Greetings, CharterFolk!

 This week, Andy and I are talking with David Griffith, Associate Director of Research at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, regarding The Education Competition Index: Quantifying competitive pressure in America’s 125 largest school districts, which indicates the death of traditional public schools has been greatly exaggerated.

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

This week some of the topics include:

• Introductions (00:01)
• A brief description of the study, its findings, and their significance (04:07)
• The effects of competition generally (06:54)
• Evolution of the role of competition as advocacy battles intensify and polarization increases (14:54)
• Other creative ideas to increase competition (16:10)
• Interesting findings on variation in competition by demographics of students (24:46)
• Thoughts regarding the ability of new ESAs and voucher programs to increase competition (31:01)
• Upcoming Fordham studies (39:42)

 Notes:

 You can use the following links to access:

 ·      The Education Competition Index: Quantifying competitive pressure in America’s 125 largest school districts

https://fordhaminstitute.org/national/research/education-competition-index-quantifying-competitive-pressure-americas-125-largest

As ever, I’m eager to hear feedback and suggestions from CharterFolk. So, if you have a chance to listen to the discussion and want to drop me a line with some thoughts, feel free to reach me at jed@charterfolk.org.

If you haven’t yet heard or seen previous volumes of WonkyFolk, you can access them here.

Meanwhile, I thank you once again for being part of the CharterFolk community and for the efforts you are making to improve educational opportunities in our country.

Hey, Andy, how you doing?

Hey, Jed, what's up?

Not a whole lot, you know, in my deck of the world woods, but there's

sure a lot going on in education policy and charter school policy.

Liked your post today on the latest piece of scores and all those things,

lots of stuff we could dive into.

You're dating us already for listeners.

So we record.

We're recording this on a Friday.

It'll come out sometime next week.

So who knows what'll happen between now and then.

So you have to take everything with that, with that caveat.

But, I thought that maybe we would dive in today having a visitor

from Fordham, who's just finished a great new piece on the effect of

competition in the charter school space.

So any other introductory comments you want at the end,

you want to just dive into stuff.

Well, if I don't think that's a good idea, it's a little late now, right?

Yeah, stop it.

Stop.

If you've got something else on your mind, whatever I, you know,

No, I think it's actually, it's a really interesting study.

It's good to have a guest, although people seem to really like the last, I got a

lot of feedback on the last podcast.

But I think it's great to have a guest and I'm super glad that this particular

person was able to take time of the study just came out this week, was able to take

time out of their busy week to join us.

Let's bring David in.

David Griffith is joining us, who has written several reports now for Fordham.

David, thank you for being with us today.

Hey guys, thanks so much for having me.

And David, that is a fantastic house you have.

What is Mike paying you guys over there now?

This is my whole house in DC.

Everything that you see is a hundred feet away.

Well, I already asked him before we started recording whether he

plays piano and he doesn't, right?

So, that piano looks like it needs to be used by somebody in the family there.

That makes two of us.

Do you play an instrument, Jed?

I was just saying that my grandmother sent me her grand in the

last year of her life, remembering that when I was eight years old, I played

piano and not knowing that I'd given up piano playing for like 25 years.

So I got it and I felt so shamed by it.

I got some lessons and now I play well enough to irritate the neighbors.

That's fantastic, though.

My wife's a very good musician.

She's in a band and so forth and like.

But I am, she's one of these very musical people.

I am not.

So, like, when we do, like, our concerts and stuff, I do the business and logistics

side because I, you know, everyone's saying, you talk to musicians, they're

like, it's not true that everyone can't be a musician or has two left feet or

whatever, but I actually think it is.

I'm living proof.

My lived experience is that's actually true.

I'm good at listening to music, guys.

Yeah, exactly.

Consuming it.

Well, I could go on on piano playing forever, but let's dive into,

you know, David, your new report.

Look, I've just liked how Fordham has kept the All Boats Rising

story a central piece that you're coming back to again and again.

If I recall, Your all boats rising or something titled something similar

to that came out in like 2019.

I think it was a great piece.

I am constantly reminding charter folk that, you know, we need to be

able to talk about how all of public education is improving as we grow.

