Weekend greetings, CharterFolk.
NHJ is the gift that keeps on giving.
Whether intentionally or not.
CharterFolk may remember one of the first articles I wrote here, and one that I return to again and again.
No Vision, No Voice, wherein I highlighted that the then-New York City Chancellor had made something very clear to the charter school world.
There was one thing that CharterFolk were not allowed to do.
Say anything negative about district schools.
As he described it, he was like a proud father in his protection of district schools.
And woe to any CharterFolk who would cross proud Papa Bear.
It was, in my estimation, a threat we acceded to.
We did so, again in my estimation, for two reasons. The first was that we were scared and we felt vulnerable. The second was a conscious calculation that the public didn’t like us saying anything negative about district schools, so we should muzzle our critique.
And so, over the past decade, our voice has been quieter than it could have been.
Than we needed it to be.
Now, a decade later, here comes NHJ going on offense against Mamdani’s new Chancellor in New York City, Kamar Samuels.
Poking the bear.
The new bear.
How’s The Who’s old tune go?
Meet the New Bear. Same as the Old Bear.
A chancellor who maintains a general posture of fatherly protectiveness.
And yet, NHJ proceeds to give us something approaching a master class.
Refusing his handshake.
Goading him on.
Getting him to put his paw just inches above the clamp that will ensnare him.
And then, so sadly, flinching.
Letting the Bear go on maintaining its menacing presence.
It was a mix of inspiring fearlessness and maddening hesitation, all wrapped into one.
As such, I found it a highly entertaining and illuminating 45 minutes, a conversation laying bare the abundance of scarcity and scarcity of abundance that limit nearly every conversation we have about education policy these days.
And yes, CharterFolk, our unique responsibility to show the full spectrum of courage that will be needed to finally put the Bear in its place.
Loaded for Bear
But really, CharterFolk, we should start by offering NHJ our props.
We have so much to learn from her and, frankly, to thank her for.
Starting with her absolute fearlessness in her overall posture toward the Chancellor.
The two of them haven’t even gotten into their chairs on stage and she is announcing that she’s come loaded for bear.
I’m getting my notes out because while they said it was going to be a conversation, it’s really going to be an interrogation.
And for the next 45 minutes, she makes the Chancellor squirm.
Why aren’t you making faster progress?
What’s stopping you?
Don’t you find the current situation as intolerable as I do?
By the end, she’s bringing in the audience.
Students lining up at one mic.
Parents at another.
One student described having attended a district school she found intolerably bad and needing to move to a private school to get a decent education.
Now she has a younger sister in middle school.
Will the Chancellor fix things fast enough for her sister to have a better option, or will her family have to seek a private school option for her as well?
It was a portrait of community coming together to force the powers that be to defend the indefensible.
Like when NHJ herself pressed the Chancellor to explain why geographic and academic admissions screens came into existence in the first place.
And when he wouldn’t candidly provide the answer, she did it for him.
Naming the plain truth that they were created to keep families with means in the system.
Because if those families don’t get access to schools they consider acceptable, they will leave for private schools or leave the city altogether.
Before she then surfaced the devastating irony.
Which is that the effort to retain families with means has helped create a system so unfair that even larger numbers of families without means have decided to leave it.
With many of them being Black families.
Which she then accurately described as being served in large numbers by charter schools.
You heard that right, CharterFolk.
In her grilling of the Chancellor, she did something she didn’t do in her entire 8,000-word essay a month ago.
Nikole Hannah-Jones actually mentioned the word charter!
And she did so while drawing attention to the fact that enormous numbers of Black families have moved from district schools to charter schools.
Precisely because the district has failed to serve those families well.
It was, CharterFolk, nothing short of brilliant!
She had walked the bear straight into its trap!
The giant paw was raised. The clamp stood poised to ensnare its prey.
And then came the flinch.
The moment NHJ’s questioning stalled out.
