Weekend greetings, CharterFolk.
We are adjusting this summer to having so many new readers, with thousands more joining us in the next few weeks.
Keep ’em coming, CharterFolk!
Readership rates for our first resumed CharterFolk X post profiling Jennifer Goodman …
… were through the roof.
Exciting.
A bi-product of the new momentum is even more Folk wanting to get thoughts out into the CharterSphere in the form of Contributor Columns. It results in us having more content than we have slots for this week.
What a delicious problem.
It leaves me with no other option but to bump out one of my own posts.
So this week you will see two Contributor Columns, one coming from Freedom Coalition for Charter Schools CEO Jay-Artis Wright about her observations coming out of the DNC, and another penned by Opportunity 180 CEO Jana Wilcox Lavin about important developments happening in Nevada. Meanwhile, Andy and I finally got our schedules aligned enough to be able to record a WonkyFolk discussion. You’ll see that come out late in the week.
Meanwhile, there are many developments afoot in the national landscape that align with the themes we follow here at CharterFolk.
Let’s get to them.
Starlee-ness
Maybe some of the biggest news was seeing one of Starlee’s first long-form interviews come out.
It’s worth all 39 minutes if you can find the time, CharterFolk.
For those of you wanting to cut straight to pure Starlee-ness showing her already stimulating new thinking among CharterFolk, I draw attention to the following:
On the need to get our acts together politically (at the 18:00 minute mark):
Voters support charter schools. The only place that it is controversial or contingent is among elected officials themselves. And so I will say, in that space between elected officials, the coalition is fragile. That is true.
And part of it is because we, the charter community, don’t do ourselves any favors.
Some of us in the charter community actively antagonize Republicans. And at the same time, we don’t do the work with allied political organizations to help make sure that pro-charter Democrats are actually winning their elections.
That is weird.
That is a weird thing we do, where we’re like unhelpful to the people who actually vote for pro-charter policies, and then we don’t make sure that people on the other team who would vote for the pro-charter policies get elected.
That is weird. And we have to stop doing that.
So we need to handle our political business better across the political spectrum. We need to work with allies who engage in electoral activity to make sure that pro-charter candidates are winning their elections regardless of their party.
On the need to remember who our friends and opponents are (18:30):
We need to remember who we’re actually in a fight with and stay focused, right?
We are not in a fight with people who support private school choice programs. That is not our quote unquote enemy. The people that we should be fighting with are people who want to shut down charter schools, not people who want to open other schools.
That’s not about us. And we need to make sure that we’re staying focused on the fights that are actually about charters. And when we get disciplined about who our friends are and making friends with more people then we will keep our coalition strong.
On the need to recognize that loss of autonomy is becoming a threat to the entire movement (25:00):
So charters are holding up our end of the bargain on outcomes. Hands down. But what I want to talk about is how the government is not holding up its end of the bargain on autonomy in every state, even the most charter friendly red states like Texas. There is a slow and steady chipping away at charter autonomy.
In Texas, we spent two years working on a comprehensive rollback of red tape after we found more than a dozen examples of rules and regulations on the books that didn’t have any basis in state statute. Now, if that’s happening in a place like Texas where the climate is good for charters, imagine what it’s like in a state where the climate is bad.
And of course, it’s the same story at the federal level. So we are routinely trying at the National Alliance – I was just in a meeting with one of my colleagues where we were talking about resolving an issue that emerged at the Federal Department of Education because someone decided that the language of a statute and an existing rule means something different today than it meant last year.
So, this regulatory creep is happening at all levels. And I feel like that’s where we really need to have a conversation around the charter bargain. It’s not about quality and outcomes. It’s about the guarantee of autonomy.
To all three, I offer my amens.
But I save the bulk of my comment for another of the topics that Starlee chose to take on in one of her first interviews.
Walls
Yup.
Walls.
Here’s her quote (13:25): .
There’s also been a push in Texas to modernize inter-district transfer policies. Texas has some really bad transfer policy laws on the books today. One of them is that districts do not have to allow transfers. And if they do, they can handpick the students. And they can charge tuition, which is so interesting. You don’t even need me to tell you what the outcome of that is, right? Our friends over at the Texas Public Policy Foundation …
… have done some really good work …
… taking a look at who is actually approved to transfer into our highest performing districts in the state.
And I bet you’d be surprised at who gets expelled. I know that would shock everybody.
These are bad policies for kids.
And the TPPF and a number of others have been leading the work here in Texas to push lawmakers to change those policies to make sure that all districts are required to have open enrollment policies and to stop allowing them to charge tuition. So, I hope lawmakers in Texas will revisit those proposals. It is time to get these bad policies off the books.
It’s moral clarity.
What we expect of inspired leadership.
Words that will be looked back upon for decades, regardless your party affiliation, for having been on the right side of history.
“Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”
Words of moral clarity helped bring an end to the Cold War.
Just as words of moral clarity will help our society bring an end to the cold indifference of those who stand in the way of millions of kids finally getting the better public education they deserve.
A new leader, and a whole movement coming together, alongside countless allies, making our demand:
“Mr. Public Education Establishment, tear down these walls.”
Bradford-ness
Sadly, as we all know, Brandenburg Gates keep standing everywhere we look in public education.
