I will not only are we observing the 25th anniversary of the First Charter School in america, here we are with the magnum opus the tells everybody anything theyve wanted to know about Charter Schools. That might be a bit of an exaggeration. When i refer to it i often think the core message is that every school should be a Charter School. But in reality, youre painting a broader and slightly different picture than that. What you call basically reinventing the system. Not just more Charter Schools. Talk a bit about the difference between Charter Schools, lots of them and reinventing the system. For the audience we should probably be clear about what it Charter School is first. Turns out the polls say half of america doesnt know what they are. So Charter School is just a Public School that is run independently of the district. Usually back by a Nonprofit Organization and usually school of choice, but doesnt have to follow all the district and state rules. It has to follow some, cant discriminate it cant select children, et cetera but its outside the bureaucracy and they can run their own show. But there held accountable if theyre done right for their performance. If the kids are not learning than their replace. Thats what a Charter School is. My argument in the book is that the places around the country that have embraced charters the most systematically are also the fastest improving cities in the country. So not saying make every school a charter, im saying if we look at the data we want to do it works for kids lets treat every Public School like a charter. You can call it Something Else, you can call it a renaissance school, pilot school, but lets look at the autonomy so the people who run the school can really make the decisions and create a school model that will work for the kids they need to teach and lets hold them accountable for their performance. If they do a great job lets let them open another school and if they do a terrible job lets replace them with a stronger operator. Us let the parents choose which allow the nonprofits to diversify their school models. Nobody is assigned to their school. That resonates with me. Im a fan and authorized through Charter Schools. Are you also saying that those are among the fastest improving . Yes, i think new orleans just Something Like 93 charters, students and charters the sheer and has the plan to convert its last for schools to charters for the next school year that it will be 100 if all goes well, they are the fastest improvement in the country, now they were one of the worst. Famously bad. Corrupt. Awful. You had valedictorians not able to pass seventh grade testing graduate from high school. But by any measure whether test scores are graduation rates, parental demand, whatever measure you like, new orleans is off the charts. Washington, d. C. Leicester have 46 and charters in this you might have more. Of the 21 large city that take the National Assessment of progress, the nate test, they are the fastest improving over the last decade, d. C. s. That is charters in district. About halfandhalf. And, there improving faster than any state. So Rapid Improvement, charters perform better but i would say the district has embraced proud reforms in part because they lost so many kids to the charters. Competition has spurred innovation on both sides. Denver is interesting because the other two were not done by an elected school board. In d. C. , congress created a Public School board. In the mayors ultimately in charge. Thats right. The mayor points that board. In new orleans the state legislator was so fed up they took all the 17 schools performing below the average and put it in a Recovery School district which gradually turn them over to charter operators. The state did it in new orleans in congress created the possibility of this in d. C. In denver at a decade ago, the elected school board and superintendent decided this district is so bureaucratic and messed up in some of these charters are knocking the ball out of the park. The fastest route for us is to embrace these charters and replicated and lets do it fast. So they give them school buildings, try to equalize funding, didnt quite get there but close. The strong charters have basically replicated rapidly. You know 21 and charters and they also got a state law passed that allowed them to give their own schools more autonomy. To imitate charters. They call them innovation schools. The about 21 of kids in those schools also. Will come back to the invitation charters in a few minutes. Its an interesting sideline. Lets help viewers understand your prescription which revolves around what you talk about is the seven seas are key strategies for this reinvention process here suggesting to take root. Will you briefly review with the seven key strategies are . If you can remember them. I can probably only remember for. My analysis going back for years argues that these are the keys to really boosting performance. Doubling the effectiveness and School Systems. Lets start with autonomy which Everybody Knows about with charters. And its control, decentralizing control so that the principal of the School Leaders often in the charter world theres more than one, said group of teachers who run the school. Including the first one in minnesota so, they have the power to say heres her school model, we are going to hire these people and if this person doesnt work out will let them go this is what were going to pay, they get to make the decisions. In traditional publics schools the headquarters makes those decisions. Principals have little authority over how the school is running what it looks like. The second one Everybody Knows about his accountability. The see theres consequences. That there are consequences. Do