Weekend greetings, CharterFolk.
A central premise I have been asserting here at CharterFolk since our earliest days is that we are witnessing the “National Crack Up” in public education policy …
… red states and blue states going in directions that are so different that there is little overlap in thinking that remains.
It was born of the “Great Disconnect” …
… with so little of public education’s offerings meeting the minimum expectations of parents, that, again, hardly any overlap remains.
The early months of the second Trump Administration offer us a watchtower vantage point, allowing us to see these dynamics unfold in ways that weren’t apparent before.
To my mind, this whole “will they” …
… or “won’t they” …
… issue an executive order targeting the Department of Education is beside the point.
Whether the Republicans completely dismantle or just significantly downsize the department, the national consensus is behind us, much like the Transatlantic Alliance is behind us.
Yes, significant funding will likely keep coming from the federal government to support the education of low-income and special needs students. The Republicans will likely stick some private school tax credit in their upcoming reconciliation bill, and let’s hope they hold intact the federal Charter Schools Program, with the coup de grâce being a final sunsetting of any requirement that states administer tests, rendering us blind to the learning that is happening, or not happening, in our country.
Essentially, CharterFolk, the feds are abandoning the education policy landscape. Power is going to the states. It’s where we must now train our eyes.
Taking advantage of the watchtower view, we can gain a glimpse of that which hasn’t been apparent before:
Not just the shifting policy landscape, but the deeper political instability beneath it.
On the Blue Side
A hypothesis that some — including myself — have put forward in recent months is that the scope of the Democratic setback in November will force a reckoning, one that compels the party to stake out new ground. Ezra Klein, a liberal standard-bearer, has been writing and podcasting at the Times along these lines …
… and has a new book coming out this month …
… arguing that Democrats need to get out of the way and allow an abundance of new things to be built.
If there is any place where a new abundance agenda is needed, it is in the realm of public education.
Sadly, developments over the last few weeks have shown blue state contexts as affixed to their scarcity agenda as ever before, with new charters being denied in Massachusetts …
… and Philadelphia …
… and New Jersey.
In every case, the rationale for denying the new charter schools had nothing to do with whether they would create greater educational opportunity. Indeed, in Massachusetts, the acclaim for the KIPP school denied expansion was nearly universal. In Philadelphia, the school district board members were effusive about the proposed new school they rejected. And the performance of New Jersey charter schools unquestionably exceeds the performance of district schools in every community where expansion proposals were denied.
No, the rejections were a function of blue policy makers prioritizing the schools the system needs above the schools that kids and families need.
It’s something that’s been happening for years — an establishment whose schools are mired in the lower left quadrant, having no theory of change for overcoming the Great Disconnect other than …
… extending the fuse.
So, despite what luminaries like Klein might be calling for, the pivoting of the Democratic Party toward some abundance agenda will not happen with the policy makers who are already in their seats.
They’re bought and paid for by the status quo, and they will continue to do its bidding as recent developments in Massachusetts, Philadelphia and New Jersey attest.
The reckoning awaits.
Meanwhile on the Red Side
Meanwhile, in red states the march toward universal vouchers continues unabated …
… despite the mounting evidence …
… that the lion’s share of the benefit …
… is going to families who can already afford to have their kids in private schools.
With such evidence amassing, it’s intuitive to revisit the theory of action undergirding the red state policy agenda. New illumination comes from another fascinating discussion hosted at the Times, this one moderated by conservative standard bearer Russ Douthat.
This week he interviewed Chris Rufo from the Manhattan Institute, who is seen to have as much influence as anyone over the cuts that are being proposed for the Department of Education.
The interview is one of the first times we have been able to see a conservative inquisitor deeply interrogate the theory of action of a fellow conservative working in education policy. I found this interaction particularly telling:
Rufo: So you have a system that is unaccountable, and when the culture of that system and the vast bulk of the bureaucracy of that system is captured, you get the status quo of the first Trump administration, which was a Department of Education that was radically left wing, funding only radical left-wing causes.
I just think that there has to be a kind of binary choice, agency by agency. Can this agency be reformed or can this agency only be abolished or dismantled to the maximum extent permissible by law? I think the Department of Education is then in the latter camp. I think the F.B.I. could maybe be reformed.
Douthat: Right.
Rufo: Other agencies can be perhaps reformed. But the Department of Education in my view is beyond reform. You have to spin off, liquidate, terminate and abolish to the furthest extent you can by law. All while maintaining your political viability and your statutory compliance for those things that are essential, required by law, and that are politically popular. You always want to maintain the popularity, but can you take those things away ——
Douthat: But it just seems weird to me.
Rufo: Why?
Douthat: Put it this way, Chris. If you can’t find enough right-leaning or centrist people to staff a stripped-down and slimmer Department of Education to affect American education in the way you want, how are you ever going to find enough personnel to do it at the state level?
A big reason that American education writ large is left leaning is that many people who go into it are left leaning. You and I know this very well. Some of my best friends are left-leaning graduates of America’s many fine educational schools. It just seems like it’s sort of pre-emptive despair on the part of conservatives to say, Well, we have political control over this agency that has a certain kind of influence over American education, and we’re just going to give it up because we can’t find enough people. You’re assuming a capacity to fire people, right?
Rufo: Yes
Douthat: But you don’t assume any capacity to hire new people?
Rufo: Well, this gets to another point, and maybe I can answer your question more effectively from the other side. You’re essentially asking, why can’t you just replace the bad folks with the good folks?
Douthat: Well, just to be clear, you are advocating eliminating all of the people who you think are sort of irredeemably left wing, right? Like they will not have jobs anymore?
Rufo: The unfortunate answer is yes. They’re redeemable as people, but they aren’t entitled to lifetime federal employment with no accountability.
