Good morning, CharterFolk.
Lots of developments. Not much time this morning. Let me just highlight what I can quickly.
EdWeek focuses on CharterLand covering nearly the entire national map. Todd Ziebarth from the National Alliance does a good job summarizing how the common sense of charter schools ultimately overcomes opposition just about everywhere.
Our most recent state, North Dakota, appears to be off to a great start.
Note Lisa Grover from the Alliance team there for the bill-signing. Well-deserved given how hard the Alliance team worked on this one.
New detail about the scope of the legal win for charter schools in Los Angeles.
And yes, it was big.
Meanwhile, up in San Francisco, a new charter is being proposed, testing the new more moderate school board.
Yesterday I visited Jared Austin’s school in Vacaville. Jared wrote a great piece for CharterFolk earlier this year.
They continue growing like crazy. Tractors literally started breaking ground on their new high school facility as I pulled out of the parking lot.
The long and the short of it?
Reports of the demise of charter schools in California are very much premature.
New analysis from Georgetown about who is being served by new ESA and voucher programs.
Sobering. But let’s not lose sight of how opportunity is allocated within the traditional system.
Meanwhile, the Times laments that district public schools are having to market themselves these days in order to attract students.
It happens while some school districts seem to have encouraging things to market.
While others very sadly …
… do not.
Future Ed has another good article out this morning, this one on declining enrollment.
It show that decline rates vary greatly by region.
Demographics is the biggest driver, of course. The American birthrate hit its lowest level on record last year.
China is showing first what will happen to education elsewhere as demographic realities are felt.
Over 20,000 kindergartens are closing every year.
Let’s wrap with AI.
OpenAI’s podcast this week is an example of marketing in the education space.
They’re drawing attention to their “learn mode.”
I sped through it, but actually found parts of it interesting. And overall, I like the fact that OpenAI is thinking enough about education to make it a focus for the podcast.
A part I found particularly noteworthy?
The fact that Open AI went to India to learn about what was needed in the tutoring space given the vibrancy of the tutoring market there.
A few years back, in this post …
… I wrote the following:
The idea that U.S. parents would have interest in educational offerings that are now being developed to help parents in India compensate for a meltdown in educational offerings during covid seems laughable at first.
But when you recognize that a lot of what is being built in India today is being created in English, you begin to see that “Tuition Republic” is exactly the space within which Christiansen predicts disruptive change would be born.
It’s why I’m convinced that a new convergence is emerging:
Parent BATNA in the United States is on the cusp of radical transformation, a transformation born of changes happening on the other side of the world.
Seeing what OpenAI has rolled out this week, all I can say is: “little did I know.”