and a half years ago.
The contrast between Camden and Trenton implies a clearly policy agenda for an administration willing to act upon what the spotlight reveals.
But contrasts between Camden and other places are illuminating as well.
Newark Deserves the Spotlight Too
In some ways, the similarities between Camden and Newark could not be greater.
Newark’s charter schools, by some measures, are literally the highest performing charter schools in the country.
And yet, because the Renaissance law has never been fully applied to Newark, the district has not evolved toward something more excellent and more equitable.
Instead, it is becoming less so, in what increasingly looks like a deliberate strategy to protect the district by limiting options available to students and families.
The district has opened a large number of new schools …
… almost all of them selective admissions magnets …
… including one that bills itself as a trade school but which still screens out low-achieving students nonetheless.
Thousands of students apply to these schools each year and are denied admission.
Those students are then required to attend neighborhood schools that the district systematically under-resources, because it siphons money away from them to fund the very selective admissions schools the students were denied access to in the first place.
These selective schools are resourced at very high levels.
As Marguerite Roza of Georgetown’s Edunomics Lab put it:
“It makes me nervous for a district like Newark that they have some of these very small, very expensive schools, and are simultaneously opening new ones… that makes me nervous for them financially,” Roza said.
Nervous indeed.
The story of Sir Isaac Newton Elementary School is emblematic. The school does not directly screen students, but it guarantees those who attend admission to Science Park, the most selective high school in the city.
It’s about as cynical a ploy to manipulate desperate parents into enrolling their kids in district-run schools as I’ve come across, something the district makes all the more offensive by funding Sir Isaac at a per-pupil rate two and a half times higher than other elementary schools.
According to Edunomics data, Sir Isaac Newton School — which was reopened since Leon took the helm in 2018 — has a $36,000 per pupil cost …. Meanwhile, East Ward Elementary spends about $14,500 on each pupil, according to Edunomics. According to the state Department of Education performance reports, 15.3 percent of the students in the school are proficient in English language arts (ELA) and less than 10% in math.
At the same time, the district uses its bonding authority to pay exorbitant prices for buildings that growing charter schools want, even though it has underutilized facilities nearby and will likely never make use of those buildings.
This is where our spotlight must be focused:
On a system that denies thousands of students access to its most resourced schools and then compels them to attend schools from which resources have been diverted to fund that denial, all while simultaneously doing all it can to prevent students from accessing other public schools who don’t engage in such nonsense.
Casting the Spotlight Across the River and State Lines
Would that the need for policy innovation stopped at New Jersey’s borders.
Just across the river from Camden, Philadelphia is pursuing many of the same strategies as Newark.
Research shows that charter school growth in Philadelphia has lifted all boats and narrowed achievement gaps.
At the same time, the city is experiencing sharp enrollment decline and confronting the need to close campuses.
Those closures make headlines.
What gets far less attention is what happens inside the restructuring.
While closing neighborhood schools, the district continues to expand selective admissions programs.
Under the proposal, the district would increase the number of seats at five criteria-based schools, including Central and Masterman, which are consistently two of the top-ranked schools in the city. It would also open a new middle school to feed into Palumbo High School, another top-ranked magnet school …. The district is also planning for some high schools that would close to live on in a different form. Lankenau Environmental Science Magnet High School, Motivation High School, Parkway Northwest High School, and Paul Robeson High School will each close and become honors programs integrated into other schools.
Which raises questions worth asking plainly.
What would it mean if Philadelphia chose to learn from the city just across the river?
And what would it say if Josh Shapiro, as he prepares for a national stage, used this moment to help his state live up to its status as the Keystone State, anchoring a more coherent and equitable vision for public education?
The pattern plays out again and again.
In Texas’s capital city, the district announced this week that it would reclaim a partnership school, highlighting how Texas lacks a Renaissance law that allows conversion schools to evolve the way Camden’s have.
In the fall, the district announced its plans for closing many campuses …
… while making sure that all of its selective admissions programs …
… continue to grow.
Enrollment figures in Austin show how district choices have shifted over time. Since 2019, selective admissions seats have increased by roughly 1,500 students, even as overall enrollment has declined by about 12,000. The district has moved from roughly 8 percent of students in selective programs to about 12 percent, and the trend points toward a system that will become even more selective as declining enrollment continues in the years ahead.
