But you are painting a broader picture than that. What you call basically reinventing the system. Talk about the difference between Charter Schools and reinventing the system. We should be clear about what a Charter School is first because it turns out they say half of america doesnt know what they are so it 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 and state rules. But its outside the bureaucra bureaucracy. Those that have embraced the charters the most systematically are the fastest improving cities in the country. So, im not saying make every Public School a charter. I am saying look at the data and if we want to do what works for kids, lets treat every Public School like a charter. We can call it Something Else, a renaissance school, play with school, whatever. But lets give it the autonomy so people who run the school can 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. And if they do a great job and if they do a terrible chocolates replace them them with a stronger operator and whats with the parents choose and what the nonprofit status of either School Models because nobody is assigned to their school. Host i am a fan of Charter Schools and authorizer. The places you cited most often in the book are dc and denver. Are they among the fastest improving . Guest they have the plan to convert its last four schools to charters for the next school year, so itll be 100 . They are the fastest improving in the country. That country. If not in american history. They were one of the worst. They were famously bad, corrupt, awful. You have valedictorians while able to pass a test to graduate from high school that whether you want to use graduation rat rates, parental demand, whatever measure you like new orleans is just off the charts. Washington, d. C. Which last year had 46 of the kids in charters and this year might have more is above the 21 large cities that take where all the kids take the National Assessment of progress. They are the fastest improving in the last decade as charters and district and they are also improving faster than any state. So, Rapid Improvement, they perform better i would argue, but the district has embraced profound reforms because they lost so many of their kids through the charters. The competition spurred innovation on both sides and then denver is interesting because the other two were the elected school board in dc congress created a school board and the meir is ultimately in charge and in the ne in new orle state had a Recovery School district and they took all but 17 schools and all those performing the statewide average and they put them in the Recovery School district which gradually turned them over to charter operators so in a sense the state did it in new orleans and congress could create the possibility of this in dc, then denver a decade ago the superintendent who is now a senator david cited the district is so bureaucratic and messed up and got charters theres a few of them that are not going out of the parks of the fastest route for u us toward improvemet is to embrace the charters and replicate them and lets do it as fast as we can. So they gave them School Buildings and try to equalize funding and didnt quite get there up close. And the strong charters basically replicated quite rapidly so you now have 21 in the charters last year and they also said they got a state law passed that would allow them to give their own schools more autonomy to imitate the charters and the they called an imitation schools and theyve got about 21 of the kids in those schools also. Imitation charter is in a few minutes as interesting sideline. They had this reinvention process that you are suggesting to take root all over the place. I probably can only remember four of them. Guest this is my analysis going back for years. It argues these are the keys that are boosting performance, doubling the effectiveness of the School Systems. Lets start with autonomy which Everybody Knows about with charters. It is a decentralizing control at the school level, so the principal or iprinciple or by ss often are more than one. They are the group of teachers that runs this school as it happens as well. They have the power to say here is our school model. We are going to hire a piece people and if this person doesnt work out they are going to let him go. This is what we are going to pay. They get to make those decisions and in the traditional Public Schools downtown at the headquarters they make those decisions and shockingly with little authority over how the school is run and what it looks like. So thats the first one. The second when Everybody Knows about is accountability. Its a consequence. There are actually consequences for their performance. Doing a great job maybe you can expand and even start another school or more. A terrible job and you will probably be replaced by another operator. And not all Charter Authorizers do this. We have some bad practice, but im talking about what really works. The next one is choice. Choice for the families to pick a school that fits their child at the best. When you do that you can allow the schools to diversify their models. Traditionally, we had the same cookiecutter education for everybody and we thought that was fair. Kids dont learn the same and they dont come from the same background. It doesnt work for a lot of them so we need a different kinds of schools into different kinds of kids. The next one is clarity of purpose. When you are upgrading schools s and running the district dealing with all of these systemwide issues, it is hard to do both. When you separate the roles as in the charter sector and in authorizer like the public Charter School board in dc steers the system dot lets the schools which are independent to the operational stuff coming each one has a clarity of purpose and is able to do what it does well. It seems to work a lot better. Hence the distinction you and the coauthor from years ago. So you want the authorizer to steer and the School People to row. Guest also is the idea of contest ability. Then the people will steer him are no longer captive of their employees. If you are a superintendent or elected school board and have thousands of employees and start making reforms changing things and start inconveniencing some of those adults coming you are going to get a reaction if its going to be systemwide. You may lose your next election. Its the average for a superintendence. But if you are like the dc public Charter School board they only have 32 or 36 employees. 