a great job maybe expand and start another school or more. To terrible job and you will probably be replaced by better operator. Not all Charter Authorizers do this. We had some bad in the charter sector too. The next is choice. Choice for the families to pick the school that fits their child the best. When you do that you allow the schools to diversify their models. Traditionally we had the same cookiecutter education for everybody. We thought it was fair. Kids dont learn the same. Its not fair. It doesnt work for a lot of them. We need different kinds of schools. The next one is clarity. Clarity of purpose. When you are operating schools and running a district in dealing with the systemwide issues its hard to do both well. When you separate the roles in the charter sector and an authorizer like the public charter board in d. C. Steers the system but less the schools which are independent to the operational stuff, each one has clarity of purpose. It is able to do what it does well. Works well not just in education but other arenas. Hence the distinction you made years ago between steering and rowing. You want the authorizer to steer in the School People to row. Along with that is an ideal contestability. If you separate the roles than the people steering are no longer captive politically of their employees. If youre an elected school board with thousands of employees and you start making reforms changing things and start inconveniencing the adults you get a reaction. Its going to be systemwide. You may lose your next election were for your superintendent you might get fired. Thats why superintendents are only on the job for three years. Exactly. But, if youre like the d. C. Public Charter School board you dont operate schools. The only of 36 employees. None operate schools. Other nonprofits operate the schools. Its not a 900 person bureaucracy. 900 would be small. Solicit they decide that the school is failing. Though get a protest often from that one school building. But every other is looking at think maybe we can get that building. Its not easy to close schools, its easier, much easier than a traditional district. I call that contestability. The idea that if im running the school rather than assuming his people have been able to for decades, this will be here forever and ill probably be here till i retire. My rights from the school or our right collectively to run the school is contestable. If other people are doing a better job we might lose our right to them. We are up to five now . Keep going, your honor roll. Guest culture. This really goes with the autonomy. People who run a school have to be able to create a positive School Culture. Thats the first thing charters to, successful charters to when they started school. Theyre very deliberate about a culture. The autonomy gives them the ability to do that. If they dont take it up they wont succeed. If they dont deliberately create a culture that really sustains learn creates motivation among the students. Were talking about urban schools. A lot of the students arrive not terribly motivated. They didnt grow up in neighborhoods where people went to college. So they dont think theyre going to college. So the schools job is to motivate them and thats part of the culture. The other one is capacity. And most of the Public Sector average people can perform well if the system is designed well. But urban education is tougher. Then the typical Public Sector job. Educating poor minority kids is really hard. When he great School Leaders and Great Teachers so places like new orleans, d. C. , denver and other cities invest in recruiting, training, and developing those leaders and teachers. If you dont have a strategy to do that and build capacity will get as far. You emphasize silly those charters urban today, would you be back minding the same thing for Fairfax County virginia brookline, massachusetts and in new york . I would, but its not going to happen soon. I understand that. I think those suburban districts would get better results using this model. But im not spending time trying to convince them at this point. What we need to do is get people to understand this model is producing the most Rapid Improvement in the country, get other cities to try to gradually, this will be a gradual process to embrace. And then some of them will start to look at it. It will take well. But youre focusing on the neediest kids in the most broken School Situation not the complacent suburbs. The parents in the suburbs understand that cookiecutter schools dont do it for their kids either. I have four children all grown, but i one point there are four different schools. Part of that was age and part of it was there different kids, we went nuts driving them around but they needed different things. Different kinds of learning environments and different kinds of schools. My son would Given Technology and he was off to the moon. But not the girls. Theyre interested another thing. I can see the diversity and choice coming faster to suburbs that i can the evolution of control the contestability in the realm of school choice, many are for charters and many are for vouchers. Youre not much for vouchers. Why do you say little bit about why. I dont have a problem small Voucher Programs for innercity kids. They expand opportunity for those kids. It would be nice if we could hold the schools who get that money accountable for educating the kids which a few places to but not most. Those programs dont upset me. What worries me is what Republican Leaders want which is vouchers for everybody. It sounds good, we can have choice, competition, market, but think of how it would work in practice. Solicit middle School Voucher is worth 10000 per year. So i love my children