This week some of the topics we discuss include the following:

• We introduce ourselves (00:00:00)
• Reactions to the 2023 Chicago mayoral election results (00:02:39)
• Thoughts regarding the 2023 Denver mayoral election, which has two strong charter candidates in a June runoff (00:12:35)
• Gutsy mental health moves (00.20.50)
• The Biden Administration’s nuanced Title IX decisions (00:23:11)
• Implications of Supreme Court cases in Washington, North Carolina, and Oklahoma with an emphasis on broader religious liberty issues (00.30.50)
• Here is a link to the article Andy mentioned regarding last year’s main Supreme Court case as religious institutions come into closer contact with charters and the potential political risks that may be raised with a blurring of church state lines (00.36.15)

For those of you who would prefer a video recording, we provide a link to YouTube .

Hey Andy.

Hey Jed.

Hey, good to try number two here at WonkyFolk.

I know number one went okay, so we're back.

We're back, and family members were giving me a hard time that we

didn't even introduce ourselves at all.

So maybe like, okay, 10 seconds each or 15.

You want to go first?

Just give a little background about yourself.

Yeah, sure.

It's entirely possible somebody might have watched that first

episode and concluded, "these guys aren't professional podcasters".

Maybe we're just impersonating the Muppets, the guys in the orchestra, a

big orchestra or something like that.

But I guess we need a little intro, so give us, give me a little bit here.

Yeah, we just jumped right in last time.

So I'm Andy Rotherham.

I'm a co-founder and partner at Bellweather.

So I've been there since 2010.

My background is Think Tanks policy, some research work, a lot of media

work and I'm a state board member.

I'm actually in the middle of my second stint on the Virginia Board of Education,

and I write the blog Eduwonk.com and do some other media stuff, and I lead

external relations at Bellwether, and I work on our policy team as well.

So, Jed,what about you?

Who are you?

So, I just come from a family of public school educators.

I spent seven years in the classroom in Los Angeles, ended up authorizing

for a couple years in San Diego.

I Had a chance to work at High Tech High for five years,

just a great five year run.

And then I led the Charter School Association of California for ten years,

left about a little over four years ago and have been really working to help

however I can on national advocacy for charter schools -- and that's included

my service project to the movement, which is this thing, CharterFolk.

But what I love most about the work is it gives me excuse to stay in contact

with great people, and Andy, you've been an incredible supporter of everything

we've been doing, so thank you.

And then it becomes natural to try something new.

So this is fun.

I'll just also, my, my last part of my introduction is I am obsessed with the

Sacramento Kings and this baby light the beam, maybe this town is going crazy.

So my obsessions continue to grow as I get older here.

Yeah.

I mean, the playoffs, they have started our communications and marketing

director Andy Jacobs, a huge NBA fan.

So I've already sort of seen productivity drop here over the last couple of days and

because the NBA playoffs sort of seemingly never end, like what they, when do they

end like around Thanksgiving or something?

And so this will continue for a while.

Well, listen, let's go back to where we left things, or one of the topics

that we addressed last week in a big NBA city is Chicago, and we recorded

on the day before the election, and I think we made a mental note.

Let's come back and just make some observations about whatever

may have most surprised us.

How are you processing the Chicago results.

Yeah, I can't even remember if we made predictions.

I think we both said it was going to be close and it was close

and it was a little hard to tell.

Neither of us are a Chicago expert, and honestly, when you talked to people

out there, you heard there were people who were quote unquote in the know,

connected politically who had different takes on which way it was going to

go, and I think that's reflected.

It was tight.

So, I mean, look if obviously Vallas losing does send a message, a lot

of the race turned on issues besides education policing and so forth but

clearly if that brand of politics had been overwhelmingly popular,

it wouldn't have been a close race.

And so clearly there's some thinking to do there, on the other hand, you

have seen this happen elsewhere.

So I guess my bottom line is when I look at a race that's that close, I'm

cautious to read too much into it, and if, say Vallas had one and it by the

same margin that Brandon Johnson did, I think it would've been a mistake for

reformers to suddenly assume they had a mandate and sort of charge forward.

