In this live Washington, D.C. episode, Jed and Andy tackle the early policy shifts of the new Trump administration and what they mean for charter schools, education funding, and equity. They discuss the chaotic rollout of federal budget cuts, block grants, and DEI policies, analyzing how these moves may shape the future of public education—especially in blue states.

With federal oversight in flux, the conversation explores whether charter schools could be left without a seat at the table, the potential impact of religious charter schools, and the broader political realignment in education policy. The episode wraps up with a live audience Q&A, bringing in diverse perspectives on school choice, funding inequities, and the future of education reform.

Key Takeaways:

✔ The chaotic pace of policy changes under the new administration and how it differs from 2017

✔ The potential risks of block grants for charter schools, particularly in blue states

✔ The legal and political implications of religious charter schools and upcoming Supreme Court rulings

✔ Why charter school advocates must define their values and strategy amid shifting political winds

✔ The growing divide between red and blue states on public education policy

Notes & References

Eduwonk on IES cuts and the cultural moment we're in

Eduwonk on the recent "Dear Colleague" letter

SCOTUS Blog on the Oklahoma religious charter school case

Hey, Jed.

Hey, Andy.

Y'all welcome. We have a live audience today for the people who are listening to the podcast and most of our list.

For some reason, like, not a lot of people actually want to watch. They only want to listen. Yeah, I think. I think you get better looking as you age. But for some reason, the.

The streams are not nearly as popular as just downloading it.

Well, it's fun to be able to do a second live cast. We did. We did a live cast from Charter School Growth Fund last spring.

It was fun to have questions from the audience, and it was just a little bit more informal and chatty. So we're glad to be able to do it. We kind of talked about doing this months ago.

We knew that February was likely to be a moment when we would see what the early days of the Trump administration were going to be like. Oh, wouldn't this be a good time to get together over a couple of whiskeys? Little did we know just how many whiskeys we were going to need.

But it is, you know, it is a good moment to come together. So for all of you that were able to be here, thank you for that. And be.

Do be thinking of questions, we will take them in the last, last 15 minutes or so of our time together.

And if you guys think this one's fun, the one we're going to do at the beginning of Trump's third term is going to be fantastic. Really, really off the rails.

We'll set some context. Andy, I mean, they're just. The question right now is just, well, I mean, tell me how you're feeling.

I think we're in this moment, like, things are changing so much. We could say something right now and 12 hours from now, it could be pointless.

I mean, yeah, just a couple of notes. Daniel's already dying inside because we forgot to introduce the podcast as we do by tradition every time. So, I'm Andy Rotherham.

I'm Jed Wallace.

And we should note we are recording this the day after President's Day in February.

And with the velocity of things, if you're listening online, there are probably going to be some things we're going to talk about that might have already changed, particularly related.

Some of the things are happening around budget cuts and agency decisions and so forth, because things are happening with a real, real degree of velocity.

And we're. We're going to try and keep the conversation right at the nexus of wonky and charter. In fact, this may be more wonky.

And I were just talking about, for years, just thinking about doing this where's that overlap and really trying to, like, come up with stuff that resonates with both audiences. Yeah, I'm obsessed with charter ness. I mean, bellwether people tell me, I'm like, you know, I've got a tick or something. I plead guilty to that.

But, you know, I really enjoy this time to be able to talk, I think.

Very well said. You were charter pill.

Charter pilled. I really.

You've been chartered, but, yeah, all, all, all charter folk are wonks, but not all wonks are charter folk, and we certainly respect that. Yeah. So it's chaotic, Jed. I mean, like, first of all, tell me, I mean, you're from California. What does it look like? I think when you're in D.C.

you can be a little inured to this, in part.

There's blue and then there is D.C. i mean, the thing that's unique about D.C. is federal policy feels like local policy. So I don't.

I would not extrapolate anything from DC to the other blue context. I think there's some really unique stuff going on here, specifically.

I know we have Ariel here, and I know we have some charter people here who probably can attest to that. But as far as, you know, the blue state world would go, I don't know. I was at.

At the association in California for those first months after Trump won. And, you know, I think there were a lot of things that we did that I would still say they were the right things to do.

I also think there were several things that we did. I would probably want to revisit something that feels fundamentally different to me right now.

And it may not feel as fundamentally different to everybody else in this room, but in my conversations with blue state context, I think that blue state leaders.

And in some of those conversations, some of those projections, we did good stuff, and in some, we screwed it up.

That's interesting and I hope. I hope that holds. It does feel different to me in a couple of ways. One is simply just the amount of chaos. I mean, the sort of.

I mean, there's lots of people who think ies should be restructured and have been calling for that for a long time in different ways, but sort of just the speed, I would say, the carelessness of the cuts, that they were cutting things simply because they legally could be cut. There was. It wasn't any sort of a framework on, like, is this effective? Is this needed? Is this obsolete?

Was this bid, you know, as it should have been? Whatever it was, just simply, let's just cut all the stuff that has contractual language. We can cut, like that sort of degree of carelessness.

And now it's like, okay, some of that stuff's going to have to get fixed. That's happening, you know, with sort of similar speed at the main ED agency now at the Department of ED.

We had an election, the people voted, but the people who were sort of in positions of responsibility seemed to be more careful, and I use the word care, you know, deliberately, than what we're seeing right now. Now this, I think it'll fall under its own weight at some point, but there's going to be a lot of chaos before that.

That's what really feels different. Yeah, that's what feels different to me.

Yeah.

So on the one hand, you would say, well, if they're running a Plan that explains why perhaps they're just simply getting more done or the barrage of stuff seems so overwhelming. I think what would be a little bit more reassuring is if in the volume of stuff that was coming, there was a smaller degree of chaos.

And right now it's just. Wait, what?

You've been thinking about this for years and this is the level of chaos you consciously, intentionally want in the landscape very concerning to our world. Yeah.

I mean, what I. My understanding is some of what happened with DOGE at ies, the Federal Education Research Agency, was simply.

They were trying out sort of different ways of doing this, which, like, in a normal environment, you would scenario plan, you would do that. You would figure out where some of the problems are ahead of time.

