Good day, CharterFolk.
Let’s start today with some fun news.
Rosalyn Yalow Charter School in the South Bronx just won the chess championship in New York and is headed to nationals in Maryland next month.
And don’t even think about taking them on …
… in fencing …
… never mind academic progress.
En garde!
This morning, Robin Lake and Travis Pillow do a great job of presenting the new reality that school districts find themselves facing.
This statement certainly seems authoritative.
The era of school districts as monopolies is over. But their core mission remains: ensuring every student has access to a high-quality education.
The question is not whether districts will change. It’s whether they will change fast enough, in ways that strengthen, rather than weaken, public education.
Unfortunately, we keep finding example after example of school districts believing that the way of the past can still be the way of the future.
In Milwaukee this week, the former superintendent pointed out the folly of his former school district treating charter schools with such hostility that they are transferring to other authorizers, resulting in Milwaukee Public Schools losing more than $4,400 per student in funding it is otherwise allowed to siphon away from charter schools. In aggregate, the district is pushing away more charter-related funding than would be needed to close its entire $50 million budget shortfall.
If only such problems were limited to Milwaukee.
My hometown keeps struggling to come to grips with the size of the local school district’s fiscal demise.
Mind you, this is the same district that gave every employee in the central office a layoff notice.
Down south, employee groups are doubling down on a strategy to cause as much chaos as we see in the state’s capitol.
Halfway in between, Fresno Unified is living with the consequences of its own decisions. After years of attempting to put an end to lifetime health benefits for employees and their dependents, but finally throwing in the towel earlier this year, the district is finding the cost of that commitment so prohibitive, and the abuse of the system so widespread, that it is forcing retirees to document who their dependents actually are.
This quote puts it in perspective.
Some retired employees questioned the district’s motives for conducting the audit and said it places an undue burden on elderly retirees.
“Hundreds of us are in nursing homes and assisted living facilities where we do not receive mail,” said Emily Brandt, a retired Bullard High teacher. “Many of us are in the midst of severe cognitive decline and cannot speak or even understand, let alone order a marriage certificate online.
“We do not have any records with us where we live, and we have no family or other advocates to alert us to this audit or to guide us through the required process, and we may soon be cast off our insurance or be thrown out of the facility and potentially made homeless.”
Playing watchdog with people in the last years of their lives, rather than helping launch people in the first years of their lives.
This, CharterFolk, is how public education ends up with priorities that are fundamentally askew from its central purpose.
Elsewhere, the charter school world shows how it is coming up with solutions at scale.
Yes, all charter districts can devise solutions for age-old challenges in special education.
Many districts across Texas are turning to the charter school world for new solutions.
Converting district schools to charter status is resonating in more parts of the country.
Places that have seen the light attempt to provide charter schools even greater freedom …
… and more fair funding.
Meanwhile, others simply dig in their heels, taking critically needed funding away …
… and literally demolishing historic school buildings rather than provide them to charter schools.
But fear not. Testimonials from places embracing the future …
… are working their way back to communities that cling to the past, turning up the heat on recalcitrant protectors of the status quo.
Yes, it’s a kind of game of chess, CharterFolk.
But it’s not charter schools on one side and districts on the other.
It’s the way of the past and the way of the future on opposite ends of the board.
And we’re playing out an endgame.
One where ultimately, the charter school world will make sure that public education becomes greatly more public than it’s ever been before.