Good day, CharterFolk.
My apologies for getting this one out a little late. I had meant to get it out over the weekend.
But it is a complicated one, and it took a little extra time to get right.
The topic is an important one:
Abuse of discretion.
School districts misusing authorities that should never have been entrusted to them in the first place.
And what we do about it.
Because what we do about it will, to an important degree, define the trajectory of progress our movement can make in the years ahead.
Of course, the central misplacement consists of empowering school districts to serve as charter school authorizers.
I know whereof I speak.
In the early 2000s, I served as the charter school authorizer for San Diego Unified.
I came away convinced that school districts should not be authorizers.
The reasons were many.
Part of the problem was simply organizational. Charter authorizing was tucked away in the basement of the district, secondary in importance to what everyone understandably regarded as the real work of the organization:
Trying to improve district-run schools.
But the deeper problem was structural.
The school district was being asked to regulate institutions with which it was directly competing for students, funding and, ultimately, public confidence.
My next boss, Larry Rosenstock, the CEO of High Tech High, understood the contradiction immediately.
He had a memorable way of describing it.
Why, he would ask, would we assign responsibility for holding charter schools accountable to school districts, which are among the least accountable entities we find anywhere in modern life?
It is an observation that has stayed with me.
As has something my previous boss, Alan Bersin, did while serving as superintendent of San Diego Unified.
Alan understood the conflict of interest the district faced when it took on charter-authorizing responsibility.
He saw the hostility many district staff felt toward charter schools and knew that many would always want to close them.
At the same time, he believed many of the district’s own schools needed to be held to much higher standards.
So he proposed a novel idea.
San Diego would adopt a charter school policy stating that the district could not close an underperforming charter school unless it first demonstrated that it had closed district schools exhibiting comparable levels of underperformance.
Normally, CharterFolk do not line up to celebrate a new policy governing how they are going to be regulated.
In this case, they lined up out the boardroom door to express support.
Not because they expected the district to close charter schools less often.
But because they believed the district would finally have to hold itself to the same standards it wanted to impose on everyone else.
Larry Rosenstock, a black belt in Aikido, later described Alan’s policy as a stroke fit for the dojo.
It demonstrated mastery of the central premise at the heart of his chosen martial art.
Instead of meeting force with force, redirect the opponent’s energy back upon itself.
Alan had taken the district’s desire to hold charter schools accountable and redirected it toward holding district schools accountable as well.
I have been thinking a lot about authorizing and Aikido in recent weeks as I’ve watched events unfold in California.
Because California is where opponents of charter schools first partially enacted their new agenda, an agenda centered on authorizing.
In 2017, the NEA approved a new charter school policy stating that only school districts should be allowed to authorize charter schools and that districts should be able to consider their own financial impact when making authorizing decisions.
It was, to be plain, an effort to achieve something approaching a national charter school moratorium by giving school districts discretion they should never have been entrusted with and legitimizing the consideration most likely to corrupt that discretion:
Their own institutional self-interest.
Gavin Newsom was the first prominent Democrat, despite a history of fairly strong support for charter schools, to capitulate. His election resulted in California’s charter school law being contorted to conform with the NEA’s new vision.
It represents one of the worst charter-policy setbacks in the history of the movement.
Despite it, however, California’s charter schools have shown remarkable resilience, adding as many students in recent years as any state in the nation.
To some extent, you could argue that Newsom did what he could to minimize the damage, agreeing only to the very letter of the NEA and CTA agenda and not an iota more.
But another way to look at it is that the pandemic and an extension of automatic renewals merely delayed the carnage.
We now find ourselves in a situation where hundreds of charter renewals will come forward in the next few years.
So now we will finally see the fundamental threat that AB 1505 and AB 1507 represent.
Under the new framework, charter schools are sorted into three performance tiers.
High-performing schools generally receive streamlined renewals.
Low-performing schools are generally denied.
But schools in the middle tier can be renewed or denied depending on how local school boards interpret a sprawling collection of indicators and whether they conclude that closure is in the “best interest of pupils.”
916 California charter schools are now in that middle band.
More than three-quarters of the state’s charter school community.
Think about that.
More than 900 schools now occupy the very category in which local districts possess their greatest discretion.
And a scan of the landscape reveals how aggressively some districts intend to use it.
Last fall, LAUSD, a district now in the news for having created a massive fiscal deficit through its approval of compensation agreements it plainly cannot afford …
… denied the renewal of Gabriella Charter School.
A few months later, it attempted to take Locke High School back from Green Dot.
Both were stopped by a reasonable county appeal board, one of the few remaining checks against district abuse of discretion in California’s authorizing landscape.
