Weekend greetings, CharterFolk.
It’s great to be in a period when we have so many new readers at CharterFolk. But it’s happening at exactly the same time that I’m struggling to keep to my regular posting schedule. For NewFolk not yet accustomed to my typical pattern, I try to get my longer “New Yorker” columns out on Sunday afternoons so Folk might have an extra few minutes to get through them. Dumping 2500-word tomes in Folk’s inboxes on Monday mornings just as weeks are ramping up, as I have done here lately, is not ideal, I know. But sometimes the challenge of balancing my CharterFolk service project with my regular work means I have to make adjustments. This week I’m getting this one out on a Sunday as I prefer, and I’ll make every effort to do the same going forward. But I do appreciate your understanding when too many things come at me at once. Meanwhile, in the next week or two, I’ll provide a proper community update sharing more broadly what we’ll be doing in our fifth year to enhance the material we are publishing here. I’m excited about it and trust the broader CharterFolk community will be as well.
Let’s get on to today’s post.
Damned if You Do, Damned if You Don’t
I start today thanking Sobeida for her Contributor Column this week.
It’s been an honor to profile the efforts of Charter School of Educational Excellence since CharterFolk’s earliest days.
Theirs has been one long story of overcoming obstacle after obstacle. For years, as profiled in this article last summer …
… CSEE had parents plead with them to open a high school. But their authorizer, peopled by status quo protectors, imposed an utterly arbitrary and ridiculous condition. The organization could only open if they agreed to limit the number of students from the local school district to 50% of enrollment.
What would you do facing such a predicament, CharterFolk?
Not open at all?
Ultimately, CSEE decided to go forward knowing that an additional million dollars per year in transportation costs would fall on the organization as they serve many kids coming from more distant areas.
To meet the new costs, as well to fund many of the school’s other program enhancements, CSEE made a foundation.
It’s a common occurrence for many charter schools having to make up for not receiving all the resources and facilities that district schools do. CSEE’s support foundation is a separately incorporated nonprofit. It results in a multi-entity structure that many charter schools end up adopting for a variety of reasons.
Often legal counsel and authorizers will tell charter schools to keep different funding streams segregated from one another. Otherwise you risk getting in trouble. What happens if your organization is engaged in activities that might not all be considered exclusively K-12 endeavor, such as providing day care, or offering parent training, or running a food bank, or sending kids to summer camps, or supporting alumni post graduation?
Far better, advisors and regulators often say, to have those efforts housed in separate entities so no questions arise.
In California and other states as well, inane regulation imposes additional governance complexity on charter schools. If charter schools want to access facilities dollars under California’s SB740 program, for example, they may only do so if the funds are structured to pay a lease.
But what happens if the charter school is attempting to own its own building, not lease it?
Well, it has to establish a separate entity to own the building.
Which ends up creating a multi-entity governance structure that our adversaries think open to insinuation and attack.
It happened again this week in my home town.
For years the local teacher union has been working on elections to get back complete control of Sacramento Unified.
Since those elections, the union has been able to remove the superintendent that they’ve long detested. They’ve also been able to approve a new collective bargaining agreement and district budget in the face of a local county office of education that has long labelled the district’s financial practices unsustainable.
Such is what you can pull off when you’re essentially negotiating with yourself.
Now status quo interests have turned their attention to one of the highest performing charter schools in the area, commissioning an audit …
… that found no actual misuse of public funding, but tried to make the organization’s multi-entity governance structure sound nefarious.
So, rather than the school continuing to prepare for what should be a celebratory renewal decision next month, hundreds of students, parents, and staff suddenly had to show up at a district board meeting to share how much they love their school.
Last year, I highlighted …
… how the Sacramento Bee had identified the schools in the area with the highest college-going rates.
Most were in affluent suburbs. The one school on the list serving a large percentage of low income students …
… was the very school the district has decided to investigate.
The only school that the district operates itself that made the list was one that uses selective admissions.
The district’s other selective admissions schools …
… didn’t even make the list.
Meanwhile, the district is now moving forward with a new effort to eradicate incidents of racism happening in its schools …
… while not even bothering to look at the structures of unfairness that are cooked into the very DNA of the district to such a degree that I posited during the pandemic …
… that there is virtually no equity to lose in Sacramento Unified.
It sums up the status that charter schools find themselves subjected to in contexts across the land:
Damned if we do.
Damned if we don’t.
In a world where the truly damnable things happening in public education go utterly undamned.
The Best Study About Charter Schools in a Long Time
How schools are doing with students, of course, should be our primary concern. And as is becoming more broadly recognized …
… charter schools are going through a period when our unique value-add is becoming ever more apparent.
This past week, we saw another huge chunk of evidence added to the pile.
