Happy Labor Day, CharterFolk.
I start with the latest WonkyFolk recording with Shaka Mitchell getting pick of the week from the Superintendent’s Association.
I do think it was a particularly interesting discussion if you haven’t had time for it yet. And it will provide good background for the heart of today’s post.
I also highlight the importance of Christina’s Contributor Column this week.
I don’t come with any hard data here, but I have enough anecdotal information across the years to be rather emphatic in my opinion: charter school organizations should have a much stronger bias toward promoting from within, and Christina’s piece provides helpful suggestions for organizations preparing proactively to grow their internal leadership benches.
I also highlight another very favorable piece about the experience in New Orleans post-Katrina.
Future-Ed also added an important, in-depth affirmation.
I will say that, thus far, I have been mildly surprised by how positive the coverage has been of the charter school story in New Orleans since Katrina, which confirms my intuition that we should be talking much more ourselves about what our contribution has been.
I will also say that I find it interesting that several articles have offered commentary on the lessons that charter schools have to offer private school advocates.
This is from the Future-Ed piece.
But in responding to the inequities that resulted from an unregulated market, Louisiana education leaders demonstrated that it is possible to combine the strengths of market reforms in public education with necessary regulatory protections for vulnerable students. They showed that it’s possible to pursue excellence and equity in public education at the same time.
“Government needs to exist in a publicly funded education system, not to manage schools, but to regulate equity,” John White, who now leads Great Minds, a national organization that produces curriculum materials, told a conference on the New Orleans reforms at Tulane a decade ago. “When we realized that charter schools would be serving essentially every child, it changed the paradigm.”
In that sense, the New Orleans experience is a cautionary tale for the new federal tuition tax program, that beginning in 2027 is expected to funnel billions of dollars to families to use for private schooling, perhaps without any of the protections for students that Louisiana officials came to realize were so important to their work to rethink New Orleans’ schools.
Finally before turning to the heart of today’s post, I extend thanks to many of you who have responded to my message about the CharterFolk Board getting stern with me that I need to work more on CharterFolk resources. We’re not out of the woods yet, but it has been heartening to see new individual subscriptions, organizational subscriptions, and new philanthropic support come in this week. I’ll provide a more detailed update later this month before I head off for my annual anniversary/vacation trip with Amy. In the meantime, it would be great to get even more new paid subscriptions from regular readers. So keep ’em coming! And anyone interested in securing organizational subscriptions or offering philanthropic support, please ping me directly at jed@charterfolk.org.
The Biggest New Federal Investment in K-12 in Our Lifetimes
To start the heart of today’s column, I return to this post from a couple years ago …
… wherein I posited that the Great Crack Up in red and blue states on education policy would continue to lead to a greater divergence on education policy …
… but the unsustainability of both sides’ education approaches – teetering school districts in blue contexts, and state-budget-busting universal vouchers in reds – would ultimately lead to a new convergence:
Both parties turning to the feds for massive infusions of new money to keep their different modes of education afloat.
And the only real question that remained was whether policy makers could hold their noses enough to allow the other side to go in directions they find objectionable.
But that in the end, given the degree of financial brokenness both sides face, my guess was that nose-holding would prevail.
An argument can be made that this scenario is exactly what we have seen in this summer’s approval of the new tax credit program inside the OBBB – a tax credit that, yes, funds private school choice, but also includes a policy innovation allowing resources to go to public schools for program enhancement.
So will Dems now do the nose-holding part or not?
But before getting to that, it helps to get a grasp on the potential size of this new program.
And it can be challenging to find baselines for comparison.
Overall K-12 expenditures in the country come in at about a trillion dollars …
… with the fed’s contributing about 12-13% of it.
Of the $120B of federal funding going into K-12, about $50B goes into Title I, IDEA and student nutrition. Over half goes into “Other and Unspecified Programs.” Here’s a table that Chat helped me make.
So it’s helpful to realize that there are different ways of looking at the benchmark, both the $120B number that people throw around in the aggregate, as well as the $30B in Title I and IDEA money that is most visible.
In terms of attempting to estimate the amount of money that will flow through the tax credit, there are about 138M taxpayers eligible to take the credit. If everyone takes it, that would yield $235B in new resources for education. The Joint Committee on Taxation, the entity responsible for scoring the cost of the new program (and having incentive to keep the estimate as low as possible so as to show little impact on the deficit), offered an official estimate of 2.2M taxpayers taking part, which would generate about $3.4B in resources for the new program.