The Flinch
Because in the end, her critique fell short.
She had nowhere to go next.
She just didn’t ask the follow-up question that begged to be asked.
Imagine, CharterFolk, that she had just kept going.
That she had asked the questions that were begging to be asked.
And how, Mr. Chancellor, do you think those charter schools are actually doing with Black students?
Because, CharterFolk, we know the answer.
As I’ve shared in previous posts …
… the evidence from New York City is absolutely unequivocal.
Controlling for demographics, comparing schools’ actual scores to their predicted ones, charter schools are doing far, far better than district schools in the aggregate, including with Black students …
… and low-income students.
Almost 60% of Black charter school students attend schools performing in the top two deciles of the city’s performance distribution. Less than 5% attend schools in the bottom two deciles.
And it’s been this way since far before Papa Bear first growled a decade ago.
Begging the next question that should have come from NHJ.
And why, Mr. Chancellor, are charter schools achieving results so different from those of the district schools serving similar students?
Leading to still another:
And if those schools are doing better, why aren’t we allowing them to grow much more quickly?
And many more thereafter:
Why are we maintaining a cap on the number of charter schools that can operate in New York City?
Why isn’t the district giving these schools facilities so they can grow?
Because goodness knows the district has enough empty space to allow successful charter schools to grow.
Which aren’t, by the way, the only schools in NYC that are far exceeding prediction.
I mean, I’m sure, Mr. Chancellor, you’re an avid reader of CharterFolk.
Who isn’t an avid reader of CharterFolk?
And they’ve done a good job over there showing all the charter schools that are nailing it.
But like they said, NYC is blessed to be a city where a portion of district schools are actually nailing it too.
Now, they didn’t show all those individual district schools at CharterFolk.
But I decided to do a little analysis of my own, Mr. Chancellor.
Using a methodology very similar to the one CharterFolk used last week.
Because it doesn’t take rocket science to do this.
And look what we find!
Amazing district schools.
Not selective schools.
Not schools protected by attendance zones encompassing highly affluent neighborhoods.
But district schools serving students who have historically been denied access to excellent educational opportunity.
Schools demonstrating that excellence can be achieved with the very students we’re told are so hard to serve.
Schools that collectively were serving a thousand more kids a decade ago, suggesting that there may be substantial capacity to serve more today.
Why, Mr. Chancellor, why aren’t you doing all you can to keep these schools as full of kids as possible?
Why aren’t you giving their leaders opportunities to replicate what they’re doing?
Why aren’t you telling families about these schools so they can see that better options exist?
Why aren’t you making it easier for families to access them?
And while we’re at it, Mr. Chancellor, let’s look at the other side of the equation.
The schools that are dramatically falling short.
Like the one my daughter attended.
PS 307.
I mean, I’m sure you saw the analysis CharterFolk shared last week …
… showing that PS 307 is among the persistently lowest-performing schools in all of New York City relative to the levels of learning we would expect given the students it serves.
And that it’s been allowed to remain in this circumstance for years.
Now, as the author of CharterFolk acknowledges, there could be all sorts of reasons why that school performs like that.
There’s an autism center at the school. Is that, Mr. Chancellor, what’s leading the school to be such an outlier?
And if so, what evidence do you have to demonstrate that?
Because, Mr. Chancellor, even if there’s some explanation for PS 307, what about all the other schools?
I mean, I decided to look at that too.
Again, using a methodology very similar to what CharterFolk used last week, look what I found, Mr. Chancellor.
Fifty-one!
Fifty-one district-managed schools that, over the past three years, have averaged results even further below prediction than the lowest-performing charter school in all of New York City.
Not the average charter school, Mr. Chancellor.
The lowest-performing one!
What, Mr. Chancellor, is the explanation for that?
Mr. Chancellor, as I know you know, charter schools have to make an argument every few years for continuing to have the privilege to operate a public school.
CUNY is a good local authorizer and I’m sure would be more than happy to take a look using the same criteria it uses for charter schools.
