Good day, CharterFolk.
We’re in the middle of National Charter Schools Week. The National Alliance is doing a great job leading the celebration.
As only he can, Bruno Manno puts the long-term progress of the charter school movement in perspective.
As Bruno put it:
While charter schools haven’t replaced traditional K–12 public schools, they’ve done something arguably more consequential. They’ve changed what families, educators, and policymakers expect from all public schools. What was a boutique innovation is increasingly a baseline expectation.
This morning, Joel Boyd, CEO of Mastery Schools in Philadelphia, demonstrates what Bruno is talking about, pushing all schools in Philadelphia to evolve to embrace accountability standards that heretofore have only applied to charter schools.
It’s essentially encouraging Philadelphia to move in a direction first taken by Indianapolis where now all schools will be held to the exact same accountability.
It’s the very definition of baseline: what once applied only to us will now be the architecture that applies to all.
All this happens at a moment of immense change and challenge.
Press reports across the country have covered the release of Stanford’s latest look at a generation-long decline in learning that has happened since the waning of NCLB.
Demographic change and family exodus are resulting in one-year enrollment declines in public education that are difficult to fathom.
Budgetary challenges within the legacy system are so large they too seem almost impossible to fathom.
School districts near me reflect the times. My hometown’s district, having been taken over by the teacher union in recent years, is now facing a reckoning they still want to deny.
The board offered its latest raise to teachers in December. Now over 500 classified staff are gone.
But still, auditors project the district being unable to pay its remaining 5,000 employees come January.
Down the road, the first of California’s school districts to offer immense compensation increases to teachers in response to a strike is seeing its first cuts. No surprise, the cuts are aimed at the very programs parents most want.
In Oakland, the California city where we have seen perhaps the most persistent dysfunction, the consequences are becoming clear – an implosion in home prices, though the pricey hills where families choose either private schools or quasi-private schools with walled-off attendance boundaries, have seen essentially no decline at all.
Across the country, we see charter schools chalking up new advocacy wins.
And yes, charter schools keep growing, even in the most difficult places.
Leaders like Natalie Kaharick at the Texas association are laying out compelling visions for charter schools having even greater impact in the years ahead.
It points to what comes next after the progression from boutique to baseline:
Backbone.
Yes, backbone in terms of having the wherewithal to say the difficult things that need to be said about the future of public education.
But also serving as the backbone around which the future of public education will be built.