They would've needed to listen the message the voters were sending.

And I think the message the voters are sending is they, they have conflicting

priorities they want different things.

And there was a bunch of dynamics in the Chicago race, including

obviously race that played out.

So I think we'll have to see which direction it goes.

Brandon Johnson probably has an opportunity to pull some Nixon into

China, moves to improve quality of life in that city and schooling.

But we'll see kind of how that happens with the coalition he's put together.

What's your read on it?

Yeah, I don't, I, I wouldn't extrapolate anything

out from the results themselves.

I think there were so many idiosyncratic things to the race itself, but what I do

think is worth focusing on is just some of the changes to the political coalitions

that seem to be coming together that I think are likely to sustain themselves

and are becoming national trends.

I've been writing a lot at Charter folk about how the Los Angeles Teacher

Union and the Chicago Teacher Union have really come together and been

articulating a new vision for what a teacher union political strength could be.

And I think we've seen now in Los Angeles and in Chicago, that

race be run on political fronts.

One of the things most interesting to me is how SEIU and the teacher union,

came together to win races and came together to do a strike in Los Angeles.

And now we've seen SEIU and the Teacher's Union in Chicago,

which had previously been at odds together in the very same way.

So that is something that I would imagine we're going to see people

attempt to bring to other cities.

It's not as easy as you might first assume, that's one thing.

And then the other one is just, I found it very striking how the youth vote

really broke strongly for Johnson in the general rather than in the primary.

And that's just what I find perplexing or potentially very interesting.

What is it that is resonating, especially with some of our young folk.

I we can chalk it up to simple progressivity of youth, but I think

there's a lot more in it than that and worth us, you know, diving into

when we have a chance to really see what the election results are.

Yeah, I think so, and look, obviously like reforms, particularly

reformers of a certain generation, have not figured out yet how to

talk to energized young people.

And you and I have talked about sort of some of the quote unquote progressive

positions are on education, are actually like decidedly conservative, right?

And reactionary, but reformers haven't sort of figured out

how to pick that lock yet.

And there's a bunch of work to do than we're going to know we're going to talk

about Denver and that's an example where that might be happening we'll have to see.

The other interesting thing about Chicago that I think we can't like

move on from, is just the scale of sort of violence in Chicago and

gun violence is just unbelievable.

When you talk to school leaders out there, just the presence of

particularly handguns just in the life of schools and the number of incidents

where they're finding the kids are bringing them to school and so forth.

It's unbelievable and it just sort of happens day to day and it's sort of

background noise and there's almost this attitude of like case sura surah and then

something happens like we talked about last time about covenant and so forth,

there's obviously that horrifying school shooting and it galvanizes the attention,

but like the sort of just routine violence just does not garner the same attention.

It's really, it is in terms of the numbers just catastrophic.

And it's going to be interesting to see in Chicago what can be done about that

and if there is, or if it just this just turns into sort of again, sort of just you

get, end up getting a backlash cause we'll feel like it's t's not being handled.

And then the other thing in Chicago I do, and you sort of alluded to this,

If I were a charter school leader out there, I'd be preparing for pressure,

that may not be like pressure that's going to get headlines, but it seems

the unionization efforts will certainly step up and there's going to be

more pressure on those schools, and that's gonna be how that community

responds out there and, and navigates that will be interesting to watch.

Yeah, my pessimism comes through in my saying that I don't think that those

that are coming into power in Chicago right now have a vision for making

traditional public schools any better.

And I think we're going to see a lot more doubling down and I think we're

going to see a lot more of adult benefit being the focus of most of the

EF policy efforts there, which is only going to result in some parents having

greater desperation for something else.

And it's how do you remain a strong and vibrant, the charter school community,

wanting to be growing when the overall environment seems so hostile, but

yet the needs for what you offer has never been higher than right now.

It's a real tough dichotomy for people to deal with right now.

Yeah, I think that's right.

