Good day, CharterFolk.
Scrambling a bit. So my mid-week (Wednesday) whip-around is becoming mid-ish (Thursday).
The truth is that, since coming back from the Bob, I’ve been behind simply keeping our world up to date on charter news.
I’ll do what I can to begin catching up, starting with a great interview that Starlee did this week.
Definitely worth a quick read if you have a few minutes. In it, Starlee surfaces her three top priorities for philanthropy today, suggestions I certainly agree belong at the top of the list.
She can see the legal threats that are coming down the pike.
I’ve written about this extensively. I won’t repeat, except to say that we have greater confirmation what opponents of charter schools aim to do should SCOTUS ever determine that charter schools are private schools after all.
I laid out my thinking in April, citing a relatively obscure legal paper.
The brief argued that “the solution,” should SCOTUS deem that states must allow religious charter schools if they choose to have a charter law, is that all charter schools become governed by school districts.
Last month, the concept was embraced and amplified …
… by a new study …
… that was co-authored this time by Carol Burris at NPE, the Ravitch-created charter-attack vehicle.
It’s recommendations make explicit for a lay audience what was convoluted in the brief I cited last spring.
It’s an end state that many charter opponents have been working toward for decades – a pretense that they’re not seeking to do away with charter schools altogether but merely want to adjust their governance.
Now, mind you, that governance shift is one that results in all public schools being governed and operated by school school districts again, which, of course, would be the end of the charter school movement itself.
It’s why these efforts we see in places like Montana to sow confusion in the public about charter schools are actually much more pernicious than they might otherwise seem.
See, Burris and her crowd are able to say. We’re not against charter schools altogether. We’re just proposing that they have the same governance as you find in Montana, which is one where they’re all governed and operated by school districts.
The man whose office I was kicked out of, as I described in the column above, was Tony Thurmond, California’s outgoing Superintendent of Public Instruction. At the time I was kicked out of his office, he was supporting a bill that would have required all of California’s charter schools to move to Montana.
Today, he continues doing the bidding of the teacher unions who put him in office.
Sacramento Unified, a school district on the verge of state takeover due to financial mismanagement, has proposed to solve a small part of its problem by raiding the fund that the district has created to pay for teacher retiree health care. Sacramento County officials have deemed that an unacceptable plan. The district has appealed to Thurmond for support.
He rejected the appeal but sent a forearm shiver of a letter warning the county to let the district raid its retiree fund, or else.
Got that?
The teachers union is asking the state to intervene in order to stop a state intervention.
One of those signing a letter asking Thurmond to intervene in order to stop his own intervention was UTLA in Los Angeles.
They face the same situation and are proposing the same solution.
In LA’s case, though, the county has already backed down, saying LAUSD’s plan to take $175M from its retiree fund is acceptable. It demonstrates, the county concedes, a way that the district can keep paying its bills for a few years.
But let’s be clear, CharterFolk. LAUSD’s total retiree health care liability is about $9 billion. Over the decades since making the promise to teachers, the district has only set aside about a tenth of the money that they need to deliver on that promise. And now LAUSD is proposing to consume about a fifth of what they’ve saved in order to prop up a single year of operating budget.
Current pay-as-you-go costs for retiree health care take about $300 million per year from the district’s operating budget. As enrollment continues to decline, pay-as-you go costs are projected to double by early next decade.
It means the fewer babies we seem destined to have in the future will have greater financial burden on their shoulders.
Such wanton mismanagement draws the attention of national observers.
The part of the WSJ column I hadn’t been keyed into yet?
That last week’s dismal jobs report …
… had embedded within it 50,000 job losses in school districts.
If it hadn’t been for public education job losses, a 25k decrease in jobs nationally would have been a 25K increase.
It’s finally happening, CharterFolk.
The COVID punchbowl fueled massive job growth in public education earlier in the decade, but after flattening in 2025, public-education employment has now fallen off a cliff in 2026.
The answer to Matt Barnham’s rhetorical question …
… is now being made clear.
Serving 900,000 less students over a decade while employing 700,000 more staff definitely is a problem.
(By the way, doesn’t it make you wonder why there’s so much reporting on empty school buildings? If you take into account the additional adults in those facilities, there about as many people in schoolhouses today as there were a decade ago.)
It’s against this backdrop that charter schools continue to grow.
Seven new charter schools in Idaho.
It’s eight, all told, in Colorado.
Up to a dozen in Utah.
Four new ones in Georgia.
Four got turned down in Nashville a couple weeks ago but are now on their way to a state appeal where they stand a good chance of being approved.
North Carolina’s movement is on fire.
Meanwhile, those like MIT who care enough to do a deep dive continue to show charter schools generating encouraging academic results.
And some of the places where we have the most charter schools are showing some of the most encouraging results.
If you’re someone with means looking to help public education improve in this country, where better would you turn than toward the charter school movement?
Where’s it leave us, CharterFolk?
At the top of this whip-around.
Thankful that Starlee is out making the case!