I do think there's a culture clash that's happening that sort of is hidden in plain sight and hasn't been remarked on, which is simply, this is.

This is like that tech culture, which is the California culture, where, I mean, like, you know, I have friends in that industry and they get laid off. And like, getting laid off, that's like a good excuse to go to Thailand for six weeks. Right, Right.

And then you come back and you've got those skills, you find a different job. That level of disruption, kind of like what Musk did to Twitter.

He came in, he fired everybody, and then Discovery needed half these people, so they started bringing them back and so forth. That's just not. Federal operations need to be more predictable, more diligent.

I mean, you can argue they're too much so and we need more agility and reform. But like, we've completely overcorrected to sort of a different culture that just is a bad match for. For governing.

Well, I imagine it's kind of a hot seat for you personally, Andy. I mean, if you, if you talk about anybody in the national ed reform landscape who is turned to for.

At moments of like, I don't understand what's going on, what signal, what's noise. I imagine the volume of outreach you're getting right now to people is huge.

Do you have any starting point conversations or is every topic so different? There is no shorthand that gets you through the first two paragraphs or so of conversations you're having with really concerned people right now.

Well, I mean, the, the challenge is how many different ways can you say, who the hell knows? Because that's the answer on, on a lot of this stuff is.

I mean, there's stuff you can sort of see, and you can sort of see the broad contours, but a Lot of it is we're, you know, we're in uncharted waters in some ways. Who knows? Who knows what's the reaction is going to be?

I mean, big questions are, who knows what's going to happen when we actually get confirmed officials?

Yeah, it could change, or they could still be just sort of doing the White House's bidding, and this could continue to be driven out of the West Wing. Is Congress going to get involved?

I mean, there's just huge, like, traditionally, like, when I first started doing this work, like a sort of a bureaucrat would be reluctant to, like, you know, make any sort of substantial change, let alone contractual change at this level without running it through the committees, making sure, checking with appropriators, checking with the authorizers. I mean, like, you know, I can't imagine this happening like in the old days of Budget Committee chairmen who were sort of feared.

And yet, like, when this went down, nobody quite knew what was going on. The Hill was like, what's on the list? Everybody was kind of calling each other.

It was just like, it was a startlingly new way of doing business, which, to a certain kind of person, is the appeal of Trump. Obviously, we should. We should name. I see that as sort of a defect, but there's a certain kind of person who's like, yeah, this is. This is great.

And so I find myself a lot saying, you know, who knows? And I think it's difficult to separate, like, what are the real serious problems of which there are some. And then what's the noise?

So, like, last Friday is a great example. Trump took two action.

Most people celebrate Valentine's Day by, you know, going out with their spouse or going and trying to find a partner or whatever. Trump celebrated it by launching an EO on vaccines, which was, like, largely just performative because their vaccine mandates.

I mean, there's a few places that still have them, but, like, they're mostly gone. Even the people who used to track them don't bother to anymore. And that was a big thing of the White House. But what was really. That was.

But that was theater. What was really consequential is they.

The Office of Civil Rights, the part of Education, sent a letter out that basically said, we're going to enforce civil rights law to the letter. And that means no dei. There's problems with the letter we can talk about. It's kind of. It's vaguely written in place. It's kind of confusing.

Just from a craftsmanship standpoint, it's like missing a footnote. There's Like a footnote in it. And you go to look at the footnote and there's nothing there.

It turns out when you fire the entire staff, the quality of the work might suffer. But that's real. Right. That's actually consequential that that is going to matter. And so it's also, it's helping try to figure out which is which.

And you can't have your hair on fire about everything. And some of this stuff is just, you know, it's been 100 executive orders and a lot of them are sort of whatever.

Yeah.

And then there's a few that actually matter. Yeah. Quite a bit.

Well, the.

But I appreciate you saying that.

I mean, the using of, of public education as the landscape across which to paint your pretty pictures is one of the reasons why I think the Republicans will never get rid of the Department of Education because they're going to want to keep being able to project on social issues ad nauseam and they're going to need someplace to be able to do it.

See this as turnabout. So I do think it's important to, I think one of the problems our sector has, we've talked about is this sort of hyper bubbleness. Right.

And like there's just not as much sort of cross pollination as there should be. One of the things, if you're listening, you can't see the audience, but it's fantastic. We have people here from the agencies, we have Hill staff.

We have different, like people need to come together and talk. And one of the things you hear is Republicans are like you all meaning the Democrats ran roughshod over everything for quite a while.

Turnabout is fair play and you can agree or disagree with some of these actions and so forth, but you can also sort of understand a little bit that impulse and some of the things that they're doing, like using this dear colleague letter we just talked about, like that's there's precedent for that. I think it's actually unfortunate precedent. I'm sort of more of an Article one guy at the end of the day.

I think Congress should do, should, should do its job and make policy. But sort of the, this expansion of executive power has been sort of bipartisan and so Republicans are feeling a little bit turnabout's fair play.

And so you guys use the landscape of public education to do all this and now it's our turn.

Yeah. Well, I think the attack on DEI ends up having so much collateral damage. You know, I was really surprised.

Well, I wasn't surprised by it, but I was chagrined to see this story out of the Washington Post. I think it was yesterday about friendship schools here in D.C.

they've got a big federal grant to basically recruit and train the next generation of teachers and school principals. And by the way, yeah, if you're doing it in Washington, D.C.

the vast majority of your people are going to be people of color that are coming into this. And somehow or another that gets construed as, you know, a DEI initiative that is a simple, you know, people talent issue.

That seems like we've got to find a way to get our bearings on these things. If we're going to just keep our heads low and, and not object to these kinds of ridiculous things like this, it's going to be.

I'm worried people aren't going to pick the right fights.

Like, so my thought on this has been a lot like, they put out an executive order that says we're going to follow the Civil Rights act, we should take them at their word, and if they do things that violate that, then they should be sued.

And so if this turns into sort of wantonly taking away money just because of a commitment to diversity, like, that's way over the line and people should fight. We should also recognize DI was weaponized in certain ways. It went too far. I mean, there's been loads of debate in our sector about that.

