Iron Cages Across the World – Taking on Something Even Bigger Than First We Recognized

Good morning, CharterFolk

I get this first post of the year off to you a few days later than anticipated. Complications flying into SFO during last week’s bad weather delayed the departure of our return flight from Delhi. So I had to suffer through a few more once-in-a-lifetime experiences in India’s capital, like being there to see Amy and Tess get hennas at a local market …

…and visiting Humayun’s Tomb …

… which was constructed to honor one of the first Mughal emperors in the 1550’s.

I love y’all, CharterFolk.

But when given the choice between staying cooped up in a hotel to scribe a timely post, or using some surprise extra hours to see a building that was the inspiration for the Taj Mahal, well, I hope you’ll understand why I opted for the latter.

I’ll get back on a regular posting schedule this week.

Meanwhile, the delayed flight home provided ample opportunity to catch up on charter news.

Some of it inspiring.

Some of it sobering.

Some of it enough to make your stomach turn.

And all of it pointing to comparisons with India that cast revealing light on the path before us in the United States.

It’s to that topic I now turn.

Iron Cages Across the World – Taking on Something Even Bigger Than First We Recognized

Right in the middle of our trip, one of the best articles I’ve seen about recent developments in India was published.

It’s an article that underscores the feeling Amy and I had again and again observing the difference between India today and the India we visited 25 years ago:

Something absolutely massive is happening.

Something that will end up having huge impact on our country, and indeed on all countries, in the years ahead.

It’s something happening at such an immense scale that it can be challenging to maintain bearings.

Not just that India has four times the number of people as the United States.

Or that its robust growth will give it 300 million more people than China by mid-century.

It’s the stunning scope of youth in particular.

Put it this way:

In the United States, Statista estimates that there are currently about 73M people under the age of 18.

In India, there are 444M.

Six times as many.

India has 100 million more children than the United States has people.

All my mental models for processing issues related to education seem inadequate in the face of such numbers.

It’s only when I begin looking at the experiences of individual families when things become recognizable again.

An hour after I sent my Year in Review post, the crew headed out to see Auroville, a spiritual center outside Pondicherry.

I asked our guide where his two kids go to school.

It unleashed a torrent.

It was so pronounced I had to turn to my family and friends to avow that I had not led the witness.

Public schools, he explained, were simply not an option for his family. His oldest was getting ready for exams that would determine his path in life and his only hope of doing well was attending a private school where, unlike public schools, teachers were at least trying to teach. At public schools, he asserted, teacher absentee rates were 30% or higher. Meanwhile, teachers earn three or four times the average salary in the area, a level of compensation far higher than his own, and yet he was having to pay tuition out of pocket despite the fact that he had received no earnings during Covid.

He then catalogued a host of other criticisms, including stories about teacher applicants paying bribes to get positions from which they could never be fired while sending their own kids to private schools. He concluded saying that he was a strong proponent of proposals that would require public school teachers to send their children to the same schools that they work in because, in his view, that was the only way teachers would ever get serious about improving.

He must have sensed I knew a little about this subject area. He asked me what I do. When I told him I work to improve public education in the United States by supporting something we call “charter schools,” the guide/tourist dynamic between us suddenly reversed. He began peppering me with all sorts of questions. It didn’t take him long to grasp that charter schools are founded with a guiding sense of purpose, something he pointed out had been the origin of the very place we were visiting, which led him to walk me to a particular exhibit.

Later in our visit when he began inquiring more, I told him that years back I had taken part in informational interviews exploring whether charter schools might be a viable reform concept for India.

He asked me when that would have been. I told him I thought about 2012 or 13. He said that timeframe made sense because ever since India’s current prime minister had come along in 2014, any pressure on public schools to improve had vanished. The way India’s political system works, he explained, teachers have enormous influence because of the financial contributions they make to politicians, and no astute leader like India’s current prime minister was going to get crosswise with teachers.

As you might imagine, I told him it was a dynamic we are familiar with in the United States as well.

It was a conversation not unlike several others I had during our time in India.

Our guide in Delhi told us his son had just graduated from private school and his younger daughter still attends one. He talked about having gone to public school himself as a child, but he had seen public schools deteriorate so badly that he felt he had no choice but to go private for his kids.