The same thing happened in Sacramento. Another district confronting serious fiscal distress following years of mismanagement …
… attempted to deny the renewal of an Aspire school …
… only to see the appeal approved by a reasonable county board, which, unsurprisingly, resulted in status quo interests spending massively to win county school board races so that such reasonableness will not be present in the years ahead.
In other parts of the state, the vacuum of reasonableness is already here.
Perhaps no place is as sobering as Alameda County.
There, Oakland Unified, also facing a fiscal reckoning following years of woeful mismanagement, denied the renewal of Aspire Golden State College Preparatory Academy, a middle-tier school that district staff had recommended for approval. When the Alameda County Board of Education upheld Oakland’s denial, Aspire had no choice but to appeal to the State Board of Education.
Under California’s revised statutes, the State Board could not simply conclude that Oakland had made the wrong decision. It could overturn the denial only if it found that Oakland had legally “abused its discretion.”
Many pulled out all the stops to demonstrate that Oakland Unified had done precisely that. Former Governor Jerry Brown, a person who understands Oakland Unified’s long history of abusing discretion as well as anyone, was among the first to speak.
But ultimately, the State Board took no action, with members casting blame on the Legislature for having enacted a statute that left the board, as EdSource described it, “puzzled” about what would constitute an abuse of discretion.
Think of that.
The highest policymaking body in the state claiming it could not determine what constituted an abuse of discretion.
It leaves us not with charter school accountability.
But with charter school open season.
Some readers may remember that I previously argued that the Biden Administration’s proposed regulations for the federal Charter Schools Program amounted to an attempt to take the principles embedded in AB 1505 and AB 1507 national.
Now it is my contention that, should Democrats find themselves in a place of greater authority after the next presidential election, it is clear what status quo interests will attempt to achieve.
Open season on charter schools.
Only at a national level.
Implemented through…
You guessed it…
An abuse of discretion.
It is a form of abuse …
… we are increasingly seeing …
… across the country.
I do not present myself as someone who can read political tea leaves better than others.
I certainly do not understand what is happening inside every state capitol better than the advocates who are much closer to the action.
But I feel fairly confident saying that a full-scale rollback of AB 1505 and AB 1507 is unlikely.
As is the elimination of district authorizing that we would prefer to see enacted across the country.
That would amount to meeting force with force.
When Aikido training suggests another approach:
Use districts’ zeal to close our schools to advance what we stand for.
An end to vacuums of accountability.
A system in which all schools improve.
And all students are better served.
District zeal, of course, is scary.
Strong forces are declaring open season on our schools and the children we serve.
But, CharterFolk, it is essential that we recognize something else.
That zeal is also the force our collective black belt can best exploit.
The unsightly spectacle of districts attempting to close schools that perform better than their own calls out for redress.
And given district desperation in the current landscape –
Declining enrollment.
Plummeting learning.
Histories of financial mismanagement finally coming home to roost.
District zeal – not merely abuse of discretion, but wanton abuse – will be almost everywhere we look in the years ahead.
So it behooves us to be ready with crisp thinking about what to do each time a district makes its lunge.
Our strategy should begin with Alan’s recognition:
It is simply unseemly for districts to attempt to close schools operated by others when they have failed to close their own.
This, CharterFolk, is what we should bring to legislators in California and everywhere else districts serve as default authorizers.
Not necessarily a blanket elimination of everything contained in AB 1505 and AB 1507.
Nor yet a proposal to do away with district authorizing altogether.
Though we will get there eventually.
Start instead with a simple assertion.
What the supposedly puzzled California State Board apparently needs spelled out for it:
A district attempting to close a charter school that, controlling for student demographics, performs as well as or better than schools the district continues to operate cannot, by definition, be acting in the best interests of students.
If performance warrants closing the charter school in the interests of its students, comparable or worse performance should create a presumption that closing district schools is also in the interests of their students.
A district unwilling to accept that consequence for its own schools should not be allowed to impose it on a charter.
Any action to the contrary represents an abuse of discretion.
And should not be allowed.
Anywhere.
See what legislators say in response.
Especially when the recent behavior of so many districts has been so abjectly irresponsible.
Look again at Oakland.
For years, teachers unions and allied board members resisted repeated efforts to close or consolidate district schools even as enrollment declined and the district’s finances deteriorated.
The board rejected multiple closure proposals.
It removed a superintendent who continued raising the need for consolidation.
Finally, more than 60 Oakland principals publicly urged district leaders to close schools, warning that the district could no longer spread scarce resources across so many campuses.
Still, the district resisted closing schools while adding further compensation obligations it had no idea whether it could afford.
Then, amid that track record, it turned around and voted to close a charter school, supposedly because that school had failed to meet the district’s standards of quality.
You call that, CharterFolk, a lunge calling out for an expert pivot.
Make legislators try to defend it.
Force them to defend the indefensible.
If a district wants to close a charter school, let it first demonstrate that it has closed its own.
