Weekend greetings, CharterFolk.
I start with a few updates.
First, Arne Duncan joined Jorge Elorza to declare blue states opting in to the federal tax credit program a “no brainer.”
I reiterate:
I could be wrong on this one, but my sense is that the program is going to be bigger than many expect, and that ultimately even status-quo protectors will opt in and will begin intense marketing efforts to convince locals to direct the free money to SGOs that the status quo interests control.
Second, people are processing the school board election results in Denver.
The consensus is that the reform candidates and union-backed candidates ran on the same platform.
So what were voters choosing between then?
Denver’s superintendent, no great supporter of charter schools, but someone who got crosswise with the union on other matters nonetheless, is clearly hedging bets.
The fact that he might see Chicago a safe landing spot in comparison speaks volumes about Denver’s likely future.
Some see a possibility that, now that Mamdani has won, he might pivot to charter school support.
Call me very skeptical.
Karega reached out to me this week with more info about authorizing. In last week’s post, I cited NACSA figures showing that 90% of authorizers are school districts. But Karega pointed me to other data indicating that the percentage of schools authorized by school districts is shrinking, now down to less than half.
Which is reassuring.
This week in my hometown the local school district voted to deny a renewal citing the school’s shaky fiscal situation.
Meanwhile the district sails into a fiscal mess of epic proportions.
And we’re supposed to trust the district to make renewal decisions that focus on the needs of kids?
Finally, I wrap up highlighting Literacy First’s 25th anniversary celebration. I was supposed to be there, but then delays to my flight into San Diego prevented me from making it.
Congrats to all of you at Literacy First.
Here’s to 25 more.
The Blueprints We Can Bring to Life — and the Blueprints We Can’t
Which brings me to where I was planning to start this week’s post.
The transportation hub I thought I was going to be passing through.
San Diego’s new and improved airport.
The city seems to be positively giddy about it.
Clearly, many contributed to the project’s success. But the person who got the whole thing going years ago – the person who shepherded approval of the airport master plan, the blueprint for how the new airport would take shape – was my old boss, Alan Bersin.
After leaving San Diego Unified, and after serving as Schwarzenegger’s Secretary of Education for California, he returned home to take on an absolutely thankless task. Everyone knew the airport was inadequate. But the powers that be who didn’t want change were so formidable that no one wanted to touch the job with a ten-foot pole.
But then the mayor asked Alan, and he being the kind of guy he is, he said yes.
And through his leadership and relationships, he got the job done.
What took me down to San Diego, as luck would have it, was the reunion Alan hosted for the people who had worked in his administration at San Diego Unified.
During his tenure, Alan was seen as one of the boldest, most formidable reform superintendents in the nation.
The team he assembled.
The plan they put together — The Blueprint for Student Success.
A comprehensive reform effort more ambitious than anything seen before.
The political coalition he was able to marshal.
There really wasn’t anything like it anywhere in the country.
Normal Street became a kind of Mecca.
Rod Paige came.
Joel Klein made it his first stop after being named chancellor.
Checker Finn and Paul Hill came.
I’m pretty sure Michelle Rhee did too, or at least they were in regular contact.
I met Alan through business school connections. He immediately took a shine to me, and I to him. He wanted me to come to San Diego for my summer internship. But I had other offers, and I figured a summer in the private sector might be good experience.
So I sat down one Monday morning to write him an email letting him know I wasn’t coming. But something came over me. I couldn’t push send.
I called Amy, who was on her way to work, and said I had a bad feeling.
She said I’d better go.
Which I did.
The first thing Alan asked for was a comprehensive reform strategy for the district.
I wasn’t sure if it was just a mental exercise or if it was something he might actually use.
All I know is he asked me for it. So I took it seriously, spending the better part of a couple weeks working on it.
I still have a copy.
Getting the reunion invite prodded me to pull it out again.
I didn’t have the language then, but it basically called for San Diego Unified to evolve itself into a portfolio school district.
Not operating schools directly any more but becoming one that would oversee and hold accountable a plethora of options that would come from other providers.
About a week after I sent it to him, we had a call. I remember the portion of the discussion dedicated to my homework not taking much time.