900 would be small. Lets say they are failing and want to replace it with another operator. Dont get a protest from that one school board. But they are looking at that and thinking maybe we can get that building. The politics are entirely different. Its easier than in a traditional district so i call that contest ability to idea that if i were running a school rather than assuming as people have been able to for decades and i will be here until i retire. My right to run this school and our right collectively is contestable. If other people are doing a much better job, we might lose the right to run this school to th them. This one really goes with the autonomy. People who run the school have to be able to create a positive School Culture and that is the first thing that they do when they start a school. They are delivered about a culture. So the autonomy gives them the ability to do that. And if they do not take it up, they are not going to succeed if they do not deliberately create a culture that sustains learning and creates motivation among their students because remember we are talking about urban schools and a lot of the students arrived off terribly motivated. They didnt grow up in the neighborhoods where people went to college so they dont think that they are going to college. Why should they learned geometry. So, the schools job is to motivate them and that is part of the culture. I forgot the seventh, capacity. So, in most of the public sect sector, average people can perform well if the system is designed well. But urban education is tougher and typical publicsector job. Educating these poor minority kids is really hard and we need grade School Leaders and teachers. And they are not going to get this far. Host . Guest i did but its not going to happen soon. I understand that. I think that those districts will get better results using this model. But im not spending a lot of time trying to convince them at this point. We are trying to get people to understand that this model is producing the most Rapid Improvement in the country to get other cities to try it out and gradually because it is going to be a gradual process to increase it and then the suburban schools, some of them will start to look at it but its going to take a whale. Host but you are focusing on the needy kids in the school situation. Part of the worst age and part of that was just a different k kid. They needed different things, different learning environments and different kind of schools. My son was Given Technology and just off to the moon but wont the girls. It is the control and contest ability and other parts. In the realm of school choice, a lot of people are for charters and a lot of people are for vouchers. You are not much for vouchers. Why dont you say a little bit about why . Guest i dont have a problem with vouchers for the Inner City School kids. Innercity school kids. It would be nice if we could help the schools be responsible for educating the kids which a few places to go if not most. Those programs dont upset me. What worries me is Republican Leaders actually want which is the vouchers for everybody. Anand it is middle school vouchr is worth 10,000 a year, so i love my children and i make a pretty good living. Im going to add to it and throw out a 30,00 30,000 occasion soe people might have 40,000. There are schools out there. Then somewhere between half and three quarters of the population will buy 10,000 schools. A lot of them public, none of them private. In the auto market, we have mercedes and bmw and cadillac and so on down. We want a market in education eventually this could take a while in which a lot of folks ended up in the equivalent of used cars. And i think that would be so destructive. I think that part of the role of Public Education in the old biracial multicultural democracy is to give kids from different walks of life together to rub elbows and get to know each other and understand that beneath oubeneath ourskin, we ae same. And we would lose so much of that if it was in all voucher system. Lets talk about the diversity in the school because one of the objects and critics made to the Charter School it ts is that it is alleged that they are segregating america as people flock into the Charter Schools that are only full of kids like themselves. And they are not getting much diversity, they are getting choice but not diversity. How do you deal with that one . If you look at all the charters versus the district Public Schools. They have therefore more segregated. They are not more segregated. That is what the data says comes with a fair comparison they are not. Are there examples where they have been created by people that want to pull kids out of the minority dominated schools im sure there are and i think thats wrong but thats why we need strong authorizers to prevent that kind of thing. What i