Good day, CharterFolk.
I’ve had a parade of family and friends stay with us in recent weeks, which has gotten in the way of my regular publishing calendar.
And now I’m headed into a week off the grid for a horseback trip in the Bob Marshall.
So I’ll get this post off today and then plan to get back in the saddle – or out of it, as the case may be – a week from Sunday. In the meantime, we have some great CharterFolk X and Contributor Columns in the chute for you.
It’s a challenging moment to attempt to write something coherent.
The crosscurrents coming together …
- Enrollment decline
- The emergence of AI
- The red/blue divergence
- The funding of private school choice both federally and at state levels
- The pulling back of the COVID funding punchbowl
- The abject brokenness of so many big school districts
- The fundamental disconnect that has grown up between so many parents and the traditional system
… speak to two competing interpretations.
One is that it’s just one thing after another. Nothing new here. Just the ongoing drama that public education is always in the middle of.
The other is the belief that something fundamental is happening.
The disintegration of the old is accelerating.
And the ungainly something new is just about ready to get on its feet.
Perhaps it’s because I’m so decidedly in the second camp that I find myself constantly believing that most of the discussion we see about public education is bereft of a long-term theory of change.
We end up arguing about this policy proposal or that one without ever putting our arguments in a broader context.
Over the past couple of weeks, we’ve seen some milestones that encourage looking through the broader frame.
A country celebrating its 250th anniversary.
The National Alliance getting us together for our annual conference marking our 35th year as a movement.
And here at CharterFolk, thousands of new readers coming into the community.
So I’ll venture a post with three purposes:
- A recap
- A commemoration
- An introduction
In the process, I’ll propose a frame from which a new theory of change might emerge.
Let’s get to it.
A Recap
Given the need for a broader frame, I don’t think the Alliance could have done better this year than gather us in New Orleans, the first of what will ultimately be many cities in the United States where all public schools become charter schools.
And where all city students and families benefit greatly because of it.
In the opening plenary, Dana Peterson from New Schools New Orleans told the city’s story well, as did Starlee, stressing that 20 years ago, 61% of the city’s schools were deemed to be failing by the state.
Today, zero are.
And yet, to this day, there are still many in the New Orleans political landscape who would do harm to the city’s charter schools.
It’s a dynamic playing out across the country, with Rhode Island being perhaps the greatest example.
In the second half of her comments, Starlee highlighted that the Alliance had rescinded its Charter Champion award from Rhode Island’s governor, who had previously supported charter schools but has now signed a charter school moratorium bill into law.
It lays bare the central irony and the central political imperative before the charter school movement right now.
Sadly, it doesn’t matter to many in this country whether charter schools like those in New Orleans and Rhode Island are offering far, far better education than what was available before.
Status quo interests are doing everything they can to slow cities from evolving toward what we have in New Orleans.
Meanwhile, anyone wanting better education for all should want their cities to get to New Orleans as fast as they can.
To be clear, when I say that more cities will become places where all public schools are charter schools, I don’t mean that we want charter schools for the sake of charter schools.
I mean that we want all public schools to operate according to a different public education architecture – one that updates the originating architecture Horace Mann helped lay down nearly two centuries ago:
Schools free enough to create the opportunity families want.
Schools held accountable by responsible, conflict-of-interest-free public authorizers.
Schools open to all students.
And families no longer blocked from opportunity by attendance boundaries, selective admissions, or the accident of what neighborhood they can afford to live in.
That is the “something new” struggling to get on its feet.
And the places that are furthest along in bringing it about are already showing us the way.
A Commemoration
Like so many attending this year’s conference, I traveled home to find headlines waiting for me showing how my local community is part of this national drama.
The story in Sacramento, a city whose schools are in abject crisis, is now shifting toward an awareness that the failure of the city’s schools is damaging the well-being of the entire city.
The same realization is dawning in St. Louis …
…and Minneapolis.
In Philadelphia – the city where events occurred 250 years ago that launched our nation – the story is very much the same.
A dysfunctional urban school district is doing all it can to slow the movement of students and families into schools they want to attend.
Recent polling shows just how dire the public’s assessment of the traditional system is, and how decidedly families want to see charter schools continue to grow.
And still, the opposition mounts.
Two years ago, the National Alliance hosted its annual conference in Boston. I wrote a piece asking CharterFolk what anniversary we should be celebrating that year.
The 70th anniversary of Brown v. Board?
The 50th anniversary of Milliken v. Bradley, which effectively dismantled Brown and gave us the legacy segregated system we still have today?
Or the 25th anniversary of the state’s charter school movement, which has proven to be the only reform able to provide a systemic solution?
In that piece, I highlighted the irony of the fact that Massachusetts – a state with some of the ugliest history of educational segregation and unfairness – had imposed a cap on further charter school growth, the one thing that could help the state overcome that ugly history.
The more our schools succeed, the closer we come to bringing our country to something fairer and more excellent, the more forcefully we are opposed.
In some ways, what I wrote in 2024 is exactly what I would write again today.
Succeed.
Provoke blowback.
Repeat.
That remains the dominant rhythm of our work.
But in other important ways, what I am saying today is different.
Because the charter school story has continued to unfold.
We can see things now that we couldn’t see as clearly two years ago.