It's so important that I think the other side knows that the counter

narrative is their most valuable one.

I think in Massachusetts, when question two was voted down, basically the voters,

after the fact, we did an autopsy.

They bought that charter schools in Massachusetts were actually doing a

better job with kids, but they had been convinced that the growth of charter

schools somehow makes all other schools worse, and so they voted it down.

And for me, all of our advocacy has to pass the question two test.

Yes, we're doing a great job with kids, but as we're growing, everything

is getting better and the competition piece is one of these, these

ideas about how things get better.

And now you've come out with this new report, which really focuses

on, focuses in on competition.

Why don't you share with our listeners to begin with, you know, what's the study?

What are the main findings and what you think the significance is?

Yeah, well, thanks so much for that sort of segue and

laying the table like that.

The gist of the study is that we wanted to look as comprehensively as possible at the

level of competition that school districts around the country are facing and in

particular the big school districts and there's obviously a lot of overlap between

competition and school choice, but we chose competition as our lens because it's

very very hard to quantify school choice comprehensively as i'm sure the two of you

know there are so many different kinds.

We don't have sort of universal access to student level data that

allows us to follow kids, you know, wherever they're going.

So basically you can't quantify school choice comprehensively,

but if you limit yourself to places, you know, to homeschooling.

to charter schools and to private schools, which are sort of these truly independent

institutions that are not creatures of the district then you can make a run at it.

And so that's what we tried to do.

To my knowledge, nobody has really tried to do this before.

But we tried to tell the story in the 125 biggest districts in the country

of how many kids were not attending district schools, how that number varied

depending on which group you belong to and how it had changed over time.

And there are four big findings, but I think the one that I don't

want to overlook is the first one, and that is basically, that the

death of traditional public schools has been greatly exaggerated.

There is this media narrative, and I identify center left, but it

is a media narrative, right, that public schools are dying, right?

And as with so many stories, there's sort of a grain of truth to that, right?

But it also is exaggerated.

And so when you look at the biggest school districts in the country, despite

the growth of charter schools, despite the growth of voucher programs, despite

the growth of homeschooling, you know, your typical big district, 80 percent

of kids are still, still, still, attending traditional public schools.

And so all of the sort of Sturm and Drang that surrounds school choice is really

about the move from about 15 percent to about 20 percent of kids who are not in

your standard issue district run school, so it's just, you know, it's overblown.

And if you take the view that competition is good, that choice is good then

we still have a lot of work to do.

Okay.

So, staying on that for a second, I do think that's really interesting.

We'll get like, but let's just stay on that thought for a second.

I think a parlor game you're hearing more and more with this, because you do

have some places that are now saturated with choice and people are like, Oh

my God, this guy's going to fall.

But like among like serious analysts, a parlor game that you hear a lot is okay.

Like in a really saturated environment.

So with like ESAs, charters, some significant penetration of private

and parochial schools, like what number do you actually expect to see?

And if you ask sort of, you ask that question on Twitter, people are like,

Oh my God, public schools are dying.

only 10 percent of the kids will be left.

But like in reality.

People who study this are giving really pretty high numbers, which doesn't

mean that's not a problem from a school finance standpoint or won't be disruptive,

but it's not the bottom falling out.

So say, just say a little bit more about that cause I think that's

like just a super important piece of context here just to start with.

Yeah.

So let me just say, first of all, I don't have the magic number, right?

I don't think we really know how many parents are truly, truly dissatisfied

with their traditional public school to the point where they would walk?

And I think, I think the answer really, it depends so much on context, right?

It depends on, like, are the alternatives fully funded, right?

Or are you going to take a hit in your pocketbook, right?

I mean, is there a, is there sort of a culture of school choice that has

existed for a decade and a half, right?

I mean, to some people, the idea is scary or strange, right?

But it's not to people in Arizona, right?

It's not to people in DC or Louisiana.

So there's a sort of acculturation piece to it as well.

just to sort of put some context on it though.

I mean, I think folks in the field understand that at this point, New Orleans

is for all practical purposes, right?

A hundred percent school choice, whatever you want to call it.

After that, right, you've got, uh, D.