advocate is something that some places do with about 15 charters and district schools the algorithms as it has to be 40 or 50 below income so that you will deliberately create diversity by income levels. You cant do it by race. Of course both with us anymore but you can by income levels and that gets you the race in a multireach the city, racial diversity in schools. Part of what im arguing is we need strong systems not just the schools. We are going to go for more economically integrated schools so we are going to use the enrollment system to make that happen. I see how that works in the cities where there is a single of the visor in the district of ththe state or the separate charter board. Theres a lot of places with multiple authorizers going on simultaneously including ohio where the foundation that im involved in is an optimizer. We do a pretty good job and we are responsible for i it in many cities scattered around the state in any given city in columbus or cincinnati or cleveland or isnt just one thee authorizers so it gets messy in some of the steering you are recommending is hard to pull off in that circle, perhaps impossible. Multiple authorizers was better because they are trying to get away from monopolies because the steering is so important there are systemwide ish as. You kids have equal access to the schools, and they have transportation or is it only the kids whose parents have the money and time to driv the timem who have equal access. The kids with disabilities, do they have equal access or are some schools trying to prevent or get rid of them. Somebody has to say this is how we are going to handle and enforce that. In cleveland and detroit and other cities in the state where we have so many authorizers, no one can do that, so both cleveland and detroit there were big pushes supported by the governor and legislators and by Community Organizations and leaders in the cities to create the Detroit Education Commission and in cleveland it was called the Transformational Alliance but it was an organization that could innocence act as a supervisor and a good close schools for poor performance and overriding authorizer decision and i think in some cases this could actually authorize the schools and it was an attempt to give more power to steer and deal with some of these issues with low quality in some of the charters because theyve been a terrible job in some of the cities. Host and then would have . Guest neither of those, while in ohi ohio the legislatin passed by without the power. And in detroit some legislation passed that they didnt create the commission. Now the mayor is thinking about creating one anyway. And using the power to shame the bad authorizers into doing whats right. But its an issue that we have to solve. Host to be clear you do want there to be a system, you just wanted to be a steering system rather than steering and roaming system. Guest there are things in our Public Schools that we dont want to have been we dont want the special education kids pushed out and kids who spirits cant drive them to not have equal access. We want to create equal opportunities as much as possible. You cant do that if no one is stealing. Someone has to set the rules of the game. Host but someone has to want to do the other things that are part of the package of strategies. Historically in some places in america where there was a single authorizer, it was the local School District and they didnt want anything to do with what they have always done. We know that doesnt work because we have been trying it for 25 years. Lets ask the monopoly to authorize competition. It doesnt work while. Host so in your modeling needs to be not always but something usually other than the local district. In the denver example that is the district. Guest the truth is theres probably six cities in the country that are pretty far down this path. Three we talked about plus indianapolis, memphis and camden new jersey. Six different paths. So this is going to happen in different ways and different places. Some places will be a charter sector beside the district and the district as an denve ingrain him t he could indianapolis stat treating schools this way. There will be all kinds of paths. Ideally in the end we should have one body withi body with ad or elected school board that steers the system and then there should be someone to Charter Schools can appear to guest appeal to if they feel they are being denied something. Because if that board is captured by a political faction or Interest Group and they say the heck with these kind of schools, we want those kind of schools, there should be a way to appeal to. I described an idea but i believe we are going to approach it in all kinds of ways, and this is not about everybody deciding suddenly one day to love this model. It is an evolution driven by necessity and desperation, our urban Public Schools are not very good and we are going to be driven in this direction a lot of cities i think in the future and they will model the ideal because it is democracy and its messy. Host you and i both know most turnaround efforts to take a bad school and tweak its formula so that it gets better, most of them dont work very well. You talk a lot about replacing these unsuccessful schools and a lot of other people talk about closing the bad schools. As in authorizer ive experienced how difficult it is to close a bad school. It has Politics Around it and parents that love it and it poses for the authorizer in our case and often moral dilemma what if the current schools that have them available in a mediocre Charter School that they are actually worse than a mediocre Charter School, do you still closed even though