As I have written here often in recent months, the modern architect of public education’s Iron Curtain is Milliken vs Bradley …
… the U.S. Supreme court decision whose 50th anniversary passed almost completely unnoticed a month ago.
In a recent post I lamented how there had been almost no press coverage of the milestone.
But afterward, I discovered that I had, in fact, missed a piece of journalism commemorating the moment.
Who’d it come from?
Bradford, of course.
Along with Tim DeRoche, the CEO at Available to All.
The thing I loved most about the piece aside from the fact that it simply exists?
The moral clarity contained within:
That’s the key word in this whole saga: reassignment. Everyone involved in the case — and most commentators today — just assume that the government needs to assign children to public schools. Governor Milliken and his allies argued that kids should be assigned to schools based on race, while their opponents argued that kids should be assigned to schools based on their address.
Here is the huge moral problem with both of those positions: Whenever the government takes on the role of assigning children to specific public schools, then it also takes on the role of enforcing their exclusion from other public schools. This is why parents, in the 21st century, can be put in jail for using someone else’s address to get their kids into a high-quality school. This is why school districts hire private eyes to spy on kids and to conduct residency checks.
The answer to this conundrum is so simple: We need to move away from school assignments. Parents, not bureaucrats, should be allowed to ignore the arbitrary school district lines that divide our communities.
Public schools should be required to be open to the public.
“Tear down these walls” indeed.
Proving that “nesses” really matter.
Starlee-ness.
Bradford-ness.
And, of course, perhaps the most important “ness “of all:
CharterFolk-ness.
Of Chinese Walls
We live in a world, sadly, where in some places walls are being built faster than they’re being torn down.
Not just in our society, but across the world.
To wit:
Families that live in or come from the countryside face a bigger challenge. Rural schools tend to be shoddy, sometimes lacking basic facilities such as a library. Their students often end up in secondary schools that focus on vocational training. This rarely leads to university. The children of rural migrants who work in cities have it no better. Many are barred from city schools because of the hukou system, which ties access to public services to the place where one’s household is registered.
To make matters worse, elite universities, which are concentrated in wealthy areas, reserve a disproportionate number of spots for locals. In 2016 the Ministry of Education tried to get such universities to set aside 140,000 places, about 6.5% of the total, for students from poorer areas. To make room, fewer locals would be admitted. But protests erupted in cities. “Why should they eat from our bowls?” one angry mother asked the New York Times. The government walked back the policy.
These are great walls.
“Great Wall of China” walls in their dimension.
An Iron Curtain being brought down between those with means and those without.
Born of a recognition that in the modern economy so much depends upon whether your kids are well educated.
And built around a sad belief that learning and opportunity has to be a zero-sum game.
Not only must my kid get something great, but he or she has to get it in ways that other kids do not.
Colombian Dismantling
At the same time, we also have a vague intuition that things hang in the balance.
Will the forces putting up walls or the forces taking them down ultimately prevail?
For every example we have of wall construction, we have at least as many of wall dismantling.
Again, not just in our country but across the whole world.
I remember one of my most amazing hours.
It came at the end of an odyssey arising out of a family emergency that interrupted my work here at CharterFolk.
At the end of an all-consuming three weeks, as our airplane for the United States made its way down the runway, I finally had the chance to open my New York Times app. There was a story in English …
… confirming all the lessons I had learned about the state of public education in Colombia while I was there.
That, like in the United States where we have CharterFolk pushing on to make a new generation of schools without walls, Colombia has ConcesiónFolk doing the same.
It was that amazing hour when it finally clicked in that I am part of something even bigger than I had realized.
Something that keeps even more octane in my tank to this very day.
This spring we saw confirmation that, in fact, Colombia’s version of charter schools are doing remarkable things with students.
In some places, CharterFolk, new walls are going up.
In others, old ones are being fortified.
But in many, many others, we must recognize, they are being dismantled.
Contrasting Referenda
Wherever we turn, we see evidence of things hanging in the balance.
In one state, we see a drive to create charter schools that is clearly supported by the overwhelming majority of policy makers in the state …
… now going to the ballot.
In another state, status quo interests are using the referendum process …
… to try to pass a dismantling of standards in public education ..
… that virtually no mainstream policy makers support.
Of Rock and North Stars
This is the cacophony into which the charter school movement steers right now.
A broad education policy landscape that has never been in greater need of coherence and clarity.
A world where things hang in the balance.
It is a realm where leadership really matters.
Where “ness-ness” really matters.
Where, perhaps indeed, inspired leadership can actually prove the difference maker.
For years now I have been doing all I can to advance two central assertions.
The first is that the charter school movement needs better advocacy, and that can only be achieved by our world building stronger membership organizations that are set up to get CharterFolk more involved in the political process.
The second is that we need to change what we advocate for such that the public, and indeed we CharterFolk ourselves, can more firmly understand that we are on the right side of history.
Are on the right side of the Brandenburg Gate.
It’s been one nonstop calling for both Rock and North Stars.
Rock Star advocacy advanced toward North Star moral clarity.
We’ve known from the first moment that Starlee was announced that she has the Rock Star part well covered.
This week we saw that the North Star part is well within her reach too.
Amen.