Good day, CharterFolk.
I tried to finish this one over the weekend but needed a little more time to get it right. I hope you’ll find a moment mid-week to give it a read.
Last weekend, I wrote about rising college costs across generations and their ripple-through effects on our work. This week brought fresh developments:
The Economist reported on sharply declining job prospects for recent grads.
The New York Times documented steep tuition hikes and spending cuts at universities responding to policy shifts from Washington.
The Journal covered that the feds are preparing to garnish the wages of 2 million people behind on loan payments.
And Politico spotlighted a Senate provision to sharply reduce subsidized borrowing for graduate students.
All of it points to a new imperative for the charter school movement – the need for a sharper focus on education economics.
The Politico story in particular highlights how complex the challenge can be.
We’re now trying to fix decades of broken higher ed policy – policies that created unlimited government-backed loans, unleashing a torrent of inflation in college costs starting in the mid-1960s. But in trying to purge the scourge of excess borrowing, now deeply embedded in the higher education landscape, we risk derailing low-income students aspiring to enter fields like medicine.
The sad reality is that there are no easy answers. Fixing broken systems will require smart thinking and political resolve – both of which we all know are in short supply these days.
And just as profound, complicated challenges confront higher education, equally vexing changes are coming to K–12 – ones that could ultimately prove every bit as seismic.
It’s going to require the charter school world to completely rethink how we approach our funding advocacy efforts.
From Equity to Architecture
Going back to the inception of the charter school movement, one of our biggest advocacy objectives has been on funding equity – ensuring that charter schools receive per-pupil funding that is neither a dollar higher nor a dollar lower than what traditional public schools receive.
And rightly so. Many districts and states have systematically underfunded charter schools, often by thousands of dollars per student per year.
It’s taken decades just to achieve some of the breakthroughs we’ve needed – like the historic win we had in Indiana this year and in Missouri in 2022.
In many places, the fight for equity is far from over. Charter schools in Minnesota, Georgia, and Pennsylvania still face deeply unfair funding gaps that compromise their ability to deliver the educational quality they’re capable of.
But three recent developments create a new imperative for us to level up:
- The heft the charter movement has gained, giving us influence we’ve never had before
- The strength of our design, which embeds a funding approach the broader system should emulate
- The vacuum left by reform organizations that once led in this space, leaving the charter school world as the only meaningful counterweight to status quo funding interests, which always skew toward adult, not student, benefit
The next chapter in charter school funding advocacy won’t just be about fighting for fair treatment.
It will be about creating the future blueprint for all publicly funded education.
Becoming the architects of education abundance, where public funding incentivizes the creation of greatly more public education – inclusive, high-quality schooling, rather than entrenching scarcity and exclusion, as our prior blueprint so sadly generated.
I. Urban School Districts and the Economics of Scarcity
Nowhere is the need for advocacy presence on economic matters more apparent than in major urban school districts. Consider this remarkably uplifting story from Newark:
Despite aggressive opposition from the local district – including clawing back school buildings, contesting charter school expansion requests, and rapidly expanding selective-admission magnet schools meant to compete with charter schools by screening out harder-to-serve students – more parents than ever are applying to charter schools.
Think about the scope of that accomplishment, CharterFolk.
Newark’s charter schools have managed to grow parent demand while keeping their doors open to all students and families – even as the district has tried to win back enrollment by doing exactly the opposite.
It’s a success story that puts the question before our movement in clear repose:
What should our orientation be toward districts like Newark that are pursuing agendas of education scarcity and exclusion?
Should we remain neutral or silent as districts divert resources away from high-need students to subsidize selective schools?
Or should we have a point of view?
Should we articulate a policy agenda – one grounded in our values and designed not just to protect charter schools, but to bring about greater excellence and fairness systemwide?
Because it’s not just Newark.
Look at Chicago, which climbs the scarcity hill by a slightly different path.