C.

which is maybe at about 50%, right?

Detroit, San Antonio is higher than people think.

But your standard, your standard district is still somewhere in

the low 20s or the teens, right?

And I personally, I just find it hard to believe that if you really

put all schools or all options on an equal playing field, right?

That 80 percent of parents would pick, you know, their sort of district run school.

if charters had full access to facilities funds, right?

If, you know, per people funding were identical, if you had sort of a good

centralized enrollment system that was easy to use that didn't, you know,

sort of implicitly preference, just doing what everybody else was doing.

I just find it very hard to believe that 20 percent is the ceiling.

So I don't know what the ceiling is but I don't think it's 20%.

So I think I get another way to say it might be like, if you have that off of

that environment, enrollment will be less than it is now, but it will probably not

be as catastrophic as the naysayers claim.

Yeah.

So look, there are some, I think there are some hard, like, let's be real here.

Right.

Transportation is an issue, right?

When you get out of the ivory tower and you talk to like actual parents,

they don't particularly want to drive an hour and a half across.

town just to go to a school that maybe scores at the 62nd percentile

for school growth instead of the 60, you know, instead of the 60th, right?

Like nobody's going to do that.

And so I, you know, I do think that the sort of end state may have a fair number

of traditional public schools in it.

Um, but I don't think it's 80%.

Yeah.

Okay.

That's good.

I don't want to, I don't want to believe, but I think it's this important

context because This debate can quickly get, like, you know, unhinged

or hysterical around, like, school choice, and I do, I don't know that

we're playing between the 40 yard lines, but we're definitely not playing

between the, you know, the whole field.

David, can you talk a little bit more about the effect of competition?

This was a part of the the study and you basically did a survey of the field

and you showed that the vast majority of research seems to suggest that competition

is in fact, as common sense would suggest a positive force within public education.

But I think it's 1 that we have to keep revisiting because there are

some people out there that would identify competition within public

education as being the big boogeyman that we want to try and keep out.

However, we possibly can.

Just quickly, I think that's really important.

I want to talk about that real quick for me when I had a chance to read it yet.

Like when I'm at the top 125 and so forth, just give us, I mean, I think people think

of like a New York, LA, Chicago, but a lot of these districts are not necessarily.

So just.

people haven't had a chan just kind of understand what are we talking about here?

Yeah, so Colombus makes the cut, right?

So it's true, but there's a very quick falling off after the top 5 to 10

districts start talking about a lot came.

That's the least we

He went patrolling and I cannot escape from football talk.

Yeah, I mean, so we're talking about a lot of like medium sized districts, right?

Inner ring suburbs like Arlington, Fairfax, you know, Wake, it's

not necessarily Chicago, right?

So, but it's not small towns either.

Great.

And then obviously to Jed, so the Jed's question, if I had a competition and

you guys have a lot, the demographic breakouts, I think are super interesting.

Yeah.

Well, let me just, let me speak a little bit to just the research on competition.

I like any literature, right?

It is nuanced when you really start to dig into it.

So I will try to summarize it without doing too much violence

to that or going on for an hour.

Overall, the research is positive.

Somewhat interestingly, at least to me, it's actually more positive

for vouchers and for private school choice than it is for charters.

And I think there's a reason for that, and, or at least this is

where my gut feeling is on it.

I think that there are probably some transition costs associated with

dropping an entirely new school into a community that hasn't had it before.

And so I think, you know, when you're talking about like, a sort of a

smaller suburban, or rural district, there could be some transition costs.

But I think over a 10 year time period, right?

I think, which is kind of what many of the studies are looking at.

I think there's just no question that competition on average is positive.and

I think it's also really important to just note, like people, you say

competition and people, you know, they picture like, I don't know, some

sort of cutthroat test factory, right?

But there's no reason that you only have to compete.

over tests, right?

I mean, you can compete to see how safe your school is, right?

You can compete to see how nurturing it is, right?

You can compete to see who has the most fun recess, right?

So that's kind of where I always start, is like, look, when we talk

about competition, Rationally, most parents, I mean, most parents do

not care about test scores, right?

What they care about are these other things, right?

Is it a kind of place where you'd want to send your kid, right?

