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. Guest well, you know, for the audience we probably should be clear about what a Charter School is first. Because it turns out the poll say half of america doesnt know what they are. I Charter Schools just a Public School that is run independently of the district usually by a nonprofit organization, and is usually a school of choice, but it doesnt have to follow all of the district rules and state rules. It has to follow us on they cant discriminate. It has give equal opportunity to get. It cant select children, et cetera, but it basically is outside the bureaucracy and they can rent own show. They have autonomy but there held accountable if they are done right. If you dont perform well, then they are replaced or closed. Thats what a Charter School is. My argument in the book is the places around the country that have embraced charters the most systematically also the fastest improving cities in the country. So im not saying treat, im not saying make every Public School a charter. I am saying if we look at the data and we want to do what works for kids, lets treat every Public School like a charter. We can call it Something Else. We can call it a district school, an innovation school, a renaissance school, a pilot school, whatever but lets give it the autonomous of people run the school can really make the decisions and create a school model that will work for the kids that they have to teach. Lets hold them accountable for the performance. If they do a great job lets let the open another school. If they do a terrible job lets replace it with a stronger operator. And lets let the parents choose, which also allows the nonprofits to diversify their School Models because they dont have to, nobody is assigned to their school. Host surely resonate with me. Im a fan of Charter Schools and all the rise of Charter Schools in ohio. The places you cite most often in the book are d. C. And denver and new orleans. Are you also saying those are among the fastest improving . Guest yes. New orleans which is Something Like 93 charters, students in charters of this year, and has the plan to convert its last four schools to charters for the next school year. It will be 100 if all goes well. They are clearly the fastest improving in the country. If not in american history. Its stunning. They were one of the worst. They were at the bottom. Famously bad, corrupt, awful. You had valedictorians not able to pass a seventh grade level test to graduate from high school. But by any measure, whether you want use test scores, graduation rates, College Going rates, rental demand, whatever measure you like, new orleans is just off the charts. Washington, d. C. , which last year at 46 of the kids in charters and this year might have more, we dont know yet, is, of the 21 large cities that take, where all the kids take the National Assessment of education progress, the nate test, they are the fastest improving over the last decade. Dcs. Thats charters and districts. Host about half and half . Guest yes. They are also improving faster than any state. So Rapid Improvement that charge perform better i would argue but the district has embraced profound reforms in part because they lost so much of the kids to the charter. The competition has spurred innovation on both sides. And in denver, interesting because the other two were not done by elected school board. In d. C. Congress critter a public Charter School board host and the mayor is ultimately in charge. Guest exactly, the mayor appoints that board. Into new orleans, the state at a Recovery School district and basically the legislature was so fed up with the district in new orleans that they took all those performing below the state line average and they put that in the Recovery School district which graduate in the over to charter operators. So in the sense of the state it in new orleans, and congress at least created the possibility of this in d. C. But in denver a decade ago they elected school board and the superintendent who is now a yes, senator, michael bennet, decided, this district is so bureaucratic, so messed up, it is charters, there so few of them that are knocking the ball out of the park. So the fastest route for us toward improving is to embrace these charters and expansive and replicate them, and lets do it as fast as we can. They gave in school buildings. They try to equalize the funding. Didnt quite get there but close, and the strong charters have basically replicated quite rapidly. So you now 21 in charters last year, and they also said that a state law passed that allowed them to give their own schools more autonomy supportive to imitate charters to call the innovation schools. And they got about 20 of the kids in the schools also. Host back to the imitation charters in a few minutes because its an interesting sideline but lets first understand, help viewers understand your sort of prescription, which revolves around what you talk about as the seven seas for the seven key strategies for this reinvention process that you are suggesting sort of take root all over the place. Want to reserve you what the seven key strategies are . Guest see if i can remember them. Host i can probably remember for them. Guest my analysis going back four years, argues these are the keys to really boosting performance, doubling the effectiveness of School Systems. So lets start with autonomy which Everybody Knows about with the charters here control, decentralizing control to the School Levels so that the principal or the School