Good day, CharterFolk.
Thank you to several of you for reaching out about my last post regarding a prominent CharterFolk on the Move.
As it happens, many Folk are on the move, as is the case with Ethan Gray, who is wrapping up a great run at City Fund to found Ed City Labs.
I consider this both good news and big news.
So it was great to hear from Ethan after my post. He noted that his recent LinkedIn piece took a similar starting point to my discussion about the evolution of the portfolio strategy. Like my post, he cited Neerav, Robin, and Paul as important champions of the concept.
Great minds … I guess.
Regardless, our interaction gave me the chance to ask whether Ethan might be willing to share some thoughts with CharterFolk in the weeks ahead, and I’m happy to report that he’s considering it!
For surely there is nothing more pressing in the current education landscape than helping cities better address the crises unfolding in their midst.
Choose your city these days.
Or start, as I do, with your hometown.
I often find myself thinking Sacramento has become one of the most broken school systems in America. Then I talk with people from other cities who say the very same thing about theirs. Increasingly, Sacramento feels less like an outlier and more like a symptom of what is happening across urban education.
Everywhere you look, we seem to be moving in reverse.
As I have written previously, Sacramento is on the verge of state takeover because of its financial mismanagement.
Today’s headlines are full of stories about a supposed “breakthrough” in negotiations between the district and the teachers union.
That breakthrough amounts to taking money from the district’s retiree health care trust fund – the resources that are supposed to be set aside to pay the promises made to retired teachers – and using those assets to cover current pay-as-you-go retiree health care costs.
The trust has already been woefully underfunded for decades, leaving the district hundreds of millions of dollars short of what it should have set aside. Rather than contributing more to reduce that funding gap, the district will instead draw money out of the trust over the next three years.
Not contributing more to reduce the shortfall.
Not even allowing the existing assets to continue compounding.
Instead, drawing them down.
It’s exactly the opposite of what anyone who cares about the long-term health of a city’s schools would want.
It’s reminiscent of another recent “breakthrough” in Sacramento: the district’s response to its improper admissions policies.
A state investigation recently found that the district’s enrollment system illegally favored higher-income families for admission to desirable schools. Now the district must figure out how to remove students from schools their families desperately want to attend.
How is it proposing to do that?
You guessed it.
With a lottery.
A lottery to pull kids out.
A reverse lottery.
Again, exactly the opposite of what we want.
What we want are many great schools, with lotteries deciding who gets in when demand exceeds supply.
If these are the schools families most want, let them serve more students.
But no.
Collective bargaining agreements and negotiated class-size limits stand in the way.
The result is an exodus.
Some families simply leave the city altogether, as we see in many urban areas. But in Sacramento, many instead move to neighboring districts to escape the dysfunction. Demand in Elk Grove has become so strong that the district is now pursuing eminent domain so it can build another campus.
Meanwhile, homeschooling has become so popular in central Sacramento that the local newspaper is running a series of stories about it.
Sacramento is hardly alone.
This morning I saw that the Nashville school board once again rejected every charter school application before it. Last time, prominent local business leaders left the board’s proceedings embarrassed by what they witnessed. This time, retired hometown sports heroes found themselves on the receiving end of the public dressing down.
In Providence, a school scheduled to open has sued to overturn the state’s charter school moratorium.
Meanwhile, Eva Moskowitz continues documenting the stark differences between the performance of many district-run schools in New York City and the city’s highest-performing charter schools.
Let me end with one final “opposite of what we want” story, again from California.
The University of California system has been making considerable noise lately about how underprepared many incoming students are for UC coursework.
One proposed solution?
Providing reports back to high schools showing how their graduates actually perform once they arrive at UC.
Think about that.
Not colleges depending on high schools to tell them whether students are prepared through the admissions process.
High schools depending on colleges to tell them after the fact.
It is developments like these that make me think the creation of Ed City Labs is not merely big news.
It is good news.
Perhaps it is one more sign that we are finally beginning to think seriously about how cities can shift urban education out of the gear in which it has become stuck.
Reverse.