Good day, CharterFolk.
We had about as good an article come out about charter schools as we’ve seen in a while.
It’s a great rendering of the compelling program being offered at Eagle Ridge in Minneapolis.
It’s a school I haven’t visited yet. I’ll have to put that one on my list.
Though I’m no stranger to the benefits of classical schools generally, having visited several others. We had a great piece from Thibaut a couple of months ago about the strengths of the classical approach.
This latest NYT piece hits all the right notes. It studiously calls the schools public in the title. It describes the program in detail, showing why the model is particularly valuable in this era of hyper-partisanship. And it highlights how over 70% of the school’s students are low-income.
The only problem with the piece has nothing to do with the piece itself.
It’s the reactions to the piece.
In the comments section, the message getting the most likes, by far (almost 700), was the following:
The central weakness of this article is that the classical schools being touted are also charter schools. Charters, unlike traditional public schools, can select their students and dismiss those with behavioral or academic challenges. In this way, they function more like private schools than public ones. If we’re serious about evaluating public education, we need to look at public schools–the institutions legally and morally responsible for educating every child in their district, without selection or removal. Otherwise, we risk ignoring the students charters can exclude–the very population that makes public education both difficult and essential. This feels more like correlation, not causation. Any apparent success of classical charter schools could easily be explained by who they enroll and who they push out, rather than by their curriculum or pedagogy.
It puts in repose the latest courageous op-ed we see coming from Jorge and Ben.
In my view, the problems we have with Dems and left-leaning folk generally are certainly a function of the fact that status quo interests are one of the largest interest groups in the Democratic Party, if not the very biggest.
But a lot of the responsibility lies with us.
We allow them to present us as cherry-pickers …
… when the broader system is engaged in orchard harvesting …
… with New York being a primary offender as Available to All’s latest report confirms.
It reflects the fact that some of the most blatantly anti-public aspects of public education are found in some of the bluest parts of the country.
This week I came across an article that dove into the implications of this study.
This comment leapt out:
Some states have comparatively high funding, but are rated poorly on funding distribution. Illinois, for example, gets an “A” on per-pupil funding, ranking 8th among states, but a “D” on distribution, ranking 35th. Connecticut is the sharpest example of this pattern, near the top in per-pupil funding — but at the very bottom in funding equity, because districts’ funding relies on local property taxes, favoring high-property-value suburbs over poorer urban districts.
Our way out of this is to heed the advice Andrew Broy shared last week in his Straight Up No Chaser chat with me.
Across our hour together, Andrew returned again and again to the recipe we need for greater advocacy strength. It consists of four ingredients:
- Structure — strong state associations that are C3/C4 tandems at national, state, and local levels.
- Unity — governance and engagement that authentically bring our world together.
- Resources — increased membership revenue providing the base capacities associations need to succeed.
- Offense — a policy agenda and willingness to take risks that put us in position to genuinely frame issues.
It’s frame or be framed, CharterFolk.
And right now, as the comments in the NYT piece reveal, we are still being framed.
The only way we truly draw a frame is to run policy agendas that highlight the orchard harvesting happening in the traditional system.
A report alone, as great as Available to All’s latest is, won’t do the trick.
What we need is a policy agenda on offense that reveals the inherent contradiction people advance when they say such uninformed things as the most popular NYT commenter did.
Will it win over absolutely everyone?
Of course not.
But at least we will be in the public sphere, duking it out, where over years of effort, and with our movement simply being on the right side of the facts, we can prevail.
Leonard Cohen’s masterpiece “Anthem” …
… contains the following immortal line:
Every heart, every heart to love will come, but like a refugee.
Just like the charter school world will come to advocacy coherence.
Not directly. Or easily. Or without heartbreak along the way.
But like a refugee.