Don’t you think it’s time, Mr. Chancellor, the district finally got its charter renewed?
The Origins of the Flinch – A Scarcity Mindset
Yes, sadly, obviously, that last set of hypothetical questions did not come from NHJ.
It is so tempting to wonder why one who is so fearless in certain ways seems so fearful of asking the next round of obvious questions.
But for purposes of this post, and for many others, I think it better to maintain a posture of grace, and not go ascribing to her motivations we can’t possibly be sure of.
Whatever her motivations, at the very instant the hairy paw is about to hit binding metal, she pivots.
And starts talking about attendance boundaries and selective admissions screens.
Which I believe reflects an approach to the problem that is constrained by a particular worldview.
A belief in scarcity.
Her approach seems premised on the belief that the amount of great opportunity available in public education is fixed.
The size of the pie is the size of the pie, and the only thing you can do about it is more fairly attempt to cut up that pie.
So she turns her attention to families with means finding ways to hoard more than their share of opportunity via attendance zones and selective admissions.
And don’t get me wrong, those things are offensive and must be done away with over time.
But what a weary vision of the future that is, CharterFolk.
What a pessimistic one.
A world in which the only way for one child to gain access to something better is for another child to lose access to it.
When we know, from decades of experience, that something so much more hopeful is possible.
That we can create excellent schools where none existed before.
That we can grow schools already doing extraordinary things.
That we can make the pie dramatically bigger while dividing it more fairly.
And yes, the parents and the students in that audience, and NHJ herself, are right to make all of us squirm on this matter.
By all means, start the process now.
Make some small percentage of spaces in citadel schools open to all through a lottery where historically underserved students have a statistical advantage.
And grow that percentage steadily over time such that by 2040, these vestiges of Jim Crow cooked into the very DNA of our public education efforts are done away with forever.
But simultaneously, grow much more rapidly the schools that are doing great by students such that every family has multiple great options at their disposal and feels that nothing is being put at risk.
Because if there is any pernicious belief in our country we should consider the true Bear, it’s that the only way you can make something better in public education is to put up screens that further advantage the already advantaged.
It’s the vision that has been at the heart of the charter school movement since the very beginning.
The belief that we can create both more excellence and more equity in public education simultaneously.
It’s the vision, of course, that gives our movement voice.
The very thing needed to spark conversation itself.
And when we stop articulating that vision …
When we stop putting forward ideas for how to create dramatically more excellent schools …
When we become so preoccupied with defending what we already have that we stop advocating for what could be …
We create a scarcity all our own.
A scarcity of abundance.
Not because we lack examples of what is possible.
But because we haven’t done enough to put those possibilities before the public.
The Ultimate Bear Spray
So let us proceed, CharterFolk, to use our collective voice to spark the societal conversation that needs to occur.
It is one, I believe, we could have sparked much earlier if we hadn’t acceded to the threats of the Bear.
Or to the mistaken intuition some of us have had that we can’t say anything negative about district schools.
Of course we can!
NHJ shows us that we can.
And she reminds us how.
By putting the Bear in front of an audience full of parents and students and making it defend the indefensible.
Because as terrifying as the Bear’s growl can be, the fact is that it’s only truly threatening when we are alone.
Some courageous tenor or soprano singing a tune the powers that be find off key?
Easy to intimidate.
But a chorus?
Hundreds of schools standing together, supported by thousands upon thousands of parents and other supporters?
All singing our movement’s age-old tune of equity and excellence pursued simultaneously?
Growing the pie faster than we need to divide it differently?
CharterFolk, call it bear spray!
Put the Bear on stage!
NHJ is showing us how to wield the can.
And with our own potent mixture of abundance contained therein?
We can do more than poke the Bear.
We can tame it.
CharterFolk, meet the new Bear.
Same as the old Bear.
But this time, hear us:
We won’t be fooled again.