So I think people should pick like, smart hills to die on.

But I am worried that you're seeing there was an overcorrection one way and now everyone's just going to overcorrect the other way and just start to abandon these principles because they're concerned about it or they feel like the tide is shifting or whatever, and that's a mistake. I feel like this sector should very clearly define what are the things we care about.

And I mean, most people I know in this work, especially people have been doing it for a long time. They come to work because they believe the country and the economy is not inclusive enough.

There's not enough opportunity, there's not enough social mobility. And if we can't, like, talk about those things, then we should fight about those things. Right.

And I worry, like, we should have a while ago asked some hard questions about the way some of these things were being discussed and used when, when the word equity ceased to mean sort of equality of opportunity, making sure kids have what they need and turned into, like, let's not give kids access to advanced classes and things like that. Like, those are errors and we need to, like, talk about those. And There was not enough conversation at the time.

And if you raised those, you were, you know, there was a social cost. We should talk about those things, but we should not simply then be like, oh, let's just toggle to the other side. Yeah.

If this sector, given what we do, can't talk about inclusion, broadly speaking, can't talk about making sure kids have a fair shot at opportunity and the resources and so forth that go along with that.

And can't talk about diversity as a strength and that, you know, a commitment to difference and that we know diverse groups are better at solving complicated problems than homogenous groups. I mean, this is all like. If we can't talk about those things in, like, a smart way, then we sort of. We sort of deserve it because these are.

These are the right fights and they're. They're fights that most of the American people are with. They didn't.

Yeah, well, let's crack open like a sweet spot for Bellwether and for Rotherham. Right. So people call you in when it's a tough issue and we need groundbreaking analysis. It's sometimes it's quasi.

Can you give me some quick research on this? I just feel like this whole realm of education research having been attacked, and I don't know if any of those dollars are ones that we can get back.

But what are you saying to this world that you have particular relationships with?

What are you saying, given that we're in this environment now where we're flying blind on public education in so many ways already, what should be the collective pushback on. We want research. If there are some, you know, if there's some extremes here that we should address, okay, great, let's do it.

But let's keep the heart of analysis, of analysis of what's working in public education, a part of what the federal government funds.

Sure. That's a great question. I should pause, though. Like, I think you set up. Like, I don't have, like, my secret sauce is not having all the answers.

My secret sauce is I know who to call to get the answers quickly. And that's like. And that's seriously, like, what I've been able to do over a career is build credibility by helping people, being an honest broker.

I don't burn people. And so I talk to all sides I can sort of piece together. There's no, like, I'm sorry for saying.

That Bellwether is known to be very Very smart people. I take it all back.

And I think that. Take it all back, that's Bellwether's secret sauce, too, is like, Bellwether's good at answering questions. We get hired.

That question might be like, what should our strategic plan be? That question might be, what should a policy look like? That's what we're good at. That's what, that's what we do.

And I sometimes bristle when people like Bellwether smart, because I think Bellwether is, like, only as smart as its component parts and our ability to access. Access information. So. But like your question, what are we telling people? I'm telling people a couple of things. One, get. Get good information.

Be thoughtful. These cuts are consequential. I think some of them are going to get undone.

I think the Trump people have already realized they cut stuff, that they've also said, these are things we want to do. And there's data that I really think there's an old thing, you'll hear people say, Chesterton's fence.

And it's one of those things that fancy people say.

But it's like a pretty simple idea which is simply if you were to come across upon a fence, before you rip it down, you probably ought to figure out, like, why the hell did somebody put this fence here? Maybe it's obsolete and it should be taken down. But, like, maybe it's there for a good reason.

Like, that idea seems not to have ever occurred to Elon Musk. Right. And so, like, they. They went storming into IES with little understanding of just how the agency worked.

I mean, I'll be the first one to say, IES needs some reform. And I think we should be. Ashley Jochim has made a very, I think, brave point where she has said, like, look, she's a researcher.

She has said, hey, look, you know, the. You're not hearing an outcry from the field on most of this stuff.

Superintendents are not, like, you know, calling Capitol Hill, like, there's some of this work is not actually hitting the people it needs to hit. There's room for reform. And I'll be the first one to say that. But to sort of reform the agency, you have to understand, like, what does it do?

Why does it do it? What's the purpose? And I think the error they made is, is they just stormed in without even bothering to understand that.

And they're going to repeat that mistake if they're not careful. And God knows there's waste that education. There's places we could have Efficiency.

I actually think we should have a conversation about ways to restructure aspects of the agency.

But if you just go storming in there, there's special education programs, there's civil rights enforcement, a lot of things going on that you'll just upend if you don't take the time to figure out, okay, why is that fence there? Yeah. And look, I mean they won the election so they have some prerogatives here. Like that's just the way it is. Whether you like it or not.

You, you know as you can, as you know, I don't, but it's like that's, that's the deal when you live in a liberal democracy. But we should demand that they just be thoughtful about how they do this and the sort of upending.

And so the advice I'm giving to people is try to get good information, try to figure out what's going on. Don't rise to every piece of bait and every target. Get good information and then figure out how do you actually make a case for these things.

I am very worried.

Many of the cases you hear from the Department of Education, it needs to be more than like, but the children, we need to make like a serious case for the department. Like I believe you, Donald, Donald Trump says he wants to build more ships in this country.

That, that seems to me to be a good thing, that we should do that and we need more kids who have the skills to do that. In Virginia, we're actually opening two schools focused on exactly that. Not being able to build ships here.

The way we do now is it is a national security problem. There's a whole bunch of, of, of laws and so forth that complicate all this. We should address that.

We should bring chips manufacturing back into the United States. Like that's an important goal so that we're less pressured around the world there. But who's going to do all that work?

Who's going to do that high skilled work? Who's going to build those ships?

So like, I don't understand how you possibly even bring this vision right into being without cabinet level leadership. And we should be making that case, I think much more affirmatively than we are. If I was, I want people on the Hill to actually have arguments.

I'm not sure right now. They're getting like really strong arguments.

And if we're not careful, it just sounds like this stuff is a jobs program rather than like these are really important institutions and entities.