Casting the spotlight across other capital cities reveals the scale of the brokenness we are confronting.
This week, California’s capital city revealed just how close it is to fiscal collapse. Sacramento City Unified is once again staring at insolvency and possible state receivership.
The reporting is instructive. I was reminded of a dinner I had last year with friends, one of whom serves as the office manager at a district elementary school. She did not just ask a casual question. She expressed sheer bewilderment.
How can it be, she kept saying, that there is supposedly all this new money in California schools, and yet when she looks around her building, the classrooms feel bereft of basic learning materials? It was deeply frustrating for her. And what made it worse was that there was no information available to help her make sense of what she was seeing.
This article helps explain that disconnect. Sacramento is cutting instructional materials by 30 percent and imposing across-the-board supply cuts, even as it approves another increase in teacher pay.
Everyone says they want to keep cuts as far away from the classroom as possible. But the reality is unavoidable. Fewer programs. Fewer supplies. Fewer people. Students will feel it.
And the district’s broken example is now rippling across the entire region as teacher unions in other districts threaten strikes unless unsustainable compensation levels are matched.
All the while, Sacramento has been pursuing selective admissions policies aggressive enough to make Newark blush.
There is an irony here. The city’s basketball team, the Sacramento Kings, has a mantra:
Light the Beam.
Every time they win, a purple beam is cast into the night sky above the city.
Public education in California’s capital needs its own version of that beam, only one directed downward toward public education itself, so that what so badly needs to be seen in Sacramento, and in so many other capital cities, is finally illuminated.
What It Takes to See Clearly
Which brings us to an essential clarification about the work ahead.
What we must do is focus the light deliberately on the patterns of unfairness and dysfunction that are sadly defining features of public education as it currently exists in cities across America.
But the patterns only become visible when the illumination is concentrated.
They do not reveal themselves with a casual scan of the landscape. They are hidden in the crannies and crevices of policy, where status quo interests work hardest to obscure the consequences of their self-interested choices.
The New Jersey Spotlight article succeeds precisely because it does not look away from those places. It concentrates the beam where it is least comfortable. It exposes how inequity is produced, maintained, and justified, even when it is dressed up as pragmatism or tradition.
Advancing our shared work requires that same discipline.
We must become adept at casting the spotlight into the corners where power prefers darkness, so that we can see clearly the systems that are failing children, understand how those systems are defended, and advance policy agendas designed to make things better.
Knowing Our Business Makes the Difference
It is important to say that not all the news out of capital cities is bad.
We are seeing progress in Wisconsin.
Things keep moving forward in Missouri despite the opposition.
And if we look more broadly at Texas, we see real progress where it matters most, at the level of state advocacy. Our first Contributor Column of the year came out of Austin and was co-authored by leaders from the National Alliance, the Texas association, and the Texas Education Agency.
It shows that even as the local school district struggles, Texas’s capital city is also a place where advocates and policymakers are working together to illuminate problems clearly enough to solve them. They did not simply note challenges. They concentrated attention on the mechanics of problems. They aligned around a common understanding. And they used that clarity to help secure the largest charter facilities incentive grant in history.
In Missouri, as the state moves to end a lawsuit challenging charter schools’ right to enter the capital region, the Missouri Charter Public School Association has asked the court for permission to intervene. The association argues that the case threatens its members’ ability to operate and expand, and that, as the membership organization stewarding the well being of the state’s charter school movement, it should be allowed to directly defend the constitutionality of the charter expansion law.
Talk about advocates as designers.
Noah and his team in Missouri …
… like Harry Lee and his colleagues in New Jersey …
… and others in Texas, New Orleans and beyond are resources this movement simply didn’t have in its first three decades.
But we have them now.
Leaders like Andrew, who know what our business is:
It starts with something far beyond what our public education landscape has been subject to heretofore.
Not just a surface scan, but a probing spotlight.
Something that concentrates the light where it’s needed most.
Such that both the broken and the possible may finally be seen.
It is ultimately how we move from shining a spotlight to advancing policy agendas that actually design public education’s next delivery model.