Weekend greetings, CharterFolk.
Per my column last weekend, I said I wanted to return to a post …
… that I think is among the more important I have tried to write here at CharterFolk, but which, in retrospect, I do not think I got quite right.
I turn to that in a second.
Before I do, though, a story from this week puts it all in context.
The Gabriella Moment
The disconnect between the photo and the headline says it all.
On the one hand, three boys, Saul Martinez, Matthew Veliz, and Jett Yorker, dancing with joy at Gabriella Charter School like they do every day.
On the other, the Los Angeles Unified Board voting to bring the dancing to an end.
All because they want space back, in an era when thousands upon thousands of kids and families are disenrolling every year, leaving the district with so many underutilized facilities it does not know what to do with them.
It is unbelievable. And yet, here we are.
Gabriella is not just another “popular charter school.” It is one of our most legendary schools.
Its founder, Liza Bercovici, was one of the first we recognized as CharterFolk Extraordinaire, someone who took an unimaginable loss, the death of her daughter, and turned it into a school that honors that daughter’s love of dance. It’s a school whose excellence has been recognized across the land.
And yet, four members of the Los Angeles Unified Board, aligned with union and status quo interests, have voted to close it.
Never mind that the school’s renewal will almost certainly be approved on appeal to the county.
That is not the point.
This is:
CharterFolk, NOTHING matters to status quo interests.
Not how great your program is.
Not what a good partner you are.
Not how ecstatic your families are.
Not how much the community loves you.
Attempting to bring the dancing to an end at Gabriella Charter School might as well be trying to do away with motherhood and apple pie.
It’s emblematic of status quo interests willing to do almost anything to protect their turf, even when their actions stray far from our shared values.
There’s only one way we get over nonsense like this, CharterFolk.
We have to build the advocacy strength we will need to survive, and ultimately to thrive.
Which was what I tried to write about a couple of years ago.
But I went on too long. I got discursive, brought in clutter, and then published it six days before Christmas when no one had time to absorb it.
So let me try again, getting directly to the point this time.
This will be an unusual post for me, more bulleted, more outline-like, stripped of extra context and story.
Something that reads more like a roadmap, a way to navigate the next chapter of advocacy challenges that await.
Topics addressed will be as follows:
- What the Charter School Movement Needs to Succeed
- Building the CAPE: How We Become Superheroes
- Escaping Our Small-Thinking Mindset
- Understanding the Centrality of the Free Rider Challenge
- Essentials for Overcoming Free Riding
- Running the Advocacy Play We Now Know Works
- The Challenge at the State–Local Nexus
- A Call to Weave the CAPE Together So Kids Might Dance
Let’s get to it.
What the Charter School Movement Needs to Succeed
In my view, in order for the charter school movement to succeed, we need three things.
- Heroic schools like Gabriella, doing great things with kids and families. Without this, what is the point?
- Superheroic collective advocacy strength, the ability to defend ourselves and push through policy change.
- And a great North Star policy agenda toward which to direct that collective strength, something I have been writing about ad nauseam in recent months.
In other words, charter school movement success consists of three parts.
- a hero,
- with a cape,
- headed toward the stars.
Building the CAPE: How We Become Superheroes
The focus today, and the focus of the article from a couple of years ago, is on the second part, building collective strength.
Whether we like it or not, those who oppose us possess massive strength. We will either find a way to amass similar strength, or we will not long succeed.
For me, the CAPE we need to transform ourselves into superheroes is assembled across four stages.
1. Coherence
We need coherent structures patterned roughly after what teacher unions have built.
- A great national membership organization, connected to strong state associations, connected to city-based affiliates where numbers warrant.
- These must be C3/C4 tandems, so we can engage in the full range of advocacy and politics.
- Too many organizations are counterproductive. Unions are strong because they are unified; everyone is part of the whole.
- In Charterland, funders and school leaders have often created too many splinter groups that undermine coherence.
- Fortunately, though, we have learned from our mistakes and are now seeing strong, coherent C3/C4 membership associations emerge across the country.
- We just need more.
2. Adequacy
Adequacy comes from having enough resources flowing through those coherent structures and ensuring those organizations are well led and making wise, collective decisions.
3. Permanence
Permanence comes through a level of resources that shows we are not just strong now but that we will remain strong for decades to come.
- For years, only public employee unions had reliable revenues that projected long-term staying power.
- Now, we have the potential to achieve that too, if we get our act together.
4. Excellence
Excellence emerges once permanence is established.
- Policymakers see that we are here to stay.