It’s really one of the best analyses of charter school performance to have been released in a long time, coming from the National Bureau of Economic Research …
… whose impartiality, standards of research, and level of peer review make its conclusions virtually unassailable.
In the process, it has both confirmed known existing performance characteristics and uncovered previously unknown ones which all further reveal the unique value-add coming from the national charter school movement.
The study’s unique contribution is a function of its decision to have studied a state like Massachusetts which, unlike some states that only allow charter schools to grow in urban areas, has permitted charter schools to open across the state, leading to the state’s sector serving a mix of communities and student populations.
In terms of confirming the known, the story validates the many studies …
… that have found Boston’s charter schools to be among the highest performing in the nation …
… significantly increasing test scores for low-income, Black and Latino students.
As well, the study shows that for charter schools serving more affluent students in other parts of the state, test scores are actually lower than expected. This is a result similar to a trend we identified in California about a decade ago showing that charter schools serving lower SES student groups generated test scores that far exceeded expectation, while schools serving higher SES student populations scored lower than expected. But when we looked at the higher SES schools whose test scores were not that high, we knew many of those schools to be excellent ones providing alternatives parents and students really valued, like project-based learning, Waldorf and Montessori instruction, and dual language programs. And having visited those schools and having gotten to know them well, our intuition was that, while their test scores may have been lower, the likelihood that the schools were propelling kids toward successful futures seemed very high.
That’s where last week’s study breaks new ground, showing that in terms of college enrollment, college persistence, and degree attainment, charter schools serving both low and higher SES groups were far exceeding the results of district schools serving similar students. And in fact, the schools serving higher SES students were increasing post-graduate success at rates even higher than charter schools serving lower SES schools.
Just as our intuition had led us to believe.
The significance of these results is even greater when we take into account what our adversaries attempt to assert about our schools. Their “Charter School 101” story …
… is the myth that there are only small differences in performance between charter schools and district schools and that, in the aggregate, charter schools perform no better.
CharterFolk, it’s an outright lie, and they know it.
The only way they can come close to retaining credibility on such a claim is to rely on data from decades ago and to lump together charter schools serving different SES groups.
When you look at the latest results …
… and when you disaggregate, the true scope of the charter school contribution is made plain.
Call it the real “Charter School 101;”
Charter schools are out performing district schools across all demographics of students and are generating outcomes that are having lasting positive impact on the lives of those who they have served.
Millennia of Additional Learning – How We Present Collective Impact Now
I’ll add a last coda, which is to assert how we can best present the scope of the contribution that the charter school movement is making.
Once we understand our own performance even more deeply, the next thing we must do is remember the long term.
Because, while what we are doing in the here and now is impressive, the full impact of the movement can only be seen if we pull back to get greater perspective.
Often detractors want to assert that charter schools generating an additional 30 or 40 days of learning in math and reading isn’t that noteworthy.
What they refuse to admit, of course, is that charter schools are not just making that difference one time, but are doing it every year, meaning that, across a student’s entire K-12 experience, years of additional learning are being achieved.
And that achievement is happening across a school’s entire student body.
Add it up across the number of students served, and many charter schools are literally generating centuries of additional learning!
And when we consider the impact that whole communities of charter schools are having, we are talking literally millennia of more learning!
Think what that means for urban areas whose public schools have been broken for generations.
Seeing the progress that Boston’s charter schools are making over a one-year time horizon can be difficult. But over a multi decade period, we see that the charter school movement has achieved things in Boston that no other reform of public education ever has.
Inarguably, public education in Boston has improved greatly since Roxbury Prep’s founding a quarter-century ago.
And Boston is by no means an outlier in terms of the progress that charter schools have helped entire communities make.
Each is experiencing its own millennia of additional learning.
The question is can we find the creative ways to make the impact of that learning real to people?
Like what we saw in DC this week.
Charter schools from across the city came together to celebrate a communal graduation ceremony.
Before chartering, these were exactly the kids that were being left behind in massive numbers.
Now, across seven of the most respected charter school organizations in the city, we saw an additional summer’s worth of support and effort pay off, as dozens of additional students graduated with hundreds of parents and staff being on hand to celebrate it.
One of the challenges the charter school movement must take on in its fourth decade is becoming better at demonstrating the scope of the accomplishments that our movement is achieving.
A part of it, as the new study this week shows, will come from simply understanding more deeply the value-add we are providing to students from every SES background.
Another part will come from remembering to present our progress over the long term.
The final part will be finding new ways to present the achievements that are happening across vast numbers of schools.
Add it all up and the millennia upon millennia of additional progress that the charter school movement is making will finally be fully appreciated.
In the process, it will turn the narrative from “damned if we do, damned if we don’t” to what every informed person in the United States should be thinking about the stunning progress that our nation’s charter schools are making:
“I’ll be damned!”