Charter school in america but here we are magnum opus that tells everybody everything they ever wanted to know about Charter Schools. That may be a bit of an exaggeration. Indeed, when i referred to it, and often think its core message is every school should be a Charter School, but in reality, you are actually painting a broader and slightly different picture than that. What you call basically reinventing the system. Talk a little bit about the difference between Charter Schools, lots of them, and reinventing the system. We probably should be clear about what a Charter School is because it turns out half america doesnt know what they are. A Charter School is just a Public School that is run independently of the district. Usually by a nonprofit organization, and its usually a school of choice, but it doesnt have to follow all of the district rules and state rules. You have to follow some, it cant discriminate, it cant select children, et cetera. But, its basically outside the bureaucracy and they can run their own show. They have economy but they are held accountable if its done right. If they dont perform well, if the kids are learning, then there replaced or closed. Thats what a Charter School is. My argument is that the places around the country that have embraced charters the most, systematically are also the fastest improving cities in the country. So, im not saying make every school a charter, im saying if we look at the data and we want to do what works for kids, lets treat every Public School like a charter. We can call it Something Else. We can call it a district schoo school, a renaissance school, a pilot school, whatever, but lets give it the autonomy so people who run the school can really make the decisions and create a school model that will work for the kids they have to teach, and lets hold them accountable for their performance. If they do a great job, lets let them open another school. If they do a terrible job, lets police them with a stronger operator. Lets let the parents choose which allows the nonprofits to diversify their School Models because nobody is assigned to the school. It certainly resonates with me. Im a fan of Charter Schools and authorizer of Charter Schools. The places you cite most often in the book rdc in denver and new orleans. Are you also saying those are among the fastest improving. I think nora which is Something Like 93 charters, students and charters and has the plan to convert its last four schools to charters for the next school year. They are clearly the fastest in the country, if not in american history. Its stunning. They were famously bad, corrupt, awful. You had valedictorians not able to pass a seventh grade level test to graduate from high school but, by any measure, whether you want to use test scores or graduation rates, College Going rates, prinparental demand, whatever measure you like, washington d. C. Which had 36 of the kids and charters and might have more, is of the 21 large cities where all the kids take the National Assessment of progress. They are the fastest improving over the past decade. Thats charters and district, about halfandhalf. They are also improving faster than any state. Rapid improvement is better but the district has embraced profound reforms partly because they lost so many others. It has spurred innovation on both sides. Denver is interesting because the other two werent done by an elected school board. In d. C. Congress created a public Charter School. And the mayor is ultimately in charge. In new orleans, the state had a Recovery School district in the legislature was so fed up with the district in new orleans but they took all but 17 schools, they took all those performing below the state line average and they put them in a School District which gradually turn them over to charter operators. In the sense the state did it in new orleans and the congress created the possibility of this in d. C. , but in denver a decade ago, the elected school board and the superintendent has now u. S. Senator, michael bennett, decided this district is so messed up in bureaucratic and these charters are just knocking the ball out of the park. The fastest route for us toward improvement is to embrace these charters and expand them and replicate them and lets do it as fast as we can. They tried to equalize the funding and didnt quite get there, but close and the strong charters have basically replicated quite rapidly so you now have 21 in charters last year and they also got a state law passed that allowed them to get their own schools more autonomy in order to innovate charters. Theyve got about 21 of the kids in those schools. We will come back to the imitation charters in a few minutes. Its an interesting sideline. Lets first help viewers understand your prescription which revolves around what you talk about as the seven seas are the seven key strategies for this reinvention process. Do you want to briefly review what those seven key strategies are. Off if i can remember them. I can probably only remember four of them. This is what i believe, my analysis going back for years argues these are the keys to really boosting performance, doubling the effectiveness of the School System. Lets start with autonomy which Everybody Knows about the charters. Its control, decentralizing control to the school level so that the principle or the School Leaders, they are the group of teachers who run the school because thats what happens as well. Including that first Charter School in minnesota. They have the power to say heres our school model, we will