Weekend greetings, CharterFolk.
I write to you from Mexico City today where I’m enjoying a spring break week with the fam and am indulging my never-ending obsession.
Learning as much as I can about public education.
No charter schools to visit here, though.
;(
At least … not yet.
😉
I’ll be taking a week off from writing. In my absence, we’ll release a CharterFolk X column tomorrow, and a Contributor Column on Thursday. Andy and I will also be releasing a WonkyFolk recording about AI and education mid-week.
I’ll see you with my next column on April 1.
Meanwhile, before getting to today’s post, I highlight that the National Alliance released their 2025 Year in Review. It’s quite the momentum story.
We Over Index on Local Variation
I start today, reporting again on my hometown.
The district’s deficit is now projected to be $171M. That’s equal to approximately 16% of its general fund, which will need to be cut.
In September, the estimate was $43M. It’s bounced around since then.
At the beginning of the week it was thought to be $108M.
Now it’s this.
As a reminder, the district’s superintendent bailed a few months back.
And its chief financial officer is under investigation.
The board didn’t like the new news brought to it by the district’s interim chief financial officer, or her assertion that the board approving a raise for teachers in the fall had exacerbated the problem.
So they decided they need outside help …
… while being sure to make the point that the problem has been staff’s refusal to implement budget reductions that the board had approved, not some deficiency in decision-making coming from the board itself.
Call it a classic “she-said/they-said” story.
In Natomas, a district adjacent to Sacramento, the public still doesn’t know what its deficit is going to be. The district and the teacher union agreed to a new deal putting the union’s strike to an end …
… but the terms were not made public, meaning we won’t know how big the gap is for a few more days.
In another district adjacent to Sacramento Unified, teachers and parents storming the central office didn’t bring their strike to an end.
So we aren’t even close to knowing how big their hole will be.
But here’s the thing, CharterFolk:
When I say that I’m writing about my hometown, that’s not really accurate.
Because what is broken in my hometown is broken in yours.
So I’m really writing about your hometown as well.
In Oakland, the situation is a carbon copy of what we see in California’s capital:
Strike. Unaffordable agreement. Abrupt leadership departure. She-said/they-said. And then an outside financial expert being brought in.
Yada yada yada.
There’s a near carbon copy happening down south in Los Angeles.
A strike is about to make the district’s existing gargantuan fiscal hole even more gargantuan.
And interim leadership is having to deal with it all.
And don’t go accusing me of writing just about my home state either.
My home state is your home state.
This weekend word broke that the ex-superintendent in St. Louis is suing both the district and the local teacher union.
It makes for particularly incendiary she-said/they-said dynamics, including allegations of widespread fraud and misuse of funds.
It happens against a backdrop of even greater brokenness being surfaced by the state.
And this is the scope of the problem after the charter school world agreed to help bail out the St. Louis teacher pension fund.
Imagine where we’d be if charter schools hadn’t agreed to take on more than our fair share of the solution.
And don’t accuse me either of writing about my home side of the Mississippi.
This week, Colleston Morgan, CEO at the City Collaborative in Milwaukee, wrote another great piece about the desperate efforts that legislators are making in Wisconsin …
… to bail out Milwaukee Public Schools …
… by proposing a new funding stream that they leave charter schools out of.
And this is what is happening after the district passed a big new local tax measure that it left charter school students out of.
Again, imagine how much larger the hole would be if charter schools weren’t bearing much more than our fair share of the problem?
And need I mention that the district recently went through an abrupt change in its superintendency …
… and is now seeing an exodus of other senior leadership, including its budget director?
CharterFolk, clearly all the problems from across the nation I present above have their own local flavor.
Each has its own local character.
But they are not problems unique to their cities.
The truth is that we over index on local variation in public education.
Because the sad truth is that public education is broken in very similar ways across place after place.
It’s tempting to highlight just how bad things are in our own hometowns, to attempt to drum up even more support for change, by asserting that there is something uniquely askew in the local school district.
I get it as an advocacy tactic.
But in the end, it contributes to a misperception that our brokenness is somehow unique to us. So why bother looking anywhere else?
When any honest scan of the national landscape, any modicum of comparing local conditions to ones occurring elsewhere, would reveal patterns that many of us just don’t want to acknowledge.
Many certainly saw this current moment of challenge coming. We saw that the needs hierarchy of public education, which should be aligned with the interests of young people needing great education …
… has been tragically broken into a mangled mess designed to serve the needs of the establishment, not the needs of kids.
And when you introduce into that broken hierarchy an unprecedented amount of one-time money meant to support students at a moment of acute need…
… the system can’t help itself, and converts temporary funding into ongoing commitments that it cannot sustain.
It was an uncontrolled form of gorging that has set up what we’re now seeing:
The collapse of entire systems of schools.
Not just in my hometown, or in yours. But in all our hometowns.
It sets up a new moment of responsibility for the national charter school movement, which is to begin pointing out cross-state patterns, and to begin educating when teachable moments arise.
Like when the New Orleans parish decided to begin operating its own public school again after the city became an all charter school system.
Predictably, the new school has struggled.
But instead of the parish doing what it had done in prior generations – siphon money away from other places to compensate for its own shortcoming, allowing the problem to fester and compound – this time the parish had to do something different. They couldn’t take money from other schools because all the other schools are charters whose access to their own funding is protected.
It meant the parish had to turn where it should have turned in order to keep its struggling school afloat – to private donors.
And now, we will see whether the parish’s new school gets on its own feet.
But what we’re much less likely to see is the emergence of the kinds of system-wide financial distortions that allow $43M problems to suddenly become $171M problems where parties devolve into she-said/they-said dysfunction.
As we begin to shift away from an over indexing on regional variation in public school brokenness, so too should we begin reducing our over-indexing on regional variation on proposed solutions.
This week in New Hampshire, we saw the bill proposing to study converting all New Hampshire public schools into charter schools pass the House and now head to the Senate.
It would put New Hampshire on a course toward what Indianapolis has achieved this year.
For what should we call Indianapolis these days but an all charter system?
Schools that access their funding and their facilities exactly like charter schools do, where all schools become schools of choice, where compliance burdens are reduced so the district will have greater ability to innovate, and where the district will have a third party determining every few years whether its de facto charter should be renewed.
It’s the equivalent of IPS evolving into what I have previously called a CABIN – a “charter all but in name.”
This is what it looks like when a structural solution begins to match a structural problem.
Not because we’re trying to cookie cutter anything here.
Not because we want all schools to become charter schools for the sake of them becoming charter schools.
But because there are aspects of charterness that simply better align with our values.
The belief that schools must become both much better and much fairer than they sadly are today in many places across the nation.
And the belief that it is possible for us to implement broad patterns of reform that guard against school systems devolving into the sadly familiar dysfunction we see on display in so many of our hometowns today.
Patterns of brokenness are more similar across regions than we recognize.
As are patterns of possible repair.
We live in a country and in a time where we over index on regional variation in public education.
We in CharterLand don’t believe in one-size fits all solutions.
But becoming a movement serving four million kids in communities across the country is allowing us to see what others cannot.
Patterns of brokenness.
Repeated examples of “she-said/they-said” drama playing out in communities again and again.
As well as seeing reasons for hope.
So the work before us now evolves,
From not just being able to see what others cannot, but to help them see as well.
Such that we become a movement not only able to create a stunning number of simply more excellent and equitable schools.
But a movement able to create entire systems of such schools.
Such that the pace of positive change we unleash grows to levels we have not seen before.