Douthat: Absolutely. I’m not making a moral case for their right to a job. You’re saying we can fire them?
Rufo: I believe that to be true as far as part of an overall reorganization. But I think the other problem that you’re identifying is one that I take seriously and the unfortunate answer is, no. Conservatives cannot fully staff the Department of Education. Conservatives cannot fully compete for education grants, or university-level research programs. No, conservatives can’t do any of those things. So we have to figure out what we can do. Where can we have leverage? Where can we take over or recapture an institution? And if we can’t do those things, then what do we have to shut down? Shutting things down is actually a very effective strategy.
Quite a stunner.
An admission that the entire conservative approach is a shutdown strategy, predicated upon a recognition that there aren’t enough conservatives in the education space to replace that which is being dismantled, at either a federal or state level.
It cuts straight to the vacuum in conservative thinking about the future of education generally.
Where’s the “something better” ever going to come from?
And if there isn’t a good answer to that question, how is the red state abundance agenda any more abundant than the blue state’s preservation of scarcity?
Last week I had a conversation with a universal voucher proponent wherein he conceded that much of the criticism of new private school choice laws are warranted. Yes, the wealthy are benefitting the most right now. Yes, rampant inflation is being released in private school tuition as government subsidies expand. Yes, with tuition levels rising, with most private schools not having excess capacity to serve more kids, and with most using highly selective admissions, little direct value is likely to come in the near term to the kids and families who need better education most.
In sum?
In the early years, yeah, this is what it’s going to be.
But we have to keep our eyes on the longer term prize, he said. The presence of wealthy families will give the new choice systems the political support they need to long endure, much as social security has proven politically viable over the decades because all Americans, even the wealthy, benefit from it. And as the new paradigm settles in, and as EntrepreneurialFolk see that there are a huge number of parents who still haven’t gotten what they wanted either from the old public system or the new private one, a cornucopia of great new options at the $6,000-$10,000/student price point will suddenly appear.
This is the red state theory of action?
A stunning array of new low cost educational opportunities becoming available in communities across the country, when Rufo doesn’t think there is enough fresh blood to even staff the U.S. Department of Education?
Maybe, and it’s a very emphatic maybe, the new paradigm inches us upward and to the right over a multi-decade timeframe.
But for the foreseeable future, it seems to me that the red state rendering looks strikingly similar to the blue one — mired in the bottom left quadrant …
… hoping for a very long fuse.
The View from the Watchtower
This, CharterFolk, is the public education landscape viewed from the watchtower that the early months of the second Trump Administration afford us.
Some of it is a vista we’ve seen before — the disconnect continues, power devolves to the states, red and blue further diverge.
But other parts are new to behold:
Like the vacuousness of each side’s theory of action, revealed more starkly as the gulf between them widens.
Maybe a fuse will blow under one or the other.
More likely, the illusion of unity will dissolve, atomize and collapse into incoherence.
You think No Child Left Behind is discredited?
At this rate, it’s going to look like a golden age of education policy-making in comparison to what people will look back and say about the 2020’s.
Meanwhile, a second contour also begins to come into focus in the distant landscape.
Not just the incoherence of education policy, but the instability of the politics that underpin it.
Last week, we saw Andrew Cuomo, a long-time Democratic supporter of charter schools, announce his candidacy for mayor of New York …
… and we saw U.S. Senator Michael Bennett, another charter school champion, signal his likely race for Colorado governor.
No one is saying these guys are fresh-faced reformers, but in a Democratic Party where most policymakers have been frozen in place on education for nearly a decade, these moves signal something important.
They show how Ezra Klein’s call for Democrats to embrace an abundance agenda is going to happen — not through current policymakers suddenly seeing the light, but through them being replaced by others who do.
Meanwhile, on the red side, I find it fascinating.
Take Texas where Governor Abbott has already spent years waging primary battles to force Republican legislators into line on vouchers. Yet even after all that work, the bill still faces a massive fight …
… so much so that Trump and Musk are issuing implied threats just to keep the troops in line.
Does that seem like a political order ready to long endure? Arguably the three most powerful people in the country having to hold people’s feet to the fire indefinitely?
What happens when the true cost of the system becomes apparent?
Because Texas’s proposal isn’t the only place where “billion dollar news” is reshaping private school choice.
This week, Arizona revealed its latest state budget projections …
… showing that the state’s universal program ESA is set to cost more than a $1 billion next year, when original estimates were that it would cost just 1/15th of that.
Two Riders Are Approaching
CharterFolk, as often happens to me at times like this, my thoughts drift to Dylan.
Two riders were approaching, the wind began to howl.
Like the Joker and the Thief watching from their above-it-all vantage point in “All Along the Watchtower,” we, too, see two new riders approaching.
- A desperate need for better policy
- And the changing politics undergirding it all
It equates to a new order taking shape — one that neither red nor blue fully controls — bringing a wave of change in the second half of the decade that will surpass the first.
Like Dylan’s characters, it’s natural to wish for “some kind of way out here,” to feel like “there’s too much confusion,” and to believe we “can’t get no relief.”
But the only thing that matters is whether we’ll be ready for the riders we know will soon arrive.
As ever, we’ll be on the watchtower’s ramparts here at CharterFolk, helping us prepare.
Tomorrow I think you will all be electrified by a Contributor Column from Former Michigan Governor John Engler, who will share his ideas about the first rider — what we should be doing politically right now.
Meanwhile, I will be burning the midnight oil to take on the second rider — laying out policy orientations that could help us navigate the shifting landscape.
And it won’t surprise any of you to hear me say this:
Despite all the immense challenges we face right now, the charter school movement is still the best-positioned force in public education to bring forward a coherent vision for the future.
But that will require doing some things differently.
And taking some new risks.
I’ll lay those out in the next week or so.
Hope to see you here.