Good day, CharterFolk.
Well, I lead off with the same intro that I started with last week. There is obviously lots of news on other matters, much of which is outside our lane. We’ll do our best to stay focused on the implications for charter school policy.
Let’s get to it.
Starting With the Counterpoint
Let me start with the exception to the rule.
Idaho.
A place where student enrollment is growing faster than any other place in the country. A red state where charter schools are still clearly seen as the primary driver of school choice. A place where charter school growth is as robust as we saw in many other places across the country a decade ago. And yes, a place where, germane to the topic for the rest of this post, authorizing is working decently well at both state and district levels.
A breath of fresh air.
Common Ground
Thank you to many of you for reaching out about my post last week about what we could learn from the relative strengths and weaknesses of the major party platforms that are coming out this summer.
For quite some time here, I have been writing about how school choice has become a litmus test for Republicans.
“Universalness,” though, has been absent from the discussion in prior Republican platforms. It wasn’t even mentioned in 2016 and 2020. But for 2024, it has become a top priority.
And now, just a few days after its inclusion in the platform, we see it has already become the next litmus test.
As Jay Greene and Jason Bedrick write:
Before now, Republican politicians could say they were adhering to their party’s platform if they were only willing to support school choice policies that were limited to specific populations, like families with low-incomes, students with special needs, or those enrolled in failing public schools.
Now, the bar has been raised.
If Republican officeholders and candidates want to abide by their party’s platform, they will have to support universal school choice policies for which all families would be eligible.
Universalness is a theme I’ve written about previously …
… and I’m sure to return to it in upcoming posts.
For now, though, let me make one small but important distinction.
In the Daily Signal piece, Greene et al put “universalness” and “means-testing” on opposite sides of the spectrum as though it’s not possible to support one while also supporting the other.
The same process appears to be underway on the issue of school choice. Democrats who have been supportive of school choice, even with more limited policies such as charter schools or means-tested vouchers, are being forced to change their positions or face defeat in primaries. The opposite is occurring among Republicans, who are facing pressure to support universal programs or lose to opponents who do in the primaries.
While I agree with the overall sentiment of this paragraph – that the major parties are going in opposite directions on education matters – I don’t think “universalness” and “means-testing” are necessarily mutually exclusive. It’s certainly possible to design a “universal” program where every family, including wealthy ones, get resources but where the overall program is still means-tested such that low-income families receive more.
It may seem a small distinction, but in this world of “you’re either with us or you’re against us” …
… keeping a focus on common ground seems more important than ever.
Meanwhile, in the end, the degree to which universal vouchers and ESAs actually end up helping families who have previously been denied high quality education will be a function of how meanly those programs are means-tested.
So, yes, it seems a distinction worth keeping our bearings on.
“Woke” Capture
But my primary focus today is another piece that the same authors wrote just before the RNC arguing that charter schools have gone woke.
It is an op-ed building upon the research paper they published at the Heritage Foundation late last month …
… asserting that charter school wokeness is a function of “regulatory and donor capture.”
Their methodology was a comparison of charter school and school district handbooks …
… and a tallying of their use of key words that the authors believe to be indicators of wokeness.
Finding that charter school documents feature higher incidence of woke words than nearby school district documents in 58% of cases, the report deems vast swaths of charterness to be out of touch with the values of parents, and it goes on to identify the primary culprits to be NACSA …
… supposedly the progenitor of “regulatory capture,” and national foundations like Gates and Walton, supposedly the main perpetrators of “donor capture.”
Setting aside questions of methodology (including whether a survey only reviewing three documents from California, one from Texas, and literally zero from New York and eleven other states with charter school laws achieves even a modicum of national representativeness), it’s hard to know where to even begin on substance.
Let’s start with the recognition that many CharterFolk are located in major urban areas, and like most educators, lean somewhat more left than the general population.
Granted.
But “captured by wokeness?”
Along with the Walton Foundation?
That known advancer of left-wing ideology?
And NACSA?
Somehow a player with enough independent heft to drag the entire sector toward positioning at odds with parental values?
At least from where I sit, this is not even close to what is really happening.
Round and Round
The truth is that positioning on hot button social issues is a matter being decided way above NACSA’s political pay grade, and yes, far above the pay grades of Walton and Gates as well.
Look at the evidence that has emerged in just the past few days.
Gavin Newsom signed a bill making California the first state in the country to ban school districts and charter schools from adopting parent notification policies regarding transgender students.
Within hours, a school district in the Inland Empire filed suit attempting to block implementation of the new law.
