Good day, CharterFolk.
Thanks to several of you for sending in kind notes about Andy’s and my discussion with Steven Wilson. It was a discussion that brought up many themes we will be returning to here in future posts.
I’m also resurfacing our CharterFolk X post about Julie Jackson, which some of you may have had trouble accessing due to technical issues on the website that have now been resolved.
Thanks also to many of you who have reached out about the possibility of publishing Contributor Columns. We’re setting up our publishing calendar for the second half of the year. If you have a piece you would like to get in front of CharterFolk readers in the coming months, please ping me so we get you in the chute.
The Road Less Traveled and the Threat of Vouchers Being “Charterized”
Some of you may have seen Robert Enlow and Michael McShane’s piece in Education Next late last month.
Their thesis is that the history of the charter school movement has been one where we have committed the own-goal of embracing, if not outright creating ourselves, excessive regulation, which has relegated our movement into becoming a “revolution at the margins.”
Their recommendation is that private school choice supporters take “the road less traveled” by resisting the creation of unnecessary regulatory restriction so that a broader array of diverse options can come into existence.
It’s the best way, they argue, for the broader private school choice movement to avoid being “charterized.”
What Has Actually Slowed Charter School Growth
It’s a thought-provoking piece, one worthy of a response from our world.
I start mine with an obvious admission.
We have way too much regulation in CharterLand. And it is impeding growth and innovation.
Full stop.
But is it a function of the charter school movement scoring an “own-goal?”
Not primarily.
The primary force holding us back is not our own embrace of unwise regulation, but outright opposition coming from status quo interests – arguably the most powerful constituency within the Democratic Party.
In 2016, they rolled out a new playbook for knocking us off stride – not even objecting to the notion that charter schools are better schools than district schools, but spreading the myth that the growth of charter schools somehow makes all other schools worse.
It’s a playbook they turned into a national agenda, one stating unambiguously that the stopping of the charter school movement had become their absolute top priority. That put to an end the era of many Dems like Clinton, Obama and many blue state governors being at our back. Former supporters like Newsom and Biden buckled. That led to policy change that has made growth much more difficult. California and Illinois dismantled strong authorizing options at the state level. Caps came into play in Massachusetts and New York. Now we have big city mayors acting as de facto wings of the local teachers union.
So it’s a play that we haven’t found an answer for yet, though things remain complicated.
Despite the NEA’s new line in the sand, we still see many Dems remaining strong in support of charter schools – Denver’s new Mayor. Colorado’s governor. Legislatures generally in New Mexico and New Jersey.
Things hang in the balance.
Advocacy matters.
Increased Opposition Sparks the Great Red State Catch-Up on Charter School Policy
Meanwhile, in red states, the NEA’s new policy turned out to be a fundamental miscalculation. There they assumed the historical opposition to charter schools that had reliably come from Republican defenders of the status quo would hold.
Indeed, if you had looked at policy conditions for charter schools in red states as of 2018, you would have found that they lagged far behind what was found in many blue states.
- Most of the few remaining states without charter school laws were red states
- Many did not allow charter schools to operate in all parts of the state
- Few had strong state authorizers, or other authorizers that were not the local school district
- Many had massive funding inequity problems for charter schools
- And few if any had strong facilities programs to support charter school growth
Circumstances in red states, in fact, conformed quite nicely with what the NEA’s new policy agenda called for!
But then came COVID and Donald Trump and school choice becoming a new litmus test for Republicans. Within just a couple of election cycles where hold-outs were primaried into political oblivion, age-old GOP opposition to school choice collapsed.
It led to “The Great Red State Catch-Up” on charter school policy and to a new generation of voucher and ESA programs, which are about as unregulated as any form of publicly funded education that our country has ever seen.
Robert and Michael see that lack of regulation as key to private school choice’s future success. In the past year, several states saw legislative efforts to create additional regulatory requirements for ESA and voucher programs.
Thus, Robert and Michael’s piece.
The Real Own Goals and How the Re-Regulation Really Comes About
None of this is meant to say that, in addition to blue states outright blocking the growth of charter schools, harmful re-regulation hasn’t also occurred.