Well, I want to ask for your advice. Not, not your smart advice, just your advice as it relates to charter schools in a second. But before we get to that, my.

Friends will tell you I give both kinds.

But before we go there, I want to just see. I mean, with all this different stuff going on, to be able to claim, you see, any broad, broad contour is obviously something we should question.

But I still see a lot of this in terms of a fundamental decoupling of, you know, our shared consensus on what public education policy should be like. And the federal government's role in it gets to be seen as, you know, this place that's torn asunder.

And I think we see red and blue states going in fundamentally different directions.

Well, I think you're making a very perceptive observation.

The trust was broken during the pandemic, and in some ways, Donald Trump's timing on this is just fortuitous for him that he is, like, able to roll in at a time when trust is really low and people are frustrated.

And so I've said for a long time that I think what's coming is that at a federal level, we will either get to a point where we're comfortable enough with red and blue states going in different directions, or the red states are going to say, forget it, it isn't worth it.

And they're going to have enough influence over the budget process in Washington to see a significant reduction in the overall federal investment in public education across the country. And what we're seeing right now is basically a skirmish along those lines and how this plays out.

They're trying to design a federal tax rebate for a voucher program. If they fund that on one side, are they going to take it away from the U.S. department of Education on the other? I don't know.

But am I wrong to, like, see this in, in that broad landscape, or that's just, that's more tea leaf reading.

That's, that's even hard to read the tea leaves. I mean, I think. And there's people in this room who would know more.

But, like, my sense is the large categoricals, those, these big programs, Title one, Special Ed, these go everywhere. And at the end of the day, that's, there's a, there's an element of bipartisanship there because they hit red states and blue states.

The programs, I think, are more at risk. A lot of the smaller programs you're already seeing, they're cutting. This week, they're cutting teacher quality grants.

They're cutting various kinds of grant programs like that. They're using some new authority. There's an executive order they did, and there's now we've changed a little bit of how federal policy works.

They're using some new authority there to, to go after those grants. I don't see the big programs as is in peril because people want that money.

As we said, you're sort of already starting to hear political gravity still exists.

You're hearing Republicans from some of these states be like, hey, you know, yeah, Alabama is bright red, but like the University of Alabama gets a lot of indirect funding from, from federal grants. And so you're starting to hear the senators down there be like, let's, let's be thoughtful here.

So I think the bigger thing, I do think we're going have a huge fight over choice. If the Republicans, they kind of another thing is sort of hidden in plain sight.

They don't really have their act together yet on like, what their strategy is in terms of like how they're going to move these bills through.

My own personal view is the Trump team probably should have spent less time doing these performative stunts and more time like trying to get Congress and work with them and figure out like, because the president, you only have so long to sort of push on that stuff. But, you know, they've obviously chosen a slightly different path. So I think it's been more stuff like that.

I'm not as concerned, but I think we'll see restructuring in the department.

And I do think this question of accountability and measurement is where rather than money, because people want the money, is where we may see the consensus break down.

And that concerns me a great deal that we could even see a further rollback on sort of just building basic federal pressure around accountability and measurement.

Well, I, I'm more pessimistic than you on this front, I feel like, and it's primarily borne out of a recognition that the red states that have gone toward universal vouchers cannot pay for them. Arizona forgoes a $400 million bond payment for water projects, you know, in Phoenix in order to pay for their ESA voucher program.

And essentially every other state that's going in this direction is finding that the hole in the state budgets are way, way bigger than they've been advertising. And to me, that's just to get.

You a nasty gram from Matt Ladner or whatever.

Matt gives me to our time about this all the time.

But it's like, look at, I mean, look, yeah, in Arizona, almost all the new money or 70% of the vouchers are going to those that already had their kids in private schools. And look, I don't have some kind of blanket opposition to providing resources to those families if that's what they want to do.

But let's just be upfro what we're doing and let's be upfront about what the budgetary impact is going to be.

And I think that's ultimately going to float to Washington and either of these resources that are in Washington are going to be provided to Arizona and to Florida and to Iowa and to the other places to help them fund their universal voucher commitments. Or else people at the federal level are going to say forget it, let's just decrease our funding of public education altogether.

Well, that's.

Well, except the thing is the deal doesn't work quite because it's, it's, you know, at a, at a state level you can decrease funding one place lower taxes and at the federal level you could get rid of the large categorical programs. I'm not saying that's a good idea, but I'm saying you could do that. People aren't going to see a change in their income taxes. Right?

You're not going to, it's, there's not going to, it doesn't work like that. So I think the political trade is going to be less that than this, this pressure on measurement, this pressure on accountability.

And I do think this issue of choice at the state level is going to be a big deal. And you, I think you are right there. You've got these two forces, the budget force and the choice force.

I just saw coming over today, I just saw a press release out of Florida. 300,000 applicants for the scholarship.

Like, like we need to people who, you know, whether you're sort of in the wonk world, the charter world, whatever, need to have an answer because choice is incredibly popular and our arguments against that. People don't care, right?

I'm not arguing against.

No, no, you never know. But I mean the arguments again like, and so I think we need to, like people need to figure out like what does that look like?

How does that energy start to, how do we start to put that into a more productive politics? Because I think if it's just like let's fight the choice people, that's not good. That's not going to go well.

People have said you put means testing versus universal vouchers on opposite sides of the spectrum. I'm like, no, no, they can all be universal. Every darn family, every darn kid gets funded.

No one's looking at how we are unleashing a level of inflation within private education right now unlike anything that we've seen for a long time. And these are the issues that we need to be focusing on.

But it's a remarkable thing how fast it's happened, right? Yeah. I mean, like, you and I have been doing this for about the same period of time.

And like, Texas is going to be out of the gate a billion plus. Right. So, yeah.

No, it's incredible the change we've seen in our, in our lifetime and career. And it's almost like not remarked on, which is what, which is what is so peculiar to me.

It's like, happening and people are barely like, discussing it. And is it.

It is a tectonic shift at the state, at the state level, like, I think it's like 30 million kids are going to have a right of exit before long, which is just. That's. That's an amazing thing. Yeah.

