But you are painting a broader picture than that. What you call basically reinventing the system. Talk about the difference between Charter Schools and reinventing the system. We should be clear about what a Charter School is first because it turns out they say half of america doesnt know what they are so it is run independently of the district usually by a Nonprofit Organization and its usually a school of choice but it doesnt have to follow all of the district and state rules. But its outside the bureaucra bureaucracy. Those that have embraced the charters the most systematically are the fastest improving cities in the country. So, im not saying make every Public School a charter. I am saying look at the data and if we want to do what works for kids, lets treat every Public School like a charter. We can call it Something Else, a renaissance school, play with school, whatever. But lets give it the autonomy so people who run the school can make the decisions and create a school model that will work for the kids they have to teach. And lets hold them accountable for their performance. And if they do a great job and if they do a terrible chocolates replace them them with a stronger operator and whats with the parents choose and what the nonprofit status of either School Models because nobody is assigned to their school. Host i am a fan of Charter Schools and authorizer. The places you cited most often in the book are dc and denver. Are they among the fastest improving . Guest they have the plan to convert its last four schools to charters for the next school year, so itll be 100 . They are the fastest improving in the country. That country. If not in american history. They were one of the worst. They were famously bad, corrupt, awful. You have valedictorians while able to pass a test to graduate from high school that whether you want to use graduation rat rates, parental demand, whatever measure you like new orleans is just off the charts. Washington, d. C. Which last year had 46 of the kids in charters and this year might have more is above the 21 large cities that take where all the kids take the National Assessment of progress. They are the fastest improving in the last decade as charters and district and they are also improving faster than any state. So, Rapid Improvement, they perform better i would argue, but the district has embraced profound reforms because they lost so many of their kids through the charters. The competition spurred innovation on both sides and then denver is interesting because the other two were the elected school board in dc congress created a school board and the meir is ultimately in charge and in the ne in new orle state had a Recovery School district and they took all but 17 schools and all those performing the statewide average and they put them in the Recovery School district which gradually turned them over to charter operators so in a sense the state did it in new orleans and congress could create the possibility of this in dc, then denver a decade ago the superintendent who is now a senator david cited the district is so bureaucratic and messed up and got charters theres a few of them that are not going out of the parks of the fastest route for u us toward improvemet is to embrace the charters and replicate them and lets do it as fast as we can. So they gave them School Buildings and try to equalize funding and didnt quite get there up close. And the strong charters basically replicated quite rapidly so you now have 21 in the charters last year and they also said they got a state law passed that would allow them to give their own schools more autonomy to imitate the charters and the they called an imitation schools and theyve got about 21 of the kids in those schools also. Imitation charter is in a few minutes as interesting sideline. They had this reinvention process that you are suggesting to take root all over the place. I probably can only remember four of them. Guest this is my analysis going back for years. It argues these are the keys that are boosting performance, doubling the effectiveness of the School Systems. Lets start with autonomy which Everybody Knows about with charters. It is a decentralizing control at the school level, so the principal or iprinciple or by ss often are more than one. They are the group of teachers that runs this school as it happens as well. They have the power to say here is our school model. We are going to hire a piece people and if this person doesnt work out they are going to let him go. This is what we are going to pay. They get to make those decisions and in the traditional Public Schools downtown at the headquarters they make those decisions and shockingly with little authority over how the school is run and what it looks like. So thats the first one. The second when Everybody Knows about is accountability. Its a consequence. There are actually consequences for their performance. Doing a great job maybe you can expand and even start another school or more. A terrible job and you will probably be replaced by another operator. And not all Charter Authorizers do this. We have some bad practice, but im talking about what really works. The next one is choice. Choice for the families to pick a school that fits their child at the best. When you do that you can allow the schools to diversify their models. Traditionally, we had the same cookiecutter education for everybody and we thought that was fair. Kids dont learn the same and they dont come from the same background. It doesnt work for a lot of them so we need a different kinds of schools into different kinds of kids. The next one is clarity of purpose. When you are upgrading schools s and running the district dealing with all of these systemwide issues, it is hard to do both. When you separate the roles as in the charter