Weekend greetings, CharterFolk.
Before diving into the news of the week, I want to take a moment to thank Shannon for joining me for a CharterFolk Chat this week.
The entire discussion was terrific, but one moment in particular stood out to me. Shannon spoke about the discipline required to keep an organization focused on the learning needs of kids, even when the world around you is pulling attention in a thousand different directions.
It was a powerful reminder that leadership in our field is often about maintaining focus when the noise level rises.
And right now, the noise level is rising.
Which brings me to the challenge of writing this weekend.
There is simply too much news.
Too many things to write about.
Too little space.
Choose just a few topics and leave others unaddressed?
Or try to cover more and risk not doing justice to any of them?
Never mind risking the overall piece losing its sense of coherence.
Some things, for now, I’ll just have to leave out and hope I can circle back later.
Let’s just get started and see where this one goes.
The Meaning of CPS Has Changed
A column by conservative commentator Jason Riley in the Wall Street Journal has been circulating widely this week.
He scatters criticism across a wide range of topics, but among them is a fact that many across the political spectrum would prefer to look away from:
The fact that there are many schools in Chicago Public Schools where literally zero students are proficient in reading or math.
Many of us who have served in education roles know well the concept of a mandated reporter. Someone who is legally obligated to say something when a child is in danger.
We make it a law in the micro. Yet in the macro it often feels as if the opposite dynamic prevails. An expectation to keep quiet about the travesty unfolding in plain sight.
Chicago Public Schools now spends, as Riley points out, roughly $30,000 per pupil on average. In some schools the effective spending is even higher.
That exceeds the tuition at some of the most elite private schools in the city.
And yet in school after school the result is the same. Students leaving without basic literacy or numeracy.
It may be the greatest tax on learning we see today: the abject failure of many of our largest urban school systems to provide even a modicum of learning to those kids and families who need it most.
For most people working in education policy across the United States, the CPS acronym clearly refers to Chicago Public Schools.
For some of us though, depending upon our geography, CPS can mean something very different.
Child Protective Services.
The agency you are mandated to contact when you believe a child is endangered.
What we are seeing in Chicago today looks like a level of child endangerment that is almost difficult to comprehend.
Immigration Enforcement and the Tax on Learning
As many of us in ReformLand and CharterLand have been writing about in recent years, we are living through what increasingly looks like an education depression.
In fact, I keep raising the possibility that we may be living through the first sustained period of global learning decline since the Middle Ages.
I find this one of the most important and least recognized developments unfolding in our country and in the world today.
One of the forces that has most consistently pushed learning in the right direction has been the charter school movement in the United States.
Macke’s research shows that at a scale now comprised of thousands of schools serving millions of students, charter schools are producing meaningful gains in learning.
And in city after city, PPI scholarship shows that when charter enrollment reaches meaningful scale, achievement rises and gaps close.
That is what makes the developments Joey describes in his excellent Contributor Column this week so troubling.
His column highlights the challenges Minnesota charter schools have faced since immigration enforcement activities intensified in the area.
As CharterFolk readers know, I am generally not one to encourage our world to take positions outside our lane. We have more than enough to say within our lane, if we have the courage to say it. And the truth is that when we speak too broadly outside our lane, we dilute the narrative we can drive on issues of social justice that sit squarely within it.
But immigration policy is one of those areas where our work inevitably intersects with broader public policy.
Schools do not make immigration policy. They do not maintain borders. But whatever policies the country chooses, schools inevitably deal with the consequences.
That is why for generations it has been understood that schools should be places where immigration enforcement activity does not occur.
Not at school.
Not at school events.
Not on the way to school or the way home.
That has long been a bright line.
In recent months that bright line has been crossed in Minnesota. A Los Angeles Times article several weeks ago captured the experience of one charter school community in vivid detail.
The veracity of that reporting has been reinforced by the many conversations I have had with MinnesotaFolk in recent weeks, including family working in the charter school community there.
The impact is irrefutable.
It is a tax on learning.
And it is happening right where we can least afford it.
Including St. Paul, Minnesota. One of the cities highlighted in the PPI study as a place where all boats are rising and achievement gaps are closing.
And as CharterFolk from across the country have been sharing, this is not confined to Minnesota.
Which means learning, desperately needed student learning, is being endangered.
Needlessly endangered.
Such that our collective mandated reporter responsibilities kick in, even as we remain mindful of our lane.
