Weekend greetings, CharterFolk.
I start acknowledging that I’m a few posts behind. The rush of catching up on projects after vacation has left me scrambling a bit. But I should be through it now and back on my regular cadence.
This week we’ve got a full roster of great content coming out, including a WonkyFolk recording with Mike Kirst that we’ll release on Tuesday.
As I turn back to writing, I’ve been continuing to think about Andy’s and my recent WonkyFolk conversation with Macke Raymond.
If you haven’t watched it yet, I encourage you to take a look. In that discussion, we wrestled with a sobering question:
What does the charter school world do now that we can no longer count on CREDO as our field’s integrity check?
As Macke noted, the data that underpins our understanding of student learning has become so compromised and unreliable that even researchers willing to do the work can’t base their studies on it.
Meanwhile, we live with high-quality data being within our reach like never before.
A quarter century ago, I marveled at how computer-adaptive technology had made the GMAT quicker and more precise, and I wondered why something similar couldn’t be available in public education.
Today it is.
Assessments like NWEA’s MAP Growth can measure whether students are acquiring basic literacy and numeracy skills in as little as twenty minutes. The holy grail – knowing whether schools are positively affecting the rate at which students learn – has never been more at hand.
And yet we choose to fly blind.
In a world where we all profess to care about the “science of reading.”
But what is science without empiricism?
It leaves us, I’m afraid, in a sadly familiar context: unable as a society to address our own most serious problems.
Isn’t our country’s ballooning learning deficit every bit as grave and seemingly unsolvable as our national fiscal debt?
For the rest of education, the solution is easy: kick the can.
But for charter schools whose existence is predicated upon the demonstration of progress it’s becoming more apparent every day that there is no can to kick even if we wanted one.
And into that vacuum rushes a different kind of certainty — the kind that isn’t grounded in data but in institutional self-interest.
Developments in the current landscape put the challenge before us in even clearer repose.
Revelatory Banality – Most Authorizers are Just Opponents
At the top of the list of new developments is Fordham’s new research on the opinions of school board members across the country.
Rarely do we see a publication that is both so revelatory and banal at the same time.
All of us know that school board members support their own schools and oppose charter schools. It’s common sense. But seeing the evidence laid out so plainly offers a kind of catharsis.
Fifty-nine percent of board members oppose charter-school formation, while only 29 percent support it. Among the general public, the pattern is reversed: 45 percent support charters while just 36 percent oppose.
What explains this gap? … Board members likely view charters as the competition. Opposition to charters may thus reflect a defensive instinct to protect district enrollments, funding, and influence.
NACSA reports that fully 90% of charter authorizers in the country are school districts …
… which, in combination with the new data confirms that society has chosen to situate authority over charter schools within the hands of people who are pre-disposed to detest them.
The Big Shrink Leads to Big New Desperation
For three and a half decades, we have made it work, but now that the great beast slouching toward Normal Street has arrived …
… or as Marquerite describes it, now that “the big shrink” is upon school districts across the country …
… we see status quo desperation leading to the most unseemly gestures.
Voting to close beloved charter schools …
… and then publicly gloating about it.
Last week in Oakland, we saw just brazen unseemliness as the OUSD School Board voted to deny the renewal of Aspire Golden State College Academy.
It was achieved on the same 4-3 vote that denied the Gabriella renewal in Los Angeles. The cabal of four voted without explanation, offering nothing but a slide citing California’s multiple-measure gobbledygook dashboard as justification.
It was, sadly, a perfect embodiment of what many have long predicted.
It left Board Member Mike Hutchinson, a self-avowed, strident opponent of charter schools, stunned at his colleagues’ brazenness.
So the last 10 months of me sitting on the school board has been a very frustrating experience. And so like I stated earlier tonight, I spent a lot of years in pushing back against charter schools and school privatization. And I really worked hard to lower charter enrollment and the number of charter schools in Oakland. But I did that through working to change the state law and establishing new policies and procedures in OUSD. I was really involved in the creation, passage and implementation of Assembly Bill 1505 when I chaired the charter matters committee. We revised the OUSD board policy on charter schools. I was the school board liaison to the strategic plan for OUSD where we scrubbed any mention of charter schools …
It is very frustrating now at this point at the last minute. I have colleagues on the board who are trying to introduce something where they’ve got to put it up on the screen because nobody’s even seen it before. This is not how we’re supposed to operate as a school board. No matter how you feel about charters …. This ain’t the way to go about it.
