Weekend greetings, CharterFolk.
Thanks to many of you for your positive notes about this week’s post about the three policy changes we could pursue to accelerate the marginal revolution in public education being unleashed by charter schools.
I like having been able to write a post about a specific topic, but a tradeoff is that I crowded out my regular mid-week whip-around, which means I feel far behind on updating you about national news in the trends we follow here at CharterFolk. I’ll do what I can to jam two weeks of news into Wednesday’s whip-around.
Meanwhile, this weekend, I’ll start with what I know has been a recurring theme here of late: the stunning audacity of the We Can’t Wait campaign in California and what it is revealing about the brokenness of so much of public education today, not just in California, but across the country.
Rudderless
Again, there is so much news to choose from, but being the son of a school principal, let me start with this one.
It profiles Maria Nichols, the leader of AALA, the administrators association in Los Angeles, which, as I highlighted in November, had recently voted to join the Teamsters…
… because they had grown tired of UTLA icing principals out of “me-too” raises.
This negotiating cycle, the first after AALA having joined Teamsters, SEIU and UTLA agreed to admit principals into the united front.
This week, we see the result. It was not absolute “me-too” parity in terms of raises.
SEIU got the highest, 24% raises. Teachers received 14%. And principals got the least, around 12%.
But in terms of other compensation, school principals might have gotten the most consequential change of all:
An agreement stipulating that a school principal’s role is a 40-hour-per-week job and giving principals a contractual basis to reclaim time for hours worked in excess of 40, without prior supervisory approval.
I asked ChatGPT to find me another agreement in the country for principals along these lines. It couldn’t find one. Lots of principal agreements reference a 40-hour work week as a comparison point districts should respect, and Las Vegas gives principals compensation for excessive hours worked on holidays, but none we could find go this far.
I admit, CharterFolk, this development leaves me flummoxed.
Just thinking back on my Dad’s experience as a principal. All my years working in schools. The experience of charter school principals I come into contact with every day.
Everyone knows the school principal job is at least a 55 to 60 hour per week undertaking. To be precise, NCES estimates it to be 58.3.
So what happens now?
Principals just start leaving after 40 hours? LAUSD starts slashing a third of principal responsibility? Principals start taking far longer summer breaks after having banked weeks of time? Or does the whole system simply depend on principals doing the right thing despite the fact that they now have a contract protecting them if they do otherwise, and a force as formidable as the Teamsters standing at their back whenever they want to contest things?
The short answer is that no one really knows, of course. The agreement is so unhinged from reality that it becomes impossible to predict how the district will reconcile its terms with the actual work of running schools.
But one thing does seem certain:
The agreement has introduced into public education a new race to the bottom.
One that will ultimately, if not quite immediately, result in public schools being even more rudderless than they are now.
Bereft of leadership.
At the school level, as well as at the very top of the district.
The Times profile closes with Nichols wondering aloud:
“We got all of these wins, but how is that going to impact our budget at schools? Where’s the money going to come from?”
But the article says that those issues “will be left for another day” as Nichols looks forward to convening with the presidents of UTLA and SEIU to “enjoy some adult beverages.”
It is as stark a portrait of rudderless public education as any I can recall.
Impending Chaos
Other reporting this week suggests that what is being left for another day may arrive more quickly than many anticipate.
In Sacramento, a district that has given raises in recent years, but nowhere near the scale now seen in Los Angeles, the moment of running out of cash is now estimated to be July.
Meanwhile, Newsom is letting Democrats in the legislature know that they need to prepare for belt-tightening in the state budget.
It’s clearly a gauntlet thrown down to CTA, whose entire We Can’t Wait campaign is based upon an assumption that state policymakers will ultimately buckle at the prospect of so many school districts going insolvent at once.
It makes this week’s reporting about school districts shortchanging legally required investments in the arts seem almost quaint.
When the wolf is at the door, you think central staff in districts across California are going to be prioritizing their legally required support of arts programs for low-income kids above their need to fund their new collective bargaining agreements?
And question not, CharterFolk.
The wolf absolutely is at the door.
This week, the state reported that Los Angeles Unified lost 4.5% of its enrollment this year, over 16,000 students.
The district serves about 10% of the state’s public school students. It lost about a quarter of all kids who were lost in the state.
Meanwhile, its new agreement, on top of providing the raises I cited above, obligates the district to provide new parental leave benefits and to hire hundreds of new counselors and other support staff.
The new reporting followed the state’s release of statewide enrollment figures.
Public school enrollment statewide saw a 1.4% drop this year. Private school enrollment a 6.6% drop. And homeschooling lost 3.7%.
For a while, I thought the reporting might disrupt what I had been planning to write about today.
Charter schools are shown to have experienced a 0.3% decline, about 2,000 students.
But the EdSource article reports that those numbers are distorted by the implosion of one adult-oriented charter school that lost 12,000 students. Factoring that in, California’s charter schools have actually seen another year of growth, about 10,000 students.
