Weekend greetings, CharterFolk.
We’ve had late-breaking developments out of DC on CSP matters. A few weeks back I drew attention to the fact that the Biden Administration had offered a parting shot to charter schools, releasing on their last day in office Notices for Applications (NIAs) regarding CSP that would lock in another year of restrictions designed to make charter school growth more difficult.
On Friday, we saw the Trump Administration counter it …
… announcing the rescinding of the NIAs for the 2025 cycle and announcing the awarding of $33M in awards from last year’s CMO competition. This postures the new administration to make the upcoming round of grants at least incrementally less restrictive for us this spring, and gets critically needed funding out the door to organizations ready to grow.
I know not all of you thought I got it right when I wrote on this, with some believing I had been too hard on the outgoing administration, and others thinking I hadn’t been hard enough. But I take this gesture to be as strong an indicator we’ve received yet that the incoming administration is intent on remaining very strong for charter schools.
Amen, I say.
Meanwhile, we had two great contributor columns this week, Andrew Broy going deep on charter governance and Mercy Herrera sharing the value of community coming together through the El Camino program at LEAL. Check them out if you missed them. I also hope you find some time for Andy’s and my discussion about math instruction with outgoing Citizens Math Founder Karim Ani. This week we will have two more great contributor columns, one coming from Jennifer Stern at Great MN Schools about how we can help good charter schools become great, and the other from Aimee Evan at WestEd about how leaders can recognize early signs of decline so that charter schools can avoid bigger problems down the road. Should be a great week.
Let’s get to today’s post.
Call Me a Heretic: Why I’m Agnostic on Religious Charter Schools
Today, I wanted to share a few thoughts about the Supreme Court’s impending consideration of the religious charter school case, a topic we’re sure to return to often in the coming months, welcoming the wide range of opinions that I know CharterFolk hold on this matter. (If you have thoughts on this topic or any other you would like to get out into the CharterSphere, please ping me directly at jed@charterfolk.org.)
Old time CharterFolk readers know this is a subject I’ve been writing about for a long time.
What I wrote nearly three years ago holds up pretty well, I think.
With all that said, it doesn’t take having a JD from Harvard to recognize the writing that is now on the Supreme Court wall.
Whether we like it or not, the highest court in the land is ultimately going to deem that religious institutions cannot be prevented from applying to operate charter schools.
Many of our advocacy organizations have presented themselves as unequivocally opposed to the notion of religious charter schools. I understand why they’re doing this.
But I wouldn’t confuse that positioning with a belief that the future isn’t already written on the Supreme Court wall.
The question isn’t whether this will happen but how. And what will be the practical and political impacts of such a change.
It’s an issue that touches upon many Folk’s most deeply held beliefs.
Andy Smarick, who I respect a great deal, wrote this week …
… talking about his many years of work in support of religious charter schools becoming lawful:
Please forgive my brief self-focus, but this is an exciting turn of events for me. I first wrote about this issue almost fifteen years ago, hypothesizing why this then-nearly inconceivable concept might be possible. Since then, I’ve returned to the topic from time to time as state-level action and court decisions gradually made the idea seem less inconceivable.
Last year, Joe Nathan, who I also respect a great deal, was quoted in this New York Times piece …
… saying the idea of religious charter schools runs counter to all that we have worked for over the past three decades.
“It’s a complete repudiation of the central principles of the chartering idea,” said Joe Nathan, who was a leader in the successful effort to pass the country’s first charter-school law in Minnesota in 1991.
Like I say, passions on this topic run deep and wide.
Andy’s colleague at Fordham, Mike Petrilli, wrote an interesting piece this week arguing that we’re not keyed-in yet to how big the impact of this case will be.
On the one hand, though he says it isn’t a foregone conclusion things work out this way, he suspects …
… we’ll see thousands of Catholic and other religious schools turn into charter schools in every corner of the country in the next year or two.
On the other, he concludes that:
It would be easy to imagine blue states and their districts and authorizers clamping down on new charter schools altogether, especially given the political left’s antipathy to anything that blurs the line between church and state.
Ironically, then, the Supreme Court might be about to answer the teachers unions’ prayers by critically wounding the most successful education reform initiative in a generation.
It makes me want to ask Mike, then:
So what do you mean by a “favorable” ruling?
One that is favorable to the notion of religious liberty, or one that is favorable to the national charter school movement despite the carnage it is likely to cause in many blue contexts?
To be clear, when I say that I see the writing on the Supreme Court wall, it doesn’t mean I agree with what is scrawled there. I personally favor greater separation of church and state, and I don’t see anything fundamentally broken in society on this issue. So what is the fix that is really needed?
And as it relates to charter schools specifically, I just don’t think our architecture has been set up to deal with the presence of religious operators in the field. I doubt that authorizers deciding to turn down new applications or renewal requests from religious operators will ever be able to make those decisions in a manner that will be perceived to be religion-neutral. And in an era when states across the country and across the political spectrum feel no compunction whatsoever telling schools what history they can teach, do we really think they’re going to have some compunction telling schools what religion they can teach?
It’s the nightmare that Neil McCluskey at Cato …
… has been writing about for years.
If I hold out hope that the writing is not permanently engraved in the Supreme Court wall, it comes from the Court recognizing the complexity of the issues under consideration here and of the decades of jurisprudence that has gone into defining the legal landscape for charter schools going all the way back to 1991. As Petrilli states in his piece this week, any effective ruling would require the Court to expound on all those issues. And, not that I expect the justices to be reading CharterFolk posts too much, I will offer a caution to those in black robes:
Be careful what minefields you go walking in, dear Supreme Court Justices. It may not take you too many strides to get in. But getting back out? Get ready for decades.
All that said, fully recognizing the depth of passions many CharterFolk feel on this topic, and fully aware of the depth of complexity that will arise should the Supreme Court upset the legal applecart, in terms of an overall posture for our world, I would advise a bit more agnosticism as it relates to the concept of religious charter schools.
Yes, make the argument against minefield-walking as best we can, but given the stencils now taped on marble, it behooves us to be as well-positioned as possible for what comes next.
And I could assert a host of reasons why I think a bit more agnosticism would serve us well, but it really boils down to a belief that I know many would find absolutely heretical.
It’s the belief that, as profound as the changes could prove should the Supreme Court send our country off into a new direction regarding separation of church and state, the charter school movement’s potential for long-term societal impact may prove even more profound.
In terms of setting our society up for greater fulfillment and fairness for decades to come, very little surpasses the need to improve education for everyone while improving education even more for those who have been historically underserved. And no one thing in our society gives us better leverage to make progress on those imperatives than the national charter school movement.
And perhaps the greatest risk we face is the possibility that CharterFolk get divided.
So, it’s an incredibly important time for CharterFolk to remain focused on the importance of remaining united.
Should Petrilli’s reading of the future bear out and even-more-than-open-season be declared on charter schools in blue contexts in response to the Court’s decision, we are going to need to be more united than ever to overcome it.
And should the case open up issues that cut to the innermost core of our values as a movement, such as whether it is permissible for a public school of any kind to deny admission to a student on any grounds, never mind religious ones, we are going to need to be more united than ever to advocate successfully on these matters in the political landscape that awaits.
It’s why the last thing we want is our differing beliefs on religious charter schools to result in us losing sight of the many other foundational beliefs we all hold in common as much today as ever before.
And it’s why I say:
Call me a heretic, CharterFolk.
But on the topic of religious charter schools, I encourage us all to become a little more agnostic.