Weekend greetings, CharterFolk.
Picking up where we left off last weekend, I turn attention to a situation that puts today’s topic in repose.
The Milwaukee Public School Board is signaling that it intends to deny the charter renewal for one of Carmen’s schools. Some school board members cite the school’s supposedly low academic performance; others the opinion that anything other than “district-charters” is a plot to destroy public education, implying they all should be summarily closed.
Wisconsin’s charter school law has an odd feature. There are “non-instrumentality” charter schools – schools that are not instruments of the school district, having their own legal status as nonprofits. We in CharterLand would refer to these schools as true charter schools – schools with the autonomy they need to control their own destinies and create truly new and better options for kids and families.
Then there is a second type, so-called “instrumentality” charter schools – schools that are controlled and operated by the school district and whose employees remain employees of the district.
It calls into question whether I’ve properly placed my quotation marks in the prior sentence.
More descriptive would be instrumentality “charter schools.”
For these schools are anything but real charter schools. Their being completely controlled by the school district, including the district receiving all the funding that goes to them, explains why MPS board members support them.
The difference between the instrumentality and non-instrumentality models was the first example I cited in this post.
The instrumentality concept I called the definition of “CHINO” schools – schools that are charter-in-name-only.
Most often they’re created as a kind of defense strategy for district schools:
Call district-controlled schools “charters” in order to delude the public into thinking that true charter schools have been made.
This is the strategy that has been run to a tee in Montana and that I’ve been writing about in recent years.
Sensing that it had become inevitable that charter schools were finally going to pass in the state, status quo interests slapped together a bill creating CHINOS, passed it, stopped the true charter bill in court, and have since gone on to open over 20 district-controlled schools that the public believes are charter schools.
States can also make CHINO schools to get their hands on CSP funding, which is supposed to only go toward fully autonomous charter schools, but the feds have been lax in enforcement. In Wisconsin it’s resulted over the years in tens of millions of CSP dollars going to CHINOs, which now far outnumber true charter schools in the state.
There are other kinds of public schools as well.
Straightforward district schools and charter schools are easy to classify.
More difficult to get our bearings on are schools I call CABINS – schools that are charter-all-but-in-name. Usually they’re created because the charter school brand has become so toxic that policy makers want to be able to say they’re advancing something other than straightforward charter schools. We have many of them across the country. Three that I cited in the prior post were Innovation Schools in Indiana, Renaissance Schools in Camden, and Mayoral Academies in Rhode Island – all schools that have the fundamental autonomies they need to succeed and are thus turning out to be great new options for kids and families.
The problem, though, in my estimation is that we’re not being crisp ourselves about what specifically defines CABIN and CHINO schools, and that is leading us to reach wrong conclusions about what works and what doesn’t.
The final unwinding of the Achievement School District in Tennessee underscores the point.
Right now, the shorthand many take from the ASD experience is that converting failing district schools to charter status doesn’t work. But the more in-depth analyses …
… reveal the deeper truths:
ASD operators had to contend with many of the constraints that impede traditional schools yet without the benefits that a conventional district could provide …. Being located in an unusual institutional space made ASD operators dependent on a school district where factions could be indifferent, if not hostile, to their success. As we have shown, although the ASD had considerable statutory authority, SCS retained substantial control and informal power that left operators vulnerable to its decisions about neighborhood zoning, school phase-ins, and the pool of priority schools to which they could be matched. Charters’ work and potential were also influenced by SCS’ inaction particularly by the district’s decision not to develop a common application system or common school accountability framework.
Well I remember the phone calls I had with leaders of California organizations operating schools in the ASD explaining the myriad limitations on their autonomy, and the unique levers the school district could pull to undermine their success.
- Having to buy services from the school district that were terrible.
- Having compromised independence over special education.
- Being limited to recruit only from the school’s attendance boundary without being given the contact information of the families who reside within the boundary, while the district had every family’s information and was using it to make the ASD schools’ enrollments as unstable as possible.
The complaints went on and on.
The schools were separately incorporated as nonprofits, a hallmark of charterness, so it may be an overstatement to call them full CHINOs.
But true charter schools as we know them?
Not even close.
Some of the limitations that were imposed were known by operators in advance.
Many others weren’t.
All of them, with the wisdom of hindsight, were ultimately recognized to be of paramount importance.
They are precisely the operating conditions around which we are going to have to be uncompromising going forward if we are going to make the next chapter of the charter school movement successful.
Because in this era of declining enrollment, and charter schools growing to achieve 30-50% of enrollment in many large urban school districts across the country, the conversion story is going to be a far bigger part of the charter school movement than it has been heretofore.
If we convert schools successfully to full charter school status as we did in New Orleans, we will be successful. If we convert schools to CABIN status like we have done in Indiana and Camden, again we will succeed.
But if we convert schools into CHINOs, or into schools with different names whose autonomies are fundamentally constrained, our efforts will come to naught.
Our opponents know this story better than we do ourselves.
Denver is instructive.
Earlier this month, the teacher union swept elections.
As I wrote immediately afterward, I don’t really think the election had much to do with charterness, but was instead a statement of general progressive reaction to Trump.
Nevertheless, we’re going to have to deal with the aftermath, much of which offers nuggets of learning, if we pay attention.
As I have written here often, the Denver story is an incredibly important one for us nationally. Independent researchers have called Denver’s reform efforts among the most successful in history.
So the question is, why have things receded in recent years, or at least paused at some new equilibrium that leaves the rest of the job undone, while Indianapolis has gone on to become what I call the charter school movement’s first true North Star?
In my estimation, a big part of it is because Colorado’s Innovation law is fundamentally flawed, while Indiana’s is the strongest in the country.
Here is a table summarizing the differences in Indiana’s and Colorado’s Innovations Laws.
(Sorry for having to present it in two screenshots here. The contrasts are too numerous to contain in one, and yes, the detail really matters here. In fact, the detail is the point.)
What should be made abundantly clear here is that there are massive differences between Indiana’s and Colorado’s laws.
So much so that I’m inclined to say that Colorado’s is an “Innovation-In-Name-Only” law.
And status quo interests are fully committed to preserving in-name-ness, if not doing away with innovation altogether.
A few years back, reformers began to recognize some of the fundamental compromises that have been embedded in Colorado’s law and tried to address them.
While a bill passed, it was essentially gutted of true reform, leaving the Innovation Schools open to attack.
The teacher unions and their then completely union controlled board realized their vulnerability and acted decisively to strip Innovation Schools of their autonomies.
It was an action that so enraged parents that two formerly teacher-union-aligned DPS school board members ended up apologizing for their actions.
It didn’t matter. Soon thereafter, DPS followed up with formal action to strip the schools of innovation status altogether.
The schools sued but, having no legal ground to stand on, were defeated.
Status quo interests danced on graves …
… and enacted retribution on those who deviated from the teacher union’s orthodoxy on innovation schools.
It all points to why I found the following headline just stunningly ironic.
What can Indianapolis schools learn from Denver schools?
That answer is easy.
Absolutely nothing.
The learning should be going the other way around:
Denver learning from Indianapolis.
Unless, of course, the learning you want to spread is how to knock a successful reform effort off stride.
I said last week, I’d tie this together with a bold new effort to innovate coming out of TX.
It’s turning into one of the most important settings in the country testing whether a new era of innovation will arise, or just innovation in name only.
And yes, how CharterFolk weigh in on things, in my view, will be very important.
I’ll get to it next week.
Really I will.
Hope to see you here.