sector and in authorizer like the public Charter School board in dc steers the system dot lets the schools which are independent to the operational stuff coming each one has a clarity of purpose and is able to do what it does well. It seems to work a lot better. Hence the distinction you and the coauthor from years ago. So you want the authorizer to steer and the School People to row. Guest also is the idea of contest ability. Then the people will steer him are no longer captive of their employees. If you are a superintendent or elected school board and have thousands of employees and start making reforms changing things and start inconveniencing some of those adults coming you are going to get a reaction if its going to be systemwide. You may lose your next election. Its the average for a superintendence. But if you are like the dc public Charter School board they only have 32 or 36 employees. 900 would be small. Lets say they are failing and want to replace it with another operator. Dont get a protest from that one school board. But they are looking at that and thinking maybe we can get that building. The politics are entirely different. Its easier than in a traditional district so i call that contest ability to idea that if i were running a school rather than assuming as people have been able to for decades and i will be here until i retire. My right to run this school and our right collectively is contestable. If other people are doing a much better job, we might lose the right to run this school to th them. This one really goes with the autonomy. People who run the school have to be able to create a positive School Culture and that is the first thing that they do when they start a school. They are delivered about a culture. So the autonomy gives them the ability to do that. And if they do not take it up, they are not going to succeed if they do not deliberately create a culture that sustains learning and creates motivation among their students because remember we are talking about urban schools and a lot of the students arrived off terribly motivated. They didnt grow up in the neighborhoods where people went to college so they dont think that they are going to college. Why should they learned geometry. So, the schools job is to motivate them and that is part of the culture. I forgot the seventh, capacity. So, in most of the public sect sector, average people can perform well if the system is designed well. But urban education is tougher and typical publicsector job. Educating these poor minority kids is really hard and we need grade School Leaders and teachers. And they are not going to get this far. Host . Guest i did but its not going to happen soon. I understand that. I think that those districts will get better results using this model. But im not spending a lot of time trying to convince them at this point. We are trying to get people to understand that this model is producing the most Rapid Improvement in the country to get other cities to try it out and gradually because it is going to be a gradual process to increase it and then the suburban schools, some of them will start to look at it but its going to take a whale. Host but you are focusing on the needy kids in the school situation. Part of the worst age and part of that was just a different k kid. They needed different things, different learning environments and different kind of schools. My son was Given Technology and just off to the moon but wont the girls. It is the control and contest ability and other parts. In the realm of school choice, a lot of people are for charters and a lot of people are for vouchers. You are not much for vouchers. Why dont you say a little bit about why . Guest i dont have a problem with vouchers for the Inner City School kids. Innercity school kids. It would be nice if we could help the schools be responsible for educating the kids which a few places to go if not most. Those programs dont upset me. What worries me is Republican Leaders actually want which is the vouchers for everybody. Anand it is middle school vouchr is worth 10,000 a year, so i love my children and i make a pretty good living. Im going to add to it and throw out a 30,00 30,000 occasion soe people might have 40,000. There are schools out there. Then somewhere between half and three quarters of the population will buy 10,000 schools. A lot of them public, none of them private. In the auto market, we have mercedes and bmw and cadillac and so on down. We want a market in education eventually this could take a while in which a lot of folks ended up in the equivalent of used cars. And i think that would be so destructive. I think that part of the role of Public Education in the old biracial multicultural democracy is to give kids from different walks of life together to rub elbows and get to know each other and understand that beneath oubeneath ourskin, we ae same. And we would lose so much of that if it was in all voucher system. Lets talk about the diversity in the school because one of the objects and critics made to the Charter School it ts is that it is alleged that they are segregating america as people flock into the Charter Schools that are only full of kids like themselves. And they are not getting much diversity, they are getting choice but not diversity. How do you deal with that one . If you look at all the charters versus the district Public Schools. They have therefore more segregated. They are not more segregated. That is what the data says comes with a fair comparison they are not. Are there examples where they have been created by people that want to pull kids out of the minority dominated schools im sure there are and i think thats wrong but thats why we need strong authorizers to prevent that kind of thing. What i advocate is something that some places do with about 15 