And so rationally, when you're in competition, right, with

another school, you should want to make your school attractive.

Based on those metrics, right?

You should want to make it, a place that anyone would want

to send their kid, right?

And so, I think it's important to try to get past , this sort of very

sterile view of competition as just kind of inherently dehumanizing.

I don't think that's true at all.

I think I bring some advocacy lens to this that may not be right to spend

too much time on for this conversation, but something I think is a reality

is that in some, at least some places, um, where the establishment has huge,

huge power, they essentially believe that they don't have to compete.

That they can literally just stop.

So when a UTLA strike happens in Los Angeles, they can basically say,

we refuse to compete and we got the political power to make sure that there

will be no further competition here.

And so, you know, I think it's a different orientation that a lot of, you know,

these establishment protectors are taking at this point, which is we refuse to

compete with you and we're not going to.

And until we can, like, figure out a theory of change.

That again still results in, you know, all boats rising where we

don't necessarily have a cooperative partner who's willing to like compete

in a very traditional type sense.

you know, I think our world is not going to have the bearings that we

need to win the advocacy fights of the next, you know, next decade.

And this is hard to do, right?

So like.

The tie the last part of the conversation this part saying you said

like it's new entries and so forth.

It's hard.

We're working Bella is working in Texas.

We're creating 25, working with existing and new providers.

There are 25 new charters.

It'll be either a, you know, A or B charters and their accountability system.

And it's just, it's a ton of work.

I think there's also like, this idea that it's like.

Even this far in that it's like easy to open schools and all this.

And so like getting to competition and building like

high quality schools is hard.

People respond differently to competition.

I mean, you, you were saying the literature is complicated and I do, I

think it's the idea that schools just immediately respond, like this is a

very political context, which I think points to the third thing that I wanted

to ask you about is the politics.

So like I looked and not surprisingly.

Schools in Virginia don't fare well on that.

Cause we don't like, Virginia's not a strong school choice state.

There was an article in the times recently that was like, basically

saying like if Republicans had done well in the, in the Virginia's midterm

election, like there was something gonna be a lot of choice, which is just.

It's one of those things people say, but it's actually not true.

If you understand the political demographics of the state,

Texas is the same way.

They've had this huge fight over school choice.

So like, what are your inferences just in terms of like States you would

think would be stronger on choice, but are simply where it's like,

it's still like a huge uphill fight.

Yeah, well, I don't have all the answers, let me just say that right

up front, I completely agree in one sense, like, there's this sort of mystery

when you look at the states that have seen a lot of charter growth or a lot

of vouchers, I mean, it's not obviously red states or blue states, right?

I mean, the last states that don't have, charter schools, for example,

are places like Nebraska and Montana, and so those are not blue states.

So what's going on?

I think, I, I'm not sure I want to tackle that so much as, as I want

to address your question of like how we should view strategy and the

fight moving forward and where we should really be putting our eggs.

My personal take, right.

Is that.

Moving forward, it is largely a defensive effort, and this may not be

true in Virginia, sorry, but outside, in other places, you take Texas, right?

Texas has a pretty strong charter school law at this point.

It has an enormous Latino population, right?

And if you look at the numbers, that is the place where the saturation

narrative has the least traction, right?

I mean, it's just obvious that there is room for growth there.

And so what do we need to do in Texas?

Well, mostly we need to prevent any legislative rollback, right?

And we need to keep doing what we're doing and the charter of school

movement will continue to grow.

And so that's sort of, It's a boring answer, right?

In some sense, but one of my pet peeves is the way that the funding community

and the reform community and all these people who frankly, make money by

talking, right, tend to be attracted to the next shiny thing, right?

When in reality, the most important thing we can do might be to, you

know, just keep doing what we're doing, right, and, and execute.

And so I, that's sort of, for me, part of the point of the report, part of where I

come from to this, is like, look, we made a lot of progress between 2010 and 2020.

And then all hell broke loose, right, and we had this sort of world

changing pandemic, and everybody, you know, has a different haircut now.

Right?

And we're all trying to get our bearings again.

And it's understandable that we've sort of lost the plot a

little bit as a result of that.