hire these people, if this person doesnt work out will let them go, this is what we will pay, they get to make those decisions. In traditional Public Schools downtown, central headquarters makes that and how the school is run and what it looks like. The second one Everybody Knows about his accountability. The sea is consequences. There are consequences for their performance. As i said before, do a great job and maybe you can expand or start another school. Do a terrible job and youre probably going to be replaced by a better operator. Not all Charter Authorizers do this. We have some bad practice in the charter sector, but im talking about what really works. The next one is choice. Choice for the families to pick the school that fits their child the best. Traditionally, we have the same cookiecutter education for everybody. We thought that was fair. Well, kids dont learn the same and they dont come from the same background. Its not fair. Its unfair to 80 of them. It doesnt work for a lot of them. We need different kinds of school for different kids. The next one is clarity. Claritys purpose. When you are operating schools and running a School District and dealing with all the systemwide issues, its very hard to do both well. When you separate those roles as in the charter sector and authorize like the school board in d. C. Steers the system that lets the schools which are independent do the operational stuff, do the rowing. Each one has clarity of purpose. Each one is able to do what it does well. It seems to work a lot better, not just in education but a lot of other arenas. Hence the disc tension you made years ago about steering and rowing. Along with that is this idea of contestability. If you separate those roles, then the people steering are no longer captive of their employees. If youre a superintendent or an elected school board and you have thousands of employees and you start making reforms, changing things and start inconveniencing some of those adults, you will get a reaction. If theres a strong union it will be a strong reaction and it will be systemwide. This is why so many superintendents are only in the job for a few years. If you are like the d. C. Charter school board, you dont operate schools. They only have 36 employees. None of them operate schools. Other nonprofits operate the school. Its not a 900 person bureaucracy. That would be small. So, lets say they decide the school is failing, we want to replace it with this other operator, every other operator is looking at that and thinking maybe we can get that building. The politics are entirely different. Not easy to close schools. Its easier, much easier than in a traditional district. I call that contestability. The idea that if im running a school, rather than assuming as people have been able to for decades, the school will be here forever and ill probably be here until i retire. Our right to run the school is contestable. If other people are doing a much better job, we might lose our right to run the school. Culture. This really goes with the autonomy. People who run a school have to be able to create a positive School Culture and thats kind of the first thing that charters do, successful charters do when they start a school. They are very deliberate about a culture. The autonomy gives them the ability to do that. It creates motivation amongst their students. Were talking about urban schools. Many of them arrive not terribly motivated. They dont think theyre going to college so why should they learn geometry. The schools job is a motivator. Ive forgotten the seventh. Capacity. In most of the public sector, average people can perform well if the system is designed well. Urban education is tougher than the typical public set sector job. Educating these poor minority kids is really hard. We need really great School Leaders and we need really great teachers. Laces like new orleans and d. C. And other cities invest in recruiting and training and developing those leaders in those teachers. If you dont have the strategy to do that, you have to build capacity, you wont get nearly as far. Youve emphasized this, and certainly most charters are urban today. Would you be recommending the same thing for Fairfax County virginia and brooklyn massachusetts and new york. I would, but if i can happen soon and i understand that. I think those suburban districts will get better results using that model, but im not spending a lot of time trying to convince them at that point. What we need to do is get people to understand that this model is producing the most Rapid Improvement in the country and get other cities to try it out and gradually, this will be a gradual process, embrace it. You are focusing on the neediest kids, not the complacent suburbs. Right but parents understand that trick cookiecutter schools dont always work for other kids. Kids are so different. At one point our kids went to four different schools. They needed different things. They thrived, my son was Given Technology and he was off to the moon, but not the girls. They were interested in other things. I can see the diversity and choice coming faster to suburbs. But anyway, in the realm of school choice, a lot of people are for charters and a lot of people are for vouchers, and youre not much for vouchers. Why dont you say a little bit about why. I dont have any problems with small voucher problems for innercity kids. They expand opportunity. It would be nice if we could hold the schools that get that money accountable for educating the kids which a few places do, but not