Our guide at the Taj Mahal reported that his kids had in fact gone to public schools – not public schools open to all kids, but a special form of public school that was set up originally only for the kids of employees working for the central government. They’re called “Kendiya Vidyalaya” schools. This article from a few weeks before the onset of the pandemic sums up nicely how they differ from other public schools.

Not only do they have selective admissions favoring government employees, but they’re often provided ten times as much funding per pupil than other public schools.

But not even that is enough to keep central employees loyal. Recent trends show government staff abandoning Kedriya Vidyalaya schools to send their kids to private schools instead.

Our guide didn’t know if he had to do it all over again whether he might enroll his kids in private schools too.

These conversations, of course, were not an even remotely representative sample of what is going on more broadly across India. No set of conversations over a three week period could do more than just begin to scratch the surface.

But it was at least enough to inform my further inquiry, which has, not surprisingly, revealed a mix of stories like we see in the United States today.

Some inspiring. Some sobering. Some enough to make your stomach turn.

But across them all, there is overwhelming evidence of a fundamental disconnect opening up within India’s education system that is not dissimilar from the one overtaking our own.

Yes, as I wrote about in my last post, immense strides have been made in Indian education in recent decades. Literacy rates have increased significantly since the 1980s.

Earlier this year a New York Times article trumpeted signs of improvement in Delhi.

But such positive assessments are hard to come by.

More broadly …

…the much more commonly reported story …

…is one of vast numbers of schools failing their students …

… many of whom are left with woefully inadequate skills.

Some cite corruption and graft as the culprit.

Others low expectations for teachers …

… which are broadly recognized to have been around for decades.

Various policy proposals have been surfaced over the years to require Indian teachers and other government employees to send their own kids to regular government schools …

… none of which have been approved, but which speak to the level of desperation many feel to inject greater accountability into India’s schools.

It’s created a societal circumstance leading to a massive growth in private education in recent generations.

By the time Covid hit, fully 50% of India’s students were being educated in private schools, and some observers were predicting that, by 2025, 75% of students would be attending private schools.

But then Covid hit, and unlike what we have seen in the United States, private school enrollment has collapsed during the pandemic.

The New York Times article cites the strengthening of public schools to be the cause. But all other reports I can find on the topic focus on the fact that, unlike public schools which received enough funding from the government during the pandemic to keep paying teachers (sometimes belatedly), private schools received virtually no assistance from the government and have seen tens of millions of parents simply not be able to pay tuition. And so, since the onset of Covid, tens of thousands of private schools have closed.

It’s a scope of disconnect between what parents want and the education that their country is providing that is simply hard to believe.

Literally tens of millions of parents in circumstances they find completely intolerable.

Brought on by conditions that are, to some degree, unique to India.

But in other ways are identical to the ones we find in the United States.

Indeed, it is the extremity of the conditions in India that allows us to more clearly see our own:

A desperate need for improved education for all students, but especially those who have been most underserved historically. And an education Establishment that has built up the power needed to hold back change.

Ours is not a dysfunction unique to our country.

Very few, if any, approaches to public schooling in the world originally envisioned the emergence of power dynamics that would enable the education Establishment to protect its own interests at the expense of those for whom public education was created in the first place.

And yet, country after country across the world find themselves converging on disconnect.

It’s in our approaches to overcoming the disconnect where our paths sometimes diverge.

In the United States we have CharterFolk and other reformers driving for change alongside parents.

Many other countries have brethren Folk engaged in similar efforts.

But in other places like India, parents have been essentially left on their own.

The global crisis in public education may be as severe a problem as any that we face as a species …

… with systems of inequitable allocation of educational opportunity found across the globe …

… protected by iron cages of bureaucracy and status quo protection.

And that was before Covid came along.

And while many countries have reform efforts underway, none, it seems to me are further along than the ones we CharterFolk are advancing in the United States.

It speaks to how essential it is that we succeed, not just for ourselves, but as an example more broadly that, in fact, public education across nations is ultimately reformable.