charters and district schools the algorithms as it has to be 40 or 50 below income so that you will deliberately create diversity by income levels. You cant do it by race. Of course both with us anymore but you can by income levels and that gets you the race in a multireach the city, racial diversity in schools. Part of what im arguing is we need strong systems not just the schools. We are going to go for more economically integrated schools so we are going to use the enrollment system to make that happen. I see how that works in the cities where there is a single of the visor in the district of ththe state or the separate charter board. Theres a lot of places with multiple authorizers going on simultaneously including ohio where the foundation that im involved in is an optimizer. We do a pretty good job and we are responsible for i it in many cities scattered around the state in any given city in columbus or cincinnati or cleveland or isnt just one thee authorizers so it gets messy in some of the steering you are recommending is hard to pull off in that circle, perhaps impossible. Multiple authorizers was better because they are trying to get away from monopolies because the steering is so important there are systemwide ish as. You kids have equal access to the schools, and they have transportation or is it only the kids whose parents have the money and time to driv the timem who have equal access. The kids with disabilities, do they have equal access or are some schools trying to prevent or get rid of them. Somebody has to say this is how we are going to handle and enforce that. In cleveland and detroit and other cities in the state where we have so many authorizers, no one can do that, so both cleveland and detroit there were big pushes supported by the governor and legislators and by Community Organizations and leaders in the cities to create the Detroit Education Commission and in cleveland it was called the Transformational Alliance but it was an organization that could innocence act as a supervisor and a good close schools for poor performance and overriding authorizer decision and i think in some cases this could actually authorize the schools and it was an attempt to give more power to steer and deal with some of these issues with low quality in some of the charters because theyve been a terrible job in some of the cities. Host and then would have . Guest neither of those, while in ohi ohio the legislatin passed by without the power. And in detroit some legislation passed that they didnt create the commission. Now the mayor is thinking about creating one anyway. And using the power to shame the bad authorizers into doing whats right. But its an issue that we have to solve. Host to be clear you do want there to be a system, you just wanted to be a steering system rather than steering and roaming system. Guest there are things in our Public Schools that we dont want to have been we dont want the special education kids pushed out and kids who spirits cant drive them to not have equal access. We want to create equal opportunities as much as possible. You cant do that if no one is stealing. Someone has to set the rules of the game. Host but someone has to want to do the other things that are part of the package of strategies. Historically in some places in america where there was a single authorizer, it was the local School District and they didnt want anything to do with what they have always done. We know that doesnt work because we have been trying it for 25 years. Lets ask the monopoly to authorize competition. It doesnt work while. Host so in your modeling needs to be not always but something usually other than the local district. In the denver example that is the district. Guest the truth is theres probably six cities in the country that are pretty far down this path. Three we talked about plus indianapolis, memphis and camden new jersey. Six different paths. So this is going to happen in different ways and different places. Some places will be a charter sector beside the district and the district as an denve ingrain him t he could indianapolis stat treating schools this way. There will be all kinds of paths. Ideally in the end we should have one body withi body with ad or elected school board that steers the system and then there should be someone to Charter Schools can appear to guest appeal to if they feel they are being denied something. Because if that board is captured by a political faction or Interest Group and they say the heck with these kind of schools, we want those kind of schools, there should be a way to appeal to. I described an idea but i believe we are going to approach it in all kinds of ways, and this is not about everybody deciding suddenly one day to love this model. It is an evolution driven by necessity and desperation, our urban Public Schools are not very good and we are going to be driven in this direction a lot of cities i think in the future and they will model the ideal because it is democracy and its messy. Host you and i both know most turnaround efforts to take a bad school and tweak its formula so that it gets better, most of them dont work very well. You talk a lot about replacing these unsuccessful schools and a lot of other people talk about closing the bad schools. As in authorizer ive experienced how difficult it is to close a bad school. It has Politics Around it and parents that love it and it poses for the authorizer in our case and often moral dilemma what if the current schools that have them available in a mediocre Charter School that they are actually worse than a mediocre Charter School, do you still closed even though you know it is mediocre and you havent been able to frustrate the people that run it to do a better job. You talk about about replace rather than close. Say a little bit about how