most. Those programs dont accept me. What worries me is what Republican Leaders want which is vouchers for everybody. It sounds good, we would have choice and competition in the market, but just think of how it would actually work in practice. Lets say a middle School Voucher is worth 10000. Year. I love my children, and i make a pretty good living, some of the take that 10011 add to it. I might buy my children a 30,000 dollars. Year education. Some people might buy 40000. Year education. There are schools out there. Other people 15000. And then somewhere between a half and three quarters of the population will buy 10000 schools. A lot of them public, some of them private. It wont be like any other market. Think of the auto market. The auto market has mercedes and bmw and cadillac on down to used cars. We would have a market in education, this would take a while, in which a lot of folks ended up in the equivalent of used cars. I think that would be so destructive, i think part of the role of Public Education in a multiracial, multicultural democracy is to get kids in different walks of life togethe together, to rub elbows and get to know each other. And to understand that beneath her skin we are all pretty much the same. We would lose so much of that if it was an all voucher system. That love to argue that a little bit more. Lets talk about the point you just made about the diversity of the student body because one of the objections that critics make of Charter Schools is that its alleged that they are re segregating america as people flock into Charter Schools that are full of kids who are only like themselves and are not actually getting much diversity. Theyre getting choice but not diversity because they choose not to go for diversity. How do you deal with that one. A topic its true. The data says, if you look at all schools in the country, yes, since charters are created mostly by people who are absolutely committed to helping poor and minority kids to seek seed, they tend to be in the cities so if you look at all of the charters versus all of the district Public Schools, the charters are more heavily minority and more segregated. But if you compare the charters to the traditional Public Schools around them in that same part of the city, they are not more segregated. Thats what the data says. Other examples where charters have been created by people want to pull their white kids out of minority dominated schools, im sure there are and i think thats wrong and thats why we need strong authorizes to prevent that kind of thing. What i would advocate is something that some places do. Denver does this with about 15 charters in about 15 district schools. In their enrollment system, the algorithm says okay, the school has to be at least 40 or 50 low income so you will deliberately create diversity. You cant legally do it by race. The courts wont let us begin by income levels and that usually gets you race in a multi racial city, racial diversity. Part of what im arguing is we need strong systems, not just more Charter Schools. These systems can make those decisions. They can say we will deliberately grow for more economically integrated schools and use our enrollment system to make that happen. I would support that. I see how that works in the cities that youre talking about where there is a single author or a separate charter board. There are places with multiple authorizers but not simultaneously, including ohio were the foundation that im involved with is in authorizer. We do a pretty good job for the schools we are responsible for in many cities. There scattered around the state. In many different cities, there is no one authorizer so its messy, and some of the steering that you are recommending for the reinvented system is really hard to pull off. Absolutely. Its a big flaw. Those of us who have believed in charters for a long time, theres been different schools of thought. There is a Strong School of thought that multiple authorizers was better. Were trying to get away from monopolies. We want lots of competition. Big mistake. Steering is so important. There are systemwide issues. Transportation. Two kids have equal access, do they have transportation or is it only the kids whose parents have enough money and time to drive them who have equal access. Special ed. The kids with disabilities. Do they have equal access were sums schools trying to prevent or get rid of them. You can go down the line. All of these issues, someone has to be able to say this is how we handle that and we will enforce it. In cleveland and detroit and other cities where we have so many authorizers, no one can do that. In both cleveland and detroit, there were big pushes supported by the governor him by legislators and by Community Organizations and Community Leaders in those cities to create essentially a detroit education commission, but it was an organization that could, in essence act as a super authorizer. It could close schools for poor performance, it could override authorizer decisions , and i think in some cases it could actually authorize schools. It was an attempt to get more power to steer and to deal with some of these issues, particularly lowquality and some of the charters because some of the authorizers would benefit. And then what happens. But neither of those, in ohio the legislation passed without that power and in detroit, some legislation passed but they didnt create a detroit education system. The mayor is thinking about creating one anyway and using the power to shame authorizers into doing whats right. Its an