Not only are we sort of observing the 25th anniversary of the First Charter School in america but here we are with the kind of magnum opus that is everybody everything they wanted to know about Charter Schools. And maybe a bit of an exaggeration. Indeed, when i refer to it, i often think that its core message is every school should be a Charter School, but in reality, you actually are painting a broader and slightly different picture than that. What you call basically reinventing the system, not just more Charter Schools. So talk a little bit about the difference between Charter Schools, lots of demand reinventing the system. Guest for the audience, we should probably be clea be cleat what a Charter School is first because it turns out to the polls say half of america doesnt do what they are. Are. So, a Charter School is just a Public School that is run independently of the district, usually by a Nonprofit Organization and it is usually a school of choice but it doesnt have to follow all the district rules and state rules. Rules. It cant discriminate and has to give equal opportunity to kids. It cant select etc. But its basically outside the bureaucracy and they can run their own show. But they are held accountable if it is done right in their performance if they dont perform well, then they are replaced. So that is a Charter School is and my argument in the book is that places around the country that have embraced the chargers do most systematically also the fastest improving cities in the country, so i am not saying make it a Public School a charter im 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 that a district school, renaissance school, private school, whatever. But lets give it to the autonomy so that the people around the school can make the decisions and create a school model that will work for the kids to have to teach and lets hold them accountable for their performance. And if they do a great job with open up another school and replace them with a better operator and what the parents choose which also allows nonprofits to diversify their school bottles because nobody is assigned to their school. Host it resonates with me. I am an authorizer of Charter Schools in ohio and the places you cited most often in the book are dc and denver and new orleans. Are you also saying that those are among the fastest improving . Guest yes, they are. New orleans is Something Like 93 of charter students in the chargers this year. And they have the plan to convert its last four schools to charters for the next school year. So it will be 100 if all goes well. They are the fastest improving in the country if not in american history. It is stunning. No paper at the bottom o, famouy 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 to use test scores, graduation rates, college going, provincial demand, whatever measure you like, it is off the charts. Washington, d. C. Which had 46 of the kids in charters and this year might have more, we dont know yet is u of the 21 large cities that take where all the kids take the National Assessment of progress in the test. They are the fastest improving over the last decade as charters and district. Host about half and half. Guest yes. And they are also improving faster than any state, so rapid improvement, the chargers perform better but the district has embraced profound reform in part because they lost so many of the kids to the chargers. The competition spurred innovation on both sides and then denver its interesting because the other two were not done by an elected school board. In dc, congress created a school board. Host and the mayor is ultimately in charge. Guest right, the mayor appoints the board. And in new orleans the state had a recovering School District and basically the legislature was so fed up with the district in new orleans that they took over 17 schools, they took all of those performing below the statewide average and put them in the recovery School District which gradually turned them over to the operators of the state did it in new orleans and congress at least created the possibility of visiting dc. But in denver if elected school board and superintendent who is now a senator Michael Bennett decided this district is so bureaucratic and messed up and the charters, theres a few of them knocking the ball out of the park for the fastest route is to embrace the charters and expand them and replicate them and do it as fast as we can. So they gave been School Buildings and try to equalize the funding and it didnt quite get there but close. And the strong chargers basically replicated quite rapidly so you now have 21 in the charters last year and then they also got a state law passed that allowed them to get their own schools more autonomy to imitate charters. They called an innovation in schools and they got about 25 and also. Three of you want to revie revit the three strategies are . I probably can only remember four of them. Guest this is what i believe my mls is going back for years argues that these are the key to boosting performance is doubling the effectiveness of the school systems. This, lets start with autonomy with everybody noting about the charters and it is decentralizing the control to the School Levels so that the principal or the School Leaders often in the charter runs out of school because that happens as well. Host including the First Charter School in minnesota that was a teacher led to starting school. Guest in the academy. So they have to cover to say thy here is our school model we are going to hire these people and if this person doesnt work out, we are going to let them go. This is what we are going to pay a. Its shocking authorities over how the school is run and what it looks like a. Do a terrible job and you are going