and i make a good living some you take that 10000 member and add to it. I might buy them a 30,000 dollars per year met education. Some people might buy 40000. There are schools out there. Other people 20,015,000. And then somewhere between half and three quarters of the population will buy 10000 schools. Some public some private. It be like any other market. Think of the auto market, the market for homes. The auto market we have mercedes, bmw, and on down. If we were to have a market in education eventually this would take well in which folks ended up in the equivalent of used cars. I think that would be so destructive. Part of the role of Public Education in a multi racial cultural democracy is to get kids from different walks of life together to rub elbows and get to know each other. And to understand that beneath her skin we are open much the same. We would do so much of the if it was an all voucher system. I would love to argue that more. Lets talk about the point about the diversity of the student body and enrollment of the school. One of the objections that critics make is that it is alleged they are re segregating america is people flock into Charter Schools that are full of only kids like themselves. Theyre not getting much diversity. They choose not to go for diversity. How do you deal with that . I dont think its true. The data says that if you look at all schools in the country yes, since charters are created mostly by people who are committed to helping poor minority kids succeed they tend to be in the cities. So if you look at charters versus district Public Schools the charters are more heavily minority and therefore more segregated. But if you compare charters to traditional Public Schools roman in the district operated schools they are not more segregated. Thats what the data says. A fair comparison. Are there examples where charters have been created by people who want to pull their kids out of minority dominated schools, i think so. Thats why we need strong authorizers. What i would advocate is something that some places in denver does with about 15 charters and 15 district schools. And their lotteries and their computerized gnomon systems the algorithm that the says the school has to be at least 40 or 50 low income. So youll deliberately create diversity. You cant legally do it by race. And you can do it by race and that usually gets you racial diversity in the schools. Part of what im arguing this we need strong systems, not just more Charter Schools. And those systems can say that were gonna go for more deliberately integrated schools and will use our roman system to make that happen. I would support that. I see how that works the cities youre talking about or theres a single authorizer but there are places in the country with multiple authorizers going on simultaneously including ohio where the Foundation Im involved with is an authorizer and we do 60 plus. We do a good job for the dozen or so schools were responsible for. In many cities there scattered around the state. Columbus, cincinnati or cleveland there is no one authorizer. Its messy. Some of the steering that you are recommending for the reinvented system is hard to pull off in that circumstance, perhaps impossible. Absolutely. Its a big flaw. Those of us who believe in charters for a long time theres been different schools of fraud. There is a Strong School of thought that authorizers were better. We wanted lots of competition. Big mistake. Because steering is so importa important. Their systemwide issues, how transportation, do kids have equal access to the schools or is it only the kids whose parents have enough money and time to drive them have equal access . The kids with disabilities to they have equal access for some schools trying to get rid of them. You can go down the line. Somebody has to be able say this is how were going to handle that. In cleveland, detroit and other cities in those states where we have so many authorizers know i can do that. So in both cleveland and detroit there is big push is supported by the governor and by Community Organizations and leaders of the cities to create the detroit education commission. And it was an organization that could in essence act as a super authorizer. It could close schools for poor performance, it could override authorizer decisions. I think in some cases it could authorize schools. It was an attempt to get more power to steer and to do some of the issues. Particularly low quality and some of the charters. Some authorizers did a terrible job but, neither of those one ohio the legislation passed by without that power. And in detroit, some legislation passed but they didnt created detroit education commission. The mayors thinking about creating one and appointing high respected people to it and using the power to shame the bad authorizers into doing whats right. But its an issue we have to follow. To be clear, you actually do want there to be a system you just wanted to be a steering system rather than a steering and rowing system. Exactly. There are things in our Public Schools we dont want to happen. We dont warmer segregation. We dont especially kids pushed out. We dont like kids whose parents can try the to have equal access, we want to create equal opportunity as much as possible its another reason why vouchers are you cant do that if nobody steering. Someone has to set the rules of the game. But someone has to want to do the other things that are part of your package of strategies. Historically where there is an single authorizer there is a local school district. It didnt want anything to do with anything that was done. Weve been trying that for 25 years. Lets have some monopoly for your authorize competition. So the steer in your model needs to