09/26/2022
Once upon a time, demand for charter schools was scorching hot. While charters have always had some major detractors, such as teachers’ unions, they largely enjoyed bipartisan support on Capitol Hill. There were multiple movies made extolling the virtues of charter schools, and even President Barack Obama saw promise in this growing sector of the public education system.
That support has all but vanished from the left. President Joe Biden made it a point to say he is “not a fan” of them on the campaign trail. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona issued a Notice of Proposed Priorities earlier this year that clarifies the fault lines between charter school advocates and the administration.
It should serve as a wake-up call for a sector of education that can still play a vital role in our education system, as charter schools can offer a free educational option for parents so that they can find the environment where their children are best served.
The status quo, however, is untenable. While not all of the charges against charter schools have been made in good faith, some of the allegations ring true, and they cannot go unanswered. I believe charter school advocates should look toward another education sector—career technical education—if they want to turn public opinion and political power back in their favor.
About 20 years ago, and for most of its existence, vocational education was the garbage bin of the public education system. It’s where schools dumped their “other” kids—the ones not going to college, the problem kids, kids with disabilities, and, of course, black and brown kids. The system, the teachers, the kids—everyone was just going through the motions, riding out compulsory education for the required span, and then calling it a day.
It was enough for President George W. Bush to seek the complete elimination of the program. But by that point, vocational education was already in the middle of a metamorphosis. Leaders from around the nation saw how vital work-based learning opportunities can be for students, and sought to preserve what was good about vocational education. They weren’t ready to give up on a program that could help millions.
Fast forward to 2022—now called Career Technical Education (or CTE), these programs have become the darlings of a nation. Where once I had to claw and scrape to find Members of Congress who would become champions for the program, I now see candidates for offices at all levels and from both parties touting their support for it. It’s the kind of image rehabilitation that makes former Governor Andrew Cuomo green with envy.
So how did we get here, and what might the charter school movement take away from CTE’s experience?
--Embracing Accountability
Firstly, and perhaps most importantly, CTE embraced accountability in all regards. It didn’t shy away from its reputation for poorly serving students and was sincerely committed to continuous improvement. Accountability can be very difficult to accept, but this is especially so for a program that usually only has students for their junior and senior years. That’s not enough time to suggest that CTE or any other program alone is what changed the trajectory of a young person’s life. It would have been a very convincing argument, had the sector chosen to fight back against attempts to clean house.
Instead, they worked to find ways to make measurements of success more meaningful. Instead of wholesale rejecting objective targets, they worked with the Bush administration to tell a fuller story of CTE’s success. What they found was that accountability wasn’t going to come from a single number or test, but instead from an array of data about student outcomes, including college and job placement and future earnings.
I cannot give enough credit to three people for finding a way to make it work: Kimberly Green of AdvanceCTE, Jan Bray of ACTE, and Assistant Secretary of Education for OVAE Troy Justesen. They each decided that what was best for students was going to win the day, not politics. They each had to manage some strong feelings, bruised egos, and strong opposition within their respective factions. CTE is what it’s become today because these three took a difficult route, and kept working together instead of resorting to scorched earth tactics.
Charter schools have built-in mechanisms for imposing greater accountability upon themselves. Charter school authorizers—particularly those in conservative states—have taken a somewhat laissez-faire attitude towards enforcing that accountability in recent years. If the biggest players in the charter movement demanded that they have greater responsibility for the schools in their purview, it would go a long way toward rehabilitating the image of the sector. Successful reform calls have to come from inside the house, and the good apples have to get sick of answering for the bad ones.
--Get Better at Storytelling
CTE had decades of unflattering narratives to overcome. Much like charter schools right now, vocational education had become known as the dumping ground for “problem” students. Often, the only real problem was that the just system didn’t want to deal with students with disabilities, minority kids, and super-poor people.
With the benefit of hindsight, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that CTE got its second life in the wake of No Child Left Behind’s massive push on accountability. When people are thinking about and talking about the quality of education being offered by standard schools, they start to look for alternatives. When parents can plainly see that their neighborhood school isn’t serving their children adequately, they begin to seek other choices. CTE was offering students direct opportunities to in-demand careers at a time when families weren’t confident they could get the same deal from the standard educational experience. It was a simple promise of hope.
Charter schools once made sense in a similar context. Parents were made painfully aware of how much their community’s schools were struggling. It was only natural that they would demand alternatives to the one-size-fits-all solution foisted upon American families.
Back then, charter schools weren’t about segregating kids or developing Christo-fascist breeding pits. Charter schools were about liberating the futures of underserved populations. Strengthening accountability when ESSA gets reauthorized would go a long way towards helping, but the charter school movement has to get back to basics in telling its story. The promise of charters has been lost somewhere along the way, and the sector can’t thrive without it.
Absent that, charter schools have to improve how they define their mission as a sector. Part of the problem is that not everyone is on the same ship for the same reasons. Since the community as a whole is not monolithic, it’s incumbent upon like-minded charter schools that serve urban students to come together. At least some subsection of the movement can demonstrate bonafide sincerity, and start to pull in the same direction. Minimally, it gives good faith actors a negotiating partner that can prevent the baby that is the charter school movement from being thrown out with the bath water.
--Become Part of the Solution (Even If You Aren’t The Problem)
I have a hard time blaming schools themselves—including charter schools—for creating the problem of segregation. If neighborhoods are segregated, the schools in those neighborhoods simply aren’t going to look very diverse. What we have right now is a narrative that charter schools are making the problem worse, somehow. It doesn’t help that some of the stereotypical “very stable geniuses” have embraced charter schools as a tactic for their idiotic culture war. The ever-increasing number of non-secular and “anti-woke” charter schools are metaphorically driving a gas truck into a burning building.
While CTE was never considered to be actively exacerbating any such problems, it still took steps to address the societal issues in which it was ensnared. The CTE community worked alongside civil rights leaders to ensure that while things were going to change, the changes would be inclusive and uplifting. CTE also posited that, rather than being a pipeline to prison, it was a pathway to prosperity. The sector was determined to serve all students and was resistant to efforts to marginalize anyone involved.
In the case of charter schools, the need is greater than just cleaning up the movement’s own house. The good-faith actors in the charter school movement have to go beyond calling out the people breathing life into the argument that they exist to sustain school segregation. They have to start working in earnest to desegregate the schools, too, even though they didn't create the problem.
Again, I don’t believe that schools are the proper mechanism for desegregating themselves. So that means working with the people that can functionally desegregate schools. Supporting the YIMBY (“Yes In My Neighborhood”) movement to develop affordable housing in more affluent areas, for example, would go a long way toward establishing a sincere desire to be a part of the solution.
Working hand-in-hand with civil rights advocates to find policy solutions that will desegregate communities—even if those solutions are not directly related to education—is the only option. Taking a holistic policy approach to serving your students keeps conversations going across issue communities, and makes the charter school movement more insulated against allegations of segregation.
The bottom line of all of this is sincerity. There must be a true desire for charter schools to fulfill their promise and w**d out bad actors just like CTE did. Perception is almost always the reality in politics. The current perception is that charter schools are harmful to students and the entirety of the public education system. While it’s impossible to stop ideologues from spreading disinformation, the charter school community can make those lies seem silly simply by being more proactive and holding itself more accountable.
https://www.pxramerica.com/lessonsforcharterschools.html