“Yeah, we’re not doing that,” is about all I recall, followed by a quick pivot to what he really wanted me working on.
Which, though I had my doubts, I eagerly dove into.
Because Alan was Alan.
Just an amazingly compelling leader.
As was attested to again by the people who came together for the reunion in San Diego.
As inspiring and capable a senior leadership team to have overseen a major urban school district as I’m aware ever having been assembled anywhere.
People whose expertise in different functional areas of school management I can’t even hold a candle to.
With even more incredible talent not being in attendance only because of their having passed away.
Like Tony Alvarado …
… a person who, in my opinion, deserves his reputation as one of the most visionary instructional leaders of his generation.
It was a great gathering.
People present in both body and spirit.
But with all due respect to them all, and especially to Alan, the contrast between the blueprint that was left for the city’s airport and the one that was left for its schools could not be more stark.
Airplanes will launch anew for generations to come from San Diego’s new airport.
But students launched anew from San Diego’s public schools?
The sad truth is that the district has gone back to being what it’s always been – a system that offers fundamentally better opportunity north of the 8, and something fundamentally worse south of it.
A system designed primarily to meet the needs of those who work in it, not those who are served by it.
Alan often described his time as superintendent as one long experience of pulling taut a rubber band, knowing that as soon as he left, it would snap right back.
How prescient that metaphor proved to be.
In just a couple election cycles, reform opponents regained majority control of the school board.
A couple of years after that, Alan was gone.
And the Blueprint was dismantled.
In terms of what endures – aside from the team’s impact spreading to other districts – there’s little to point to.
Except, of course, for the charter schools that began under Alan’s watch.
The next day’s field trip was to Gompers, a district-to-charter conversion in one of San Diego’s highest need communities that has overcome an onslaught of attacks from the local teacher union …
… to deliver a program that has been sending higher percentages of students to college than state averages …
… for over two decades now.
CharterFolk:
We live in an era when many reformers are turning their attention again to old blueprints.
Science of reading.
Voc ed.
Teacher training
And teacher compensation schemes.
I love the can-do spirit.
But like that plan I wrote for Alan all those years ago, I find them sadly charming for their naïveté.
Yes, of course, as Tony Alvarado reminded us, we must have better teaching practice in the classroom. In the end nothing will get us to improved learning without it.
But there is no path to sustained educational improvement that doesn’t pass first through the need to restructure the governance and the operations of our district schools.
If Alan Bersin and his amazing team in San Diego weren’t able to achieve sustained improvement within our existing broken structures, do we really think any others can?
Name me any team that’s done it in the two decades since Alan left Normal Street.
The sad truth is that there are Blueprints we can bring to life and there are Blueprints that we can’t
And the more we confuse the two, the more we distract ourselves from the structural surgery our system needs – the new checks and balances, the smarter incentives, the permission for success to grow.
It’s why, of all the changes to public education that are happening in the United States right now, none is more important than what is happening in Houston.
Mike Miles is a lot like this generation’s Alan Bersin.
Yes, he’s been able to create an immediate term bump in learning through forceful central management focused on all the right things, but he also knows that the rubber band is stretched. And as soon as he goes, it all snaps back.
So he’s now proposing a perestroika.
A fundamental restructuring.
But as we all know, there has been example after example of supposed restructuring efforts that have failed, and failed again.
But because we have been distracted by naïveté, or because we simply haven’t had the courage to look into the blazing light to see what’s true, we’ve taken away exactly the wrong learnings from those experiences.
And we’ve failed to focus on what is paramount, which is whether restructuring efforts result in schools converting:
- to full charter school status enabling schools to be successful;
- to “CABIN” status – charter all but in name – where again the schools can be successful; or
- to CHINO status – charter in name only – where schools are doomed to continuing struggling.
There are things about what Miles is proposing that have never been tried before – things that might make this restructuring fundamentally more successful than what’s come before.
In my view, it has the potential to be a blueprint that could, like a well designed overhaul of a NASA facilities, lift Houston’s kids to the stars.
And in the process chart out a new means of ascent for the entire nation.
But we’ve got to get the detail right, and we’ve got to recognize that key impediments remain in the way.
It’s into this ripe materials we dive next week.
Hope to see you here.