The issue first arose a year ago when several school districts approved parental notification policies …
… in one case doing so over the objection of the State Superintendent of Public Instruction, who was kicked out of a district’s board meeting for having surpassed his allotted one minute to speak on the topic.
A month later, California AG Rob Bonta sued to get the districts to back off.
Ultimately, they did.
But parents did not, filing a trio of ballot measures including one that would have required all school districts in the state to notify parents if kids use different pronouns in school. Not surprisingly, the backers of the measure didn’t like the ballot title that it was given by Bonta, who called it a proposal to “restrict the rights of transgender youth.” The backers called it one to “protect the kids of California.”
So, they sued again.
And lost again.
And the measure failed to make the ballot.
You might think this would have resolved the matter. But state lawmakers wanted to make a statement …
… so they ran the bill that Newsom ended up signing this week …
… which sparked the latest round of litigation.
Seeing the circularity here?
And let’s be clear.
California and blue states aren’t the only ones.
Red states are seeing things go round and round on social issues too.
Legislators pass laws banning things across the state.
Local parties sue to block implementation.
Courts are forced to take a stand.
The saga continues.
And yes, ultimately, all these battles on social issues will find their expression in the decisions made by charter school authorizers, including what their policies should be on these matters being contested in legislatures and in the courts.
But what we’re supposed to take from all this cacophony is that NACSA’s somehow to blame?
Really?
Because charter school handbooks contain references to “diversity,” “justice,” and “cultural relevance?”
While red state lawmakers refer to education matters as “the civil rights issue of our time?”
There’s simply no coherence here, CharterFolk.
NACSA, as we all know, is a service provider. They try to help authorizing as best they can. But ultimately, the overarching policy positions authorizers take are going to be a function of the dictates that are coming from on high within their various states, not from a national partner suggesting best practices.
What we see happening in charterland these days has very little, if anything, to do with “woke capture,” and has everything to do with “regulatory capture.”
The fact that our public schools are hidebound by statutes and regulations of literally inestimable length that prevent our schools from doing what parents want them to do.
And what leads to the regulatory capture of our public schools is legislators wanting to project their positions on social issues believing that schools are pretty canvases upon which to paint their pictures.
And sure, they may say that they only want to regulate “regular public schools” in the near term, and they’ll never meddle with the operation of other schools that are supposed to be innovative options for parents.
But that’s what they used to say about charter schools. And now every new bill that is run in states where there are large numbers of charter schools, including the parental notification bill in California and the teacher pronoun bill in Florida, end up being made applicable to both district public schools and charter public schools.
Because that’s the canvas that allows politicians to paint the prettiest picture.
And mark my words, as more states start publicly funding private education, ultimately that funding will become the next canvas upon which pretty pictures are painted.
And so another realm of education will become “captured.”
Best Authorizing
I close with three points.
First, we must keep our focus where it needs to be, which is on the fact that our publicly funded schools are at risk of utter regulatory capture. And anything and everything we can be doing to push back against this menace we should be pursuing with all the gusto we can summon across every kind of publicly funded school. I’ll share an idea along these lines in my next “CharterFolk Short” post.
Secondly, it’s time policy makers recognize the futility of attempting to stamp out the willful defiance of parents.
Last year, the legislators of California made the state the first in the country that allowed students to express willful defiance without risking being kicked out of public schools.
Whether that was wise public policy making I’ll leave for another day, but what we really need is to let willful defiance thrive among parents such that they too do not feel at risk of being kicked out of public education.
We may not like it, but parents believe different things and want different things for their families. And we need a way of offering public education such that parents can enroll their kids in programs that align with their beliefs.
Ultimately, efforts to impose one-size-fits-all dictates on all schools banning one thing or another when significant portions of parents don’t agree with those bans is an utterly futile exercise.
This is one of the great benefits that school choice offers – a way to put an end to the futility.
Ultimately, parents will express willful defiance if that’s what they have to do to get the kids to schools they believe in, even if that means pulling their kids out of school altogether.
And we know what happens then.
Which brings me to my third and final point.
Which is what happens then.
Something profound is happening to young people learning. Not just in our own country but across all the wealthiest nations in the world.
New data comes in every day about how much our kids are struggling.
These are deep, vexing problems.
They are the mast, CharterFolk, I would lash ourselves to.
The challenge I would suggest NACSA and every other player in the charter school space make our collective obsession.
Because ultimately sound and fury surrounding social issues will ebb and flow but the need for educational opportunity that accelerates student learning will remain constant.
And discerning between those options that in fact accelerate learning and those that don’t is incredibly difficult work.
It requires great authorizing.
And to get us back to levels of learning that our kids really need?
It will require the best authorizing our country has ever seen.