- They begin supporting us at the level they have long wanted to, confident we will be at their backs for decades.
Escaping Our Small-Thinking Mindset
Our advocacy mindset is anchored to a distant history when we were so small it did not matter how much we contributed.
- In the early 1990s, we assumed membership revenue would never be enough to sustain advocacy.
- So we set tiny dues, meant only to signal loyalty. The real resources, we thought, would come from funders, or not at all.
- But we lost sight of our potential for growth. Now, with nearly four million kids in charter schools, we still operate from a small-impact mindset.
California and Los Angeles are representative.
- CCSA dues were $5 per student for 15 years, unchanged while public education funding and union dues climbed steadily.
- Only Massachusetts broke that pattern. They pegged dues to increases in public education funding and raised them consistently year after year.
- But Massachusetts was an outlier. Nearly every other state followed the California pattern, keeping dues flat so that, over time, they actually shrank in relative terms.
- Even after CCSA finally raised dues, they remain less than one-third of Massachusetts’s levels.
Meanwhile, status quo interests kept raising their contributions, and not just by a little.
- UTLA has continually increased dues and added optional political contributions from members that far exceed what charter advocates collect. They raised dues again just this year.
- Add in other establishment groups, classified unions, administrators’ unions, school board associations, business officer organizations, and more, and the total per-pupil spending on representation and advocacy in Los Angeles now exceeds $180 per student.
- By most reports, SEIU members alone contribute 2.1% of their earnings to the union every month. Not that we would do it, but could you imagine our strength if our advocacy organizations had 2.1% of the earnings of all employees working in charter schools, with significant portions of it being able to go toward political purposes?
- Meanwhile, what are CCSA’s dues? $16 per student. Even including dues that flow to other charter advocacy partners, total per-pupil contributions in Los Angeles barely reach one-tenth of what status quo protection receives.
- In Oakland, the gap is not quite as large as in Los Angeles, but it is still seven to eight times higher on the other side.
There is no rocket science here. Serving one-eighth of the kids and contributing one-eighth of the advocacy resources per pupil is not sustainable.
We do not need to match them, not even close.
We are on the right side of history.
But one-eighth of one-eighth?
Anyone can see that’s not going to be politically viable over the long term.
Understanding the Centrality of the Free Rider Challenge
As I wrote before, one of the defining questions we face as a movement is whether we will overcome the free rider challenge.
It is a question particularly pertinent to advocacy, which functions much like the NPR model. People get to listen whether they pay or not.
People get to benefit from advocacy efforts whether they contribute or not.
But contending with the free rider challenge is by no means unique to us.
It has been the defining question that species and groups have confronted going back millions of years.
And some of our most famous thinkers have been obsessed with it.
Darwin wrote extensively about it, observing that species succeed when individuals within the species cooperate.
The same held true for groups of people. Those that had members who gave at least as much as they took were the ones that survived. Those who suffered from free riding were ultimately vanquished.
These underlying dynamics have not changed. They’re still playing out in our advocacy world today.
Groups that build contribution and coherence thrive.
Groups that experience free riding fade.
We cannot compel dues, nor would we want to. Contributions will remain voluntary.
But one of the key questions before us, as we enter our fourth decade and approach our fourth million students, is whether we will self-organize into a level of contribution and coherence that matches our potential.
That is why in the article from a couple years ago, I called free riding our kryptonite.
The one thing that could prevent us from achieving superhero status.
Essentials for Overcoming Free Riding
Jonathan Haidt’s research points to two keys to overcoming free riding.
- A Sense of Shared Purpose
- People contribute when they feel part of something bigger than themselves.
- This is why the North Star matters so much.
- Transactional appeals do not move people; aspirational ones do.
- Legitimate Engagement
- Groups overcome free riding when members are engaged in decision making and see governance as legitimate.
- Even if they disagree with outcomes, they stay loyal when they trust the process.
- The unions have proven able to do this now for decades.
Consider the California Teachers Association a few years back.
They fired a beloved former leader who had headed the organization for many years because some within their ranks felt he wasn’t anti-charter enough. The drama and hurt feelings were widespread. But because the organization had deep stakeholder engagement, they weathered it. Members stayed, dues kept flowing, and the union arguably emerged even stronger on the other side.
It underscores an essential reality for us. In many places our structures of engagement and shared decision-making are still coming together. Many state charter sectors now serve hundreds of thousands of students but our structures of engagement have yet to evolve to handle well that scale.
But as Haidt teaches us, this is not optional.
Great North Stars and great governance structures overseeing our advocacy efforts are no longer nice-to-haves.
They are essentials.