There, the district isn’t just redirecting funds to selective-admissions magnets. It’s keeping alive minuscule schools that families no longer choose – while taxing the schools parents do want. In some cases, CPS is spending $93,000 per student in schools that are barely attended, while shortchanging schools that serve many hundreds.
It’s another form of educational scarcity – fiscal policy that subtracts from quality in the aggregate, while inflicting disproportionate harm on families who have long been underserved.
And then there’s Los Angeles Unified.
The district is now issuing $500 million in bonds to pay off a long history of sexual abuse settlements, with more likely to come.
These payouts sit atop hundreds of millions in similar claims from prior decades.
And given the district’s long, sad history of shifting costs to high-need communities in order to subsidize programs in more affluent areas…
… what would we expect, other than that, once again, the higher-need students of today and tomorrow will be made to pay the price for the system’s failures of the past?
This isn’t just financial mismanagement, CharterFolk.
It’s an entire economic structure intentionally built to avoid accountability.
One not unique to Los Angeles or Chicago or Newark – but present in urban school districts across the country.
One we in CharterLand have unique proximity to and can see up close.
And one we have solutions for – given the way our schools are funded.
That’s why it’s incumbent upon us to craft policy proposals that bring school districts’ most egregious financial practices to light:
- Requiring districts to operate financially more like charter organizations, developing and publicly approving school-level budgets, and completing school-level audits, not just central-office ones
- Ensuring that budgets reflect actual dollars spent, not vague FTE-based formulas that mask where investments are going
- Forcing districts to allocate legacy costs – pensions, abuse settlements, and more – down to the school level, so families can clearly see how resources and liabilities are distributed
Because without that kind of visibility – without that kind of transparency – scarcity and inequity will remain buried in the fine print, and the students with the least power will continue to carry the greatest burdens.
II. Universal ESAs and Vouchers – A Welcome Expansion, With Emerging Design Challenges
The brokenness we see in many traditional school districts helps explain why public interest in universal Education Savings Accounts (ESAs) and voucher programs is growing. These options are emerging as alternatives to systems that too often fail students – especially those from underserved communities.
As a movement that has long fought for more opportunity, it’s natural that the charter school world’s starting point would be to support the creation of such programs.
But as these programs begin to roll out across the nation, we can’t afford to keep anything but a very sharp focus on the economics that undergird them.
Because if they are allowed to embed structural flaws – just as guaranteed student loan policies did in higher ed decades ago – we risk seeing a new generation of reform morph into a new generation of scarcity and exclusion, once again leaving low-income students under-served.
And if we wait to articulate our point of view until our own enrollment comes under threat, we risk being seen not as a movement rooted in principle, but as a trade group acting out of transactional self-interest.
That’s why it’s so imperative that we come prepared – proactively – with clear, values-driven policy priorities.
Just look at the new challenges that have surfaced around private school funding programs in the past few weeks:
- Louisiana failing to fund its new ESA program for the second year in a row.
- Arizona facing a $200 million shortfall as it attempts to sustain its program.
- Texas approving a new $1 billion ESA program that’s envisioned to grow to nearly $5 billion within a few years, with its long-term viability hinging on whether upper-income families will receive the same funding as families who can’t rub two nickels together.
In the early years of the emerging ESA/voucher phenomenon, it was understandable that the charter school world would keep our heads down. But now, as these vexing issues become more apparent, we are fast approaching a moment when we can no longer stay on the sidelines on questions like:
- Should the same per-pupil funding go to all schools, regardless of whether they use selective admissions?
- Should identical funding levels flow to schools that charge additional tuition, effectively pricing out low-income families?
- Should schools that are exempt from academic accountability receive the same funding as schools held to high standards?
Our answers, it seems to me, should be aligned with our vision for future abundance.
We’re not saying publicly funded private school choice programs shouldn’t exist. Just like we’re not saying traditional public schools shouldn’t exist. But if we are moving into a new paradigm where states fund a wide variety of school types, why wouldn’t we be full-throated about which types deserve to be funded at the highest levels?
Not charter schools per se.