to be replaced. The. The next one is choice, choice for the families to pick the school that fits their child the best and when you do that you can allow the schools to diversify their models because 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 backgrounds. Its unfair and doesnt work for a lot of them so we need different kinds of schools and different kind of kids. The next one is clarity, clarity of purpose. When you are upgrading schools and running a School District into dealing with all of the systemwide issues, it is hard to do both of them while. When you separate the rules as in the charter sector and an authorizer like the Charter School board i board in dc steee system bus with the schools, which are independent, do the operational staff, each one has a clarity of purpose and is able to do what it does while. It seems to work a lot better not just in education but in a lot of other arenas. Host hence the distinction you and a coauthor made years ago about serious and growing. You wont be authorizer to steer and the School People to row. Guest exactly. Along with that is the idea of contestability. If you separate the roles in the people steering are no longer captive politically of their employees. If you are a superintendent or elected school board with thousands of entities 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 its going to be the reaction and its going to be systemwide and humane lose the next election. Host thats why they are on the job for three years. If you are like the tc public Charter School board you dont operate the schools and they only have 32 of 36 and ease. None of them operate schools. Its much easier van and a traditional district. I call that contestability into the idea that if i am running a school rather than assuming his people have been able to for decades, the school will be here forever and i will probably be here until i retire. My right or our right collectively to run the school is contestable. Its other people are getting a better job we may lose our right to run the school to an. I think we have done five or six. This goes with the autonomy. People around the school have to be able to create a positive School Culture and that is the first thing the charters do a. They are very deliberative survey gives them the ability to do that and if they dont take it that they are not going to succeed and they do not deliberately create a culture that sustains learning that creates a division among the students because we are talking about urban schools and they will have them arrive not typically motivated. They didnt grow up where people went to college so they dont think that they are going to college. Of the urban education is tougher than the typical publicsector job. We need great teachers. If you do not have a strategy to do that to build capacity, you will not get as far. Host would you be recommending the same thing for Fairfax County virginia and massachusetts. I think the suburban districts will get better results using this model. We need to get people to understand that the model is producing and get other cities to try it out. And then suburban schools of us will start to look at it its going to take a vital. Guest parents in the suburbs realize they dont do it for all of their kids either. I have four children that are all grown up now but at one point there were four different schools, part of that was age anit was age andpart of it is te different kid. Theres different kinds of schools that thrive. We can see the diversity and choice coming back faster and the control and contestability of some of the other parts of the formula. In the realm of school choice, a lot of people are for charters and a lot of other people are for vouchers and you are not much for vouchers. Why dont you save a little bit about why. Guest i dont have a problem for the innercity kids. They expand opportunity for those kids. It would be nice if we could hold the schools that get the money accountable for educating the kids which a few places do not knows. Those programs do not upset me. What worries me is what the leaders actually want which is a voucher for everybody. We have choice, competition, have a market. Just think of how it could actually work in practice. I love my children and i make a pretty good living. So im going to take that 10,000 antigoing to add to it. I might buy my children a 30,000dollar a year education. Some people might buy 40,000 a year education. There are schools out there that have 40,000 other people 20,000 or 15,000. The it will be like any other market if you think about the market for homes. Weve got mercedes and bmw and cadillacs and used cars. I think that would be so destructive part of the role in the Public Education in the multiracial and multicultural democracy is to get kids from different walks of life together to rub elbows and get to know each other and understand that we are all pretty much the same and we would lose so much of that if it were an old voucher system. Host one of the objections that credit snake is that it is alleged that they are segregating as people flock into the schools thatothe schools thd like themselves and they are not getting as much diversity of choice that much diversity. How do you deal with that one . Guest if you look at all the schools in the country they are created mostly by people who are committed to helping poor and minority kids succeed and they tend to be in the cities said if you look at all the charters versus all the district Public Schools the charters are more heavily minority or segregated. They are around them in the same part of the city. Thats what the data says. Are there examples where the charters have been created by people that want to pull their kids out of the