Running the Advocacy Play We Now Know Works
For many years, our member associations simply were not strong enough.
Now, they are improving dramatically.
- Texas, under Starlee’s leadership, has become legend, a living example of what happens when coherence, adequacy, and permanence come together in a single, formidable organization. And they remain as much on stride today with new leadership, showing how excellence can be sustained.
- Illinois, Massachusetts, and others are showing the way as well, proving that durable, dues-supported C3/C4 tandems can achieve major policy impact.
- Other strong examples include DC, Colorado, Louisiana, New Mexico, Utah, Missouri, Indiana, Tennessee, New Jersey, with many other up-and-comers on the way.
No one is saying we should be cookie-cuttering anything across states. Conditions vary greatly by context.
But general patterns exist. A play has emerged, one we know works.
The question now becomes whether we’re all going to run that play.
Because over time, we all are coming to recognize that there really is no alternative. We cannot opt out of strong membership organizations and still expect strong advocacy. Leaders and funders can go their own direction for a while, but none of it is a long-term solution. Ask anyone pursuing a short-term splintering direction what their vision is for long-term strength, one that allows us to contend with the gargantuan power of amassed status quo interests, and they will admit they have none.
It’s because there simply isn’t one. Believe me, I’ve been obsessed to find another way for decades. As have been many other advocates. To no avail.
In the end, there is only one real play:
Amassing our collective strength within strong associations, with everyone contributing and all participating in shared decision making, staying united even through periods when the collective does not choose to go in the direction individuals might prefer.
Whether CharterFolk choose to run that play will ultimately determine whether our movement succeeds or not.
The Challenge at the State–Local Nexus
Our biggest structural challenge now lies at the intersection of state and local work. For years, we just wanted a good state association in each state. Now, some states have become so large that it is extremely difficult for one group to excel at both state and local levels, especially when dues aren’t providing enough resources to be great at both.
Status quo interests faced this same conundrum and endured decades of drama, and trial and error to get it right.
We do not have that luxury.
We must build the right structures proactively, collaboratively, and trustfully.
- Structures that prove complementary to one another.
- Presences that magnify one another’s strengths rather than duplicate or dilute them.
- Responsibilities that are clearly delineated.
- With local structures focusing on local advocacy.
- While state entities handle statewide policy and politics.
- With bylaws that are clear.
- Schools that are members of a local effort should be expected to be members of the state work as well.
- And vice versa
Of course, there is great risk here.
Yes, we may need new structures, new affiliates, and in some cases even whole new organizations. But if those entities are set up as competitors or end up working at cross purposes, the consequences could be disastrous.
But as we keep in mind the risks, so too should we keep focused on the potential we could untap if we do this right.
Like unions discovered, we could find that our people are willing to pay higher dues and devote additional energy to advocacy when they can see and feel the impact close to home, and when they know their voice matters in local governance.
So too could we develop the ability to drive narrative at whole new levels, for, just as union narrative is not run by national entities but by local ones, so too could we see that our representative city-based organizations begin to tell the charter school story at levels never seen before.
So we have to get this right, again, not cookie-cuttering it, but letting a menu of options unfold.
Some states will make it work with a single organization and regional sub-units. Others will need formal regional structures. The options and the detail can emerge in conversation over time.
The only thing we can’t have is kryptonite:
Free riding.
A Call to Weave the CAPE Together So Kids Might Dance
So I end with a simple request:
We need EveryFolk to be part of their association.
EveryFolk.
So if you are a member of your association, thank you!
And if you’re not, please rejoin.
And please be willing to contribute dues at levels that leave behind our small thinking of the past.
And if you do not like how your association is performing right now, or you think it should be pursuing a different strategy, take it as a sign to get more involved, not less. Work to join its board or one of its advisory councils. Learn about the advocacy strengthening that is happening in many places across the country right now. Encourage other charter school leaders to come together and wrap a CAPE around the shoulders of the charter school movement.
We are the biggest new force in public education in generations. And it is within our grasp to become the driving force for all of public education going forward. Whether we ultimately get there depends on CharterFolk coming together to provide our advocacy organizations the resources and engagement they will need to finally release, once and for all, the full potential of the national charter school movement.
In the end, what is being attempted at Gabriella is not only the closing of a school.
It is an attempt to do away with things that we cherish as much as motherhood and apple pie
Because what touches us more deeply than the simple joy of children dancing?
Of students learning?
Of families rejoicing in options that are available to them?
That, CharterFolk, is what a hero with a cape headed toward the stars looks like:
Children dancing.
Everywhere!