issue. To be clear, you actually do want there to be a system. You just wanted to be a steering system rather than a steering and rowing system. Exactly. There are things in Public Schools that we dont want to happen. We dont want more segregation or special ed kids pushed out. We dont want kids whose parents cant drive them to not have equal access. We want to create equal opportunity as much as possible. That the other reason vouchers are a problem because they undermine it. You cant do that if no one is steering. Someone has to set the rules of the game. But the someone have to want to do the other things that are part of your package of strategies. Historically, in some places in america where there is a single authorizer, it was the local School District and i didnt want anything to do with anything but what it had always done. We know that doesnt always work because weve been trying to for 25 years. Lets ask the monopoly to authorize competition. It doesnt work well. So the steer her in your model needs to be something other than the local district. Your denver example it is the district. The truth is, theres probably six cities that are pretty far down this path. The three we talked about plus indianapolis, memphis and camden new jersey. Six different paths. This will happen in different ways in different places. Sometimes it will be a charter sector or the district will kind of get enthusiastic and start treating schools this way, the be all kinds of paths. Ideally, in the end, we really should have one body with an appointed or elected school board that steers the system, and then there should be someone that Charter Schools can appeal to if they feel theyre being denied something. Is that the word is captured by a particular political fashion and says the heck with Charter Schools or the schools were those schools, there should be some way to appeal that. Okay. You talk a lot, the issue on the table is failing or unsatisfactory schools. So i described an ideal, but really i believe we are going to approach it in all kinds of different ways. Many paths and this is not about everybody suddenly deciding one day to love this model. Its an evolution driven by necessity. Our urban Public Schools are not very good and were going to be driven in this direction, lots of cities in the future and it will take a lot of shapes. Its democracy and its messy. Speaking of messy, you and i both know that most turnaround efforts to take about school and tweak its formula so it gets better, most of those dont work very well. You talk a lot about replacing unsuccessful schools. Others talk about closing that schools. As in authorizer, i have experienced how difficult it is to close a bad school. It too has Politics Around it and it too poses often a moral dilemma. One of the alternative school available are actually worse than the mediocre charters. Do you still close it even though you know its mediocre and you havent been able to persuade the people who run it to do a better job of it. You talk a lot about replace rather than close. Say a little bit about how that actually works. First level, its better for the kids. Closing the school is very disruptive for the children and their families. As you said, often there are options, there other options are either no better or no worse. So, often we hesitate to close those bad schools for very good reasons, but, if you have a system with a strong authorizer and a lot of charters, then youve always got operators ready to take another school. You make sure you have operators ready to take another school, and, as you see charters are typically for five years or so, their performance is measured and often you see this charter is headed toward a bad place. It can begin to talk with other operators. Thats whats happening in those in washington d. C. And denver. They dont trust close schools and disrupt widespread they have another operator take over. Theres different ways to do that. If a school is really bad and the culture is chaotic and the kids have learned they dont have to do anything the teachers say and they spent half the days running through the halls, and that does happen in american education, then taking all those kids and starting over is really hard because you have a culture in place. So, a lot of charters like to start one year at a time to create a culture very carefully some places, when they replace, in some cases they will say okay you only have to take ninth grade this year, old operator will have the other three and next year you got ninth and tenth and then 91011 and finally got the whole school. The other option is you just take the whole thing and thats a decision that authorizers and operators should make based on the local circumstance, on the school and the culture of the school. There is no right answer. A lot of very good charter operators dont want to do that. They dont want to take over a bad school. Probably because of the ingrained culture they think they arent going to be able to root out and start fresh. Gotta have an operator thats up to it and knows how too do it and maybe does it gradually like you are describing. In the cities, that exists , those operators do exist, or at least they do in new orleans and denver. So if a school is faltering and another is thriving, the authorizer should find a way to let the School Network Takeover School operation. If its bad enough. Okay well it would be. Lets talk about accountability. Something emerging between people who want to let the marketplace to the whole job accountability and people