Leaders often in the charter world, there are more than one, the group of teachers who runs the school because that happens as well. Host including the first Charter School in minnesota, a teacher started a guest exactly. They have the power to say heres our school model. We are going to hire people to give this person doesnt work that we will let them go. This is what we will pay. They get to make those decisions. In traditional Public Schools downtown, central headquarters makes those decisions and principles have just shockingly little authority over him, how the schools run and what it looks like. Thats the first one. The second one never knows about is accountability. I call, the c is consequences, that there are actually consequences for the provence. Doing a great job, maybe you can expand. Maybe even start another school or more. Do a terrible job, youll probably be replaced by a better operator. Not all charter authorizes to this. We have some bad practice in the charter sector, too but im talking about what really works. The next one is a choice. Choice for the families to pick the school that fits the child the best tip when you do that you cannot the schools to diversify their models. Traditionally we have 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. Its not a big its unfair for 80 of them and it does work for a lot of them. We need different kinds of schools, different kinds of kids. The next one is clarity. Clarity of purpose. When you are operating schools and running a School District and even with all the systemwide issues, its very hard to do both well. When you separate those roles as in the charter sector, and an authorizer like a public Charter School board in d. C. Steers the system but lets the schools what are independent to the operational stuff, do the rowing, each one has clarity of purpose and is able to do what it does well, seems to work a lot better. Not just an education but in a lot of other arenas. Host the distinction between you, between steering and rowing. You want it all the rights and the School People to grow. Guest exactly. Along with that is his idea of contest ability. If you separate those roles then the people steering are no longer captive politically of their employees. If youre a superintendent or an elected school board and just thousands of employees and you start making reforms, changing things and start inconveniencing some of those adults, you are going to get a reaction. If theres a strong union, it will be a strong reaction and t will be systemwide. You may lose your next election or either superintendent you make it fired, which is why so many superintendents are only other job for three years. Guest exactly. But if you like the d. C. Public Charter School board, you dont operate schools. You dont, theyll have 32 or 36 employees. None of them operate schools. Other nonprofits operate the schools. Host its not a 900 person bureaucracy. Guest yeah, 900 would be small. So lets say they decide to school is failing, we want to replace it with this other operator. Every other operating systems look at that and thinking a be we can get that building. The politics are entirely different. Its that easy to close schools. Its easier, much easier that in a traditional district. I call that contest ability the idea that if im running a school, rather than assuming as people have been able to for decades, the school will be here forever. And i will probably be here until i retire. My right to run the school or our right collectively to run the school is contestable. If other people are doing a much better job we might lose our right to run the school to them. The next one is i think weve done five. Host keep going. You are on a roll. Guest culture. This is really, goes with the autonomy. People who runs the school have to be able to create a positive School Culture. Thats kind of the first thing that charters do successful charters do when they start a school here they are very deliberate about a culture. The autonomy gives them the ability to do that, and if they dont take it up they will not succeed. If they dont deliberately create a culture that really sustains a learning, and creates motivation among the students. Remember we are talking urban schools. A lot of the students in urban schools arrive not terribly motivated. They didnt grow up in a bridge where people went to college. They dont think theyre going to college, so why should they learn geometry . I mean, really. The schools job is to motivate them and as part of the culture. I forgotten the seventh. Capacity. Capacity. In most of the Public Sector, average people can perform well if the system is designed well. But urban education is tougher than the typical Public Sector job. Educating these poor minority kids is really hard. We need really great School Leaders and we need really great teachers. Anza places like new orleans in d. C. And denver and other cities invest in recruiting and training and developing those leaders and those teachers. If you dont have a strategy to do that, to build capacity, you are not to get nearly as far. Host lets pause on the urban play for a second because you emphasize it in those charters are urban today. Would you be recommending the same thing for Fairfax County virginia and brookline massachusetts and scarsdale new york . Guest i would 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, what we need to do is get people to understand that this model is producing the most Rapid Improvement in the country, get other cities to try it out and