Good day, CharterFolk.
I hope your week is off to a great start. I’ve got a few can’t-miss work things but am otherwise trying to make this a spring break with family. So be on the lookout for a next post from me in the middle of next week.
I head out realizing I haven’t been badgering you for paid subscriptions of late, mostly a function of my own limited time. Sometimes I find it more than I can do just to keep the content flowing here at CharterFolk, never mind keep enough resources coming in. The truth is that, with the additional costs associated with increased content and in-person events, funds are a little tighter than we’re accustomed to. We have our next CharterFolk board meeting soon after my return. If we could have another dozen individual subscribers and a few org subscribers, we’d very much appreciate it. Individuals can go here to sign up for subscriptions. For people seeking options for organizational subscriptions, either email me directly, or Daniel at daniel@charterfolk.org.
When It’s More Difficult to Open Charter Schools than Win Super Bowls – Scarcity by Design in the City of Brotherly Love
While I did touch upon it in a recent post, the denials of new charter petitions in the City of Brotherly Love warrant additional attention.
Since then, I’ve had occasion to connect with many PhiladelphiaFolk about just how ridiculous the situation is. Several were at the school board meeting when the denials happened. Apparently, the discussion was going quite positively for at least one of the petitions. The Chalkbeat article references the fact that most of the school board members had nothing but glowing things to say about the proposed school. But then the board decided to go into closed session, after which, without further comment, it summarily voted to reject both petitions – a decision that the local teacher union and other status quo interests hailed.
A PhillyFolk I spoke to afterward shared a remarkable detail. During public comment, one supporter said:
The City of Philadelphia has won two Super Bowls since the last time a new charter school was approved to open.
Think of that. It’s easier to win the NFL championship twice …
… than it is to open a new charter school in the City of Brotherly Love.
That’s because, in 2017-18, the state returned governance of the city’s schools to the local school district board of education.
And in Pennsylvania, charter petitioners have no choice but to go first to their local school district to get an application approved. As I have written here on several occasions, it is equivalent to the Eagles being both the team on the field and the referee.
How legitimate would those Super Bowl rings seem if the Eagles had reffed the games?
And yet, we let the district claim that its denials of charter school applications are legitimate.
Last week we got to see what this is really about:
A school district on the verge of financial crisis – dipping deeply into reserves just to keep the place afloat, and that doesn’t take into account the raises to teachers the district is on track to approve later this year, which would be on top of teacher raises provided just last spring.
These developments occur across a historical backdrop of Philadelphia public education having cooked into its DNA the same inequities …
… that we find everywhere we bother to look.
Selective admissions …
… and attendance boundaries that continue to allocate better educational opportunity to those with means and worse to those without.
Not to mention, allocating better educational facilities to those with means, and worse to those without …
… while making appallingly irresponsible, unaccountable fiscal decisions …
… that force the kids of today to pay for the sins of the past, all leading, of course, to widespread academic problems.
No one here is claiming that the charter school record is without blemish over the past quarter century, but in the aggregate Philadelphia’s charter school sector has been a presence that has helped close gaps and lift all boats.
And still, the school district throws its flags at charter schools, while one of the most popular sitcoms in the country …
… chooses Philadelphia as its setting, offering a heartwarming rendering of the efforts that teachers make every day while glossing over systemic issues and willfully misrepresenting the role of charter schools in it all …
… such that, if anything, Abbott Elementary School actually subtracts from, rather than adds to, society’s understanding of the circumstance of public education in the City of Brotherly Love.
It is a circumstance of scarcity.
Scarcity that is intentionally created.
The Donkey in the Room – Scarcity by Design from Coast to Coast
The saddest thing about Philadelphia’s public schools is that they’re not an aberration.
They are, in fact, emblematic.
An example of what we see in city after city across America.
We live in a time when everyone is understandably talking about the elephants in rooms. Huge Republican presence seems to occupy every space in the country, including classrooms.
But when it comes to the unspoken animal that occupies the rooms of educational scarcity, it’s not an elephant.