So let me give you a told you so opportunity. I want to get, you know, we're getting close to only 15 minutes before we start taking some pictures. Some, some pictures.

Some, some questions from the audience here. I want to have a little bit uncharted as here. I want to start with you.

And I have had this disagreement about whether or not charter schools are going to be left out in the game of musical chairs.

Musical chairs.

And so now. Okay, you got all this new data. I know you're like chomping at the bit. Okay, what's the I told you so, Wallace? Come on.

Don't you see how charter schools are getting set up here to be the one without a chair?

I do worry about it, but I don't know that it's. I don't know that it's set. Settled yet, but there is. I do. We should talk about the, the Supreme Court case. Yeah, yeah, I do worry. There's just a lot.

You've got a lot of momentum for essays. The Democrats like, you know, and if you saw sort of the DNC chair. Right.

It doesn't seem like the Democrats are really excited to like, take Rahm Emanuel's advice and get serious on ed reform. And so there is this thing of where. Who's going to. Where are the charters going to go.

The Republicans have their own stuff and they're also going to have a sort of civil war at some point between the Republican establishment and maga and the Democrats don't seem to care.

So there is a, you know, you know, a lot of the people who deeply love charter schools are like in this room that's, you know, we need a broader coalition.

Well, I remain more exuberant, irrationally so on charter school stuff than, than, than the vast majority of humanity. I understand it. I remain that way on most issues.

I actually, I don't, I don't think the CSP program is going to get sunsetted, which would be a disaster for public education. It's possible. The Trump administration proposed wrapping up. It's possible. I don't think it's going to happen. We'll see.

I'm very worried about getting rid of tax exempt bonds, you know, because there's no way to talk about that.

I know you've been concerned about that, like talk about that, that program and what that would mean if there's a big tax bill and a lot of this stuff gets cleaned up to. For new tax cuts.

Yeah, so, so they're needing to find more money to pay for their tax cuts and to extend, you know, the, the previous tax cuts.

And one, and they've got other things like paying for tips and overtime and all these other ideas that Trump shared during the administration, during the election. One of the ideas they have for getting new money is that they would get rid of the tax exemption for municipal bonds.

And you know, a category of the municipal bonds are these private activity bonds. And this is what charter schools use for the financing of. I don't even know what it would be, Ariel. I mean, is it, is it 2/3 of the school.

It's a large number of schools that get any kind of lending as it relates to, to charter school facilities. They get it through this tax exemption. And Eugene Clark Herrera from Orec is writing a charterfolk on this tomorrow. He's so worried about this.

He estimates that it's somewhere to 40 to 50% reduction in the overall interest rates that charter schools pay because of this tax exemption that we can, that we can use for our bond financing. And the Republicans have proposed to get away to get rid of it. So I mean, I'm very worried about that. There's no doubt about that.

We'll have to see how that plays out. And it's also happening at a pay scale above our.

There's going to be a lot of entry point picture horse Trading. Yeah, with that.

So I worry about that. I definitely worry about that. But I still, I don't find the voucher and charter issues to be yet so much at odds with each other.

Generally where vouchers are getting approved, charter schools continue to be growing, and it's not either or. And I think that story is likely to continue at least for a while. Where I get really worried about things is on this religious charter school issue.

This one is one where, I mean, Wallace, I expect you to be the irrationally exuberant one. Bring oxygen into this room. And I, I rain on people's parades on this issue.

Quickly, quickly, tell people. Because that case has moved up so quickly.

Yeah.

And now they, you know, they just agreed to hear and they're going to hear it in April. So I think. I'm not sure everybody's like, like tracking it because it just, it came on so fast.

Yeah.

Well, this is one where their religious liberty advocates in Oklahoma, well, just generally anywhere in the United States, have been working on this for 25 years and they've seen school choice and charter schools as again, a canvas upon which they can, you know, paint their pretty pictures. And there's been this long, slow, steady progress from their perspective on forcing the government to fund religious schools.

I wrote after that opinion. I think the writing is on the Supreme Court wall. This is going to happen while people have been looking for the right case to test in Charterland.

And so we have now this proposal in Oklahoma to run an online Catholic charter school. Now, I have not done an exhaustive analysis of the landscape, but I have talked to a lot of friends who know Catholic education pretty darn well.

Greg Richmond has written a Charterfolk in recent weeks.

We should put that in the show Notes along with Andy Smarrick wrote a piece saying this was going to happen. It's a good. We should put both of those in the.

But I don't know of any state specific private Catholic online school, nor did Greg. Greg does know that there are companies that provide classes to charter school to Catholic schools across the country.

But in terms of an online only Catholic school, in one that is in one state context. There isn't one. There isn't one. So what happens in Oklahoma? Somebody proposes to do an online Catholic school.

It's called Saint Isidore.

Right.

Isadore of Sevilla.

My own sense is that they're not that serious about operating the school. It's not really about operating the school. It's about winning this case.

And so we've now had the authorizer in Oklahoma, look at the Oklahoma state constitution, say, hey, charter schools are public schools. The constitution prevents the funding of sectarian schools. So they deny the charter.

Now Isadore has sued and now the Supreme Court has chosen to take it on appeal. And they only take 4%. And a lot of people think that, you know, the writing is on the wall here.

So let me, you know, turn back to you and just what would you add to the way I've presented the history here, at least?

No, I think the history and the one thing it makes me think of is a few years ago we had that big religious liberty case, the Kennedy case. And it was about a coach and saying prayers after football games.

And it was like this big case and it rocketed up and the coach is like, he's not coaching anymore. He sort of vanished like a little bit like what you're saying. The fact pattern was like, very weird.

We get this big case and like the people involved have just sort of vanished. Yeah. So it feels like that. We should also note this is gonna be a weird case. Amy Comey Barrett, one of the nine justices, has recused herself.

Probably justices don't have to say why they recused themselves, but she does some work with a legal clinic at Notre Dame.

Notre Dame connection is probably it.

Yeah. So it's probably. That's probably. But we don't know. That's speculation. She doesn't have to say so, but.

Which means it's going to be only eight justices. So if it's four, four, the it would uphold the lower court, the Oklahoma court's decision not to allow this charter.