you know it is mediocre and you havent been able to frustrate the people that run it to do a better job. You talk about about replace rather than close. Say a little bit about how that actually works. Guest first it is so much better for the kids because closing a school is very disruptive for the children and their families. In a dissent often be other options were either no better or worse. So, often we hesitate to close the bad schools for very good reasons. But if you have a system with a strong authorizer and a lot of charters 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 there is a period of time and as the authorizer sees that its headed to a bad place it can begin to talk with other operators. They have another operator take over the school. Theres different ways to do that. If the school is really bad at the culture is just chaotic and kids have learned they dont have to do anything the teacher says that they spen spent half e day running through the halls and that does happe if that doen american Public Education, then taking all those kids and starting over is hard because you have a culture in place. So thats why a lot of dem them start a year of the time so you only have to take ninth grade te this year the old operator will have the other three and then you have ninth and tenth. The other option is to just take the whole thing lock stock and barrel and that is a position that offer authorizers and operators should make based on the local circumstances and based on the culture of the school and what they think is going to work. There is no right answer but those are two options. Host a lot dont want to do that. Probably because of the culture that they think they are not going to be able to root out and start fresh. So if they are thriving in our authorizer should find a way to let the School Network take over the operation. If it is bad enough. Lets talk about accountability between people that want to let the parents marketing place to the whole job of accountability and people that want hard evidence of people learning is usually in the form of test scores where do you come down on this one fax guest i thought actually 25 years ago we could leave it up to the parents. I was surprised to discover that in something i wrote 25 years ago recently that experience has taught us otherwise thats not all parents have had the best education themselves or speak english well enough to know that their school, the Childrens School is really bad and that there are options. Not all parents will make a decision to move for academic reasons. For some, poor povertystricken parents if the school is warm and nurturing and safe much better than the school they went to and that is enough and they will stay with it. But if that isnt good enough for their kids and we have the responsibility as the taxpayer theres reasons we all spend money to give tax dollars to pay for Public Education. We have to have strong authorizers who will produce these schools. The ive thought about this for years and years and there is no right answer. Test scores are important. We have to know if kids can read and do math. You should measure both quantitatively and qualitatively there are things you cannot learn just through the data. Every few years they send a team of three or four people into a school and spent several days. These are people whove typically been the principals or teachers with a lot of experience and a rate of school on the four key variables and write a report that explains the ratings. Its subject to evaluation by experts and then the report goes to every parent. Its a wonderful model that has been going for 25 years. Host they call it the inspectorate. Guest i call it a qualitative assessment or evaluation and i think it is worth 20, 25 of the weight in the accountability system. I think we should survey the parents and get their opinion and we should figure out to do it in a way that doesnt allow the adults in the building to affect and we havent solved yet so i hop hope because of that be have not yet we can look at like 25 but should be outcomes which are the graduation rates, College Going rates, employment rates are continuing into the military as employment and college persistent raids and if they went to a community college, what percentage are getting certificates and degrees. Those are the most important outcomes. So there may be a few other things but that is the rough picture. Host where do you come down on the softer measures like the character development, 21st century skills, whatever phrase you want to use . Guest the century skulls to me implied can you reason, can you analyze, can you learn anything. We should be teaching that and not testing that. But the social emotional skill is used usually to describe do you work well with others. Are you able to set up a goal and work towards achieving it. Do you have persistence. Are you compassionate, theres a whole variety of things in that realm. Guest i dont see how anyone can say those things are not important. The Research Says if you have selfcontrol and the ability to set goals and go after them you are going to be much more successful in life. So, schools should be trying to impart them and they have been for generations. The problem is we dont yet know how to measure them. We are working on it, there are places measuring but its a work in progress and the only way to measure right now is to ask the kids on surveys and that runs intruns intothe problem but if t coached and theres another problem is they are at a demanding school that has High Expectations and these other kids are in a school with low expectations. These kids will have much Higher Standards for