Weekend greetings, CharterFolk.
So I’m back from the Bob Marshall.
Highly recommended.
Not just as a step into wilderness.
The Bob Marshall Complex is one of the largest undeveloped wilderness landscapes in the lower 48.
During our week, we came across as much bear …
… and lynx …
… as we did human beings.
But also as a step back in time.
The mule and horse string that accompanied us …
… was essentially identical to the strings that have been traversing the area since late in the 19th century.
No mechanized equipment is allowed in.
Including chainsaws.
Each of the tens of thousands of trees that have been cleared from trails over the decades has been hand-sawed by wilderness staff.
Recent DOGE cuts have reduced the timber-clearing team in the complex from 15 to 2, meaning that many trails that have been routinely cleared in past years remain blocked today.
Such was the case with the ascent …
… of Scapegoat Mountain …
… a vantage point from which visitors can catch a distant glimpse of The Chinese Wall, the iconic geologic feature that, for many, defines The Bob.
Though our guides, Doog and Courtney White …
… find the obsession with The Chinese Wall misplaced.
To them, Scapegoat is every bit as impressive as the Wall, and sees even fewer people, elevating its appeal.
So we made our way on foot.
Near the summit, the distinctive cry of a bird emanated from the trees.
I asked Doog what it was.
He said he could never be sure.
It’s hard to find one more knowledgeable about backcountry than Doog.
He is a direct descendant of the White family, whose ranch became one of the biggest open-space parks in the foothills outside Denver.
In a history of the park …
… I see that Doog’s ancestors were driving mule trains in the 1860s essentially exactly as Doog does today.
But for all his knowledge and expertise, Doog can’t tell the difference between the call of a red-shouldered hawk and that of a blue jay, which are known for mimicking the more dangerous hawk for various purposes.
This video shows how a jay can scare away a squirrel through its impersonation of a hawk.
We made a couple more switchbacks before the call came again, this time from a tree within view, whereupon Doog could speak with authority.
“A jay.”
As ever, my ventures into whatever place lead me to scour the local landscape for news of education, and charter schools’ role in it.
For six full days, I had no cell coverage at all.
But in the hours before heading in, and in the hours afterward, the scour revealed a continuation of the deceptive calls echoing across the Montana landscape.
Those calls have been the topic of posts written both by myself …
… and by contributors.
How Montana, one of our last holdout states in terms of approving a charter school law, had seen the writing on The Chinese Wall.
The people wanted charter schools.
But the powers-that-be did not.
And believing there was no real way to hold things back, they decided upon a deception.
A change in law that purported to create charter schools, when in fact school districts were the only entities allowed to operate such schools.
Another bill, supported by TrueFolk, also passed, but that law was then held up in court.
It has made it onto the books.
But to this day, I can find no evidence that Montana has allowed a separately incorporated nonprofit charter operator to open a school under the state’s charter statute.
Meanwhile, more than 20 district-operated schools purporting to be “charter schools” have opened.
Recent reporting is now raising questions about the academic performance of Montana’s “charter schools.”
Then the state releases a report on the status of charter schools.
Among its key findings is a lamentation that the public does not understand what charter schools are, and that something needs to be done about it.
It closes the circle of the irony.
A law that functioned from the beginning to blur the public’s understanding of charter schools is now being bemoaned for having blurred the public’s understanding of charter schools.
We end up most of the way to the summit of Scapegoat, unable to discern between hawk and jay.
Just as the deceivers wished it to be.
Jays and Hawks Across the National Landscape
Coming back to civilization, the cries of birds reverberate across the landscape.
In DC, the incoming mayor calls for the end of mayoral control.
In Chicago, the end of mayoral control was not enough, so now the city prepares for the election of more than 20 board members.
In California, they plan to shift from a state superintendent to an education commissioner.
In Kentucky, where we have no charter schools, school districts are now suing to prevent implementation of a new law giving the governor much more control of schools.
And at a federal level, they move responsibility for programs from one department to another.
All jays.
Just as are most of the more specific policy proposals we see advanced these days.
Phones.
Commandments.
Phonics.
Even those we might at first assume hawks …
ESAs. Vouchers. Tax credits.
If they don’t ensure that kids who previously couldn’t access better opportunity get actual access to better schools, as most “school choice” programs allowing selective admissions and additional tuition payments sadly don’t …
And if they don’t feature meaningful accountability for increasing student learning …
… they are destined to become jays.
Which can take many forms.
Some are governance reshuffles.
Some are symbolic crackdowns.
Some are pedagogical mandates unlikely to be long-implemented with fidelity.
Some are school choice programs that preserve exclusion or tolerate unacceptable levels of learning.
And yes, some are district schools wearing charter plumage.
