Morning, CharterFolk
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I want to cut straight to where we left off last time where I posited that the new charter school vision I began to articulate is not yet viable because it is a two-legged stool. The two legs consist of:
- growing new charter schools which model greatly more publicness; and
- pushing traditional public schools to adopt changes that would make them greatly more public.
I said that the missing third leg represents the worst mistake I made during my years at CCSA. It is also the worst mistake we have made as a movement over the past 30 years. It is a screwup I feel particularly bad about because, unlike others which involved tough calls where I always thought I was doing what was right given the information I had at the time, this one I knew better.
It’s this:
I allowed the charter school movement to become understood to believe that educators working in traditional public schools are the root of the problem.
Now, if you ask CharterFolk whether we believe that educators are the root of the problem, we’d all say of course not. But stick with me here. I’m not focused on what our intentions may have been, nor what we have said. I’m looking at what we have done and what the implications are behind some of our actions.
Look at the assumptions behind some of our theories of action. Last week I posited that our breakdown in vision resulted from a difference in point of view between the people I called the “Anti-LIFO Crowd” and the people I called the “Replacement Crowd.”
What’s the underlying assumption at the heart of the Anti-LIFO Crowd’s theory of action, obsessively focusing on the need for tenure reforms? The idea that the biggest problem in public education is large numbers of underperforming teachers, and if schools just had enough power to fire them all, everything would be made better.
What’s the assumption at the heart of the “Replacement Crowd” theory of action? The idea that the public system is so bereft of highly competent people and people who actually care about kids, that we have no choice but to replace the whole damn thing.
They’re both absurdly wrong. Worse than that, they’re offensive. They disrespect the very people who have been trying the hardest. Worst of all, they disrespect the people we need the most. Like we’re really going to be able to improve our entire public education system without having the enthusiastic participation of thousands of teachers and principals working in traditional public schools. It’s never going to happen.
CharterFolk, can we get one thing straight here?
Teachers and school principals are absolutely not the problem.
The problem is that they are trapped within a system that doesn’t allow them to achieve their potential. And instead of recognizing this and doing all we can to help them remake their schools, we end up attached to theories of action suggesting that they’re the root of the problem. And then we wonder why, after years of us behaving like this, thousands of teachers end up protesting below the CCSA office like happened during the teacher strike in Los Angeles last year.
It’s particularly unpardonable for me personally because I come from a family of educators. I know how much my parents felt held back their whole careers. Many of my friends and family still work in traditional public schools, and I know many of them feel held back. I was a teacher myself for seven years at a public school that just wasn’t working for kids and families. I remember what it feels like to drive home day after day knowing you are part of something that is being prevented from doing what it has the potential to do so much better.
I remember also what it was like to visit for the first time Fenton Avenue Charter School, a school whose teachers decided to convert to charter status. I saw the possible – a school that not so long before had been just like the one where I worked, mired in dysfunction – but then through the power of charterness changed into one of the most amazing public schools I had ever seen.
I remember what it was like for the teachers I worked with to learn about Fenton and about how the school district was holding back our school. I remember the absolute fury our teachers and parents felt when they learned that the school district was siphoning away more than $4 million per year from our elementary school serving a very high need community. I remember the hope teachers felt when we discovered that we would no longer have to implement school practices we fundamentally disagreed with, and that we would no longer have to accept whatever new staff got imposed on us by central but would be able to recruit a team of stunning colleagues. We could see how we had it within our power to make a school that would be so much better for our kids and community if we took control of our own destiny.
It was exactly the same experience that Joe Lucente described regarding the founding of Fenton.
And yet, in my role at CCSA, I didn’t let that experience frame our efforts to the degree I knew we should have. So, supporting conversion charter schools became something we essentially gave up on.
Why?
Our small-tent impulses as a movement certainly didn’t help. The collective rolodexes of the people most empowered in the charter school movement, folks with fancy pedigrees like me, don’t overlap well with people who are working on the front lines in traditional public schools. We just didn’t have the intimacy of connection, which ultimately led us to work with others with whom we simply felt more comfortable.