minority dominated schools . Im sure there are. Denver for example has done this with about 15 charters and about 15 district schools. In their enrollment systems, the algorithm says okay this has to be at least 40 or 50 of income so that you will create diversity by income levels. But you can by income levels and that usually gets the multiracial city that racial diversity. Part of what im arguing is we need strong systems, not just more Charter Schools. We are going to deliberately go for the economically integrated schools and so we are going to use our enrollment system to make that happen. We see how there is the authorizer of the district or the charter board. Theres a lot of places simultaneously including ohio where the foundation that im involved in as an authorizer incidentally. We did a good job for the schools we are responsible in many cities scattered around the state in any given city in cincinnati, columbus, england, it is messy and some of the steering that you are recommending fo that the systems hard to pull off or perhaps impossible. Thereve been different schools of thought and there was a Strong School of thought that they are trying t were trying ty from monopolies. We want a lot of competition. Steering is so important is that only the kids whose parents have enough time to drive them but have equal access with kids with disabilities do they have equal access or are the schools trying to get rid of them . You can go down the line. Somebody has to be able to say this is how we are going to handle that and enforce it. In cleveland and detroit and other cities where we have these authorizers no one can do that suburban cleveland and detroit they were supported to create the detroit commission. It could in essence act as a super authorizer enclosed schools for poor performance. It could override some authorizer decisions and i think in some cases it could actually authorize schools. It was an attempt to give more power to steer and two deal with some of these issues with particularly low quality into some of those charters because some of the authorizers had done typical child in the citys. And then what happened . Guest in ohio, the legislation passed, but without that power. And in detroit, some legislation passed but certainly they didnt create the commission but the mayor is thinking about creating one anyway, appointing highly respected people to it and using the power to shame them into doing what is right. But, it is an issue that we have to solve. Host to be clear, you actually do want there to be a system. You just want it to be a steering system rather than a steering and a running system. Guest exactly. There are things in our Public Schools that we dont want to happen. We dont want more segregation or special education kids pushed out. We dont want kids whose parents cant drive them to not have equal access. We wanted to create equal opportunity as much as possible which is another reason the vouchers are a problem because they create inequality of opportunity. And you cannot do that if no one is disputing. Someone has to set the rules for the game. Host but someone has to want to do the other things that are a part of the package of the strategy. Historically where there was a single authorizer it was the local School District iindia didnt want anything to do with what it has always done. Guest we have been trying for 25 years. The. It needs to be something other than the local district. Guest the truth is they are pretty far down the path. The three weve talked about, plus indianapolis, memphis and camden new jersey. Six different paths. So, this is going to happen in different places. Sometimes as in districts like indianapolis to get enthusiastic there will be all kinds of pat paths. We should have one body with an appointed or elected school board that steers the school system, and then there should be someone in the Charter Schools that can appeal to if they feel they are being denied something. Host as with the body in colorado for example. Guest right, the statements do exist. If the board is captured by the particular political faction or set of Interest Groups host they say the heck with choice. Guest or we want these kind of schools, there should be some way to appeal back. Host the issue at the table guest can i just add one thing, and sorry. I prescribed an ideal but really we are going to approach it in all kinds of ways. This isnt about everybody suddenly deciding one day to love this model. Its an evolution driven by necessity, by desperation. Ever urban Public Schools are not very good and we are going to be driven in this direction and one of cities in the future and it will take a love of shapes and it will not be all ideal because it is democracy and it is messy. You talk about a place rather than close so talk about how that works. First of all it is so much better for the kids because closing a school is very disruptive for children and families and usually there are other options they are either better or worse. So often we hesitate to close the bad schools for very good reasons but if you have a system with a strong authorizer and a lot of charters they are ready to take another school. Make sure you have operators ready. As you see they are typically five years and performance is measured. Where the charter is headed to a bad place, then you can talk with other operators. That is what is happening in new orleans and washington d. C. They dont just close schools and disrupt lives they have another operator take over the school. There are different ways to do that. If the school is really bad and the culture is chaotic and the kids have learned they dont listen to anything the teacher says and that doesnt happen in American Education then taking all of