I want to just say unequivocally that this is unacceptable, that I only found out this morning that this was a plan that some people had. It is disrespectful and disingenuous. And I’ll put my record of fighting against charter schools up against anyone …
There’s no way I could ever support anything that throws out years of hard work, disregards the state, disregards the community and disregards our own charter office. This is unacceptable, and I’m embarrassed and insulted that we’re at this point.
CharterFolk, what are you supposed to do with a comment like that?
Excoriate it for revealing the lengths to which school board members have gone to undermine everything we have worked for over the past 35 years?
Or laud it for at least showing some common decency in the end?
Or just let it stand on its own as a sad testament to the times we live in?
The Counter-Narrative on the March
What is clear is that the march toward school board members being the only ones entrusted to oversee the work of charter schools proceeds unabated in many parts of the country.
Yes, school choice and charter school advocates can point to many policy wins that have occurred in recent years.
But a counter-narrative is alive and well as well.
One that began in 2017 when the NEA approved its new charter school policy in 2017 …
… whose first tenet is that charter schools can only be authorized by the people Fordham has now demonstrated are committed to our destruction.
Charter schools must be authorized and held accountable by the local school board as only a local, democratically accountable authorizing entity can ensure that a charter is actually needed to meet student needs in a way that other alternatives available to the district could not, and only a local authorizer can monitor charter performance on an ongoing basis to ensure accountability and spread charter innovations to other public schools.
Across the country, charter opponents advance their work using the NEA’s policy statement as its North Star.
Last week in New York, the Mamdani campaign hosted an event …
… where their allies in the education realm offered ideas about countering “privatization” and doing away with mayoral control such that the fate of charter schools can be back in the hands of those who seek our demise.
Meanwhile in Chicago, a place where charter school opponents have achieved their long-held goal of ending mayoral control and returning authority to a school board they believe will more adamantly oppose charter schools …
… Stacy Davis Gates, president of the Chicago Teachers Union has now ascended to become president-elect of the Illinois Federation of Teachers …
… with rumors circulating that she has similar aspirations to takeover nationally.
Even those that we have come to count on to have at least a modicum of balance now teeter toward naked embrace of charter school opposition.
This week, of all educators in the United States, who did the Council of Great City Schools, recognize as their national educator of the year?
Joyce Wilkerson, one of the most rabid, unapologetic opponents of charter schools we find anywhere in the national landscape, someone whose legendary opposition to charter schools …
… and whose renomination to the Philadelphia school board despite that track record …
… have made her a personification of the opposition that charter schools face in many parts of the country.
And this is who, of the millions of educators in our country they had to choose from, the Council of Great City Schools chose as their educator of the year.
Absolutely stunning.
Revelatory and yet banal at the same time.
A perfect bookend to the Fordham study.
You want to know who it is that overseeing the authorizing of charter schools?
Look no further than to who the Council has chosen as their “educator of the year.”
Denouement – Broken Recording Again What We Need to Do About It
Let me conclude being my insufferable self.
Being an advocate for advocacy.
Back during my days at CCSA, I used to track the growth of our operating budget against that of the California School Boards Association.
I thought it a good benchmark. Aspiring to gargantuan CTA levels seemed so completely unapproachable. But CSBA, probably the second most influential group in education in the state, seemed at least remotely within reach.
About a decade ago, I took some satisfaction when we learned that our budgets had become the same.
In recent weeks, I’ve had occasion to learn that CSBA’s has grown by 50% since that time …
… while CCSA’s, unfortunately, has gone in the opposite direction.
Those whose anti-charter opinions the Fordham Institute has now documented are investing more in their own advocacy structures.
Meanwhile, we CharterFolk?
In New York in recent months we have seen the charter school community come together to speak as one like never before.
But that unity has yet to be grounded in a well-funded, city-based membership organization, affiliated with a strong state membership organization – the kind of coherent advocacy structure the charter school movement must evolve toward if it intends to overcome the challenge of charter opponents who are strategically positioned in the landscape to undermine us – and who are now more desperate than they have ever been to unwind the progress we have made over decades.
There is no solution here, CharterFolk, other than our own world accelerating our way toward the advocacy strength we need.
Resources.
No one free-riding.
Coherent structures.
Even greater courage.
Guided by a compelling new North Star.
Two hallmarks of which will be:
- Authorizers that want our movement to succeed, not authorizers whose governing boards are peopled with those who would see us fail; and
- Data which clearly, simply and efficiently demonstrates whether charter schools are positively affecting the rate at which students learn, not gobbledygook that obfuscates what’s really going on.
Thank you, FordhamFolk and CREDOFolk, for putting the challenge crisply in repose.
On we go.