And then one that we can move on to Denver.

One other thing is, it is just worth noting, I think on Chicago's, all Vallas's

concession speech, that was a classy concession speech, that's becoming all

too rare, where you and I are sort of a generation where you have elections,

they decide things and then you move on, and then you have another election

down the road rather than this sort of just constant acrimony and conflict

that never stops and nothing gets done.

And if it doesn't go your way, you just show up and argue in a

different, often more disruptive way.

And I feel like, Vallas just one thing I think that the older

generation of politics has right is just that degree of just civility.

And the way he sort of even chatted people who were starting to complain about about

Johnson was classy and it was sad that it was like, it felt like such a throw back.

Yeah, well you leave the door open for one last

conversation or comment on Chicago.

Sorry.

We're going to go to my hometown Denver.

I'm excited to talk about that too.

But, because Vallas, yes, I agree with you in terms of the concession speech.

The other thing though, I think from an education policy standpoint, is

what strike you to be is he's basically saying the same thing now that he

was saying in 2005, 2006, 2008, 2011.

There's very little evolution in what the reformers are bringing to places

like Chicago, and I think that Ballas' defeated, being defeated here is if

there's any consolation, it gives the charter school world and the reform world

to refresh what we're bringing forward.

And I think we absolutely have to, because if we're going to win that

youth vote, we're not going to simply win it by better political machinery,

but we've have to have a better policy agenda to attract these people.

Yeah.

That's probably a whole future episode because I half agree.

I mean, look you and I talked about this, I think Vallas is a guy who you don't

bring him in to a super high functioning school system that just needs some nudges

to even take it to the next level, there's a reason, the kind of places where he is

been a school leader, you bring him in to really dysfunctional situations where

sort of governance, teaching and learning, it's all kind of broken and he gives it

a jolt, and that's kind of his skillset.

And I think we do need that, there are places like that, then

there's other places that need different kinds of leadership.

So I have agree with you, but I also think so to some of these fundamentals.

Like, we're not going to tolerate low performing schools.

We're going to right size school systems, that dollars

are aligned with effectiveness.

Like those things we also have to figure out a way to talk about them

so those ideas don't go out of style.

And I'm worried like that part of what we have to meet the new meet a different

generation, a different set of demands.

I'm hearing conversations now about all this emphasis on grades

and academics and kids learning and so forth is that's a problem.

We need to have a new area of emphasis and focus and that terrifies me.

It's easy to see how that can be a fashionable.

And then you walk away from a focus on accountability for results,

student learning, all of those things.

And the unions are smart about this.

They've started to wrap their demands in the language of equity, which

has a very seductive appeal and people aren't sort of parsing like,

what are they actually saying here?

And what would be the actual effect of this.

Well, a place that's interesting along these lines is Denver.

It's where we've been wanting to get to.

And it's fascinating how we have two strong charter school supporters

who are now in the mayoral general election and speaks to Denver being,

well again, maybe it's not right to extrapolate too much, because

there could be some I idiosyncratic things that have led to this.

For example, was it nine, nine progressives and two moderates,

in the primary, get me started.

What are your thoughts about and also, we know Johnston very well and obviously

someone that a lot of charter folk have a great deal of respect for, but where

would you go first in coming on Denver.

We need like a ritual set of dis of disclosures here on this one.

I sent money to Mike.

I've known him a long time.

I think he'd be a great mayor.

He was good when he was an elected office before.

So I'm not coming at this.

Both candidates seem great.

They're both supporters of charters and so forth, but I don't want

to, but I'm coming to this with a certain, obviously perspective.

The big thing that my general take on Denver has been this idea that

reformers are actually pretty good at winning when they get focused

and there's resources and so forth.

And so what happened in Denver with the changes there, and this is under

Michael Bennett and Bosberg and so forth, was pretty remarkable.

And the school board and those were obviously really some contentious

school board races and so forth.

The problem was there was just, it wasn't sustained.

It was a classic "okay, mission accomplished", and

everybody kind of moved on.