The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy came up with a far higher number.
Another approach would be to assume that the same percentage of federal taxpayers will take advantage of the tax credit as do taxpayers in Arizona where there is a state program.
Meanwhile, Marguerita Roza has estimated that the program will be about $28B.
Here are the possible scenarios laid out side by side.
And to keep the relative sizes of things in proportion, I add back in the amount that the feds are currently investing in Title I and IDEA.
You can see the scope of this thing could be gargantuan.
My own estimate is that the total funding amount will end up closer to the ITEP model than any other estimate, roughly an amount equal to the federal government’s current overall expenditure on K-12.
My reason for thinking so is precisely because of the potential size of this thing.
Despite all the supposed handwringing that we see among Democratic governors about whether to opt in to the new program, ultimately, when the traditional system wakes up to the enormous potential size of the new funding that could be coming to it if policy makers define “program enhancements” creatively, and when school districts recognize their unique opportunity to market their preferred Scholarship Granting Organizations in ways that will certainly advantage them in front of others, I can’t see the overall public education establishment doing anything other than pivoting to get as much of the new pie as possible.
And in joining the marketing push, they’ll end up growing the program to be far larger than it would otherwise be.
So unlike Arizona, where few actors are encouraging taxpayers to make use of their tax credit option, the new reality is going to be every school district in America capitalizing on their unique positions in the landscape to encourage parents and the local community to make sure that new resources go to district schools.
Especially when those new resources won’t cost anyone other than the federal government a penny.
Because if school districts can convince but a third of those using the tax credit to direct their funds to public schools, the size of the benefit could end up matching what schools currently spend on Title I and special education.
And yes, people will make the argument that the feds directing resources to education via the tax credit will make them less likely to maintain their historic funding of public education. But given the amount of Democratic support for traditional public schools that remains in Congress, it seems highly unlikely that traditional public education funding will go the way of the USAID woodchipper.
In the end, it seems that the best assumption right now is that we are on the cusp of the largest new federal investment in education to have happened in our lifetimes, if not ever.
And while I’m not seeing much journalism yet about the public education establishment starting to give up its nose-holding, my sense is that we’re seeing smelling salts begin to pass below public education’s funding nostrils.
Which is leading to a lot of behind-the-scenes conversations going on among Democrats in state capitols across the country right now about how the traditional system can tap into this money.
The fact that the Superintendent’s Association identified our WonkyFolk post as its pick of the week I consider an early indicator.
It puts us just around the corner from an era where we will see more creative public education accounting happening than ever before.
Status quo interests will be working as imaginatively as possible to narrow down the core of public education so that there remains a larger amount of “program enhancement” to fund without violating the requirement that public education remain “tuition free.”
And yes, of course, traditional public education, with its concrete feet, will struggle to make that pivot. But when new money is on the table, isn’t it just amazing how nimble public schools can be? Just look how fast school districts prove able to shrink classes whenever class-size reduction funding comes available.
So it will be for this moment as well.
For the parts of public education that struggle most with agility, they’ll ultimately do what the status quo has learned to do in the past three and a half decades:
To look to charter schools, to see how we innovate, and to follow suit thereafter.
So, CharterFolk, in sum, my advice is not to resist this.
We can wish that the Great Crack Up was not happening.
Just like we could wish that the massive straddle wasn’t needed.
But that’s not the world we live in.
This new tax credit is happening whether we like it or not.
Some of the ways that this change plays out will run counter to our ideas about excellence and equity in public education.
The core of public education could be funded so narrowly that our most vulnerable kids could see an overall cut in services. And parts of the status quo could be depressingly just fine with that.
Just like others could be depressingly okay about public resources going to families who really don’t need them.
No doubt.
But other funding ideas could be of great benefit to students, especially those who need better public education most.
And could help us get to our North Star faster and more completely.
So it behooves us to start getting ready now.
As we begin coming up with compelling ways for new resources to be used within our world, we will recognize that we are blazing trails for others as well.
With the end result being that public education captures a bigger share of the largest new investment of resources into K-12 to have happened in our lifetimes.