It’s what makes our task, which already seemed immense in importance to begin with, even more important than first we recognized.

And while it is true that many countries see a divergence in approach to overcoming public education’s equity and excellence problems, it is also true that there is a new force that is bringing all reform efforts together in a way unlike anything we have seen before.

How that convergence is happening is the topic I turn to next.

Hope to see you here.

CharterFolk Year in Review 2022 – Greetings from Pondicherry

Happy Holidays, CharterFolk.

I file this year’s review from India.

25 years ago tonight, some of our very closest friends were married in Delhi and asked if Amy and I would attend. It turned out to be one of the most magical experiences of our lives. A quarter century later we are back celebrating their anniversary …

… this time with our kids in tow …

… and the experience is turning out to be every bit as magical.

Over the past twenty-five years, much has changed. But much has remained the same, as well.

Like the obsession I maintain over all things education. In 1997, it led me to seek out an elementary school in Rajasthan.

In 2022, it led me to seek out Gandhi’s views on education at his museum in Madurai.

By education I mean an all-round drawing out of the best in child and man – body, mind and spirit.

– Mahatma Gandhi

As ever, perspective proves illuminating.

In India, now becoming the world’s most populous nation, the imperatives of equity and excellence in education are plain to see.

How does the nation balance the need to grow the excellence of education it currently offers to the relatively few who are playing a huge role in the development of India’s economy writ large …

… with the need to provide more equitable public education to all, when literally tens of millions of students still attend schools …

…that have no drinkable water?

Grateful for having had occasion to connect again at even deeper levels with vexing problems, with old friends, and with even older wisdom …

“Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.”

– Mahatma Gandhi

… and grateful, of course, to all of you as well, I file this year’s review.

CharterFolk Year in Review 2022

2022 has been a year of encouraging progress for us here at CharterFolk.  We started the year with about 1300 readers.  We end the year with about 7500, and we are on a trajectory for having 10,000 early in the new year.  We consider that not bad progress given that we started out with 600 in June of 2020.  Open rates continue to average around 45%, which industry benchmarks indicate is a very high rate.  We are generating about $50,000 in revenues from individual and organizational subscriptions, and we match those revenues with philanthropic contributions.  It provides enough resources to pay for our subscriptions to 20+ national publications, for our various IT capacities, and for our small band of consultants who work below market to keep CharterFolk coming your way.  As ever, I take no compensation for my contribution to CharterFolk, seeing this as my service project to the movement. It leaves enough funding available to help needed things happen in charter school advocacy, like catalyzing the establishment of a charter school association in Puerto Rico, which we did this spring.  

For 2023, I’d like CharterFolk to do even more.  My thought is that it is within our capacity in 2023 to become an enterprise serving at least 25,000 readers and spinning off six figures to catalyze the development of even stronger advocacy efforts for the movement.  I consider it an extension of our 25X25X25 goal we articulated in our first year.  This will be a topic our Board of Directors will look at during our next meeting in January. 

In recent months, you may have noticed that we have been bringing down our firewall so that anyone wanting to access past posts is able to do so without cost or encumbrance.   It’s an economic model we consider more mission-aligned.  It’s also one patterned after some of the online communities I admire most where individual readers, organizations and donors pay what they can without the community becoming excessively dependent on any one subset of supporters.  In that way, our base of support remains as broad as possible while we keep our eyes set on long-term financial sustainability.

Anyone wanting to contribute can help by providing a paid subscription.  People interested in organizational subscriptions may reach Kerry Flanagan at kerry@charterfolk.org.  Those interested in joining our group of donors providing philanthropic matches may reach me at jed@charterfolk.org.  We greatly appreciate any and all assistance you might be able to provide.

During 2021 we shared a total of 116 posts here at CharterFolk.  29 of them were Contributor Columns or interviews.  I wrote 87 posts myself.  That is down somewhat from last year, but this year’s posts tended to be somewhat longer, so I consider the overall amount of content generated this year to be about consistent with prior years.

Below you can find some highlights from the year.  On our website, you can find Year End Reviews for 2020 and 2021.