But schools that reflect the admissions and accountability principles that have defined our movement since its inception:
- Open to all
- Free to attend
- Transparent about outcomes
- Accountable for performance
In short, schools designed to move us from a condition of education scarcity to a new era of abundance.
An era defined not just by more choices – but by more inclusive excellence:
Schools that welcome all students, deliver strong outcomes, and earn community trust without screening or pricing anyone out.
Such schools don’t just spontaneously appear, CharterFolk.
They must be designed.
Architected.
Through the establishment of smart economic policies that incentivize their creation – not reward exclusivity and brokenness, as the old blueprint so often did.
III. From Sector Advocacy to System Stewardship
But fixing broken district and suboptimal private school funding systems is just the start.
The future of our advocacy efforts will require us to engage with every major funding question confronting public education.
In many places, that work has already begun.
Just this year, Colorado …
… and New Mexico …
… approved new state funding systems that weight funding based on student need.
It’s an example of forward-thinking – but the change creates winners and losers, including among charter schools, making it hard to hold the movement together.
Yet smart, proactive work by each state’s charter school association – coupled with clarity around shared values and transition periods to cushion the impact – proved enough for CharterFolk to stay together.
And it’s just the beginning.
Consider what charter school advocates are now contending with in the realm of virtual and hybrid school funding.
In red state South Carolina …
… swing-state Pennsylvania …
… and blue-state California …
… proposals are advancing to redirect funding away from virtual and hybrid schools – the very models parents are choosing in growing numbers – in order to prop up in-person district schools that families are increasingly leaving behind.
These are exactly the kinds of fiscal debates charter school leaders are going to be on the frontlines of – not just as defenders of a sector, but as stewards of a better system.
Perhaps no place better exemplifies that than Ohio.
It wasn’t long ago that Ohio created a program to fund high-performing charter schools at higher levels.
Now we see the state expanding that program to include high-performing district schools.
In theory, this is exactly what we want – funding not what is broken and declining, but funding what is succeeding and expanding.
But nothing’s simple – including the worry some have that the new system will just end up providing a subsidy to districts serving the already advantaged.
This is exactly the kind of complex issue I expect our world will be asked to weigh in on more and more in the years ahead.
Which is why I see the appointment of Missouri Charter Public School Association CEO Noah Devine to the state’s new School Funding Modernization Task Force as so emblematic.
It’s not just a recognition of the charter movement’s growing role in shaping statewide education priorities. It’s a signal of where the entire movement is headed.
We’re being invited to help design the next generation of funding systems – not only for our own schools, but for public education as a whole.
It’s one of the clearest signs yet that our long-standing fight for fairness is evolving into something larger – a responsibility to help steward a better system for everyone.
The Path from Equity to Architecture Will Be Fraught With Challenge
It lays bare the scope of the challenge in front of our future funding advocacy.
The path from simply fighting for funding equity for our own schools to helping design funding systems for all of education will be complex and demanding.
But it’s a challenge we embrace.
Because in the end, as all CharterFolk know, our ultimate aim isn’t just securing fairness for charter schools – as important and noble as that goal surely is.
No, our role is to lead a shift toward funding systems that reward excellence, expand access, and build something far better than what we inherited.
For all students.
It will be a change that demands we continue building our advocacy strength – and our policy chops.
But even more than that, it will require us to go deeper – to get sharper on complex matters of public school funding, and to explore and affirm our shared values with enough clarity and conviction that we can lead with unity and purpose.
And yes, it will require a new level of imagination – to define the New North Star that we’re aspiring to, and to craft the bold new policy agendas capable of propelling us there.
It will also require that we be clear-eyed about the difficulties we will encounter.
Our new agenda is unlikely to be warmly received – at least not at first.
Status quo interests will almost certainly meet it with hostility.
And yes, some of our ESA and voucher allies may grow irked with us as we constantly gadfly them to ensure that their new programs do not simply recreate the dysfunction and unfairness of the past.
But it’s what awaits us.
An even bigger task.
Serving not just as architects of future funding systems.
But as architects of the future of public education itself.