So, like, they have to get that fifth vote. It has to be at least five to three.

And so most of the blue state advocates that I talk to, if the Supreme Court decides what people think they are most likely to decide at this point, which is that you don't have to have a charter school law, but if you have a charter school law, you can't discriminate against.

Discriminate against religious institutions wanting to operate a charter that results in immediate moratoria in, in many blue states, all right, if we have to have charter law and accept a religious, we'll get rid of anything going forward.

The thing that I think is not really thought through and it's the second reason why I don't think this, this charter school in Oklahoma is ever going to open this Catholic school. Because if you look at the Oklahoma State Council now, maybe the Supreme Court could write something in there.

But if, but let's presume they don't do that for a second. Let's say, yeah, you can have a religious charter school. You must allow for the religious charter school in Oklahoma.

But if you look at the state constitution, there's no way to fund that school. You're going to have to change the state constitution in order to make it fundable.

And we've seen in, you know, in Nebraska and we've seen in Kentucky, getting a state constitutional change is no easy deal.

So I think in a number of places, both from a blue state perspective and from a red state perspective, this decision could have just absolutely monumental impact on our movement.

Yes, I see it. I mean, I'm, I'm very skeptical of this and I don't think it's a good idea.

I think there's a couple of ways to look at it though, and I think we're all like, one is the constitutional. And you sort of said, you laid out the Maine case, but there was also a Montana case.

There's been, there's been a set of, there's Trinity Lutheran, which was a case, I think Missouri, but I could be wrong, but it's about playgrounds.

And if you were going to give money, and the court has consistently said if you're going to give this money out in these ways, you have to give it to, you don't have to give the money out, but if you're going to do it, you got to give it to religious schools.

And that builds on, you know, like this enormous shift that we had over the last 50 years just on Church state, where you used to have sort of a high wall and sort of really careful tests. Then we argued about title one and then it was like, okay, well that was finally settled. And then after title one, it was, can we have textbooks?

And it was like, you can send textbooks to religious schools because it's just the book. And then so it's going to be, that's going to be, you know, purely used for sort of non sectarian purposes.

But then it was like, well, if you're sending books, why don't you send Computers. And, and, but like, well, computer could be used for a sectarian or nonsectarian purpose. But that was a Louisiana case.

The court said, sure, and then you had vouchers. The big Zelman case, the big one.

And I feel like it's the same thing here, except I have talked to some people who think that either Roberts or Kavanaugh might decide this is too much, Charters are public schools, and that there's a line here. And so I've been surprised because I was sort of like you. I was kind of like, this seems like a done deal. This is going to happen.

And you're hearing from the people in the legal community who are not quite sure that this might not be a place where they actually say that there's a line. So that's the first way to think about it is.

And I think it's perfectly reasonable to say also, okay, it might be constitutional, it might be a bad idea. And I think it's a bad. It could be a bad idea for two reasons. One, something you've talked about a lot, brand differentiation.

One of the reasons charters are under pressure is they're not differentiating their brand. They spent a lot of years recently being like, hey, we're just like school districts too, as a strategy to try to woo Democrats.

It turns out people don't want, you know, particularly after you don't want schools, they're just like school district schools. They want an alternative. That's why Choices. That's why Choices is thriving. And so this is going to totally complicate the brand.

Like the elevator pitch on charters used to be, these are non religious public schools open to everybody. Yeah, it's going to be a hell of a long elevator ride if we're explaining, you know, in some places they also can be religious, but not everywhere.

And you know, like. And so the brand differentiation thing is an enormous problem.

And then I think the other problem is just like a political trade problem, which is, and this gets back to the musical chairs idea that when the music stops, charters aren't going to have a chair. I don't think you actually pick up a ton of Republicans here who weren't already charter supporters, and you lose a ton of Democrats.

So I just think politically, for, for charters, it's an absolutely terrible trade. Yeah, but, but all these things are happening on different tracks.

There's the political track, there's the market share brand differentiation track, which is obviously related to the politics, but also somewhat distinct. And then there's the legal track of like the, you could.

This this would be in keeping with some previous decisions or might be one where they say enough. So it's all three of these things and so it makes it a very, it's very dicey situation.

Well, let me ask for one piece of advice and then maybe we can ask some questions in the audience.

So like just one, one piece of advice for the red state advocates because I think there are a lot of red state advocates right now that are having fingers wagged in their faces. Do not get crosswise from us on these religious charter school things. Shut up and your support is going to be fine and all that kind of thing.

And so, you know, the question is, I understand what the red state advocates may want to do, but I also feel as though, and I also feel like I've been encouraging our world to be a little bit more agnostic on the idea of religious charter schools by agnosticism. On the religious issue. On the religious issue. Right.

I had no idea this was going to get so theological. You realize I'm a lapsed Unitarian, so you're going to lose, you're going to lose me quickly.

But project ourselves as like, okay, we don't want to really get into that, but we don't want anything that's going to do foundational damage to a sector serving 4 million kids, about half of which are in red states. Right. Okay. I feel like in red states the advocates can't even get say it's nothing about religious charge. Look at your constitution.

What's going to happen the day after this thing passes? So I mean, how much risk do you think our red state advocates can take?

Can they actually stand up and say it has nothing to do with religious issues, it has to do with these technical issues and they're not going to end up being a political roadkill or no, it's, you know, kicking ass and taking names moment and they got to keep their heads frickin low.

I mean, I don't know. I'm not gonna be helpful on this. I've never been particularly great at taking marching orders.

I think people should do what they think is the right thing to do. I mean, look like I don't agree with Andy Smerk, but I respect his opinion. I'm glad he wrote that piece. Let's like argue about that.

And I worry, I think, and I'll link it to the moment we're in, there's been too much, you should just fall in line and let's not debate. And that's on the right and the left. And I think that's one.

I mean lots of things have brought us to this moment, but that's one of them is like this, you shouldn't dissent like dissent. If so, I think those advocates should think long and hard about what does it mean from a values perspective.