But guess what?

We made a lot of progress between 2010 and 2020.

And let's get back to that, right?

Let's just keep doing the thing that we were doing because it's not about some,

you know, great innovative new idea.

It's just about doing the things that we know work.

Right?

And so that's why I personally come from, there are some big States

where there's a lot of headroom.

And if we can just, keep things from going off track, I think

we can keep making progress.

Well, that's basically one of Jen.

That's one of our themes.

There's always new opportunities waiting around, around the

corner, waiting to meet you.

So, but talk a little bit more, if you would about like

strategy then for advocates.

So you're saying execution, the forward of the report talks about, well, okay.

Like this is probably a roadmap, but like, if you're thinking in terms of

advocacy, which obviously, you know, Jed thinks about all the time, like

maybe these states that are in these places that are sort of deserts, they're

deserts for a reason, and so you ought to be doubling down on the places with

the strong laws and that your strategy should be going to places where there's

a more fertile opportunity, or should it be, okay, this is a roadmap to places

where there's not a lot of competition, particularly, I don't want to lose, I want

to come back to some of the demographic stuff, particularly for kids who often

are most underserved by schools today.

So that's that is the place to go have that fight.

Yeah, I think you can argue it either way.

I think the most obvious opportunities are in sort of districts that

are sort of school choice deserts within states that have strong laws.

So, you know, I mean, personally, I was surprised when I looked at

Arizona, for example, I my sort of in the back of my head, right?

I'm always seeing that long list of school choice programs in Arizona.

I just assume Arizona is super saturated.

It's not clear that it is.

If you look at the number, right, if you actually look at the

numbers, it's not clear that it is.

And I think that's probably also true of places like Florida

that are growing so quickly.

It's like, there's no way that the school choice movement could possibly keep up.

Right.

I think there are a lot of sort of hidden, I don't want to call them hidden

gems, but I think there are a lot of places that we've overlooked particularly

in sort of inner ring suburbs that are, there's plenty of headroom left

and I, I do, I think it's the places where, choice is, um, happening, but

it's not happening everywhere and it's not happening as much as it could.

Jed, what about you?

Let's turn, let's turn the tables.

That's the question.

Well, I mean, look, I think that the story in places like Texas, where

people presume that that everything is rosy for charter schools, that

is actually not been the case.

And they have struggled to get new charters approved at the state board and

they've had cities that have been blocking the building of new school buildings

and the association tries to run charter friendly legislation in the state capital.

And who is it that kills it, but 25 Republicans.

So they had to build the political strength, and they changed, you

know, who, what those Republicans.

We're in the legislature and now they're able, you know, to get bills through the

legislature and they're, and they've also won elections at the state board race.

So, yes, I think Texas is perhaps ready to step into that space where we can

have the pace of growth that I think parents actually demand but it requires

diligence, even in the red states.

And when we talk about Arizona, I mean, Arizona is fascinating . They projected

that their voucher program was going to cost 65 million bucks a year, and now it's

projected at 900 million, 900 million.

That's how many additional people.

Now, some of it is just the people that were already in private

school are just getting a subsidy and all that kind of piece.

But, you know, I think we see that, you know, there are a

huge, there's huge demand there.

The question is, can we get the breakthrough, you know, policy

changes that we want and then do those policy changes actually

increase competition and choice?

Because you could argue that hey you let universal vouchers happen, but

people can top it off with you know additional tuition payments and they

can screen out special ed kids like they can in arizona and they're going

to screen out low performing kids.

Well, You know, it may very well be that the kids that were most focused

on getting better opportunities to are actually going to be given new

choice and new competition with the new things that we're bringing forward.

Let's stay on that because I thought that was some of

those interesting overlays.

You did, David.

Like looking at the demographics.

I think one of the things that really came through, you know,

it's another one of these places.

And there are way too many of them where the rhetoric around the

sector and all these debates is like equity and equity commitments.

And then you look at how these policies play out and you're like

the kids who need this the most.

So in particular, you know, low income kids, black kids, Hispanic kids, who

are most underserved special ed kids, as well, as Jed mentioned aren't

actually seeing the benefits of this.

