Good day, CharterFolk.
We start with good news out of Los Angeles.
Los Angeles County overrode LAUSD’s denial of Green Dot Locke’s renewal.
It’s a theme we’ve seen play out over and over. LAUSD attempts to get a facility and enrollment back through the denial process only to see the county impose some sanity. Earlier this year, Gabriella saw its charter approved on appeal at the county.
Last week, this sentence from another LA Times article leapt out:
The state testing system — on which the charter evaluation is based — gives no credit at the high school level for how much students have improved since starting at Locke. Instead, the metric is where they stand in absolute terms — based mostly on testing conducted in the 11th grade.
California has among the most gobbledygook-laden accountability systems in the United States.
Dozens upon dozens of rows, columns, colors, indicators, and status labels add up to something that feels less like public accountability than bureaucratic camouflage.
Meanwhile, for all that complexity, California provides only one high school testing data point that tells us anything about literacy and numeracy across the four years students spend in high school.
The “of courses” are easy to point out here.
- Of course, we want authorizers making renewal decisions that are not riddled with the conflicts of interest that school districts so often have.
- Of course, we want schools to avoid the unnecessary drama of having to go through a clearly political process each time they seek renewal.
- And, of course, we want enough valid data so that truly independent, conflict-free authorizers can make good renewal decisions.
Sadly, few of these “of courses” are in place across the country. In Philadelphia, we see essentially the exact same problem.
A school district has been unable to create coherent renewal standards for charter schools. But it wants buildings and enrollment back, so it denies schools on an arbitrary basis, forcing schools and advocates to contest those decisions in court.
Another obvious “of course” is that whatever standards apply to charter schools should certainly apply to district schools.
And yet, ample evidence points to the school district cracking down on charter schools while giving a pass to its own.
In Newark, the school district has done all it can to take back a school facility. Of course, the school occupying that building – KIPP Seek – has a long record of producing stronger outcomes than the district system trying to reclaim the facility.
Despite all the opposition Newark charter schools have faced, they have managed to keep growing.
While Newark charter schools have not had to seek their renewals from the local school district, the state’s support under the past governor was weak. And now New Jersey’s new administration has delayed decisions on expansion requests from charter schools across the state. Those decisions, of course, will be seen as an important barometer for what comes next.
In Baltimore, a school preparing to open was on the verge of purchasing a facility, only to see status quo interests derail it, forcing the school to delay its opening.
In New York, the city’s charter schools have bumped up against a statewide cap. That cap forces charter school organizations generating clearly stronger academic outcomes than district schools to grow using existing charters. The state’s teachers union and other status quo interests, of course, throw every form of opposition against that growth that they can muster.
Conditions vary, of course.
Places like North Carolina, where conditions are more supportive, continue seeing growth apace.
But here’s the thing, CharterFolk.
Call it the “anti-of course.”
The counterintuitive truth.
Growth is not happening only where policy conditions are favorable.
The Alliance’s latest growth report confirms it.
Three of the five states with greatest enrollment growth – Texas, Florida and North Carolina – are red states where policy conditions are generally understood to be most favorable. But two of the five – New York and California – are deep-blue states where things are supposed to be most toxic.
Even where status quo interests have assembled some of the strongest barriers to growth, families keep finding their way to charter schools anyway.
Which is why status quo interests are turning to ever more desperate means to stop the growth they have been unable to prevent.
It is to that desperation that we turn this weekend.
Hope to see you here.