What does it mean in terms of the provision of education in their state and in plenty of states now it's hard to make the case that you don't already have access to a faith based religion at public expense like that is on offer now in a lot of places. And what does it mean in terms of your advocacy strategy? I think there's been way too much of this. Don't dissent, fall in line.

And that again, I think that is what's brought this sector to the moment that it finds itself in. And we should like throw that off as quickly as possible.

And as much as we can get back to more of a culture of people disagreeing and we used to have a much more heterodox coalition because people disagreed across, across lines. So I'm just the wrong person because I find, because I find the moment we're in repellent in part because of that.

Well, I think you're actually the right person and I appreciate you sharing that. I'm a lot of sink in love.

To hear questions and you can identify yourself as we said or you can ask a stealth question known known only to us. Danny in the back, can you see around the poll and don't hesitate to refill your cocktails or bring jet a shot.

Hi, my name's Paige. I'm with the Pew Charitable Trust. I was wondering for the multiple states reevaluating their funding formulas this year.

I know Bellwether is working with a nonprofit in Alabama on theirs. Has the uncertainty around federal funds entered that conversation this year as states are revisiting that?

What a great question. And you guys do fantastic work on this too. You guys, I mean I've over the years have been fortunate to work with your folks.

We used to do a lot of work with your team on pensions as well. And you guys. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Pension is great and so. Thank you. I don't think it's hit yet. It's so soon.

And I mean and like when, when the there's all this stuff first started, people and Trump did the order that has now been, you know is being litigated on the, on the funding suspension like the big large federal categoricals, those are forward funded and people were I think thinking that that money flowed like, like your paycheck like Every other week or every month or something. And that money is like out there. So it hasn't hit yet. I do, I'm glad you put finance on the table. We should make sure we don't get so like dour.

Like I think, you know, the work our team does on it is fantastic. I'd be happy to brag on them all day.

But that's like a bipartisan thing that's happening around the country and you've seen that in a number of, of red states have redone there have redone their formulas. Tennessee very, very notably. Same thing with reading.

There are these things that are happening sort of without the, the, the sort of involvement of Washington that are bipartisan and are happening in different places. And I think those are two, along with the expansion of choice would be the third that are just sort of happening at a, at a relatively rapid pace.

And it's quite interesting as a result.

Thank you.

As we think about the executive orders that have gone out about DEIA and race based programs to K12 institutions, what is your recommendation for those that partner with K12?

So the curriculum companies, the aftercare providers, and as we think of our own DEIA statements or how we as a company communicate around DEI and what that impact might be in terms of partnership with those institutions.

Take a first whack.

Yeah, I mean, you know, I've been giving advice to companies on this for a while now because there's been lots of pressure and it's been different kinds of pressure. There's been some stuff where it's like states just want things that go one way or the other.

But I think within what most people consider sort of reasonable bounds. And then there's been requests like, hey, can you like change this photograph? Or this kind of stuff where you're like, no, absolutely not.

That's like completely over the line. And so my advice sort of hasn't changed. Figure out like what are your values and what is important and you should be willing to fight for those.

If your values put you on the wrong side of the Civil Rights act, you should probably think about your values a little bit. But if they're in keeping with that, then you should articulate them clearly.

And my big advice is I would not use the words DEI and I would not use the word equity. Equity used to be. We talked the question a minute ago on finance.

Equity used to mean making sure kids had what they needed to have to have a fair opportunity and that some kids would need more in order for that. And that was the reason a Lot of us got into this movement. That word has become so bolderized in the way it's been used.

You know, in my state, it started to mean capping access to advanced classes so kids couldn't take them because that would be more fair, which, first of all, parents, like, absolutely revolted, understandably. And second, I was like, if. If you wanted to undermine the idea of equity, that is what you would tell people to go. To go do.

And yet they did it of their own, their own volition. So define your terms. What do you mean? I do work with a number of SEL providers, and I tell them, don't say sel because do you.

Like, there's all this stuff that flies under that banner now that you don't want to be accountable for. But say, what do you mean? What are the skills you're teaching? We teach kids how to set goals.

One of the ones I work with, we use Olympic and professional athletes and Paralympic athletes, and we teach kids to think like that. So it's like, what does it actually mean to have an athlete's mindset in terms of resilience, setting goals?

We put it in plain English, and if someone wants to fight us on that, we will fight them. Like, that's. But we're not. I don't want to be fighting over SEL because I don't know what that means.

It's like, when I go for a ride on my bike, I'm on the road, sometimes you'll have some driver and they hate you, and they're. And it's like, maybe they're just an asshole, or maybe like, the last cyclist was really ridiculous to them and they're angry.

And I don't want to have to answer for that last cyclist. I don't want to have to answer for the last SEAL provider, either. I just want to answer for the ones that I work with. And so that's my big advice.

Define your terms, pick your fights smartly, but don't.

I mean, the fact I am concerned, the fact that so many people are willing to very quickly be like, well, maybe we should reevaluate our values, then those weren't real values to begin with. Right. Which, again, I think is part of the reason we got into this situation that we're in, was sort of a degree of people just kind of doing things.

Yeah. I think it's like, it's bedrock issues. And. And what's the language that you use there at Charterfolk? I've been, you know, from.

From Howard Fuller, just the equity and excellence Axes I've been talking about for a long time. And I started realizing equity was already becoming a co opted term. So I changed all of my pictorials, you know, to be fabulous and fair, not equity.

And it's, it's ridiculousness. Right. In terms of how these terms get co opted, the question is really what's the substance of what you're, you're talking about here?

And, and I would just try to keep in front of the political game while keeping your organization as anchored to what you truly believe in as possible.

I saw another hand, Dana.

This is for Jed.

So at the very top, you said that there's been a lot of great conversations in the last few years, more great conversations about what the charter school movement really stands for. And so my question is, what does the charter school movement really stand for now?

And do you feel like that's going to advance the kind of brand differentiation need if you agree with Andy's point that perhaps the charter movement would benefit from brand differentiation?

It's a great question. I mean, I think I can, I can be properly accused of giving the charter school world too much credit.

I think that there, the central thing for me is we got to keep doing well with kids. We got to build the advocacy, infrastructure and strength that we need to survive.

