Weekend greetings, CharterFolk.
For a while now, I’ve been wanting to share with you “The Chart of the Century.”
But before I get to that, it’s worth highlighting a few developments happening on stories that we’ve been following here.
We start with the good news that Chicago CharterFolk raising their voices …
… appears to have paid off.
The district has redacted anti-charter school language from the strategic plan it approved this week.
But hardly was that news out before the bombshell dropped that Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson has doubled down on his effort to get rid of Chicago Public Schools CEO Pedro Martinez.
It provides further evidence:
Wherever status quo interests get control of a school system, dysfunction ensues.
Martinez’s unpardonable sin is his refusal to enter into a loan to give teachers raises, which all but Johnson’s cronies at the Chicago Teacher Union think to be a wantonly irresponsible idea.
Last month, Jana Wilcox Lavin lamented the lack of accountability that exists within district public schools in Las Vegas.
This week we saw the district’s CFO be terminated without cause.
His firing follows the departure of the superintendent in the spring who left after having negotiated a new contract with the teacher union that is already proving to be unsustainable. That’s the case despite the fact that Nevada schools saw historic increases in funding last year. It’s led Governor Lombardo to swoop in to initiate an investigation.
Meanwhile a little further west, news broke over the weekend that fiscal issues are likely to result in the San Francisco superintendent leaving after barely two years on the job.
Everywhere we turn we see more examples of the tragic dysfunction that is playing out in major urban school districts.
Broken finances, leading to leadership crises, leading to formal investigations, leading, ultimately, to tens of thousands of students being deprived of the better educations they deserve in city after city..
One of the places where it’s happening worst is Milwaukee. This week, Abby, Howard and Colleston came together to defend school choice.
That’s quite a trio.
Their launching point was the rather unbelievable statement that Secretary Cordona made about school choice.
The trio’s quote I like most?
Trying to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes isn’t particularly valuable unless you’re also walking alongside them on the same broken sidewalks to the same broken schools. We’ve noticed that parent choice is not controversial for the families it was designed for and the students who truly need it:
– Recent national polling showed that just 9% of parents, and 7% of Black and Hispanic voters in swing states, disagreed with the idea that parents should be able to choose the school that best meets their child’s needs.
– In Wisconsin, a recent Marquette Law School Poll noted that by a 2:1 margin, respondents believe the state’s school choice policies have been a success.
Meanwhile, parent choice seems to be more troubling for some people who are blessed to live near good public schools or whose incomes already allow them to choose the best school for their own children.
It provides a perfect segue to “The Chart of the Century.”
What “The Chart of the Century” Reveals About Our Work
During a week when so many have been fixated on what is going on with interest rates and inflation, I thought I would share with you what some have called “The Chart of the Century.”
It was first published in 2018. Since then, it keeps getting updated based upon the latest CPI data. Here is what it looks like as of this spring.
Generally, people like to use the chart to show the folly of government proposing solutions to problems that government itself created. Those industries that are most “captured by regulation” – health care and education – are shown to have the most out of control inflation. Those industries that are least regulated – technology related – show the greatest drop in prices. And typically competitive markets such as automobiles and clothing show increases in prices but ones that are lower than increases in hourly wages.
People much more knowledgeable than me debate inflation matters. I’ll leave those broader discussions to others and will keep focused on our own realm, which is K-12, and the parts of the economy that most affect it.
Like college costs, which, other than hospital stays, the Chart of the Century shows to be more out of control than any other segment of the economy.
Guaranteed student loans for all continue to wreak havoc.
They are the equivalent of universal vouchers for higher ed, but because they are loans that are essentially uncapped, they allow higher ed to determine the size of its own voucher, which has released an explosion of inflation.
It seems, finally, to have hit its ceiling, yielding another of the charts of the century:
For the first time in generations, the aggregate level of student debt in the country has ebbed.
Apparently, we just can’t heap any more debt on our young people to subsidize an industry whose primary beneficiaries have become older people.
It’s against this backdrop that Aidé Acosta wrote her recent Contributor Column encouraging CharterFolk to remain anchored to the importance of ensuring student success in college.
I’m certainly not one to blanket-criticize all the new focus on vocational education. But we should at least be keyed into the fact that vocational education’s current better perceived return on investment is a function of higher’s ed’s cost structure having become completely untethered from the forces of supply and demand.
What would we be counseling our young people toward if, since the turn of the century, college costs had grown as quickly as the cost of a new car?
Or a new TV?
Is it any wonder that charter school supportive Western governors like Leavitt and Romer …
… came together to create what has become the largest university in the United States, conferring over 50,000 degrees last year …
… costing a mere fraction of what other universities cost?
And is it any wonder that long time ed reformers like Wade and Henry and Breitling …
… would be gravitating toward the creation of even more affordable higher ed options?
The second realm that the Chart of the Century portrays relative to our work is housing.
Given that we have set up our public education system such that the place where you live determines where your kids go to school, from a purely educational point of view, what we want is housing that is as affordable as possible. That way, as many families as possible can get to the schools they want for their kids.
Upon my first glance at the Chart of the Century, I was actually surprised to see that the cost of housing has only grown 98% since 2000, but the broader housing category doesn’t disaggregate rental costs from purchase costs.
This slide does it for us.
Here we see that, relative to median household income, rental costs have outpaced household earnings by about 15 basis points. But the cost of purchasing a home has grown by about 60 points, four times faster over the past 24 years.
It translates into tens of millions of families not being able to purchase houses like prior generations were able to, meaning that, in terms of families having a fair shot of getting a decent education for their kids through the purchase of a house, fairness problems are even worse today than they were at the turn of the century.
In the middle of the pandemic, I highlighted that 88% of new home purchases were made by White people.
Do we see it as a sign of progress that last year it was only 81% …
… in a country where 58% of the population is White?
It shows how spot on Abby, Howard and Colleston are in their commentary about opponents to school choice, many of whom are among the fortunate who have been able to buy houses for themselves, needing to walk in the shoes of people who aren’t so fortunate.
Sadly, I do not hold out much hope that policy makers will make things better.
… which would only push housing inflation rates into the stratospheric levels currently occupied only by hospital stays.
Amid this broader context of policy brokenness, what else is there for CharterFolk to do but stay focused on our knitting?
We create great schools that families can access wherever they live, and we push our public education system to erase lines so families can get wherever they want educationally, even if they can’t residentially.
Meanwhile, we stay predatory, supporting the emergence of a new generation of higher ed options that are much more affordable for our young people.