Good day, CharterFolk.
I come back from break with a lot of catching up to do. I find it energizing to see so much evidence of charter schools making headway across the country, but at the same time, I find it dispiriting to see how bad things are becoming across public education writ large.
The Atlantic’s story from yesterday sums things up well …
… with some choice quotes from ed reformers including Mike Petrilli saying we didn’t get “jack shit” out of the money we invested in education during Covid, and Andy Rotherham saying that “the same people who are absolutely outraged about what” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “is doing on vaccines are untroubled by just ignoring science when it comes to literacy.”
A focal point of the article is Dems not having the courage to embrace successful reforms like charter schools.
Some promising educational reforms, moreover, seem to brush up uncomfortably against liberal political priors. Progressive Democrats, for instance, still regard charter schools with suspicion and tend to fight to cap their number. But in a lot of places, that only hinders the equity these people profess to care about: High-performing charter networks in American cities have registered serious improvements in learning for some of the most disadvantaged children in the country. These have been verified through several lottery studies, comparing students who got into those schools with those who didn’t based on random chance alone, which is the gold standard for policy research.
It provides a good frame for today’s whip around.
Let’s start with evidence of the headway charter schools are making right now.
Missouri is celebrating 25 years since the passage of its charter school law …
… by expanding charter schools into new parts of the state.
New data shows that DC charter schools are overcoming chronic absenteeism much faster than district schools.
Magnolia is clearly nailing it academically in Los Angeles …
… as are most Maine charter schools relative to district schools.
Florida is welcoming quality out of state operators at unprecedented scale.
Moxie-laden charter school advocates are returning to drive for even greater reform in Louisiana.
And charter schools continue to drive new effective special education models.
And that’s just a sampling.
It’s a pretty great momentum story, I have to say.
Sure, you can find examples of challenge or setback. Apparently, chronic absenteeism rates aren’t as encouraging in Ohio. We also find ongoing stories about a charter school closing unexpectedly in an era of declining enrollment generally.
But in terms of anything really going wrong in CharterLand these days, most of it is coming from Democratic policy makers.
Connecticut is emblematic.
A couple weeks ago the association there released information showing that literally all of the state’s charter schools are outperforming their host school district in ELA, and all but three are doing so in math.
And still, the Dems that control the legislature in Connecticut keep preventing new schools that have been authorized for years from opening.
Next store in Massachusetts, in one of the most talked about pieces of national journalism about education this year, the Boston Globe took its own state to task for falling behind southern red states that are implementing Science of Reading and other effective reforms.
Meanwhile the teacher union in their own backyard is doing all they can to prevent a southern surge from happening.
It’s leading to an odd circumstance.
Schools are performing so badly, and Dems are showing such stunning lack of courage, that the smallest whiff of backbone gets ridiculous praise.
Call it grade inflation for policy makers.
Look at David Brooks piece in the Times last week.
I like the frame generally. It’s much like the Atlantic’s and the Globe’s. For a while education was making great progress, but then things fell off a cliff. And since then, policy makers haven’t had the courage to do anything about it.
Or, as Brooks says:
Where the hell are the Dems?
But where does he go from there?
To cite an “astonishing video” he saw of Rahm Emanuel speaking in Iowa …
… about supposedly “aggressive” and “credible” education reform ideas such as reinventing high school and making progress in 9th grade some big focal point.
I’m sorry, CharterFolk, but deeming such milquetoast “astonishing” is the very definition of grade inflation.
The sad fact is that, ever since Emanuel had his moment of capitulation to status quo interests in 2019 …
… he has studiously avoided any utterance of “charter schools.”
Google “Rahm Emanuel” and “charter schools” and you will find a whole archive of articles prior to 2019.
Since then?
Not one.
But the very definition of policy maker grade inflation came from the Washington Post Editorial Board this week …
… crediting California policy makers with having embraced the Science of Reading instructional practices that have made such a difference in the South.
This is a topic I wrote about earlier this year:
A friend of a friend with no prior experience in education politics got involved in the Science of Reading push in the California legislature and called me seeking cathartic release after having witnessed the California Teachers Association defang legislation that could have added California to the southern surge. The bill that the Washington Post now lauds is a “Science of Reading” bill in name only. Here’s a chart that ChatGPT helped me generate summarizing the differences.
The coup de grace?
In the same week that California Governor Gavin Newsom signed the gutted Science of Reading bill to great fanfare, he succumbed to teacher union pressure …
… and vetoed charter school legislation …
… backed by charter school advocates that received literally zero no votes in the California Senate and only three in the Assembly.
This, CharterFolk, is where things stand with the standard bearers of the Democratic Party right now.
Lip service is being paid on substantive reform, while meaningful damage continues to be foisted upon charter schools.
Meanwhile, national commentators heap praise on milquetoast.
It shows where grade inflation in the nation’s classrooms gets started:
With the grade inflation being afforded to our nation’s policy makers.