Not studied them.
Not placed them on an improvement plan.
Not promised to monitor them more closely.
Closed them.
Using the same coherent measures of student learning it applies to all schools.
Because one of the greatest miscalculations our movement has made in recent years was assuming that complicated, multiple-measure accountability systems somehow protect charter schools.
Gobbledygook, CharterFolk, is not our friend.
We have finally reached the point where we can see that clearly.
California’s accountability framework has been criticized repeatedly for its incoherence.
One national review gave the state a D for transparency in reporting public-school performance.
Which may be perfectly adequate for protecting the status quo, but becomes an existential threat for charter schools.
Fifty-seven different ways for district schools to pass means fifty-seven different ways for charter schools to fail.
As Aspire’s nonrenewal so clearly attests.
When renewal decisions rest on dozens of indicators, dashboards, colors, weightings and undefined judgments, almost no one can explain why one school is renewed and another closed.
And that is precisely the point.
Far better is a narrow set of clear standards centered on acceptable growth in foundational literacy and numeracy.
And, hear me, CharterFolk, those standards must be supported by literacy and numeracy data reported every year so that progress can be tracked over time.
Again, look at Aspire.
California uses the Smarter Balanced assessment system, which tests students in grades 3 through 8 and then once more in 11th grade.
Think about what that means.
A charter high school educating students for four years can effectively find its future determined by a single statewide academic data point.
That is patently absurd.
Not something any district superintendent or status quo-protecting legislator would allow to be imposed on district schools.
Nor would a district superintendent allow renewal criteria to be imposed on district schools if those criteria had not been articulated beforehand.
Slapping together renewal standards at the last second to justify whatever charter closure a district wants to make?
No.
Make the standards public.
Specific.
Posted on the district’s website.
Date-stamped.
In effect before the school begins the charter term upon which its renewal will be judged.
And applied to district schools over the same period.
Which brings us to perhaps the final Aikido move:
Insisting on independent verification.
A neutral party in the dojo.
Before a district may close a charter school, it should not be enough for the district to self-certify that it applied the same standards to its own schools.
A third party acceptable to both the district and the charter school community should verify that the standards were established in advance, applied consistently, based on legitimate comparison schools, and accompanied by equal consequences for district schools.
If it cannot, the nonrenewal should not proceed.
Which, of course, brings us to what we have been building toward:
Look at everything we have had to construct simply to prevent school districts from abusing their discretion.
Parity of treatment between charter and district schools.
An end to gobbledygook.
Public posting of standards.
Enough data in the landscape to support reasonable decisions.
Third-party validation to establish trust.
Look at how many protections must be written into law simply to reduce the likelihood that school districts will misuse authority that should never have been placed in their hands.
One solution is to keep adding safeguards.
Another is to stop placing that discretion in conflicted hands in the first place.
Entrusting, as Larry put it, enforcement of school accountability to arguably the least accountable entities we find anywhere in modern life.
What we need, of course, is the opposite:
Independent authorizers without conflicts of interest.
Authorizers operating not out of the basements of other institutions, but as organizations whose central purpose is to become excellent at the extraordinarily difficult work of holding schools accountable.
Authorizers capable of sensitively raising the bar so that all schools improve – charter AND district.
Ultimately, helping release a renaissance of learning across the country.
Ultimately, we will get there.
But it’s going to take years of effort, making use of the desperate lunges that represent our greatest sources of opportunity.
Which will require, of course, that we stay together.
United.
With every school a member of its state association as we create the collective push for change, something I highlighted on the very day I began focusing on LAUSD’s appalling treatment of Gabriella.
CharterFolk…
We are entering a period when school district desperation will lead districts to declare open season on charter schools as never before.
In doing so, they will generate abundant evidence of their own abuse of discretion.
That is the force now being directed against us.
The Aikido move is to redirect it.
Every effort to close a charter school should become a demand that districts hold themselves to the same standards.
Every opaque renewal decision should become a demand for clearer evidence.
Every fiscal-impact claim should become an examination of the district decisions that produced the fiscal distress.
And every safeguard required to prevent abuse should become further evidence that the discretion never belonged in district hands in the first place.
The ultimate opponent is not a particular school district.
Or a union.
Or a policymaker.
It is a public-school governance structure created without the checks and balances necessary to ensure that all schools are treated fairly and held genuinely accountable.
Alan Bersin’s Aikido move showed us a path forward.
Use the force now being directed against charter schools to create something better.
A system in which all public schools have the autonomy they need.
The accountability children deserve.
And the independent oversight required to sustain both.
That is what our movement should now seek.
Not simply protection for charter schools.
But a new architecture for public education altogether.
An architecture capable of ensuring that all children finally receive the great public schooling they deserve.
That is the Aikido move.