Weekend greetings, CharterFolk.
It’s been a week where many thank you’s have come our way – thank you’s for the content we have been sharing here at CharterFolk of late.
Several new ones came in about the “Straight Up No Chaser” chat I had with Andrew Broy a few weeks back, as Folk are continuing to find time to view it. If you haven’t yet, I encourage you to do so.
From an advocacy structure standpoint, the charter school movement still has much to build. We do not yet have every organization we need, by a long shot. And we certainly don’t have some cookie cutter that’s going to stamp out a great advocacy organization for every state in the country.
But we now know much more clearly what works.
And if we run the play, we can now say with confidence that advocacy will strengthen. No doubt.
Andrew said many interesting things during our time together, but if there is one overarching straight up no chaser message I take from his comments, it’s this:
If CharterFolk from across the country come together to run the play, advocacy will greatly improve. The only question before us now is whether we will in fact come together.
This week’s CharterFolk X piece about Rhonda Deomampo at Synergy Academies in Los Angeles – another post that generated many thank you’s this week – underscored why we have more reason for hope than ever that such coming together is in fact emerging.
A common refrain we hear in CharterLand is that not all of our new leaders coming into storied charter school organizations like Synergy bring the same moxie to improve opportunity or the same commitment to movement advocacy that earlier leaders did.
I tend to worry about those challenges less than others do, especially if we, as Howard Fuller beseeches us to do …
… proactively engage our leaders about what this movement is all about.
When you see leaders like Rhonda coming forward – leaders who have worked in educational environments far less conducive to excellence than the charter school space can be – you realize that the talent engine powering this movement is as strong as it has ever been.
And when you see Rhonda among the earliest leaders in California to commit to supporting CCSA’s new effort to strengthen regional advocacy across the state – while also helping encourage many others to do the same – you see how much potential the charter school movement has today to build advocacy strength beyond anything we have previously seen.
This, CharterFolk, is how straight up no chaser unity is achieved.
It is helping create the most compelling synergy emerging in the charter school movement today:
Leaders overseeing strong charter school organizations coming together to form strong advocacy organizations, which in turn empower those school organizations to achieve even more for kids.
Other thank you’s came in this week as well.
For Debbie’s great Contributor Column about finding new ways to show how charter schools are improving the lives of those we serve.
Debbie was recognized as CharterFolk X herself a few years back and shows through her post that she continues to push our world in helpful ways to think anew about the value we are creating for kids, families, and communities.
Thank you’s have also continued to come in for Shaina and Patrick’s post from last week about the difficult judgment calls that must be made in this era of declining enrollment in order for charter schools to keep growing and offering improved opportunity.
As Shaina and Patrick point out, we are in a different era right now, and our approaches to the work must evolve to reflect that reality.
I return to this theme below.
But before I do, I want to recognize these thank you’s and tip you all off that we are about to enter one of my favorite times of the year, when we offer thank you’s back to our extraordinary contributors.
Each year we highlight some of the posts that have most resonated with readers over the prior twelve months. We call them our Brian’s Voice Awards, named for the friend to whom I made a promise that ultimately turned into the creation of CharterFolk, an effort to make sure that the voices of people in the charter school movement are even better heard.
This past year, we have been fortunate to receive Contributor Columns as compelling as any that have come before, and many more writers are now in the chute for the months ahead.
If any of you would like to contribute a column here at CharterFolk, please ping me directly at jed@charterfolk.org.
Meanwhile, on we go, grateful to occupy a space where so many thank you’s are both flowing in and flowing out.
Prop 39 For All – The Times They Are A-Changing
If there is a second recurring theme we return to here at CharterFolk – in addition to our need for coherent advocacy structure – it is our need for improved advocacy agendas.
The times, as Shaina and Patrick point out, they are a-changing, and our advocacy agendas need to change with them. In my view, they aren’t changing quickly enough, and that is holding us back.
This is why I beat incessantly on the drum that we need new North Stars across the country …
… ones that reflect the conditions we now face.
In many parts of America, charter schools have grown to have systemic impact. Yet many of our policy agendas remain rooted in a “bastions of innovation” theory of action more reminiscent of the Bill Clinton era than the current moment.
Great advocacy and ultimately movement progress are dependent on two things:
- Having great muscle cars – the kinds of great advocacy organizations Andrew Broy is talking about.
- And having great places to drive them to – compelling policy agendas that can steer our organizations and our movement toward meaningful progress.
But it is not only at the macro level – broad North Stars – where our agendas need updating. It is also in the age-old charter advocacy areas themselves: funding, facilities, freedom, faster growth, and more.
And nowhere is that more true than in facilities.
Across the country, enrollment decline is leaving increasing numbers of school buildings either empty or vastly under-utilized. The waters around us, as Dylan so famously put it, have grown.
Yet much of charter school facilities advocacy still operates as if we are living in an era of relentless district enrollment growth and facility scarcity.
It’s why I believe that if there is any aspect of our policy work that must reflect the fact that the times they are a changin’, it is facilities advocacy.
Our historic frustrations in facilities advocacy are perhaps best encapsulated by California’s experience under Proposition 39.
In 2000, charter school advocates supported a statewide ballot initiative that lowered the threshold for local school bond approval from two-thirds to 55 percent. Since that time, California voters have authorized more than $200 billion in local K-14 school construction bonds. Prior to Prop 39, roughly 55 percent of local facilities bond measures passed. Since its passage, roughly 81 percent have passed.
