Good day, CharterFolk.
I knew I would have limited time to write last weekend, so I tried to make this post a short one.
It refused.
The topic kept expanding. Then it morphed into something too important to shortchange.
So I took more time and am getting this out on a Tuesday. I will follow up with a regular whip-around tomorrow to stay on schedule.
Today I want to return to the pathology on display in the Bay Area and what it reveals about the design of public education.
Barely had the new agreement been reached in San Francisco when the district began announcing the layoffs required to pay for it.
All of this flows from the mis-design of public education in our country.
The rest of the world can afford to be naive, or willfully ignorant, about that mis-design.
We cannot.
Because we operate differently.
We have a bottom line.
And if we are serious about achieving greater equity and excellence in public education, we must understand why every school needs one.
Fantasy Thinking
An op-ed from a local teacher offered a hopeful picture of how this will all work out:
Pay teachers more. Close under-enrolled schools. Stop wasting money. Build teacher housing on underutilized campuses.
Sounds reasonable.
It is also pure fantasy.
San Francisco has proven itself politically incapable of closing campuses. The last superintendent was pushed out for even suggesting it.
As for teacher housing, the district has tried before. An article last year captured it well. Projects dragged on. Costs ballooned. Bureaucratic constraints piled up. The few units completed were so entangled in regulation that only a sliver of teachers benefitted.
I know some find this hard to believe, but building affordable housing is actually very difficult. Sophisticated organizations focused solely on that challenge have tried and failed.
The likelihood that large urban school districts, already struggling at their central mission of accelerating student learning, will suddenly excel at something else is vanishingly small.
Across the Bay, Oakland Unified is a few chapters further down this road. Which makes it easier to see how much fantasy thinking is embedded in San Francisco’s story.
At the beginning of the decade, the district embarked on a vision for building employee housing.
Six years later, nothing has been built. Projects have not even broken ground.
It is a carbon copy of what has happened in San Francisco.
Just as the strike and budget crisis in San Francisco is a carbon copy of what happened in Oakland a few years ago.
There, a teacher strike lasted about a week.
It left district leadership in the unenviable position of figuring out how to pay for the deal. The superintendent lasted less than two years.
Now the district’s interim superintendent and interim CFO are bringing forward a plan to close a $120M gap.
The plan calls for cuts as severe as any we have seen in a major urban school district in decades:
- Axing the central office.
- Reducing site based staff.
- Eliminating facilities maintenance.
- Raiding unfunded liability accounts.
- Cutting special education.
In many cases, these choices are the exact opposite of the slogans that appear on the posters of striking teachers.
Of particular note to our world, the district’s plan assumes enrollment growth of 2 percent next year, reversing a decades-long decline and reducing by $10 million the size of the cuts required.
Where do you think, CharterFolk, the district believes that enrollment will come from?
It certainly puts recent charter renewal denials in a different light.
And at precisely this moment of public anguish, what does the teacher union do?
Authorize its next strike.
A Race to the Bottom
Perhaps the most sobering aspect of what is happening in San Francisco and Oakland is that it is not confined to those districts.
Last week West Contra Costa Unified brought forward gut-wrenching cuts to pay for the agreement that came out of a teachers’ strike in December.
Now all eyes are on Los Angeles.
It’s all part of CTA’s recent campaign to initiate teacher strikes across the state.
Last week, I described it as:
… one of the boldest bets that has ever been made in the history of public education – the notion that forces protecting the status quo can consciously speed school districts toward financial oblivion. And then count on policymakers to bail those districts out.
The question is:
What is it that allows CTA to act so cavalierly?
Because common sense suggests members would want their union negotiating forcefully, but not so aggressively that districts are steered off a cliff.
The answer comes down to a basic fact:
In California, and in most of the United States, school districts have no bottom line.
They are not allowed to fail financially. Legally and constitutionally in most states, the state government must step in and pay their bills.
There is no meaningful risk of bankruptcy.
So push for everything you can. Announce a new strike before the district has even closed the fiscal hole created by the last one.
The problem for CTA is that they have a history of playing favorites. They’ve supported a few particularly irresponsible school districts like Sacramento and Los Angeles running up immense liabilities. But now other districts can see that, if CTA’s pet districts can’t pay the bills, they’ll be made whole by taking funding away from all other districts in the state.
So rather than urging discipline, CTA is effectively encouraging all districts to behave like the most irresponsible among them.
Call it a race to the bottom.
Enabled by the biggest bottom-line dynamic of all: the state itself has no bottom line.
Once commitments are made, whether by the state or its surrogates like school districts, there is no backing out.
It’s a way for CTA and its allies to take advantage of the flawed design of public education to secure through collective bargaining what they could never otherwise achieve through the legislative process:
A massive increase in taxes.
Exploiting Naivete
It’s an aspect of the design of public education that the vast majority of the public are utterly naive to.
But we cannot afford to be.
Because one of our defining characteristics is that we absolutely do have a bottom line.
We either pay our bills or we close.
We either set aside money to pay for the promises we make, or our auditors intervene.
We either pay our lenders, or we default.
And just as CTA takes advantage of the public’s lack of awareness about districts having no bottom line, it also takes advantage of charter school teachers who may not fully appreciate that charter schools do.
Unions approach charter school teachers promising the same pay and benefits secured in the local district.
In most cases, charter organizations say no. They understand that adopting district-style financial practices would lead to their demise.
But in some cases, teachers take the bait.
It capitalizes on a naivete that has, sadly, been far too prevalent in our world.
The Acero situation in Chicago is one that has gotten a lot of attention. I have written about it myself.
But it’s not the only one.
In the Bay Area, the story of the demise of Downtown College Prep is just as sad.
A school unionizes.
A few years later it agrees to a contract beyond what its revenues can support.
A few years after that it can no longer meet the financing obligations on its facilities.
The organization collapses.
Families scatter.
Students lose a school that once served them well.
Our Shared Bottom Line
That is why it is so important that CharterFolk understand what makes our schools structurally different.
Not only to protect our own institutions.
But to position ourselves as stewards of a better system.
It requires that we master the minutiae of public school funding and governance – the arcane details status quo protectors trust the public will remain naive about, or willfully ignorant of.
When we do, we see the pathologies that flow from a system without bottom lines:
Districts agreeing to contracts they cannot afford and then cutting programs families value.
Younger teachers laid off first while senior negotiators remain.
Future benefits promised without funding set aside to deliver on them.
Students of today forced to pay for the commitments of yesterday.
Funds flowing from less empowered communities to more politically protected ones.
Billions in public assets poorly maintained or underutilized.
Local tax revenues feeding the status quo rather than schools serving some of our highest-need children.
And perhaps the saddest pathology of all:
Schools lacking the organizational and cultural stability required to create excellent learning environments where all students thrive.
These are not accounting technicalities, CharterFolk. Nor are they bureaucratic tedium.
They are moral consequences – the structural drivers of inequity – that leave millions of our most vulnerable kids tragically shortchanged.
If we are serious about equity and excellence, then we must be serious about design.
A public education system capable of achieving levels of equity and excellence we have never before reached will require something very simple and very difficult.
Every public school must operate within clear, enforceable financial constraints and be held to real fiscal accountability.
The day we achieve our bottom line will be the day that every public school has a true bottom line.