Contributors

I start this year thanking and celebrating the many contributors whose voices exemplified what CharterFolk and indeed our entire movement is all about. Whether it was …

• Laurie Brown calling out the racism that is often embedded in opposition to charter schools, or
• Greg Richmond and Paul Escala explaining how Catholic school differences from public schools may have postured them better to weather the Covid crisis, or
• Jim Goenner, Joe Nathan and Jose Perez, Caprice Young, Renita Thukral and John Armbrust sharing observations garnered from decades of work in the charter school movement, or
• Dan Schaller, Starlee Coleman and Terry Ryan highlighting how their states’ sectors are generating major momentum for the broader national movement, or
• Jack McCarthy encouraging charter schools to begin offering more expanded early education and Josh Phillips encouraging CharterFolk to remember the importance of camp experiences and other summer learning opportunities, or
• Cameron Curry celebrating nonclassroom based schools, and Christine Ferris celebrating small schools, and Christopher Manning celebrating his “spirit school”, and John Eick celebrating the faculty who helped him finish his doctoral dissertation, or
• Malka Borrego and Reggie Lee and Sarah Kollman and Lee Rosenberg for sharing timely thoughts regarding the CSP challenge in the spring, or
• Daiana Lambrecht, Ricardo Mireles and Jose Salas, Lety Gomez, Kimi Kean, Jay Artis-Wright, Anthony Wilson, and Debbie Beyer all reminding us of the importance of unapologetic advocacy on behalf of charter schools, or
• Howard Fuller sharing yet again his observations with the CharterFolk community as only he can.

I thank all our contributors for having advanced the discussion here at CharterFolk and across our entire movement, and I invite any and all from the CharterFolk community to offer your own thoughts next year.

Themes

This year, several topics became recurring ones. Some of the themes that drew the most focus were as follows.

The Rough Beast Slouching Toward Large Urban School Districts

This year we focused a great deal on the range of forces coming together to put immense pressure on urban school districts to change.

• I led the year off with 2022 and the Rough Beast that Slouches Toward Normal Street to Be Born, a post laying out the case that, historically, our public schools in urban areas are among our least changed entities, but new dynamics are at play which will ultimately unleash transformational change.
• In The New Normal Street – Faster and Slower Trains A-Coming, I argued that political contexts affect the rate at which urban school districts change, but ultimately all will see their rough beast arrive.
• In March, in The State of Education in the State of California is a State of Denial I highlighted the fact that the challenges facing California school districts are as profound as any in the nation.
• In June, both An Establishment That Remains Sound Asleep and An Establishment Gone BANANAs – Our Next Chapter is Projecting Permanence focused on school districts across the country digging in their heels to resist change despite the fact that parents are growing ever more desperate for improved options for their kids.
• Inevitably, calls for change begin to come in from editorial boards and others, but in Revolutionary Milquetoast I highlighted how often those supposedly urgent calls for change fail to recognize that similarly shallow and uninformed calls have been coming in for decades without having had any appreciable effect.
• Finally, in The End of the Public Education World is Just the Beginning I highlighted how broad changes in demographics are going to result in school districts experiencing enrollment declines that will ultimately make transformational change inevitable.

The Sad Response of Many Large Urban School Districts to Become Even Less Equitable as Pressure Builds

One of the saddest things happening in public education today is that, rather than the Establishment seeing Covid challenges, racial reckoning, charter school growth, and enrollment loss as forces requiring them to become fundamentally more excellent and equitable, many school districts are adopting policies that will lead them in exactly the opposite direction. 

• In How the Pandemic Saved Boston Public Schools, I recounted how Covid allowed Boston Public Schools to stifle a longstanding effort by the state to hold the district accountable for decades of poor student outcomes, and that has allowed the district to hold off a wide host of efforts to provide better options for students and parents.
• In How a New Teacher Strike Shows Why Unions Love Elected School Boards While the Future’s Kids Do Not we saw how teacher union strikes inevitably seek near term financial wins that end up harming the education of future students, especially our highest need students.
• 9021 Uh-Oh: Declining Enrollment in Affluent School Districts and the Quest for Greatly More Public Education focused on our country’s long history of public schools serving affluent communities finding ways to continue allocating better opportunity to families with means, and worse opportunity to those without, as enrollment declines occur.
• In November, we saw new evidence emerge that Covid era changes were leading to even greater equity challenges in public education, a development I covered in The Public Education Implications of Home Purchasers Being 88% White | The Tiny Houses of Learning Our Society is Building for Our Most Vulnerable Kids Now.
• Finally, in The 30-Month in Gut-Check: Greatly More Public Schools – A Lasting North Star or Not? I wrote about three major urban school districts deciding to exclude even more kids from high quality learning opportunity, and I pressure-tested whether the ideas I have surfaced at CharterFolk over the years provide a viable response.