Some of it has come about for the same reason that excessive regulation gets imposed on public education generally.
- A nefarious actor does something egregious that results in unnecessary new regulation being proposed.
- A policy maker wants to virtue project on a social issue and proposes some new constraint on schools using public dollars.
Private school advocates may think they’re immune to these kinds of threats.
We’ll see.
In terms of charter schools making own-goals, our biggest shortcomings have been:
- To de-emphasize test-based accountability, which has led to multiple measure gobbledygook that has opened up charter schools to be messed with across a broad swath of operations.
- And to silence our critique of the traditional system, such that public focus shifted to our comparatively minor shortcomings rather than stay fixed where it should be – on the gargantuan brokenness and unfairness that remains in the legacy system.
Some of our hardest calls have been related to funding equity and facilities access. On many occasions when faced with the possibility of gaining new resources in exchange for accepting new regulation, desperate operators have made clear to advocates that the new resources mattered more. But now that greater funding equity is being achieved in many places, the conversation is shifting again.
One of the least celebrated successes of Starlee’s years in Texas was the massive rollback of regulation that the state did on charter school matters. It’s made a big difference, but it required the whole charter school community making it a priority and staying on top of a multi-year, highly technical policy initiative.
Now, the growing presence of the regulation-less private school world is providing a contrast that is focusing the charter school mind again on regulation matters. With that being the case, I’m guardedly optimistic that Texas won’t be the only place where we see progress made on the over-regulation of charter schools.
The Real Road Least Traveled
In terms of regulation of private school choice, we will see how advocates take on the same challenges that we have faced.
In some ways, private schools may be structurally set up to avoid having to make some of the hard trade-offs that we have made. When you embrace an economic model where not all of your funding comes from the state, but instead a significant portion of it comes from parents making supplemental tuition payments, private schools may not feel the same need to make compromises to get additional funding as desperate charter schools have.
On other fronts, though, it seems the private school world will ultimately face the same challenges that the charter school world has faced.
Nefarious actors are emerging in the private school world now. A small number of parents are using funds for questionable purposes. Policy makers are calling for schools to get accredited, which sounds an awful lot like authorizing.
Ultimately, my sense is that holding back re-regulation will prove as vexing to the private school world as it did to ours, and it will behoove them to be ready proactively with solutions.
Meanwhile, the most profound challenge related to private school regulation will relate to the most important path they choose to take.
Or not take.
Will they ultimately remember that many of us school-choicers got into all this because we believed that better educational opportunity could be created and could be more fairly allocated than it has been in the past such that low-income kids don’t end up out in the cold again?
Throwing ten grand per kid at every family regardless of income status and calling it good isn’t a regulatory paradigm that will speed private schooling down the path that many of us envisioned.
When we know that private schools are raising tuition everywhere new voucher programs are made, screening out families by income
When we know that private schools are also screening out kids using selective admissions.
And when we have no way to demonstrate that new programs are actually generating improved levels of learning.
It’s leading to the creation of another category of essentially accountability-less schools.
That, my friends, isn’t a road less-traveled.
It’s the main thoroughfare of public education.
And yes, it’s possible to design new school choice programs that guard against such shortcomings.
But without more dedicated, courageous work coming from private school advocates, we’re unlikely to see anything other than the main thoroughfare widened and repaved.
Every generation …
Every generation, CharterFolk …
Finds its own unique way to shortchange poor kids.
Half of this generation of public education is doing so by restricting their choices and by making them pay for the sins of public education’s past.
The other half, frankly, hangs in the balance.
Our role amid all this is to continue showing that a different way is possible.
A way that simultaneously creates better options while making sure that opportunity is more fairly allocated.
It’s what you could call the road least-traveled.
Indeed, you could call it the road that public education has never ventured down.
Our destiny is to make as much progress down it as we possibly can.
As quickly as we can.
Beckoning others to follow.
While opponents ridiculously keep throwing things in our way.
It’s not as it should be, CharterFolk.
And yet, it is.
So on we go.
Taking the heretofore never taken public education road.