And the folks who didn't like reform and the teachers unions and all of this, and

people who didn't like charters, they all sort of didn't get that memo that

it was over and they just kept coming.

And so it's it unraveled Denver.

So that's my critique is basically the reformers got

a little fat and comfortable.

But it seems that shoe may be on the other foot, I guess, mix metaphors, the fat

shoe maybe on the other foot or something.

What seems have happened is the progressives just got caught sleeping and

we're not organized, because you're right, he did that and so now, as opposed to

Chicago, were coming out of the primary, the progressives could be like, "yeah.

here is our person, we're all going to rally behind."

Yeah.

Listening to progressives in Denver, they don't like either of these choices.

They're sort of stuck.

And I think that's an interesting dynamic and obviously, Mike has proven

to be a reformer over the years, in public office on a number of fronts.

And so I think there's a potential that Denver once again becomes

a really interesting place on ED reform as it has been.

But as you said, this is like your hometown.

So I'm giving the outsider view.

You tell me that's actually really going on there.

Well, I can't say it at that level, but I can provide just the

historical context and my parents did not teach in Denver, they taught

in Jeffco, which is right next door.

And the striking thing for us, for me is just how much better public

education is in Denver 25 years later and how little it's really

appreciated that is in fact the case.

And it's, despite that great track record of success, the changing political

dynamics has led the Denver School Board to go in a completely different direction.

I, for a long term time, have said that the reform world and especially

the charter school world, needed to be more proactive in the creating

of C4 political infrastructure to defend the wins that we had.

And I think there's been a longstanding kind of distaste, for

political activity from the charter school world, and a belief that

things were going to be all right.

This blanche oi, depending upon the kindness of strangers,

somebody else will do it for us.

And I think that Denver is one of the great cautionary tales for us.

What I really love about either mayoral candidate winning, but especially

Johnston, would be something of a feeling of like, charter folk it's okay to

come out of the woodwork again, right?

What really is our vision?

Because we're still going to have a zero seven school board that

all this charter school operators are going to be concerned about.

But to have a person at the mayoral level, be able to drive a conversation.

I think it could create some really interesting dynamics in Denver and

Colorado is one of the leaders now in the national charter school movement

in terms of percentage of kids served, all sorts of really cool.

Jared Pollis, obviously a big charter school supporter, on the Denver side.

This could really be a really positive sign that charters could

regain momentum in the west.

Yeah.

And you mentioned Pollis.

I've always struck.

Jared's an interesting politician, interesting person, and I've always

like whenever the sort of mentioning starts of if either Biden doesn't

run or who will ultimately succeed Biden on the Democratic side.

I'm always surprised that Pollis' name doesn't come up more.

He's like a libertarian democrat, how he handled Covid, I think

was very popular and effective.

He supports charters in some kinds of school choice and just

has a really interesting profile.

And I'm always struck like, why the people he's using not the top

of the list, in my view, he should be, he's an interesting politician.

Interesting leader.

I think that, something I've been writing about since 16, the history I've

been writing about is 2016 and 2017.

2016 was the election in Massachusetts against question two, 2017 is the

NE's new policy on charter schools.

And basically what they said in that moment was, it is not

possible to be a Democrat and also be supportive of charter schools.

And so Jerry Brown was really the last, well almost the last, I think that

Pollis still was under, had already set his political relationships before

the change in the NEA policy happened.

So I think that Pollis' story here is one that's very important to stay focused on.

I think so too.

Also, I would throw on that list, like you got, I think Josh Shapiro in

Pennsylvania will be interesting to watch.

It's be interesting to see what they do in Massachusetts, but I can't

argue the fundamental point that like that was the sign winter is coming.

And the Democrats have sort of seeded that issue and seeded

the choice issue in general.

In some ways I think it can approve, over time to be really

unhelpful to their politics.

But if we look at the West Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, Utah, Idaho,

these are all places where charter schools support charter school momentum, reform

momentum, is very positive right now.

And I think it's possible for us to hitch these wagons together to use my

western metaphors here and perhaps drive a whole new narrative for the movement.