To some extent, it was also a function of short-term thinking. Many of the conversions didn’t see huge test score bumps in their first year of operations, leading many to fail to realize how nearly all these schools became over a slightly longer timeframe some of the most stunningly successful schools we have in charterland.
Some haven’t been supportive of conversions because it’s possible that converting teachers would want to bring their union with them, which I think just ridiculously short-sighted. What do we care if converting teachers bring their union with them if they’re embracing all aspects of greater publicness including being held accountable for the results they generate with kids? If you make a great charter school where the teachers are unionized, more power to you, as far as I’m concerned.
To the extent we made conversions a priority at all, we did so within efforts to make Achievement School Districts. Turnarounds. Forced closures. Often within the context of No Child Left Behind interventions. And look, I’m not dissing on ASDs. I know the value that they bring.
But what’s the overarching message that these schools convey about the charter school movement?
That chartering is something that gets done to you. It is something that is forced upon you from above, or from outside, rather than being understood to be a tool that educators can voluntarily use to push back against the Establishment and radically improve their schools.
That’s a high tax to pay.
We’ve done this despite the fact that visionaries have recognized from the beginning that if the charter school movement was going to succeed we needed to have educators from the traditional system strongly with us. It’s certainly something Clinton realized. Remember him talking about “radical decentralization?”
What kind of schools did he cite as shining examples of what he was talking about? The school he decided to visit while in San Diego in 1994?
O’Farrell Charter School. A conversion charter school.
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-the-ofarrell-community-school-san-diego-california
The school Hilary visited in Los Angeles a couple of years later? Vaughn Next Century Learning Center. A conversion charter school.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-02-08-me-33654-story.html
The school that Hillary requested come by her office to receive special commendation?
Fenton.
And look, I’m not naïve. I recognize that things have grown incredibly toxic. Our adversaries will keep whipping up rabid resistance that will make many educators unwilling to explore the charter option. But it doesn’t matter. Educators in the traditional system need to hear from us what they haven’t heard since the days of Bill Clinton: that they are wanted within our movement and that we are here for them too.
We recognize that there is a vast difference between those who work in the Establishment and those who are EstablishmentFolk, people who want things to stay the same in order to protect their own self-interest at the expense of kids and families.
EstablishmentFolk are actually few and far between.
The vast majority working within the Establishment are deeply caring and capable educators.
Not EstablishmentFolk at all.
Potential CharterFolk, actually.
And while the Establishment will continue to vilify us, the underlying laws of the universe will stay the same. Millions of educators will remain in settings where they are held back from doing what they know is within their potential.
And when chartering is understood to be a tool that is available to them …
When they understand that we are genuinely here for them …
When they see us fighting for changes in law that would empower them to convert their school to charter school status even if their controlling school district doesn’t want them to …
When they see us working to get them startup grants to the same degree we get funding to other startups …
When we are conducting studies showing how much money is being siphoned away from schools by their controlling bureaucracies, or better yet, when we are working to pass laws that require states to make that information available so teachers and parents in every community can see how badly their local school is being deprived of the funding that is its due …
And when we are seen to be providing as much welcome, technical assistance and other support to conversion efforts as we provide to every other new charter school in development …
… then and only then will it become hard to predict what happens next.
Will many educators working within traditional public schools ask the same question we have asked ourselves?
Am I, too, CharterFolk?
If the answer is, “Yes” …
Or if the answer is, “Maybe, I think I need to learn more …”
Or even if the answer is, “No, but I get it. I see that CharterFolk don’t see teachers to be the root of the problem but instead the root of a potentially amazing solution…”
Then we will be on the cusp of a transformation of our public school system as profound as anything we have ever seen.
Which explains why supporting voluntary conversions has to be the critical third leg of our vision for the future of the charter school movement.
A part of the charter school story I think most likely to unfold first …
… in Washington DC.
Our nation’s capital is a test case showing how our new national vision for charter schools might play out at a local level, something I can’t wait to dive into next week here at CharterFolk.
Hope to see you here.