Passionate Intensity at a Federal Level – The Administration’s Attack on Charter Schools

Of course, as many CharterFolk readers will remember, we put a lot of effort into helping contest the potentially disastrous new CSP regulations that were proposed by the Biden Administration this spring. Posts included:

• My first post on the topic helping to raise awareness about the fact that new threatening regs had been proposed: Terrible New Regs No Surprise Coming from Cindy Marten.
• That led me to delay a planned spring break to help drum up a response. Unplanned Pivots, and the Need to Be Incredibly Clear-Eyed About the Federal Menace Coming Against Us Right Now.
• I followed that up with a detailed analysis of just how terrible the proposed regs were. Disastrous, Deceptive & Dishonest – The Top 10 Reasons to Get Your Comments in Now on the Feds’ Attack on Charter Schools.
• We also covered what happened in DC when large numbers of parents from across the country showed up to protest the proposed regulations. What a Day in Washington! Parents Tell the Biden Administration to Back off Charter Schools, and That’s Just What They’ve BEGUN to Do!
• I then highlighted that, while the final regs were still greatly damaging to charter schools, they had been greatly improved due to the extraordinary efforts of parents. The Feds Release Their Final Regs. Parents Prove Those Protecting the Establishment Are Touchable. Now We Just Gotta Go Out and Touch Some More.
• Finally, I encouraged our world to keep focused on CSP going forward because much additional important work awaits us. Our Real CSP Challenge Has Only Just Begun.

Charter School Momentum Despite It All

Despite the unfair attacks and other challenges that we face, 2022 was also a year of great momentum and progress for the charter school movement. It was a theme we returned to again and again here at CharterFolk.

• Schools That Speak Their Very Own Language – Why Charter Schools Really Succeed With Students, which took as its starting off point an article in the New Yorker about Yu Ming Charter School in Oakland and explored what is it that really makes many charter schools fundamentally more effective than other public schools.
• If You Do Everything, You’ll Win – The Scope of Challenge Charter Schools Will Ultimately Take On, which highlights the charter school movement taking on an ever greater scope of responsibility as we grow in our efforts to serve students.
• Go West, VillageFolk! Why It’s So Important We Protect the Idea of Frontier in Public Education, which shares thoughts about why the charter school movement has so much momentum in western states.
• And finally, of course, articles about the momentum we are generating with advocacy breakthroughs, even in states where conditions are unfavorable for charter schools. Examples include Contributor Columns on the topic offered by:
  • Amanda Aragon, who described how an effective coalition is helping generate advocacy breakthroughs in New Mexico.
  • Ruben Felipe, who did the same regarding advocacy efforts happening in Connecticut.
  • Dean Johnson, who showed how charter schools achieved a long-sought funding equity win in Missouri.
  • And Andrew Broy who showed how long-term political work resulted in the approval of a new $35M facilities fund for charter schools in Illinois.

A Unique Bi-Partisan Space

Another recurring theme at CharterFolk this year was the challenge of maintaining our long-term balance of support from both sides of the aisle. Posts on this topic included.