And it seemed like there's a lot of places where there's a lot of

competition for upmarket white kids.

And so, like, talk about that.

Because that is given, like the rhetoric we hear from all the foundations

and what everybody cares about.

And then you see this disconnect.

It's curious.

Yeah, well, I think there is a sense that with the growth of

like the charter school movement and private school choice that

we've equalized the playing field,

and we haven't.

That's the short version.

If you look in the typical big district, you see a very old, very familiar story,

which is that white kids have more access to alternatives, in large part

because they have more access to private schools, one assumes, because they

have more, wealth or income, right?

And this is where the school choice movement gets a lot of

its moral force, and it's a deep and powerful and important point.

And I don't want to oversell it because we have made progress.

And actually, if you look at figure one in the report, you can see that we are

close nationally, to actually closing the gap between white kids and black kids.

But then when you look in within these big districts, it actually looks different.

And I'd actually want to dig into that more, cause I thought that was sort

of intriguing, but when you look in the big districts often, you see that,

that it's not, you know, we haven't achieved anything resembling equality,

but a picture is worth a thousand words.

That's part of why we did the report, honestly, is because you can

say this, but people don't really get it unless they see the image.

And so, you know, I would encourage people to go on the report page.

I think I'd be remiss if I didn't tout the report a little bit, we have these great

graphics, and they allow you to look at every big district in the country, for

every major demographic group, and you can see exactly what I'm talking about.

And you can see how, you know, access to sort of alternative schools either

has or hasn't, been equalized over time.

And you can even look within particular groups.

Do you have any suggestions, David, on how we should be thinking

about the design of future choice programs such that, you know, we can

actually get more of the low income African American and Latino kids?

I mean, it seems to me as though the way that we design ESAs and

vouchers really matters a lot, and we're at this moment where a lot

of new ones are getting approved.

I also think there are new things that we can be doing in terms of,

you know, stimulating the creation of charter schools that would actually

be attractive to a larger percentage of middle class and white parents.

It just hasn't historically been a huge focus for us.

What are you thinking about, you know, the right things to be focusing

on terms of getting the right mix of choice and competition right now?

Yeah, there are tradeoffs.

I think my personal view is that, if you funded it only a fraction

of what we spend on schools, right?

Then you're inevitably going to get middle class parents who are sort of just

topping off their private tuition, right?

So my personal view is that I would rather have a smaller

program that's fully funded, right?

So that everybody can take advantage of it.

In other words, I want, you know, the full cost of the private school

or the charter or whatever it is, to be covered so that somebody doesn't

have to be sort of glancing at their wallet when they're thinking about

school choice in an ideal world, right.

We would have, you know, a universal progressively weighted voucher that

gets taken everywhere, and, you know, we would have to engage in a thousand and

one conversations about regulation and testing and all sorts of things like that.

That's probably where we're headed in 2050, right.

But there's a lot of grounded cover between there and where we are right now.

So, I think that's the most obvious trade off for me, right, is at a political

level, I think there's a lot to be said for getting more folks inside the tent,

and I think that the school choice movement has paid a price, politically,

for the fact that it's often viewed as a way of helping black and brown kids.

At the same time, I think that the more thinly we spread whatever dollars

we're talking about, the less access, real world access traditionally

disadvantaged communities are going to have to these alternatives.

So there's a real trade off there.

Can we pause?

I'm sorry, what?

We just have to pause just for a second.

I think this does not, the perverse irony that the movement is seen as

disproportionately benefiting Black and Hispanic kids by White people who have,

for the most part, been able to find ways around the problems of public schools,

either by where they live or sending their kids to private school, hectoring the

rest of us about how much they actually care about black and hispanic kids, while

the system continues to underserve them.

It's sort of a really perverse puzzle that I think we just have to like,

and again, some of it I think shows up in this report is politically just

pause on, I mean, we could do a whole, we'd be here all afternoon talking

about all the sort of perversities in our political discourse right now.

But that is one that's like hard.

It is hard to miss.

And I We almost say it like it's unremarkable, but it's like, if you stop

and think about it, it's very unusual.

Well, andy, let me ask you, you asked me a question, I'll put one back to you.