Surely the increasingly irrefutable evidence that is now coming out of New Orleans helps.
But it’s much more than that.
Look at the lawsuit that has come out of Massachusetts this spring, one pointing out the blatantly obvious: the state allocates educational opportunity unfairly.
It comes from parties who have previously lumped charter schools in with the problem, if not tried to claim that we are somehow the source of the problem.
But interestingly, this time, they’re actually silent on charter schools.
They simply suggest that new forms of non-charter public school choice should be allowed.
It’s subtle, but I think it’s actually a very important shift in how historical detractors talk – or, in this case, don’t talk – about our movement.
In New Jersey, a desegregation lawsuit got started around the beginning of the decade.
As had been the case for decades, the lawsuit called out charter schools as things that make segregation worse.
But through the course of the litigation that has played out over many years, the conversation has shifted from treating charter schools as a cause of segregation to recognizing that public school choice across municipal boundaries – including charter schools – may, in fact, be part of the remedy.
Or perhaps even more compellingly, look at the example that Indianapolis has added to the national dialogue since we had our conference in Boston just two years ago.
It is a breakthrough showing that what New Orleans achieved can happen elsewhere:
Essentially, an all-charter system where all public schools operate on the same footing.
And it is an evolution not resulting in part from some tragic storm, but from what a civic community can consciously choose to bring about when it is willing to say the unspeakable thing.
If it is willing to propose the unproposable thing.
So, yes, CharterFolk, much of our work still feels like one long experience of Groundhog Day:
Succeed.
Provoke blowback.
Repeat.
But for those of us paying close attention, we can see the “and yet:”
The national conversation is shifting.
We’re not talking about these problems exactly as we were in prior years.
Our path forward is the one being blazed in New Orleans and Indianapolis. And it is already leading to new conversations about how charter schools can help bring an end to the most pernicious segregation still appallingly ingrained across public education today.
Segregation of opportunity.
The unfair allocation of education quality.
A scarcity enforced by purveyors of the old system, who would rather ration access to better schools than allow the abundance our movement stands poised to release.
That is why, if I were to choose an anniversary for us all to get anchored around, it would not be some commemoration of Brown, or Milliken, or even the maturing of the charter school movement itself.
Nor would it be around any anniversary of the country writ large.
It would be around the design of our public education system itself.
Which, ironically, traces its pivotal modern origins back to the very state where this summer’s litigation was filed.
Massachusetts has some of the worst segregation of opportunity of any public school systems in the country.
It is also the state that gave birth to the pivotal institutional moment in the American common school movement.
In 1837, Massachusetts became the first state to create a board of education, and Horace Mann became its first secretary.
Over the next decade, Mann’s annual reports gave voice and structure to one of the most important civic achievements in American history: the rise of free, tax-supported public education for all.
In other words, Mann helped lay down the originating architecture of American public education.
But embedded within that achievement was a fatal weakness.
The same system that expanded the promise of public education also allowed opportunity to be parceled out through local boundaries, local tax bases, and later, selective-admissions arrangements that locked some children into abundance and others into scarcity.
Eleven years from now, CharterFolk, our country will mark the 200th anniversary of that pivotal moment in the common school movement.
Before that bicentennial arrives, we need to do what Mann did in his time: define the public education architecture the country now needs.
Not one that retreats from public education.
One that renews it.
It’s my belief that, by that time, one of two things will have happened.
Either we will have brought forward the policy reforms necessary to evolve the old common school system toward something truly excellent and equitable.
Or we will see our country step back from its commitment to public education at all.
An Introduction
So for the thousands of you who are seeing this post as the first one you have read from me, I recognize that it may serve as something of an introduction.
This is the kind of stuff I write about here at CharterFolk.
It is grounded in a belief that our country needs a new coherence in public education.
A North Star toward which we all aspire.
And a recognition that no other force in the landscape stands as ready to advance us toward that coherence than the people in our movement.
We don’t say that every charter school is a great school.
Just like we don’t say that we want more charter schools for the sake of charter schools.
What we want is a system where all schools are free enough to create the opportunity that kids and families want, while being held accountable by responsible, conflict-of-interest-free third parties.
Our theory, of course, presupposes the creation of many great new schools.
But it also includes the evolution of existing schools toward something very much like what charter schools are.
And we want all families to be able to access whatever school they want for their kids without the societal menace of attendance boundaries and selective admissions blocking their way.
Growing the pie of educational excellence in our country.
While cutting up that pie much more fairly.
That is the work.
That is the theory of change.
That is the architecture we need to build before the common school bicentennial arrives.
An architecture that goes after the ultimate segregation.
The segregation of opportunity.
Of any of the posts I’ve worked on here at CharterFolk over the past seven years, the one I wrote for our 2024 conference was the one I worked on the longest.
If there was one post I would want to suffice as a personal introduction, it would be that one.
Because of all the pieces I have written here, it may most crisply lay out both our central challenge and our greatest reason for hope.
The succeed/provoke blowback/repeat cycle continues playing out again and again.
But we can’t lose sight of the hope embedded in “and yet.”
The “and yet” is the recognition that the ground is slowly shifting, creating an opportunity for our movement to articulate the new architecture public education needs for its third century.
So, for those of you who know me well, I say: on we go.
For those of you who are new …
… nice to meet you.