But they all share one thing:
They produce the sound of reform without ensuring students access to lasting improved opportunity.
In some places, the conscious deception seems downright Montana-esque.
In Wisconsin, the state announced $18.5 million in new grants purporting to support the expansion of high-achieving charter schools.
The vast majority of that funding is going to “instrumentality” charter schools — schools that are instruments of the school district, meaning they are controlled and operated by the school district, just as is happening in Montana.
Wisconsin is reported to have about 50,000 kids in charter schools.
Only a third of them are served by true charter schools.
Or like Los Angeles.
Most of the focus of late is on the impending fiscal implosion of the school district.
Don’t worry, CharterFolk. I’ll return to this topic in the weeks ahead.
But we also shouldn’t lose sight of the obfuscation the district has engaged in.
Making a bunch of affiliated charter schools in parts of town where they feared parents might go elsewhere unless they were convinced they were getting something special.
Today, reporting regularly convinces the public that they’re true charter schools when really they aren’t, often casting aspersions on the charter brand.
The only way to discern the difference is to see which schools are actually subjected to policies meant to inflict massive harm on true charter schools.
The affiliated schools, of course, are not.
They are jays.
And they’re not the only ones.
In fact, across California, about a sixth of the students supposedly served by hawks are actually served by jays.
Meanwhile, across the country, the confusion runs in the opposite direction as well.
We have many schools that are clearly charter schools but aren’t recognized as such.
Not just the mayoral academies, innovation schools, and renaissance schools in Providence, Indianapolis, and Camden that I have written about previously.
But schools that are becoming de facto charters.
Like the legacy school district in Indianapolis.
It accesses funding just like a charter school does.
It accesses facilities just like a charter school does, too.
Redlining attendance boundaries and selective admissions are being erased.
The district has a third party looking at its performance every five years in order to determine whether it can retain its right to operate, just like charter schools do.
And its operation of schools occurs in a broader ecosystem where true charter schools are free to occupy the landscape.
So you tell me, CharterFolk.
Beyond the sound the district emits …
If it’s the same size and the same color, if it flies and hunts the same way, if its very DNA is indistinguishable from a hawk, isn’t it, in fact, a hawk?
The Need for a New Hawkishness
For years, these kinds of discussions have grown to be considered nothing other than distraction.
An academic exercise.
Not worth having.
In some of my early writing here, I was more equivocal.
These days, I’ve become much less so.
Our role is to evolve public education in this country.
Away from one owned and operated by jays.
Toward one owned and operated by hawks.
And our own accounting isn’t crisp.
Four million kids in charter schools?
Says who?
When tens of thousands – hundreds of thousands likely – are served by schools that are charter in name only.
And when tens of thousands of others are served by schools that are all charter but in name.
The time has come for a new accounting.
For a new hawkishness.
Define what we stand for.
Schools that do not exclude kids through attendance boundaries and selective admissions.
Schools that don’t siphon students’ money away from one school to subsidize another.
Schools that are freed from the suffocating mountain of statute, regulation, and collective bargaining constraint that impedes so many schools today.
Schools that have enough separation from the state that, if they become fiscally insolvent, they are allowed to fail.
Schools that are not allowed to make promises to provide benefits tomorrow when they haven’t set aside money to pay for them today.
Schools that are not both operator and regulator, but have a neutral third party empowered to decide whether their performance has been strong enough to warrant continued operation.
It is my contention that such schools are as different from typical district schools as hawks are from jays.
They are, in fact, charter schools.
Something that I wish each charter school operator would begin calling itself – if not within its name itself, at least within its tagline.
So that we could help the public avoid the confusion that so many are so consciously attempting to create.
The View from Scapegoat Mountain
We live, CharterFolk, in an era when any new change in the landscape – say the release of some new blockbuster …
… becomes another excuse to scapegoat us.
To blame us for problems that we are actually a solution for.
Perhaps the solution for.
The herders in the late 1800s who brought their sheep in the summer months to the valleys around the mountain we scaled last week knew well the biblical story.
How goats were identified to carry a community’s shortcomings to as remote a place as could be found.
Those herders found the area about as remote as any they had ever experienced.
So it was natural that they would name the mountain …
… Scapegoat.
So often when we think of scapegoats, we focus on the unfair projection of another’s failure onto an inherently innocent thing.
And we think less of the belief that a shortcoming is being carried away.
Our role is not merely to endure the scapegoating.
Our role is to be the presence that carries public education’s shortcomings away.
It begins with the ability to discern a jay from a hawk.
And knowing how to help others understand the difference as well.
Which entails embracing a kind of hawkishness.
Counting only schools that count.
And not counting those that don’t.
On we go.