And then we need a better North Star, a policy North Star for the long term. I described the last two as, you know, you got to, you got to have a muscle car and you got to know where to drive it.

And I over and over and over again do not believe that our world has a policy agenda that reflects the North Star that we need. My own sense is on this.

And when public education gets to be as tainted as it is in terms of language and all that kind of stuff, you know, I think our message should be that unfortunately, public education has never been very public.

And what we need is a force in this country that is willing to unapologetically say our role is to evolve public education such that it becomes the greatly more public education, greatly more public thing that we need it to be.

And I find places where that kind of thinking and a recognition that the red lines in our country, the red lines in this city, the red lines consist of different things. Yes, the attendance boundaries that separate Ward 7 and 8 from Georgetown, but also the selective admissions that we use. School without walls.

School without walls in this city, using the most selective admissions you'll find anywhere in the country advertising itself as without walls. Our world, though, is still frightened. Our world still feels vulnerable.

Our world still Feels as though if you propose something that is controversial, you as an advocate, must be doing something wrong. What we want is a narrative with no conflict.

When Aristotle taught us, going all the way back to the poetics, that the only way you drive narrative is through conflict. Our world has to be willing to show more courage to choose our conflicts better.

We've actually made it quite a ways and I think we're ready to go even further and, you know, push me on another year from now.

But I love the question and I think the more that you surface it for me and for Ariel and for every charter advocate and every charter school leader that you come into contact with, the more it's a really positive thing.

Those two questions also tie together in the sense of take these people on their own terms, right? Like if they, the how can you possibly talk about, you want to, you want to have choice, you want to end attendance based red line based education.

If you're not going to talk about diversity of different kinds, economic, racial and so forth, you can't, you know, you.

Same thing we were talking about just a second ago with, like, if they say they're not against diversity, they're just against things that violate the Civil Rights act, take them and challenge them on that. And if then they don't, then as appropriate, take further action. I feel like we should, there's an opportunity here.

Like, we've tried, people have tried for quite a while now, fighting crazy with crazy, and it's completely backfired. And instead we should take them at their word, hold them accountable for what they say and that we, we expect that.

And I think that's a way to start to potentially move through some of these and also surface some of these very real.

I mean, the irony right now is that Republicans want to be social justice warriors on issues of race and education. There's like, they want to be able to say that, you know, kids have been trapped in, in failing schools because of their zip codes and financial.

Great, that's great.

Let's find a way to, to bring the same issues, you know, back to the Republican base and, and really suss out the substance of what we're trying to get done here.

I heard someone say the other Day that the Gulf of America is the new Latinx for the, for the, for the Republic, for the Republicans. Other questions? All right, before we let you.

Naomi, not one, no. Ariel, you got one? Okay, I think we have one there.

I want to end on a pessimistic note, but can we talk about block grants for a second? So the Department of Education has been talking about these block grants to states.

Are you at all worried in the blue states where the codes have not yet codified, equitable or shortened the funding gap between charters and district schools, are you worried those block grants will then be used to maneuver money around in ways that will disadvantage and, or curtail schools generally? And maybe could be from the California perspective. I don't worry as much here in D.C. because we are 50% of the sector.

But in like Illinois, California, Jersey maybe.

What do you think?

Yeah, I mean, this is the problem with also the, you know, in the first Trump term, they had this idea, let's just let the states have the charter school program because, like, they'll administer and they'll do it well. And if you, like, know anything about how the states approach charter schools, like, yeah, in, in a handful of places.

Yeah, you'll probably have, like, great stories of innovation, a bunch of places that money will, you know, it'll, that it would be a disastrous policy if you care about charters and you want to see them, see them expanded.

So the thing with block grants, look, you know, Congress is going, there's going to be a push on that, and I think there's actually a fair amount of receptiveness in the states, actually. And you're going to see some, some push for program consolidation and all the rest.

Pretty quickly, though, they're going to want to start attaching some strings so they can't, they can't help themselves because they don't want it to be used for just anything. And so pretty quickly you're going to start to see those kinds of things put back in, and that's where, that's where the negotiation would happen.

The idea of sort of true block grants is actually pretty unusual in our sector. We tend to get. They tend to be funding with various kinds of contingencies attached to it.

But at a pure level, yes, what you are raising is something you should be concerned about because at a lot of states, it would go in, it would replicate the problems that we see. And for charters, that's a problem of highly inequitable funding and access to resources.

Yeah. I mean, the key thing would be the loss of LEA status for charter schools under Title 1 or perhaps the loss of LEA status for special education.

These are long fought things that we have fought for and they could be put back at risk if, if those would change. So part of this is going to be just how good is charter school advocacy?

And you know, are we, are we able at state levels to make sure that these issues arise?

My sense is that in places where there are large numbers of charter schools, where if at the sea level they try to, to, to block grant in such a way that that would do damage to a large number of existing schools, I don't know, even in California, I think we're going to be able to push through even real Massachusetts, New York, where I worry about is some of the earlier stage what happens in Washington, you know, what happens in some of our other blue states where we just have a nascent movement. And what you could see there is that we couldn't get LEA status out of the gate because there wasn't a large enough.

And so we keep growing and we have a problem that's much, much larger. But it's a great question. I appreciate you.

And this goes back to what Jed talked about earlier too is with the court case, if the Supreme Court decides that charter schools, if they just, if they rule against the, the plaintiffs in Oklahoma who want the religious charter school, and they say charter schools are public schools, they can't do this. That's one thing.

If they say charter schools are private schools, then that's going to open up a whole set of things along the lines of what we're, that's what that case is worth watching for a number, for a number of reasons in terms of the precedents that it sets.

Well, you said, you know, in a text before we got here that you take me to nothing but good places. So, you know, and you, and you bring nothing but nice people. So.

Well, thank you all for coming out.

That's great. Thank you for setting this up. And it's really been a great conversation.

There's food, there's drink, there's cocktails. I saw one person who had to get home to her kids somewhat sober. But for those of you who don't, there's food, cocktails.

So please, please join us for that and some conversation. Thank you very much for coming.

Thank you everybody.