Good day, CharterFolk.
Today we’re delighted to share a Contributor Column from Ethan Gray, the Founder of Ed City Labs.
We provide a bio for Ethan below.
Ethan Gray is the recent Founder of Ed City Labs, an organization dedicated to increasing the number of cities creating innovative systems of great public schools. Most recently he was a founding Partner at City Fund where at different times during his tenure he led investments and local leader support for Denver, Albuquerque, Baton Rouge, Minneapolis, Birmingham and Oklahoma City and helped develop the organization’s early emerging market strategy. Prior to City Fund, Ethan was Founder and CEO of Education Cities – a national network of 33 city-based organizations in 25 cities all dedicated to growing high quality public schools. Early in his career he served as Vice President of The Mind Trust, where he supported the development of the 2011 “Opportunity Schools” plan to transform Indianapolis Public Schools into a high-performing system of autonomous public schools. Gray began his career as policy director at Be the Change, inc. where he led the development of a national service expansion plan that strongly influenced the bi-partisan Serve America Act. Gray’s writing has appeared in The 74 Million, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute’s Flypaper Blog, Education Sector, and Bellwether. He is an honors graduate of Harvard College and holds a master’s in education policy and management from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Gray lives in Bend, OR with his wife, son, and small adventure dog.
Just Get Started: Towards Open School Districts
In the past couple of weeks there has been a spirited, if wonky, discussion in the reform-o-sphere about school system governance and the causes of the “end” of the portfolio district reform era.
The new Indianapolis Public Education Commission (IPEC) and its inspiring choice of a founding executive director (Karega Rausch) has rightfully driven some of the commentary.
Did the unions kill off portfolio like Jed thinks? Did we get distracted by Trump or the fight for social justice or HQIM or the science of reading and just move on? Did philanthropy pivot its priorities? Or did we just stop talking about it while some version of the work continued – or even accelerated?
To be honest, I’m not really sure. Maybe some of all of the above. But I think the discussion is focused on the wrong things. We can debate why the field moved on, or whether it actually did. We can fight about whether districts should operate schools or regulate a market of schools. We can argue, as Jed and Mike Petrilli did recently, that we need new systems like IPEC to regulate city school markets and we should convert districts into big CMOs. We can (rightfully) hold up Indianapolis as a best in class example of how to reimagine a citywide system of schools.
But at the end of the day we can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Look at the Mile High City. Denver is one of the most well known and well studied examples of portfolio district reforms. In Denver they call it the “Family of Schools.” Most charter folk would argue that the reform era has completely stalled there, that the union takeover of the DPS board in 2019 signalled the end of the Bennet/Boasberg era of portfolio leadership. But look closer.
DPS still operates a unified enrollment system. Most charters are still in DPS-owned buildings. Local advocates have ensured that most charter renewals are won and that the occasional new school application has a fighting chance of approval (and the State Board appeal mechanism is a useful check and balance for the rare denial). DPS still operates a Portfolio Office. Simply put, Denver’s “Family of Schools” persists. Turns out some portfolio policies are pretty dang sticky because they work well for families and educators, too.
But wait – Jed might say – the district is both authorizer and operator. It’s conflicted in its mission. This isn’t good!
Yes: it’s cleaner to separate the operator from the regulator. I’m not arguing with the design principle. I’m arguing with what comes from it – the implied theory that says we should hold out for Indy-style structural change and view anything short of it as not worth pursuing. A purity test of sorts.
If that’s our bar, we’ve just told 99% of districts that they shouldn’t even start. Indianapolis has had 15 years of unusually disciplined, well resourced work by The Mind Trust and its civic partners. That’s not a starting condition, it’s a hard fought endpoint.
That doesn’t mean the Mind Trust strategy isn’t worth learning from. I plan to write more about exactly how other cities can build toward it, with a specific focus on some of the early moves that Indy made – like the 2014 Innovation School Law which led to IPS setting up a portfolio office and a major increase in the number of Innovation Schools launched in partnership with The Mind Trust. These were precursor steps to the eventual IPEC play.
So, do we want more Indy’s? Hell yeah! And we should probably spend a lot of time and money figuring out exactly how to do that.
But we also need more Denvers. In fact, we need a lot more. And we need the next generation to have even better policies in place to make them stronger (another topic for future conversation). But Denver didn’t have fifteen years of civic infrastructure-building or a state takeover to get started. It had two superintendents – first Michael Bennet, then Tom Boasberg – willing to lead. That’s a more likely starting point for most places.
So where to start? Assuming you can navigate the politics (a big assumption), here are six things districts can do right now to take a meaningful step towards a more open system of schools:
- Create and disseminate a comprehensive school finder to ensure families have access to good information about school quality and programmatic options city-wide.
- Develop a single enrollment system so families have an easier time navigating the choice window when it’s open.
- Develop a city-wide transportation system ensuring families can actually access choice no matter where in the city they live.
- Develop a unified accountability framework that holds all public schools in the city to the same student outcomes standards – bonus points if you innovate beyond reading and math scores to also track longer-term life outcomes like post secondary access and persistence, or early income data.
- Actually intervene in chronically struggling district schools (not just charters) to ensure that we don’t keep kids in ineffective programs in perpetuity
- Invite micro-schools to launch in underutilized district buildings. Heck, why stop there? Invite successful charter schools to operate in underutilized district buildings! Designed the right way, districts will get credit for their good performance results, kids have more quality options, and everyone wins.
There are more cities than ever pursuing a quality school growth agenda. And as I wrote recently on LinkedIn, the work has continued even if public discussion about the work has shifted.
But I think we need to shift the public discussion again. I think we need a bigger conversation about governance reform and systems change and how smart districts should respond to the disruptions of the day by getting ahead of them. And if we’re going to do that then we need many more districts, many more superintendents, and many more civic leaders and funders to see that the path forward is viable. That a district can both run schools and invite other innovators to be part of its family of schools, too. Why? Because most places won’t have a hurricane, state takeovers aren’t scalable, and we need to start somewhere.
Let’s hold The Mind Trust and the Indianapolis model up as a north star. Let’s make a huge effort to help others learn from their example. But let’s also meet the next crop of cities where they are and help them start down the path of shifting from a closed, top-down school system to a more open system of schools.