It’s a donkey.
Democrats are the primary purveyors of education scarcity in this country because one of their most powerful interest groups is the public education status quo whose first concern is to ensure that there is no other option available to parents other than the one the status quo provides.
It goes beyond scarcity by design.
It’s scarcity as goal.
Schools whose primary purpose is to meet the needs of the adults in the system, rather than the students they’re supposed to serve.
Since the election, there have been many observers who have pointed out that among the things that derailed the Democrats’ hope of a win at the ballot box last year was the fact that the party has lost its way on education.
Post-election polling bears this out: Democrats no longer hold their historic position of strength on education policy.
For many years, pundits have been claiming that teacher unions are overplaying their hand, but I have been saying that’s an oversimplification.
Yes, teacher union obstinance is eroding the public’s support for Democrats. And it has resulted in private school choice breakthroughs happening in red states across the country. But in blue contexts, there’s little indication that teacher unions feel they’ve overreached, or that they believe any change in course is needed. They’re as committed to their historical scarcity agenda today as they’ve ever been, if not more so.
In recent weeks I’ve been writing about the status quo stymying charter school applications in Massachusetts …
… and in California.
But that’s just the starting point.
Indeed, in Massachusetts, MTA is now attempting to defund many charter schools across the state, which would result in their immediate closure.
In Rhode Island we see a new charter school moratorium being proposed …
… along with a bill that would impose unionization on existing charter schools.
And blowback against charter schools in blue cities within red states …
… is as toxic as anything we find happening on the coasts.
Meanwhile, the dysfunctional, self-serving fiscal practices of status quo interests in urban school districts are on display …
… across the country.
Just three years ago, the Minneapolis school district put its kids and community through the disruption of approving teacher raises it couldn’t afford.
Now in the past 11 months …
… it’s done it again.
In none of these situations do we see indication that status quo interests are pulling back from their scarcity agenda, nor do we see any meaningful Democratic resistance to the dysfunction. Quite the opposite. Democratic leaders are either allowing it to happen, or are actively helping it continue.
Which is why we need to say it plainly:
The animal in the education scarcity room is not an elephant.
It’s a donkey.
Not just letting scarcity happen.
But consciously choosing it.
As though it’s a noble goal.
Avoidance, Not Abundance
It’s against this backdrop that I have been looking forward to the release of a new book with an intriguing title:
Abundance.
Written by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson – two prominent voices from within the Democratic mainstream – the book explicitly states that its target audience is Democrats whom the authors see to be the primary creators of policies that have led to scarcity prevailing across so much of American life – in housing, infrastructure, health care, and innovation more broadly.
And in the book’s opening pages, Klein and Thompson make the same core assertion I’ve made here:
That scarcity is a conscious choice.
In many ways, the book reads like a CharterFolk post:
Excoriating NIMBYism.
Pointing out the blatant hypocrisy of lawn signs.
Going after CEQA and other environmental regulations that impede progress.
In fact, I would argue that the book differs from my years of writing on the topic of scarcity in only one major way:
The authors never take on education scarcity.
No chapter.
No section even.
In fact, neither the word school nor education appears in the book’s index at all.
This, despite the authors dedicating pages to explaining why families can’t make cities work – citing housing costs, infrastructure failures, and crime – but never once mentioning what is often the first and last reason parents leave:
The state of the local public schools.
On a podcast this week, Klein said offhandedly:
We could have written about education scarcity as well.
As though its exclusion were a function of randomness.
But if Abundance is truly about identifying where scarcity has been most deliberately constructed in our society, then not writing about education isn’t just a missed opportunity.
It’s a choice.
Just as the advancement of scarcity is a choice.
And when your central assertion is that scarcity is intentional, the failure to include education – where scarcity is most intentionally enforced – is more than an oversight.
It’s …
… avoidance.
Which, in my opinion, would have been the more appropriate title for the book.