That puts charter growth at roughly 1.5%, a bit below the pace of recent years, but still broadly aligned with the momentum story I present below.
How California and Texas are 50/50
The following numbers don’t come from public sources I can link to. But talking to the leaders of the Texas and California charter school associations, both states added about 50,000 students between 2021-22 and 2024-25.
Texas a little above it. California a little below.
Both are substantially above any other state over that timeframe, including Florida and North Carolina, which come in at third and fourth respectively.
For a while, I was thinking that California would end up actually ahead of Texas, which I thought would have been a provocative message to share given how down in the dumps funders and others are about California these days.
But that’s not the case. Texas, it does seem, is a nose ahead.
Still, in the broader scheme of things, call it 50/50.
Which is where I think we should be on virtually all things charter these days.
Not just in literal Texas and California. But in figurative Texas and California. Red and blue states generally.
Policy Divergence
In some ways, the two states, and the two theories of action policymakers are advancing in both, couldn’t be more divergent.
Texas, unlike California, which allows school districts to wallow in dysfunction for years, works aggressively to hold accountable school districts with chronically underperforming schools.
Houston went first and demonstrated strong improvement under state control.
Now others are following close behind.
The San Antonio comparison point is resonant.
A large number of the schools that the district operates are D and F schools.
State pressure leads to the district turning struggling campuses over to charter school operators.
Open enrollment laws are allowing surrounding school districts to take on more kids.
California does all it can to allow local school districts to maintain their monopolies.
More broadly, Texas has strong state authorizing of charter schools.
In 2019, California gave school districts new legal tools to prevent the state board from authorizing schools in their areas.
Texas recently greatly expanded support for charter school facilities.
California, where charter schools are supposed to have a legal right to reasonably equivalent facilities, charter schools have to fight tooth and nail to keep from being put back out on the street.
Texas has one of the strongest A-F school accountability systems in the country and continues to refine it.
Meanwhile, California has one of the most opaque, incoherent examples of accountability gobbledygook you find anywhere in the nation.
Charter Convergence
And yet, through it all, the two states have generated remarkably similar levels of charter school growth in recent years.
A big part of California’s ability to stay at the head of the pack can be attributed to the fact that many local charter school environments remain strongly supportive of charter schools despite whatever opposition state lawmakers attempt to create.
Even more importantly, California arguably has the strongest hybrid charter school law in the country. It has allowed charter schools offering two, three, or four day per week programs, often operating out of smaller resource centers serving 200 or fewer students, to open in communities across the state. Those programs have been one of the primary engines of charter school enrollment growth in recent years.
And if there is one change that could allow Texas to get out in front of California in the years ahead, it is this: Texas has now adopted a new virtual and hybrid schooling law that gives district schools and charter schools new freedom to create similar programs.
But most important of all may be this:
The very policy divergence between California and Texas may paradoxically be producing a striking convergence in accelerated charter school growth.
Texas has a coherence of theory of action that California lacks. It is willing to intervene in chronically failing district schools. It is willing to insist that district systems change course before dysfunction becomes total. Meanwhile, it also fosters smart charter school policy, allowing charter growth to remain both orderly and robust.
That coherence matters. It acts as a kind of salve. It does not solve everything. But it does reduce the level of desperation families feel to get their children to something better.
California is moving in the opposite direction. Its policymaking is not merely tolerating brokenness. It is actively making things worse. It is actively increasing the disorder and dysfunction in public education. But in doing so, it is creating exactly the intolerable conditions from which accelerated charter school growth will emerge.
If there is any one policy circumstance that best encapsulates how brokenness is mitigated in one state and actually encouraged to proliferate in another, it is this:
Texas is one of the 37 states where school employees are not allowed to strike.
California, sadly, is among the 13 that do.
And we are now seeing the tragic consequences of that brokenness.
Broken policy inevitably leads to broken schools.
It gives employee groups the power to force districts into agreements that put entire public school systems on the brink of collapse.
The chaos about to unfold in California public education over the next year is almost unimaginable.
The drama, the distraction, the loss of focus on what parents actually care about.
And the sheer nonsense these agreements force public education to embrace.
Like this utterly incomprehensible agreement regarding school principals that has now been crafted in Los Angeles.
The folly of pretending that school leadership is only a 40 hour per week undertaking.
It leaves individual schools, whole school districts, and indeed the state’s entire public education system utterly rudderless.
Bereft of leadership.
At exactly the moment public education needs it most.
One state courageously pushes its schools to evolve in a constructive direction, and another state creates the chaos amid which more and more families will turn to charter schools…
…such that we meet in the middle.
Not just in California and Texas.
Or in red or blue.
But everywhere.
An embrace of charter schools beyond any that we’ve seen in our first 35 years as a movement.
It’s why I say:
When it comes to Texas vs California.
When it comes to red vs blue.
When it comes to almost any state context in comparison to any other.
Call me 50/50.
Ready to spread my bets just about equally across them all.
Knowing that CharterFolk are in each of those places ready to take the charter school story to new heights, if we can just find a way to support them all.