Good day, CharterFolk.
Sorry to start with the depressing, but there’s more word out in recent days about the “education depression” that we’re living through, as Tim Daly has coined it.
At both a kid level …
… and an adult level …
… we see that academic ability is falling off a cliff.
It’s enough that The Atlantic called it “a crisis” in reporting last night.
The TIMSS data is particularly sobering, showing that not only are all boats sinking …
… but gaps are widening.
You would think that it would put new wind in the sails of charter schools, the only major presence in education today that is shown to be lifting all boats and narrowing gaps.
Nearly everyday, new data surfaces about the value that charter schools are generating at a scale beyond any we’ve achieved before.
Instead, our detractors serve as distractors, trying to direct attention to nonsense, like charter schools’ closure rate.
They advertise it as a “new report,” but it’s the same one …
… they rehash time and time again.
Each rehash becomes an excuse to peddle their same recommendations ad nauseam, which are to impose caps on charter schools in every state in the country and to eliminate the federal Charter School Program, which would put an end to the national charter school movement as we know it. Which is all the detractors really care about, of course. Thus the same report again ad nauseam.
The truth, CharterFolk, is that our opponents exaggerate the charter school closure rate, which is no higher, and in many cases is far lower, than the closure rates seen by new nonprofits and companies.
No, the news right now is not the closures that are happening. It’s the closures that are not happening. Or, perhaps more precisely, it’s the closures that have not happened for many years as public school enrollment numbers have dropped. Chad Alderman’s reporting on this phenomenon is some of the most interesting, counter-intuitive analysis I’ve read of late.
What it shows, again, is the warping effect that gargantuan levels of Covid-era stimulus funding has had on school districts. It allowed them to avoid hard decisions to close schools. But now the hour of economic reality has come come round at last. It’s compounded by the sad fact that many school districts were teetering to begin with. Having shortchanged pension programs for decades and having built up additional unfunded liabilities, they are being forced to pay for yesterday’s education with today’s dollars. Brandon Johnson’s obsession with forcing Chicago Public Schools to enter into a high cost loan to pay for past expenses, further damaging the district’s future financial standing, should be seen as a more visible and extreme manifestation of a phenomenon that is happening everywhere.
And then, on top of that, many school districts choose to prop up unsustainable schools by sucking resources away from the schools that parents actually want their kids to attend.
Resource deprivation makes those more-enrolled schools not nearly as good as they should be, in many cases not nearly as good as parents believe they should reasonably expect. It leads parents to not only turn to other options for their own kids. It leads many to have less faith in public education for all kids.
Clearly, there are all sorts of reasons why voucher programs have become so popular of late, but a big part of it is that many people don’t want their kids’ education dollars going to pay for the schools of the past, or to prop up schools of the current moment that few people want their kids to attend. And when you have a voucher, while the dollar amount may not be what is being invested in the public schools per pupil, at least you know that all the money is going to a program that is serving students right here and right now.
Meanwhile, the pain having been delayed, school districts’ moment of reckoning is far bigger than it would otherwise be. The scale of turmoil about to descend on many school districts in the form of wrenching school closures will be something we haven’t seen in generations.
It happens right at the moment when many policy makers and parents have less faith in public education than they ever have.
It’s an inherently unstable circumstance.
And yes, as is always the case, the most vulnerable stand to lose the most amid the impending tumult. All sorts of reporting focuses on the inequity that school closures create for historically underserved communities.
But little focus is on the inequity of families having been forced to attend teetering schools in the first place.
Had low-income parents not been walled into sending their kids to schools that were on the verge of collapse, or had charter schools been able to grow with less resistance, a significant portion of parents would have enrolled their kids in fundamentally more stable schools. If there’s anything we should take from the Reason Foundation’s recent study of Open Enrollment programs it’s that, if you give parents better options, they will take them.
It points to a way forward – perhaps a way out of the education depression.
I have taken hope from what I’m reading about New Zealand of late. How it has understood the interplay between restrictive housing, underperforming schools and unfair allocation of educational opportunity.
In recent years, vast swaths of the country have been “upzoned” unleashing a big new era of housing being built. Quality and quantity of housing is up. Prices are down. Older homeowners may grumble about their loss of home equity, but they’re apparently pleased that their kids can find places nearby enough to provide regular access to grandchildren.
It has coincided with the country allowing a rapid expansion of its charter school sector.
It’s intuitive.
If you see the scale of housing supply expansion you need to make up for decades of under-building, you’re not going to be able to draw new attendance boundaries fast enough to maintain the old educational order of the government telling everyone where to go to school.
So things open up.
And if The Atlantic is to be believed, these are ideas that are gaining currency across the political spectrum in New Zealand. Yes, they were ones that were advanced in the beginning by a conservative government, but then the progressives got in power and saw the good sense and has continued them.
It seems like a baton-pass of better thinking on education and housing across political divide that is as ripe in our country as it is in the land of kiwis.
And look, I’m no Zealand-phile. I’m sure what I present above has aspects of gross over simplification.
But from a macro perspective, it seems like something on the horizon we know we are inevitably approaching:
Bigger change. Things having to loosen up across different policy domains. Progress in one area being dependent upon another.
It’s what I believe ultimately lies on the other side of the education depression.
Things getting better more quickly and at greater scale than many of us might think possible.
With charter schools playing a vital part in that better-ness emerging.
It’s a critically important time for us, CharterFolk.
A time to be getting ready.