• Red Meat, Blue Meat – Virginia’s Political Dynamic Rhymes With the National Times Affecting Charter Schools, which showed how the only way we make progress on policy matters is if policy makers stay focused on substance, rather than try to score points with their political constituencies.
• Going Red or Going Blue? A Response to Rick Hess and Nina Rees Writing About the Threat that Political Polarization Poses to Charter Schools, within which I asserted that no overarching political strategy must drive our efforts but rather a recognition of who we are as a movement, which is an amalgam of red and blue, and our deepest strength lies in building a tent wide enough for all of us to stand together.
• The Space From Which Solutions Emerge, which aimed to remind our world that the relationships and trust CharterFolk of different political persuasions develop working on charter schools will ultimately pay dividends on other vexing policy problems as well.
• NAEP and the Stampede of Pachyderms Shaping Education Policy Today, which highlighted how an erasing of quality student performance data is allowing partisan-motivated policy makers to make arguments conforming to their political agendas rather than truly informed judgements about what students really need.
• Odd Correlations Show the Need to Pick and Choose Across the Political Spectrum. The Writing on the Supreme Court Wall, which was meant to get us thinking proactively about assembling positions from across the political spectrum in order to prepare for inevitable changes soon coming from the U.S. Supreme Court.
• A Hot Seat of Our Own – The 10-Gallon Support That’s Within Our Reach, which attempted to dispel the myth that all is well in red states and all at threat in blue states and to encourage us all to put policy makers of every political persuasion on hot seats designed to advance the interests of students.
• The Post-Elections Challenge – A CharterWorld that Hangs in the Balance, which argued that results in November showed how many political contexts are nearly evenly split between reds and blues, and if we are going to succeed going forward we will need to keep building relationships and political activity on both sides of the aisle.

Infrastructure

CharterFolk readers were no doubt unsurprised that broken-recording about the need to build improved advocacy and political infrastructure for the charter school movement remained an obsession of mine in 2022.

• Putting an End to the Perpetually Backwards Way We Go About Building Advocacy Strength. In this post I highlighted how never-ending short-term thinking impedes the creation of “built to last” advocacy and political infrastructure, and now is the moment to change our mindset.
• The Five Boosters Ready to Lift Off Our Collective Rocketship In Communities Across the Country. Inspired by Contributor Columns from leaders at Rocketship, I highlighted how their efforts underscore that conditions are coming together in many places such that unprecedented new advocacy strength can finally be built if we seize the opportunity.
• The Challenge of Regulation and Why We Must Support Our Advocacy Orgs at New Levels. Amid the challenges happening during the CSP regulations struggle in DC, I took a moment to emphasize that the situation reveals how important it is that we increase our support of advocacy organizations taking on ever greater responsibility and challenge on behalf of the movement.
• Observations Heading Into Conference – Not Rocket Science, Just Structure, Leadership and Support. For many years, it has seemed to me that we have overthought how to build national, state and local advocacy infrastructure, and going into conference I encouraged us all to embrace the common sense solutions we have previously resisted.

Vision

Finally, 2022 was a year where I continued to advocate for an updated vision for the broader charter school movement. Posts focusing on this topic included:

• CHINOs vs. CABINs – Does it Even Matter if We Call Ourselves Charter Schools? In this column I make the argument that, from a student perspective, it doesn’t matter what we call schools as long as they’re offering great education, but, from a political perspective, it’s actually becoming more important that we all publicly, unapologetically embrace the fact that we are charter schools.
• Two Great New Studies Show “All Boats Rising” But Sea Changes Ahead Require a New Theory of Action. A long-standing assumption of the charter school movement is that we can exert positive pressure on the system to change, but we are now seeing the Establishment make changes that force us to reconsider that assumption.
• Houston, We’ve Got a Problem – Our Advocacy Now is Unimaginative. In recent years it has become increasingly apparent that we are not bringing to our policy agendas the creativity that is needed or that is within our potential to bring, in order to improve public education for all students.
• What Will Determine Results in Future Elections is the New Policy Agendas We Pursue Between Them. Often we lament that candidates are not as aggressive in their support of charter schools as we would like during elections. In order to elicit greater full-throatedness from them during political campaigns , we have to run policy agendas between campaigns that we can can more full-throatedly support ourselves.
• What the Charter School Movement Has to Learn from UkraineFolk. Over the years we have forgotten how important it is to have a dedicated base of people working together on behalf of something that feels much bigger than ourselves. World events this year reminded us.

It’s been an extraordinary year, CharterFolk. Thanks to all for being along for the ride in 2022.

I look forward to even more magic in 2023.