So we'll see how that plays out.

Yeah, and I think also, look, there's some really

interesting stuff happen on rural charter schools in the west.

And there's some folks, Rob Celine he's a political science professor university

of Montana's, doing a lot of work on sort how Democrats can win with rural

voters again, and re-energize that coalition and, I don't see how you do

it without a real economic opportunity agenda and schools and things like

rural charter schools and school choice being true, being a part of that.

Again, not speaking of things that Democrats have seeded.

They've just seeded the rural vote and that's a mistake.

And it there may be some sort of signs of life in the mountain west

around some of that over time.

Well, we focus a lot on Denver, but in Colorado, I mean we've got charter

schools in Grand Junction and Durango and Fort Collins, up and down the front range.

So it's one of these places where we've really seen a broad distribution

of charter schools and it creates a political circumstance, very different

from if you have all of your schools only concentrated in urban areas.

But hey, I know I've known that you've wanted to like get to Title IX and some

really interesting decisions coming out of the Biden administration this last week.

Do you mind if we pivot over there?

Yeah, let's do that, before we do that though, I do want one

other Denver thing, I just want to, cause it's our podcast and

so we can say whatever we want.

A really gutsy thing that happened in Denver.

I don't know how close you follow the Rockies, they have a reliever.

He is a guy named Daniel Bard, used to be the setup guy for the Boston Red

Sox, he was out of baseball for a few years and then came back and has had

sort of a miraculous comeback with the Rockies and it's just a great story.

What was really interesting at the beginning of this season, we talk a lot

about mental health in schools and this is a big issue, but there's still sort

of some stigma sometimes and so forth.

And he was having some issues with anxiety and he put himself on the

injured list, the 15 day list.

And you, I love baseball, people see lots of heroics and you're like, oh

my god, gutsy plays and all that.

But that was honestly one of the gutsiest things I've ever seen a

player do, especially given some of the aspects of the culture in that game.

And then not too long afterwards, the guy from the Tigers did a similar thing

and I am someone who believes that sort of, those kinds of things have a

queuing effect and they change, again, I wish more influencers talked about

ED reform and charter schools, but just on the mental health front, sort of

seeing that and if you had to sort of have a play of the week or a gutsy move.

I just think what Daniel Barr did is just really impressive and commendable

as we try to get more attention on these issues in mental health.

Well, my wife being a clinical psychologist, this

is our wheelhouse for sure.

And I think sometimes, blue left-leaning charter folk don't always pick up

things that are happening elsewhere.

It's the stigma in, especially in red context, against getting yourself

some psychological assistance.

And then also the stigma, the feeling that conservative folk aren't going to

find a psychologist who is, resonates with them across all these cultural issues.

It just creates this structural barrier, right?

And so any high profile person that is just going to be courageous and

be upfront about what their struggles are, I think really, really helps.

So I appreciate you pointing that out.

Yeah.

So on Title IX an interesting thing happened, and I think it's interesting in

part because the administration, they've had some hard challenges, obviously around

the economy, some foreign policy things.

But they've also had some relatively straightforward things in education.

I think a lot of people would argue that they have potentially fumbled

aspects of the recovery dollars.

This third party servicing process that they just went

through, just a number of things.

Maybe, a lot of people think the student loan and how that, that's been handled

and the entire process of the student loan issue, not just the case that

is at the Supreme Court right now.

And some of those issues actually weren't super complicated and

they still managed to fumble them.

But then you've got this 109 issue of transgender athletes and sports and they

parsed it in a really interesting way that I'm favorably disposed to myself because

I think, it gets at some of the nuance, where they basically, They're going to

put it out for comment, but that they, you can't have blanket bans on participation,

but where you have to balance fairness and safety with inclusion, you can do that.

And so some restrictions are going to be okay.

And I think this is the kind of thing, a lot of people look and are like, certain

things seem fair, certain things don't all that, and then it matters a lot by things

like age level, level of competition.