So, I mean, What do you think?

So the mode of all charter folk is keep our heads low as, you

know, Republicans are doing their universal voucher stuff right now.

And that's what we did in Arizona, and now we're on the other side, and the charter

people are coming back to the association and saying, wait a second, this voucher

design program, it's simply not fair.

Right.

And it's not, it's not skewed toward advantage, advantage in the advantage.

So what is your thought here?

Should we be like charging into buzzsaws and asserting our concerns?

As these things are being considered, or do we keep our heads low, get, you know,

say that there's actually some progress if there is more choice that's created,

and then after the fact, go in and try and refine the programs, you know, once

they're up and going, do you have any, I mean, do you have any thoughts on

what's the right thing to be doing here?

Yeah, the answer is I don't know, because it is situational, I think it's

place by place, and we should acknowledge we're in a very sort of transitory time

in terms of how we deliver education.

So like the charter schools had a huge adverse impact on the Catholic schools.

Some people were very concerned about that, some people were indifferent to it.

Some people thought that was good.

But like it was clear it was an impact.

And if you think the Catholic schools were sort of an important part of the community

provided a good option, did a good job on character education or whatever,

that was a concern, but it didn't stop us from having charter schools.

And I feel like it's these programs.

It's one on one.

I think it's going to like in different places.

It's going to Okay, we're going to have a chance to come in and refine where

there's problems and others, we may not.

And so when that negotiation is actually happening, you need to be at the table.

I think it's I'd be very leery to have some unified field theory, maybe David

does, but it just seems very situational.

This is very situational to me in different places in different context.

And we just have to acknowledge there will be it.

trade offs.

Part of the problem with the whole dialogue is every trade

off just gets weaponized, but this is, that's just policy 101.

There's going to be trade offs to these different approaches.

David, do you want to, do you have a unified field theory

on how we should handle this?

I don't have a unified field theory.

yeah, I think, in my experience, right, the average traditional public

school teacher cares authentically about just, you know, traditionally

disadvantaged kids, right?

And I think that's Why we have a hard time getting through to people is

because that's so manifestly the case if you talk to real world teachers as

actual parents do the institutional incentives are hugely problematic, right?

So you think about the fight for example, you know, funding

equity within districts, right?

I mean, arguably it's a totally rational thing to do if you're most worried about

losing kids at the high end, right?

the kids who might go to private schools, well of course you're going

to put more money towards the schools that are trying to keep those kids.

Right?

So, you know, I think part of the challenge is that so much of this

operates in the realm of market theory and economics, and, the average

person's experience of school, and the average person's experience

of teachers is very different.

So, I don't know.

I'm going to leave the politics to you guys, in all honesty.

So, I'm a researcher.

I appreciate your Bringing me into this wonderful political

dialogue, but I am not the expert.

Yeah, I think, well, I think it's hard.

I don't think there's a clear answer.

I think it's more just how do you, I do think people care a great deal, in the

abstract and they care a great deal with the kids right in front of them, there's

a gap and you look at the system again and again, you see that gap sort of,

how do we translate this at any scale?

So like, I mean, some of the divisions in your report I'm familiar with

and like I don't think it's a lack of caring in the central office.

They just have different priorities.

They care about public relations, they care about the story

that they're going to tell.

They don't want competition.

Yeah.

And so I don't know that caring is the right as a political matter.

We need to have the debate on those other terms.

Yeah, when I talk to the average D.

C.

Democrat, right, they're remarkably convincible, but I think a lot

of the way motivated reasoning works that people don't realize is

it's about attention bias, right?

People just don't seem, they don't think about this, right?

They care about climate change, they care about whatever, right?

They don't realize that the fact that education isn't at, you know, for poor

kids isn't at the top of their agenda, is itself a manifestation of, sort

of the conversation that they've been a part of what they're swimming in.

And so the first thing you have to do is assert like, look,

no, this matters a lot, right?

You care about this.

You say you care about this right now, think about it for a second.

And so I I don't know, I have any big answer except you take them one at a

time and you try and change their minds.