gradually, because thisll be be a gradual process, embrace it and then this urban schools, some of them will start to look at but is going to take a while. Host you are focusing on the neediest kids in the most broken School Situation . Guest right. Host not the complacent suburbs . Guest right. But parents in the suburbs understand that cookiecutter schools dont do it for all the kids either. And, i mean, i have four children, all grown now, but 1. They were in four different schools. Part of that was age and part of that was just they are different kids. We went nuts driving them around but we ended up pretty soon. They needed different things, different kinds of learning environments, different kind of schools. They thrived, my son was Given Technology and he was just off to the moon. But not the girls. They were interested in other things. Host i can see the diversity and choice coming faster you suburbs than i can the devolution of control and the contest ability and some of the parts of the format. Like anyway, okay. 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 any problem with small voucher programs for innercity kids. They spent opportunities for those kids. It would be nice if we could hold the schools are get that money accountable for educating the kids, which in a few places do but not most. But those programs dont upset me. What worries me is what Republican Leaders actually want, which is vouchers for everybody. Now, it sounds good. We would have choice, competition, the market, but just think about it would actually work in practice. So lets say a middle School Voucher is worth 10,000 a year, okay . So i love my children, and i make a pretty good living, its on going to take that 10,000 and then going to add to it. I might buy my children a 30,000 a year education. Some people might buy 40,000 a year education. There. There are schools out there that charge 40,000 a year tuition. Other people 20,000. Other people 15,000. And then somewhere between a half and threequarters of the population will buy 10,000 school. A lot of them public, some of them private. And it will be like any other market. Think of the auto market on the market for homes, the auto market we got mercedes and bmw and cadillacs on down to used cars. We would have a market in education eventually, this would 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 a multiracial multicultural democracy is to get kids from different walks of life together to rub elbows and to get to know each other. And to understand that beneath our skin we are all pretty much the same. And we would lose so much of that if it was an all voucher system. Host id love to argue that more but its talk about the point you just made about the diversity in the student body, in the moment of the school. One of the objectives critics makexpect to Charter Schools its alleged they are resegregating america as people flock into Charter Schools that are full of all the kids like themselves, and that theyre not getting much diversity, theyre getting choice but not diversity because they choose not to go for diversity. How do you deal with that one . Guest i dont think its true. The data says, if you look at all schools in the country, yes. Since charters are created mostly by people who are absolutely committed to helping poor and minority kids succeed, they tend to be in the cities, right . So if you look at all the charters versus all of the district Public Schools, the charters are more heavily minority and, therefore, more segregated. But if you compare the charters to the traditional Public Schools around them in that same part of the city, they are not more segregated. Thats what the data sister so a fair comparison, they are not. Now, are there examples where charters have been created by people who want to pull their white kids out of minority dominates schools . Im sure there are. And i think thats wrong then thats why we need strong authorizers to prevent that kind of thing. What i would advocate is something that would come some places do, denver for example, does this with about 15 charters and about 15 district schools. In their lotteries come in their involvement in their computerized enrollment system the algorithm says okay, this school has got to be at least 40 or 50 low income. So that you will deliberately create diversity by income levels. You cant legally do it by race. The courts wont let us anymore. But you can by income levels and that usually gets you race in a multiracial city. Racial diversity in the schools. Now, part of what im arguing is we need strong systems, not just more Charter Schools. And these systems can make those decisions. They can say were going to deliberately go for more economically integrated schools and so we will use our enrollment system to make that happen. And i would support that. Host i see how that works in the cities youre talking about where theres a single author writes for its either the district for the state or the separate charter board. There are a lot of places in touch with multiple authorizers going on simultaneously, including ohio where the Fordham Foundation im involved with is an authorizer, one of 60 in the state incidentally. 60 . We do a pretty good job with it for the dozen or so schools we are responsible for. In many cities, their scattered around the state, in any given city in columbus or cincinnati or dayton or cleveland theres no one authorizer. So the charters are, its messy and some of the kind of steering that you are recommending for the reinvented system is reall