Is this an elite sort of zero sum or just some other kind

of like recreational league.

All of these sort of nuanced things and in this sort of debate Yes/No, this sort

of macro debate to sort of get lost.

And they have a policy that sort of parsed it.

And what's interesting is, look, some people think okay, they're just

playing possum and they're saying they're going to parse it, but they'll

reject every single plane that comes.

I don't think that wouldn't be a smart strategy for them, politically.

And I think they know that, and wouldn't be a smart strategy,

with Congress and so forth.

So I actually take them at their word that they're going to recognize there's

probably differences between some sports, this really only matters when you get to

zero sum levels where you know, only a certain number of people could advance.

That's varsity level, elite level, sports, and then, college and, and so forth.

And then people are going to take them with their word, that they're

actually going to parse those.

And what they may be doing, and this is me inferring, they saw the Obama policy

on Title IX and colleges just ended up in court constantly and lost constantly.

Right?

And so it was just one of these things, it was, it just became almost sort of

a farce, and what they may be doing here is recognizing this issue is also

in the courts, it's in federal courts.

And recognizing that's going to sort of play this issue will ultimately

be decided in the courts, and so they're just creating some space.

But I just thought it was on acomplicated issue where there is a awful lot of

activist capture, and it would've been easy for them just to sort of

just do the thing that, that everybody would've just do a real straight

down the line sort of red blue thing.

Instead, they sort of parse some nuance and I thought that was interesting.

And I don't know if that means sort of signs of life on interesting policymaking.

I don't know if they're going to walk it back.

I watched one interview with the secretary who he didn't.

Like totally in love with the policy, so who knows?

That may have just been, people give lots of interviews and that may have been

an impression he didn't mean to convey.

So who knows?

But, I think it's going to be an interesting one to

watch to watch going forward.

One of the byproducts of working on charterfolk, I've got subscriptions now to

25 or 30 newspapers, across the country.

And I just try and screen them out, but the headlines keep coming through, right?

And it was fascinating to see that first day.

I think in the first like four hours or six hours, all the headlines were

about, hey, the new guidance bands any kind of discrimination, right?

And then later, before even the end of the day, and certainly thereafter

it started to get into the nuance.

Wait a second.

Yeah.

Blanket things.

They will, be opposed by the feds, but here are some, here's some areas where

clearly we should be more flexible.

The total fog of culture, that first few was right.

It was like complete fog of culture war.

What was interesting is the guidance, the proposed regulation, the way that

the department's materials described to you was actually pretty straightforward.

The key, you could sort of see the key graphs.

Yeah.

So there was a lot of like confusion, but it's one of these things we

try to teach this to since you learned this in elementary school,

like primary documents, right?

And everybody was sort of keying off this other stuff rather than just like the

plain letter of what this guidance said.

What I like about the guidance is that it doesn't necessarily erase a more

agency across all of the public education.

It can be that the political environment is so toxic in all these different

situations that we really don't want to be talking about some of these issues

and if somebody took these issues off the table, Maybe there'd be a value in that.

Generally, that's terrible.

Generally we want decision making and discussion and

nuance created at local levels.

And generally what I've seen in terms of guidance coming out of Washington.

Or guidance coming out of state capitals from across the country right now is

state taking agency away from local school districts, from charter schools, from

school, from any operators of schools.

And generally that's just not set up for long-term thoughtful decision making.

And so I would say this guidance is probably a breath

of fresh air along those lines.

Well, look, as society evolves, you get these complicated

questions and necessarily, there's nuance and they're complicated

and the devil is in the details.

And that's where you have to get and hopefully what we're seeing on

some of this stuff is blunt force sort of culture war stuff will give

way to just more texture and nuance.

I live to some extent, I think you've got 10 to 15% of people on either

side who just are really struggling to live in community with others.

And everybody else is sort of like an unwilling combatant in the,

health wars sees the areas of gray, sees the nuance and wants us to

parse through that as best we can.

But the media fixates on those loudest voices, and they obviously

are what drives politics.

So this was interesting.