who want hard evidence of kids learning, usually in the form of test scores as the metric by which School Success is judged. When you come down on this one . Lime on your side. I know where you stand on it. We have learned, i thought, 25 years ago i thought we could leave it up to the parents. I was surprised to discover that was something i wrote 25 years ago but experience has taught us otherwise. It has taught us that not all parents had the best education themselves or speak english well enough to know that their Childrens School is really bad and that there are options. Not all parents are going to make a decision to move their school for academic reasons. For some povertystricken parents, if the school is warm and nurturing and safe, thats enough and they will stay with it. But, thats not good enough for their kids and these are taxpayer dollars and we have a responsibility for taxpayers to produce an educated society. There are reasons we all spend money and give tax dollars to pay for Public Education. Its not just for kids to be saved and nurtured. We have to have authorizers who will replace failing, weak schools. I dont believe it should be 90 on test scores. Lets talk about metrics. What else. Well, i spent a whole chapter on this, i thought about it for years and years and theres no right answer. In the book you have my answer which is test scores are important, we have to know kids can read and do math and reason so lets give 50 of the weight for test scores, but another rules that in my book or books is that you should make it quantitative and qualitative. There are a lot of things you cant get, you cant learn just through data. The english, for example every few years they send a team of three or four people into schoo school, they spent several days, but look at parent surveys they meet with parents they talk with the teachers and the principal and the students, and these are typically people who have been principals or teachers, a lot of experience in education and they read a report that explains the ratings, its a subjective evaluation by experts and then it goes to every parent. Its a wonderful model. Its been going for 25 years. They call it the inspectorate. They do, which is a weird name, i never use it. I call it a qualitative assessment or qualitative evaluation and i think thats worse 20 or 25 of the weight in the accountability system. I think we should survey parents and get their opinion , and i think we should figure out how to survey students in a way that doesnt allow the adults in the building to affect how the students fill out the survey. Give me the rating and ill give you an a. Rate. I hope we can solve that, but we havent yet. For high schools, like 25 of the week should be outcomes which are graduation rates, College Going rates, those not going to college, employment rates and going into the military, and College Persistence rates, and if they went to a community college, what percent are getting certificates and degrees, those kinds of outcomes because they are the most important outcomes. So maybe a few other things. Make sense to me. When you come down on the softer measures that are all the vogue, social emotional learning, 21st century skills, whatever sort of phrase you want to use. And 21st century skills to me implied, can your reason commute can you analyze, can you learn new things and we should be teaching that. Social emotional skills is used usually to describe to work well with others, are you able to set a goal and work toward achieving it. Do you have persistence, grit,. Are you compassionate. Theres a whole variety of things in that realm. There are. I dont think anyone can say those things arent important. The Research Says if you have selfcontrol and the ability to set goals and go after them, you will be much more successful in life so school should be trying to impart them and they have been for generations. The problem is we dont know how to measure them. We are working on it. But its a work in progress in the only affordable way to measure is to ask the kids on surveys. What if the kids are at a really demanding school because of High Expectations and then these other kids are at a school that has low expectations. These kids will have Higher Standards for what selfcontrol and persistence is than these kids. They wont be answering the questions in the same way. So there are problems. What i advocate in the book is we need to Fund Research and make them figure out how too do it. More research is needed. Absolutely. Lets talk about the matchup between kids in schools. You describe the different kinds, the variety of schools. You list the 57 flavors. I was wowed and impressed and agree, but some of the like schools for the gifted and residential high schools for very needy innercity kids. International baccalaureate schools. They employed some kind of screening mechanism. The random matchup. That leads onto the question which is selectivity. Can there, in your reinvented system be screening by schools of kids who want to come there. Yes. And the degree to which a community would want to do is up to that community. This is the kind of decision steering body makes. Ill give you an example, in new orleans, when they finally integrated the schools in the 70s, all but 5 of the whites left. No, 3 . When Hurricane Katrina hit, only 3 of the students was white. The way they kept some of them was in select magnet schools which were actually pretty integrated, but they were schools that were good enough that some of the white parents would send the