Weekend greetings, CharterFolk.
Last week, I wrote about national pace setting coming out of Indy.
This week, we start with …
Validating Research!
The Progressing Policy Institute released a new study…
… showing that Indy is actually in the middle of the pack.
In the middle of a sizable and growing pack of national pace setters.
Entire cities where achievement gaps are disappearing and where all boats are rising.
And can we be real here, CharterFolk?
When people talk about “school choice” in major urban areas, they’re talking about charter schools, or schools that operate essentially just like charter schools, as is the case with “Innovation Schools” in Indy and “Renaissance Schools” in Camden.
It is just the latest validation that resurgent momentum is spreading across the national charter school movement.
In the ten cities that PPI identified that have over 33% of students in bricks and mortar charter schools, all ten showed achievement gaps being erased and all boats rising, in many cases strikingly.
For those of you in MLB playoff mode, that’s batting a thousand.
Every place where charter schools have grown to enroll a third of students, success has emerged.
And just look where’s its happening.
The very places …
… where historically …
… public education …
… has been most broken.
They’re now proof points of the possible.
Indicators of what our cumulative impact will be when the charter school movement’s potential finds its full expression.
And PPI’s decision to cut things off at the 33% threshold left out many others that are having similar effect in many other places.
Just last month new research came out about historic success in Denver.
Similar results have been demonstrated in Nashville, Boston, San Antonio and Los Angeles. The list of places where charter schools have catalyzed great progress goes on and on.
It speaks to a known imperative:
If what you want for public education is that achievement gaps disappear while all boats rise, then what you want is for the national charter school movement to grow as quickly as possible.
Enough Growth?
Which brings up another major piece of news this week, which is that the charter school movement is continuing to grow, while district schools are continuing to see significant enrollment losses.
It follows the National Alliance’s latest report about enrollment trends …
… showing that charter school enrollment grew by over 83,000 students last year, while district schools lost nearly 275,000.
I admit, I’m of two minds on this, CharterFolk.
Undoubtedly, charter schools being the only thing in public education to be growing these days is a massive accomplishment. And with all the opposition that we have faced, it speaks to the extraordinary resiliency and staying power of the charter school movement that we’re growing at all.
But the Washington Times “booming” headline notwithstanding, is 83,000 student growth really something to celebrate when we have so much evidence that the growth of charter schools erases gaps and lifts all boats, and much faster growth would clearly be in the interests of millions more kids and families?
I, for one, don’t think so.
83,000 students is actually the second lowest amount of enrollment growth the charter school movement has had since the mid 90s.
This slowing of growth happens when we serve only 7 to 8% of students nationally, and when clear evidence is emerging that percentages 4 or 5 times higher than that is what is needed for gaps to close and for all boats to rise.
It translates into what should be a moment of manic urgency to grow our movement with all the pace we can possibly summon.
CSP Squandering?
Which leads me to the third piece of news I wanted to highlight this week, which was the announcement of the latest round of CSP awards.
When it comes to our greatest single policy lever to aid us in our effort to erase achievement gaps and lift all boats, aside from charter school laws themselves, nothing rivals CSP.
And unfortunately, people who do not support our vision for the charter school movement are responsible these days for running the application process determining CSP awards.
And while I don’t believe in widespread conspiracy theories controlling much of anything, much less education policy, I do believe that the general orientation of administrations can drive decision-making, even within a supposedly objective application process, that generally aligns with their point of view.
And I believe this latest round of CSP awards aligns with the administration’s general point of view, which is to do all they can to ensure that charter schools grow as slowly as possible.
Thus, they gave well over half of the growth funding ($213M out of $376M) to state departments of education in New York and California, departments that didn’t come close to distributing all their prior cycle’s funding to charter school developers.
It’s clearly a strategy designed to make sure that as much CSP funding gets allocated to entities that will sit on it and make sure it’s not put to use actually helping charter schools to erase gaps and lift boats.
I am told that New York, which had tens of millions left over from its prior grant, never thought it remotely possible that they would be awarded the full $120M they requested because they clearly couldn’t use even a fraction of it. And yet they got the full $120M!
And for California, it is simply not possible to find a policy maker in the country more militantly opposed to charter schools than the public official now overseeing California’s CSP grant, California Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond.
And yet, between what Tony didn’t spend last time and what he was awarded this time, he’s now sitting on over $100M of it!
It’s right where charter school opponents want CSP funds: within coffers from which they know it will never be distributed.
It’s the next best thing to actually cutting CSP funding, which charter school opponents have tried to do repeatedly …
… in recent years.
Meanwhile many other places that would have fully used every CSP resource provided them to grow charter schools as rapidly as possible – Arkansas, North Carolina and Iowa – didn’t see a penny.
I’m not giving up hope that surprises might happen making these decisions turn out okay in the end.
California, for example, contrary to uninformed opinion, had the fourth fastest growth of charter schools over the past four years, and depending on how you do the accounting, an argument could be made that California had the fastest charter school enrollment growth of any state in the country last year.
Yes, faster than North Carolina, Florida and even Texas.
And who knows? While New York is well known for all the opposition that has been thrown at charter schools of late, the state has shown the fifth highest amount of charter school growth in the last four years despite all the blowback. And perhaps political changes are afoot in New York that could catapult the state even further up the list.
The Way Forward:
Whatever happens, it does seem inevitable that the National Alliance and all its partners are going to have to get even more involved in the CSP application process such that wanton effort to intentionally squander massive amounts of CSP funding becomes a thing of the past.
The reason for hope in all this was the awarding of CSP grants to state associations in Utah and Colorado.
Nonprofits that actually support the charter school movement and want charter schools to grow are the way forward for proper stewarding of CSP funds.
Terry Ryan and the team at BLUUM did a great job documenting the success that their organization and others across the country are having in their early years of managing CSP funds.
Among them are the New Jersey association, whose funding is helping erase gaps and lift boats in Camden and Newark, and the Opportunity Trust, which is doing the same in St. Louis and KC.
They are putting new charter school octane into four of the cities that, along with Indianapolis and many others, are now pacing the nation.
Imagine the momentum we will have when even more state associations and other truly supportive nonprofits are making sure that CSP funds are being deployed to their highest and best use.
Greater Conviction!
It speaks to how important it is that CharterFolk recognize the significance of the four pieces of news that have come out this week.
They’re additional stars in the charter school sky, a constellation we can chart a course around.
The time has come for us all to embrace with even greater conviction a shared mission to make sure that charter schools serve at least a third of students.
Not a third in this city, or a third in that city.
But a third in every city, and in all areas in between, such that we serve a third of students in the entire country.
Because that is the threshold where we can say with even greater confidence and credibility that we will finally see what we’ve always wanted:
Achievement gaps disappearing and all boats rising.
Everywhere!