And again, we'll have to see how it plays out a year from now.

It could look totally different depending how they do it.

And they could look, we keep calling it a guidance it's a

the proposed change to Title IX.

We'll go through a comment process, they'll issue a final version.

That could change as well.

But it was an interesting sign of life because it came on such a politic

political hothouse issue where they can all thumbs on some more basic stuff.

And this one they really tried to find some nuance.

So I thought it was interesting.

Speaking of all this stuff.

The last thing I know we wanted to talk about is rel there's

Supreme Court cases coming on.

Religious charter schools.

There was a case out of Washington state on religion and schools I think surprised

a lot of people, the Kennedy case.

Last year it's like there's a lot happening here and yet no one seems

to be paying very close attention.

It's potentially like very precedent setting.

Walk us through, there's been a couple, there's been a couple

cases now there's one up.

Walk us through, what's going on and what do people need to know?

Well, I think that there are a couple cases that are working their way through

the courts right now, and there's this North Carolina case where a dress code

and requiring girls to wear skirts in a charter school has now come all the

way up and it, we'll see if the Supreme Court decides to take that case or not.

The argument of those who say that charter schools should be able to impose

this kind of dress code is that charter schools are not public schools and so they

have greater freedoms to discriminate or whatever it may be because of that status.

That's one wing of things.

There are other things where we've had a main case and other things where

it's questions like, could a religious institution directly hold a charter.

And where that's being tested right now, first is in Oklahoma.

And and this is one where, just this last week again, monitoring the headlines the

authorizer turned down the charter school application from the Catholic diocese.

But said, why don't you bring it back again in a month, and we'll see if

you can address some of our concerns.

But the thing that's just really interesting from my contacts in

Oklahoma and elsewhere, it seems as though the operators who are proposing

this charter aren't that deeply connect, committed to charterness.

They really are people motivated around issues of religious liberty.

And so what we see then is that the charter school canvas really just

becomes something that the religious liberty advocates can paint a picture on.

And my own sense is that from a just an actual impact on school options for

people, religious charter schools, I don't think is going to make that big of

a difference because I don't think that many religious institutions are going to

be willing to deal with all the challenges and hassles of operating a charter school.

And so really this issue in Oklahoma is going to remain one

that is presidential for these broader religious liberty issues.

But what it does in terms of the core of the charter school movement, unless

there's blowback, from those precedents that like harm us from a political

standpoint, I don't think it's going to profoundly change the profile of

schools that, you know are operating within the charter school space.

So, let me push on that a little bit.

One of the things I've always like,19 good charter schools

get clobbered by that 20th.

That's terrible.

Right?

And you live some of this in California when you're running the association,

you get these sort of high profile cases and look, it's a natural instinct.

No one reports on all the planes that take off and land every day just fine.

Right?

But when you know something goes wrong, we all hear about it.

It's a natural thing.

Do you worry that with this push in, it will blur the lines on what

actually is a charter school, and then you'll get some outlier examples,

which will be used, particularly used by people in the advocacy world

to sort of paint a broad brush.

It just does seem to me like, like there's some, when people are still

actually learning what a charter school is and is not, and all of that there

is just some the reputational and political risk almost regardless of the

scale that this happens at, seems real.

Yeah, so I think that the likely collateral damage is in blue context

when we've got establishment aligned, policy makers looking for the next

excuse to sunset their charter school law or moratorium or whatever it may be.

And we can see that if the Supreme Court and the Oklahoma case, confirms that

religious institutions must be allowed to operate a charter, if you choose to have a

charter law, there're going to be several blue contexts where people are going

to use that as the precipitating event for the next round of moratorium call.

I definitely do worry about that.

But I also think that A key thing is how does the charter school world,

the operators and our funders and our policies supporters, how do we

orient ourselves to this reality?

And how much do we end up like taking pot shots at one another such that it becomes

easier to set us back with a policy loss?

And that's why I think it would be better if we were having more

proactive conversations about what are the likely results of these cases

and what are ways for us to orient ourselves that are consistent with our

values such that we can stay together.