kids. The year before they were up to 8 white. White parents are gradually trickling back as this miracle happens in new orleans, but theyre still 82 africanamerican and the rest are mostly latino and a few asians. So, youve still got these selective schools. There now charters but they used to be selectmen schools. Because there selective, they refused to join the common enrollment system. They are authorizers that say that the next time a charter comes up you have to do which leads people to fear that were to drive all the whites of the system again. This is their dilemma. What theyve decided is in the common enrollment system they can have some selectivity. There are some schools that can set standards for their kids, and you would do the same on the other end of functionality for kids like you mentioned in d. C. Which is a boarding school during the week for kids whose home life is really chaotic and dysfunctional. There has to be some selectivity there. You dont let a kid into that school who doesnt need it. Especially 30,000 dollars. Kid. Year. You need to target on the kids that need it. Theres gotta be a mechanism for targeting. Right, i agree. Lotta people on the Charter Movement are just horrified at the notion that if theres any kind of screening were randomness in the matching program. I think theyre coming from a paradigm of some charters are mostly district schools. If youre talking about a School System you have to grapple with these issues. In d. C. , people have created Charter Schools for emotionally disturbed kids. Then, over time, they migrate Something Else because parents like them and send the kids there and are no longer really targeting those kids. It evolves not because they chose people but because who chose it, which parents chose it. Thats a loss. We need schools that are really good at dealing with kids with emotional problems. We need a lot more of them. I think if people really think it through they will realize that they need to do some selecting of different kinds and that the body that elected or appointed to steer the system, its their responsibility. It will be different in every community. Some will make decisions that the courts will overturn because they will be motivated by prejudice. Nothing is perfect. Whenever there is selectivity, there will also be a default for kids who dont match in one way or another. They dont match the profiles, this schools they want to go to or they dont get into the school they want to go to, whatever. Is it the authorizer . Who manages the default problem . Thats a really good question. I think anyone has really discussed. Im sure new orleans and the charter board in d. C. Have struggled with that issue internally, but ive never read anything about that question. Its a great question. At the very real question. Maybe the next article. Im kind of tired. I would say first of all, you need to set up, to give parents real choices unique good information about each school and you need essentially counselors who can help parents who need help in their language. Interpret that information and figure out how to use it to choose the best match for their child. If you do that, and new orleans have done this, probably not enough, but whats the next step for the kids whose parents dont choose. I can imagine the next step would be you build in a function where some counselor goes and contacts that family and tries to help him make a decision thats best for kids. Than the default after that, if the family is so checked out that they wont even respond, the default is people, a local school. Veneer school with room. Thats in new york city were every high school is now. You have to list, you cant go to high school and less you list preferences and then you get matched by some computer in the sky, separated apart from a highly selective schools. You get a lot of kids who default to a school they didnt choose or didnt know they were choosing because they were good at choosing. The related question then, there has to be some limit on the extent of choice that you are allowed to make simply for reasons of practicality. If youre living on one side of los angeles or chicago, you cant just arbitrarily say i want to go to school 30 miles on the other side of town and expect to be transported there every day. Is it reasonable for the steer or to make some limits. Absolutely thats their job. You have to make lots of tradeoffs. There isnt an infinite amount of money and youre trying to maximize the outcomes. To go back to your previous question. Some of these kids whose parents are checked out will end up and not the greatest school, but, that happens today, and if you have a strong authorizer who is weeding out the worst schools and replacing them with schools operated by the best operators and its bringing in new blood to create new schools and is watching these numbers, that kid will have a much better chance of being in a decent school. Correct. In new orleans, 60 of the kids at the time of katrina went to schools in the bottom 10 statewide on performance. Now 10 do, just like the rest of the state. There arent too many bad schools left in the world because they have a system that weeds them out. There are some and they need to keep weeding them out. Its not perfect, but far better for the kids to have that. And the constantly improving system. Been a sort of static neighborhood based School System in which most of the schools are bad. So were sitting in washington d. C. , and we have to deal with policy. First, is there a federal role in bringing about