For someone like me, who spent seven years in the classroom teaching students from a variety of immigration statuses…
…and who has stayed in touch with many of those students across the decades and has seen the remarkable contributions they have made as adults…
…the mandated reporter obligation feels even greater.
No grandstanding here. No virtue projecting outside my lane.
We have had a longstanding prohibition on immigration enforcement in and around our schools.
Compromising that prohibition risks exacerbating the education depression we are already living through.
It is a tax on learning, and it is simply too high a tax to pay.
Union Neutrality and Another Tax on Learning
That brings us to another development this week that also represents a tax on learning.
A court has ruled that Illinois’ so called “charter school union neutrality” law is legal.
Working in the vein of mandated reporters, let’s call this law what it is.
We have mountains of jurisprudence governing what management can and cannot do when employees are considering unionization. Yet somehow the framework that is thought best for the rest of society is deemed insufficient for Illinois charter schools. So the state goes further and restricts them even more.
The real intent is not difficult to see.
It has nothing to do with neutrality.
It is, in fact, a blatant example of partiality.
Strident partiality.
Partiality that puts the thumb on the scale until every charter school in Illinois is unionized.
And as it so happens, in the same week that the court issued its decision, we are seeing the tragic consequences that result when charter schools unionize:
Two more unionized charter schools announcing that they will close.
Those closures follow the shutdown of another Aspira campus last year.
Which means three of the four Aspira charter schools in Chicago are now gone.
These closures come on top of the seven Acero charter schools that have either closed or are now being absorbed back into Chicago Public Schools.
The pattern in Chicago is striking.
In just the past few years, ten unionized charter schools have collapsed. That represents nearly a third of the unionized charter schools in the city.
Meanwhile among non unionized charter schools only a couple, less than three percent, have closed. And not a single one has closed from a non unionized charter network.
Charter schools that unionize risk being destroyed.
Which, in the end, is what this union neutrality bill is about.
Charter school destruction.
Sadly many charter school teachers are naïve to this reality.
Union organizers approach them peddling fantasies.
One is that schools can negotiate richer contracts without undermining the financial viability of the organization.
These events in Chicago this week prove otherwise.
Not only do unsustainable union contracts threaten the solvency of charter schools generally, they put such strain on charter school finances that they increase the likelihood of highly disruptive mid-year collapses like those we are now seeing at Aspira.
And as we all know, when charter schools collapse mid-year, it is students and families who suffer most.
Another fantasy union organizers peddle is that unionizing somehow makes schools safer from political attack.
Again the evidence points in the opposite direction.
Charter schools that unionize become less safe, not more.
Which means charter school teachers who unionize are making their own jobs less safe as well.
And they are paying thousands of dollars a year in union dues to make it so.
The absurdity of it is stunning to behold.
As is broader society’s embrace of a union neutrality bill for charter schools.
CharterFolk, if there is anything charter school teachers should not be neutral about…
If there is anything the broader public should not be neutral about…
…it is whether charter schools should be unionized.
The fact is that our schools represent one of the best hopes for pulling Chicago and the rest of the nation out of its education depression.
And any imposition compromising the ability of charter schools to deliver that progress represents a tax on hope that none of us should be willing to pay.
It’s Time to Call CPS on CPS
Which brings us back to Riley’s article, and perhaps our biggest mandated reporter responsibility of all.
The schools Riley described, those where literally zero students are proficient in reading or math, are not the only schools in the city.
Across Chicago there are also many schools serving overwhelmingly low income students that are producing dramatically stronger outcomes.
A striking number of them are charter schools.
They serve the same students as the school district does, and yet their outcomes are dramatically different.
Some charter networks are producing levels of learning that rival the results of the district’s many selective admissions schools.
And they are doing so while serving far larger shares of economically disadvantaged students.
Which makes the situation in the worst performing district schools even harder to explain away.
Because Chicago already contains proof that much higher levels of learning are possible.
The question is not whether children can learn.
The question is why so many schools continue to fail them.
Over time the two meanings of CPS …
Chicago Public Schools
and
Child Protective Services
… are finding ever greater association in the public mindset.
Because over time it is dawning on us all.
This is endangerment.
At a massive scale.
Meaning, truly, CharterFolk,
our mandated reporter responsibilities are kicking in.
Our collective responsibility.
To report.
It’s time to call CPS on CPS.