For all the book’s other strengths – and there are many – if Democrats are ever going to regain their mainstream strength, they will need the courage to take on the interests that tether them to policies that are so politically out of touch and so fundamentally at odds with the needs of young people.
Courage to take on the interests that are leading Democrats to, in fact, double down right now on the very policies that have led them astray.
And yet, Abundance displays no such courage.
And in so doing – in cataloging the scarcities that exist in so many other parts of society, but then leaving education out – the authors imply that education is somehow exempt from the problem, rather than being the biggest example of it.
Which, on education matters, anyway, makes Abundance another Abbott Elementary.
Something that subtracts from, rather than adds to, our understanding.
As such, I can call it nothing other than a disappointment.
We’ll Have to Write Abundance Ourselves
If you, like me, had been holding out hope that Klein and Thompson’s new book would take on the problem of education scarcity in our country, it should be becoming abundantly clear by now:
No one is going to write Abundance for us.
Not Klein or Thompson, or anyone else for that matter.
If we want the story of education abundance to be written in our country, we’re going to have to write it ourselves.
This has been another of the themes I have returned to again and again over the entire five-year existence of CharterFolk.
That somewhere along the line, the charter school movement lost its voice.
The question I keep asking myself is:
What accounts for our laryngitis?
In the early going of CharterFolk, I pointed to a mix of factors that held us back.
One was the status quo casting new threats at any CharterFolk bold enough to surface the forbidden truth.
Another was advice we were getting that the public doesn’t want to hear anything negative about public education – so muzzle ourselves.
There was also a wave of understandable ambivalence – born of the racial reckoning that surfaced early in the decade – that perhaps we were not as much on the right side of history as we had once believed.
It has been, in short, a suggestion that our movement has been engaged in a form of, yes …
… avoidance.
But the more time I spend with CharterFolk across the country, the more I think it’s not so much a lack of courage that has held us back.
Because if there’s anything I’ve come to appreciate even more about people in the charter school movement over the past half decade, it’s the fearlessness that our Folk bring to the work.
No – what’s been holding us back most is a lack of awareness.
A lack of awareness on two fronts.
The first is regarding the depth of unfairness that has been baked into the DNA of our public education system.
That’s why I write again about the history of Philadelphia like I did today. It’s why I brought up the history of St. Louis in my recent interview with Marlon Marshall.
Because the unfairness in our public education system is like one of those stereograms – where, if you focus your eyes just right, the animal in the room leaps off the page.
In the end, as important as it is to understand the influence of elephants and donkeys in our public education rooms, it’s even more important to recognize the shark in the room. The shark in the tank.
The menacing, unthinking creature that robs public education of both its excellence and its equity.
Because if we can see that beast clearly, ultimately we’ll figure out how to get the political creatures in line.
The second awareness now settling in among CharterFolk nationwide is this:
That the charter school movement has the unique potential to make a difference.
Not that we don’t have our faults as a movement – goodness knows we do. But that cooked into our DNA is a completely different genetic code for public education, one where educational redlines, broken fiscal practices, and lack of accountability are finally relegated to the ash bin of history.
Put those two growing awarenesses together, and they add up to one massive recognition…
… which is that public education’s abundance story is, in fact, ours to write.
Not in a best seller.
But in a policy agenda – one that charts out a course for an era where public education becomes far better and far fairer than it’s ever been before.
And just like Klein and Thompson’s first chapter, the first chapter of our book must begin with a forbidden truth:
Scarcity.
We must name the circumstance from which we start.
Not just scarcity, but scarcity consciously chosen.
Like allowing school districts to field low-performing teams while throwing flags at others who are often providing something much better.
Because once we’ve written that forbidden truth, the more aspirational chapters can finally unfold.
Chapters that lead us to what our kids and country need.
Not a world where it’s harder to open a school than to win a Super Bowl…
But a Super Bowl of better options.
With tickets available to all.
Creating an abundance of excellence in public education, with opportunity more fairly shared than it ever has been before.
Come on, CharterFolk.
It’s time we got out our pens.