And many of those successful bond measures passed only because Prop 39 lowered the threshold.
As I showed in a post a few years back, numerous large bond measures – including several in Los Angeles – received between 55 percent and two-thirds support. In other words, absent charter school advocacy and Prop 39, tens of billions of dollars in school construction likely would never have occurred.
But what charter schools were supposed to receive in return – reasonably equivalent facilities access – never truly materialized.
And that failure reveals the central flaw in first-generation charter facilities advocacy.
As I have written before …
… many of our facilities struggles ultimately stem from the fact that charter schools have historically operated as tenants within systems where districts retained landlord power.
Nearly all of our prior advocacy efforts attempting to help charter school access existing school buildings, including Prop 39 itself, left school districts in place as the landlords of public education facilities.
That meant charter schools could gain access only so long as districts, as landlords, chose to cooperate honestly and fairly. And as we have repeatedly seen, landlord power creates endless opportunities for manipulation – through utilization formulas, alternative uses, pricing games, procedural delay, and litigation.
Call it school districts standing in the doorway and blocking up the hall.
Los Angeles offers perhaps the clearest illustration.
At the time many of LAUSD’s major bond measures were approved, the district served roughly 730,000 students. Simultaneously, the district argued it needed funding to create more than 170,000 additional seats – implying a facilities footprint approaching 900,000 students.
Today, LAUSD serves fewer than 400,000 students.
Meanwhile, charter schools themselves have financed and built tens of thousands of additional seats across Los Angeles over the past two decades.
And despite all of that excess capacity, charter schools still routinely must fight in court merely to preserve access to facilities they are legally entitled to use.
That is not a facilities system.
It is a landlord system.
And it is increasingly creaking under the weight of a broader societal reality:
Massive numbers of precious school facilities are now sitting under-utilized or empty.
It creates one of the greatest facilities advocacy opportunities our movement has ever seen.
The old world is rapidly aging.
Developments in Florida, Ohio, and Indianapolis attest to that fact.
Florida’s Schools of Hope breakthrough was the first major sign that a different future might actually be possible.
It demonstrated that large-scale access to district facilities actually can occur if districts are not allowed to hide behind convoluted utilization formulas or endless alternative use claims. Instead, districts are required to report simple and transparent building capacity and actual enrollment figures for all of their campuses – dramatically limiting the gamesmanship that has undermined so many earlier facilities access efforts across the country.
And once facilities have been identified as under-utilized, the state board, not the school district, becomes the ultimate arbitrator for how charter schools will access those facilities.
It was a policy breakthrough foundational enough not only to give reason for hope that high-quality opportunity could expand within Florida.
It gave reason for hope that facilities advocacy itself could be transformed across the entire United States.
And now Ohio is signaling that this evolution in facilities advocacy is not confined to one state, but is beginning to spread.
Look at the amazing testimony that Fordham’s Chad Aldis offered in the Ohio Senate last week …
… perhaps the clearest evidence we’ve seen yet that advocates across the country are now prepared to move beyond our first-generation facilities approaches and toward a completely new North Star:
I want to focus my testimony on one part of this bill that is both overdue and absolutely necessary: the provisions strengthening Ohio’s unused school facilities law.
Let’s be clear about the problem. Ohio already has a law on the books requiring school districts to make unused or severely underutilized buildings available to other public schools. That includes buildings that are sitting empty—or those operating at less than 60 percent capacity.
That 60 percent threshold is not new. It is not radical. It is existing law.
And yet, too many districts have treated that law as optional. They’ve slow-walked requests. They’ve redefined “use” to avoid triggering the law. They’ve warehoused half-empty buildings while denying access to public charter schools serving Ohio students. They’ve quickly torn down buildings to avoid making them available to charter schools.
This isn’t speculation—it’s well documented. Charter leaders have long reported that districts are “generally uncooperative” in making facilities available, and state officials have flagged similar concerns.
Put more bluntly: districts have been playing games.
That’s why the unused facilities language in SB 311 is so important. It doesn’t invent a new policy. It clarifies, enforces, and brings transparency to an existing one.
It was, in short, the kind of testimony showing that we are prepared to bring to an end the landlord system that school districts have exploited to their own advantage for decades.
Evidence that the old road is rapidly agin’.
This, CharterFolk, is the next frontier in facilities advocacy.
- School districts being required annually to disclose under-utilized facilities using transparent and objective capacity metrics.
- Neutral third parties – not districts – overseeing the allocation of those facilities.
- Facilities being leased or sold to charter schools at reasonable cost or book value, not manipulated market valuations designed to block access.
- And finally, a clear understanding that if public school facilities are sold, the proceeds will become long-term public education assets distributed equitably on a per-pupil basis across charter and district public schools – not short-term windfalls controlled solely by districts.
And look, I recognize some of this runs the risk of sounding like prophecy with my pen.
But the line, CharterFolk, is being drawn.
Look at Indianapolis.
The district is no longer the landlord there.
A new neutral third party is.
District schools and charter schools alike will gain access to facilities through the same basic process:
By families choosing them.
And by operators generating enough learning to continue earning the right to serve students.
The old order is rapidly fading, CharterFolk.
And a new North Star is appearing on the horizon.
It’s what our advocacy muscle cars must now drive toward with all the speed we can muster.
Not Prop 39 only for charter schools.
But Prop 39 for all.