Whether or not that'll be enough to withstand the attack that

comes against us, I don't know, but we'll be stronger than if we

haven't had the conversation at all.

Something we said at the top of this episode, we're obviously amateur

podcasters, so I don't know if we actually even have show notes, but if

we do, I wrote a piece last year on the main case and its potential impact that

we could include, because I guess I'm a little more concerned than you, that

as you bring religious institutions into closer contact with charters,

that the potential, particularly for political risk there, is real.

And I'm, this isn't something I'm completely against, I actually during

the Clinton administration, wrote a guidance on how religious institutions

can do more to interact with charters and support their educational mission.

But the lines have become more blurry, the church state lines over the last 20 years.

And so I do think there's some risk there.

And then the other thing that just is interesting is, I've always assumed

when you start to do this, one of the fascinating things about homeschoolers,

and I'm not like a one of these reflexive critics of homeschooling, I've spent lots

of time, I wrote a article for the Well of Time a few years ago on homeschooling.

I think like it's actually just a really fascinating part of the ED sector.

But one of the things that you often find is people have this vision of

homeschooling is these individual kids or families, but they often

homeschoolers work together in co-ops and they pool resources, and

they're very strategic about sort of taking advantage of different

assets that exist in their community.

And so one of the things I've always wondered is if you make chartering loose

enough, you've got these groups of, you'll go in, you'll see like 15 kids, and

they'll be all working and doing stuff.

And if you say, this looks like a school, you'll get a lot of pushback,

but it looks off not a lot like in a school or an alternative school, in

practice, and if that's gonna be an attractive place, because if you can

then get all the public money to that same stuff, like what's the difference

between that and sort of a small, scrappy or startup kind of charter school.

So that's always been a place I've watched and I've wondered if these decisions

the past few years might fuel that and create more intersections there.

And why I think all this matters is we're obviously having

a big evolution on choice.

Like the quiet story during the pandemic was just this

explosion in choice policies.

The rhetoric about school choice, it's not happening, it's being rejected.

And the actual like reality, I could not have been more sort of discordant.

It was crazy.

And this is a piece of that we're going to start to redefine what choice

looks like in these various choice options, ESAs have become very popular.

We've also got tax credits and other kinds of choice schemes.

And that as this redefinition goes on, where charter schools end up living

in that new ecosystem politically, is an important question to where

their support comes from and so forth.

I think we've talked about, I don't know if it is on the podcast or just you

and me, like it does seem like there's a scenario here when the music stops.

Charters will be alone without the chair.

Yeah, I think, there's a lot more to dive into here.

I'll just end with this thought, which is, to some extent my value in at CCSA after

10 years on the road, just visiting all these schools and knowing all these people

was having a fairly good assessment.

What are folk going to think about this?

Can we keep the movement together on this?

Will it splinter on that?

And by the time I left, I was right, maybe 70% of the time.

Right?

I just don't think my intuition is nearly as good on national issues at this point.

But I know that a schism that we cannot cross is if somehow we ask charter

folk to accept the idea that charter schools can exclude kids for whatever

reason, whether they're gay or trans status, they're religious status.

And I think the same thing around employees too.

If we can kick you out and you can't work here, that is going to be a definition of

charterness that we just cannot endure.

So my hope is that ultimately these court cases play out such that remains an

option for us to try to gravitate around.

We'll see whether or not what draws us together is strong

enough to hold us together.

I think that there are so many interesting issues

percolating up to the courts.

I've been following very close, there's some issues on teacher free speech rights

that can be hugely precedent setting.

There's just a lot, a lot of this stuff is being redefined as being redefined

in the courts in ways that I think bear more watching and scrutiny it

will have big, big effects what you're talking about in terms of how political

coalitions hold together or don't.

Well, lots to talk about two weeks from now when we get together again.

Yeah.

Looking forward to it.

Continue to enjoy spring.

Enjoy the playoffs.

Alright.

Light the beam baby.

Light that beam.

See you Andy.