Good morning, CharterFolk.
Concepts expressed in a variety of formats have held my interest of late.
Let’s start with a massive validation of the importance of public education.
Althoff, an Assistant Professor at Stanford, uses a new data set to show how mass education in the United States accelerated economic development from 1850-1950. But the validation also contains an incrimination: the exclusion of Black people from educational opportunity during the Jim Crow era and beyond created a different trajectory that persists to this day. It’s a topic that Althoff has explored previously.
Both papers are dense but highly recommended.
The findings align with a history of New Orleans I recently finished.
The typical narrative suggests that housing was built first, then redlining policies were implemented, and finally, school attendance boundaries were drawn — meaning housing redlining birthed educational redlining.
Stern challenges that premise. His research recounts how new White-only schools were built first in New Orleans, and then segregated housing was developed around them.
In other words, educational redlining birthed housing redlining.
The Trump Administration modified its guidance on DEI over the weekend.
My recommendation?
Read your Stern and Althoff, and stay the course.
Hat tip to Marc Porter Magee at 50Can for forwarding me this one:
Further evidence that charter schools are a primary engine driving improved opportunity for Black students.
New research out of Annenberg/Brown …
… shows the column that would be the furthest to the left in the table above: very expensive private schools, whose attending families have thus far been the primary beneficiaries of new universal voucher programs.
I don’t agree with everything in this research, but certain aspects—particularly the foundational economics underpinning new voucher and ESA programs—seem irrefutable.
Meanwhile, in terms of illuminating the right side of Marc’s table, it’s worth taking a look at Tim’s latest piece at EducationNext.
With many magnet schools employing admissions practices as exclusionary as elite private schools, it raises a fundamental question:
What does it even mean to be a public school?
Unfortunately, rather than grounding our discussion of public-ness in that context, the impending Supreme Court case is forcing a completely different lens onto the debate.
I didn’t find the article itself that illuminating. But the legal brief referenced within it certainly was.
Illuminating and sobering.
I draw your attention to the concluding section starting on page 35 where the authors assert a potential “solution” to the problems that could arise from the anticipated supreme court ruling:
Although charter school laws as presently constituted probably do not satisfy the Lebron test, states can still amend their statutes so that future charter school boards can fit under the dictates of this state action category. States should also examine the feasibility of terminating existing charter school boards and reformulating them as government-created and government-controlled corporations.
As I say: sobering.
This is a topic I will return to shortly.
Let’s end on some positivity.
Florida’s charter school conversion is going forward.
Ultimately, through all the craziness coming out of national policy making these days, I remain as confident as ever that charter schools will continue to serve as a primary engine, if not the primary engine, in public education driving toward great excellence and equity.
And a part of our energy will be a re-awakening in us all of the importance of conversion charter schools.