And I think also this idea, Jed knows this, like, how do we

get people to realize, and Jed I know you want to talk about this,

that this lifts all boats because.

if it's either portrayed as a zero sum or people think it's any kind

of a zero sum, and that was one of the lessons out of Massachusetts,

they're not going to be with you.

And so it has to be part of like a broad opportunity oriented agenda

that people see, like this isn't going to, this doesn't carry like

a huge cost for me, even if it carries great benefits for others.

Yeah, it depends on what sea, you know, we think boats are rising on

and one of them could be on academic performance and you named David some of

the other ones we could be thinking about.

But I also think there's just a fairness and allocation of educational opportunity

in more equitable ways and allocation of resources in more fair ways too.

And, you know, I think the way that we keep people's attention on things is by

focusing on ourselves and having policy agendas that reflect it, you know, it just

drives me crazy that a place like Newark.

We know what Newark is doing.

The charter schools are growing and they're and the charter schools of

Newark are doing a phenomenal job, right?

The district feels the work.

competitive pressure.

What does it do?

It makes a bunch of new selective admissions magnets, you know, and

then it sucks and puts a ton of money into the selective admissions magnets.

And then we've got, you know, a lot of schools where a large number of kids

are in schools that are abjectly worse than as bad as any we've ever had.

And we stand here And don't articulate that this is in fact happening.

And so, yet again, another generation has found a new way to screw over the

kids that need better education more.

And I think, you know, it's a moment where all advocates, and yes, I think

the charter school world, we need to take our share of naming that these

things are happening and naming policy proposals that we think would make

the situation better than it is.

So, david, question for you.

I mean, you can listen to us, jed and I get me frustrated at the

unfairness of it all, all day.

Like question for you, what surprised you with this?

I mean, part of the fun of doing this work is like, often you're rolling

up things empirically that you kind of either knew already empirically or

intuitively, but then you come across something that sort of totally surprises

whatever your ingoing hypothesis was.

So for you, as you did this work, what are some things that

surprised you that you found out?

I was surprised by just how little private school choice had changed.

Um, I expected.

Uh, charter schools to be the dominant story in many of these places, and it

was basically the only story, you know, I should caveat that by saying that

the data we have for homeschooling and for private schooling is not quite as

solid as the data for charter schools.

Nevertheless, I really thought there would be some districts where, you

know, you were seeing like some of the growth was driven by, you

know, vouchers or private schools or whatever for the decade we looked at.

That really wasn't the case.

I'm sure that if we looked at say Milwaukee, you know, a couple of decades

back, we would see that, but this decade was almost exclusively a story of charter

school growth, and that surprised me.

It may not be true for the coming decade.

Um, but it was true for the one that just happened.

Well, David, this is great research in general.

And you know, I'm eager to see what you're going to do next.

And, what are you going to do next?

We pause on that for a second.

You said something earlier.

We're talking about some things I want to dig into.

Is this, is there more to come?

Give us a preview.

Well, there's always more to come.

We've got some great reports coming out in the next few months.

I'll just say, that, you know, I always think about school choice.

And, we're also thinking about accountability these days because we feel

like, we've been on vacation for too long.

So Fordham is looking for a way to restart the conversation around accountability,

not necessarily meaning go back to no No Child Left Behind, I don't think

anybody wants to do that, right.

But trying to get our hands around the issue with attendance, the issues

with great inflation, the issues with all these cultural shocks that

happened as a result of the pandemic that we're now trying to unwind and

get back to, you know, like holding kids and ourselves to high standards

and sort of insisting on excellence.

So, um, those are the big themes of the things that we're going to be

coming out with in the next couple of years, I think, and we're just

going to keep beating those drums.

Excellent.

Eager to see it.

Share it with us when we got it, and we'll have you back for another conversation.

This has been really great, David.

I would love to come back.

It's so nice to show you my baby grand back there, and you guys are a lot of fun.

Thanks for having me.

Hey, thanks.

Appreciate it.

Thanks for being here.

Great.

Well, Andy, we'll, uh, we'll wrap up for now and, you know, we'll

hopefully get one more recording in before the end of the year, but

we'll wrap up from here, I think.

Thanks, Chad.

I'll see you soon.

Okay.

See you guys.

Thanks so much.