the reinvented system that you outline, and if so what is it. I will also add the trump era. The answer is probably no for practical reasons. With sr, the new education bill, congress clearly chose to step back from the activism of the no child left behind era, and i dont see that choice changing. Trump once a big Voucher Program in congress isnt going to give him one. They have no interest in that so far. So, historically the federal government hasnt had a lot to do with Public Education. The constitution left it to the states. States rights rules of the Public Education system. They define the system we have. Now, starting with lyndon johnson, the federal government stepped in and put some money in to help poor kids and no child left behind was a hugely forward in trying to be prescriptive and force the states and districts to look out for the poor kids and provide better schools for them. It was a mixed blessing. Is really dumb legislation in a lot of ways. The way they measured success was all wrong. Then the Obama Administration kind of overstepped with race to the top. I agree with all that, but , what would it do. I would do another race to the top competition in which you encouraged the kinds of behaviors im talking about. Okay. And we could define them specifically. You would use a structured instead of funding system aimed at states or districts or both maybe. Both. To encourage this behavior. Incentivizes behavior. I would also, there how many Grant Programs for education. Ive lost track. I would simplify those and have much broader grants because they tie state and district hands. Denver has been trying to have a funding system where when a student chooses school ask, all the money goes to school ask, but they can only get two thirds of the way there. So much of it is tied up in these grants. It could do a lot by simplifying that. Lets talk about the other kind of politics that mostly plays out of the state and local level. Im now on the maryland state board of education where i watch this up close and painfully. Theres a lot of pushback against onl almost every one of the seven strategies you outline. Not again School Culture and a few known good things which apply equally to any good school in whatever sector, but theres an awful lot of pushback against the other one. It succeeds in some places, in capping or limiting or constraining in various ways the kinds of strategies that you are recommending. Much of it is led by the adult vested interest in the oldfashioned Public Education system. Whats the political path from where we sit today in 2017 to the reinvented arrangement that you and i would like to see happen. Well, it varies from state to state. I live in massachusetts which is possibly even more liberal than marilyn. Boston has the best charters of the country. Kids there learn twice as much every year as the kids in the boston Public Schools and we have a cap of 18 . If you spend more than 18 of the money on charters and the vote is turned down by 6040, an initiative to allow a dozen more charters statewide. Year. Its incredible. But half of them didnt know what a Charter School was. The Teachers Union told him all kinds of untruths about Charter Schools. And prevailed. A similar thing happen in georgia around a different issu issue, but it can approve to us that the state level we have trouble winning those battles. I think because suburban folks dont know what a Charter School is, but in cities where there are enough charters, its different. In denver they had bitter battles and School Board Meetings that lasted until one and 2 00 a. M. And now we have a 7 0 majority for reform because it works and they get smart about running good people and raising money and they been winning elections. Same in minneapolis. There is a huge battle, most expensive fight ever for school board recently and theres now a charter majority. All that says in urban arenas where theres a lot of charters, you can win political battles. Because your parents whose kids go to charters, you can organize them. You can get them to vote. And you have a Business Community now understands that charters produce better results and begins to weighin and you have other interest in the community that weighin that represent poor people. In denver there were two Community Organizations that were quite critical in supporting reform because they knew their kids were getting a ride deal and they wanted more charters and more choice. So, it comes down to politics , we are democracy, these decisions are made in democratic arenas where the School Board Election or a mayoral election, and we have to win those battles. I think its going to be tough. Some of these former arrangements are unstable. They worked till the next election. Whats less true with charters and more chewy with innovation schools. If its charter its independent and it has an authorizer and its much harder to close it. People value it. We are coming to the end of a really good discussion which could continue and i hope over the next 25 years, as we wait for the next major anniversary of the Charter Movement that we are closer to the reinvented arrangement that you described and that i endorse. Its a pleasure talking with you. Congratulations on a terrific book. Thank you so much. It has been a pleasure for me and i look forward to continuing the conversation all the best david. Thank you. a good evening. I am Rebecca Roberts from the smithsonian associates. Welcome to all of you and tonights presentation of
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