what the selfcontrol and persistence is, so they are not going to be answering the questions in the same way. Host its not a Good Research design. Guest right. So what i advocate in the because we need to Fund Research and figure out how to do it. Host more research is needed. Lets talk about the matchup between the kids in schools. You devote almost two full pages in the book to describe the different kinds of varieties of schools. But lets start listing the 57 flavors. And i was wowed and impressed and agreed but some of them are like schools for the gifted and residential high schools for the needy kids and International Baccalaureate implied some kind of a screening mechanism as a kind of random matchup and that leads to the selectivity of. The degree to which a community would want to do that is up to the community this is the decision that they make. I will give you an example of a city that is struggling with this, new orleans. In new orleans when they finally integrated the schools, all but 5 left. 3 . When Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, 3 of the kids in schools for white. The way to test some of them was selected magnet schools which were pretty integrated. But they were schools that were good enough that some of the white parents would send their kids there. Now today they are up to, whilethe last year or the year before they were up to 8 white. White parents were gradually trickling back as this miracle happens in new orleans but theres 82 africanamerican and then the rest are mostly latino and a few asian. So, youve still got these selective schools. They are now charters to be used to be selected because they are selected they refused to join the common enrollment system. The so in the common enrollment system they can have some selectivity and they can set standards for their kids to. And for kids like you mentioned for kids whose home life is just chaotic and dysfunctional. So there has to be some selectivity. You dont put a kid into the school who doesnt need it. Host there has to be a mechanism for targeting. I agree that a lot of people in the Charter Movement purchased horrified at the notion that there is any kind of screening other than randomness in the magic process. Guest i think they are coming from a paradigm of some charters in the city thats mostly district schools. Over time they migrate to Something Else because parents like them and send their kids there and they are no longer really targeting those kids. But it evolves not because it chose to but because of who chose it. That is a loss because we need kids to be for schools that are good at dealing with emotional problems, we need a lot more of them so i think if people really think it through they will realize that we need to do some selecting of all kinds are different in every community. And some will make decisions the courts will overturn the state will be motivated by prejudice for example. Whenever there is selectivity there is going to be a default for kids who dont match in one way or another, dont match the profile of the schools that they want to go to war they dont let them into the schools, whatever. Is that the authorizer, who manages the default problem . Guest that is a really good question which i dont think anyone has really discussed im sure that the charter board has struggled with that internally, but i never really read anything for example about that question, so it is a great question. I would say that the first of f, you need to set up to give parents real choice is you need good information about each school and then essentially counselors that can help the parents that need help. Now theyve probably not done this enough probably some of what is the next step for the kids whose parents dont choose a i can imagine the next step would be if you build a function where the counselor goes and contacts that family and tries to help them make a decision that is best for the kid. And then the default after that if they check out and that they dont even respond and wont do it than the default is usually the local school. Host in new york city now you cant go to high school unless the west sixth references and then you get matched by some computer in the sky separate apart from the highly selective but you get a lot of kids that default didnt know they were choosing. They just were not good at choosing. But the related questions and there has to be a limit on the extent of traces you are allowed to make simply for the reasons of practicality. If you are 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 be expected to be transported every day. Is it reasonable to put some limits in this enterprise . Guest absolutely. You have to make lots of tradeoffs. There isnt an infinite amount of money so you try to maximize the outcomes for the kids and that is a good example. Lets go back to the previous question which is a really good one. You can imagine some of these kids whose parents are checked out are going to end up in not the greatest schools. That happens today and if you have a system with a strong authorizer that is weeding out the worst schools and replacing them with schools and the best. That kid is going to have a much better chance of being in a decent school. In new orleans, 60 of the kids at the time of katrina went to schools in the bottom 10 statewide on performance now 10 due. Just like the rest of the state. There are not too many bad schools left in new orleans because they have a system that leads them out. Now there are some. They need to keep weeding them out. Its not perfect, but far better for the kids to have that in the reality of. Its a School System which most of them have had. So we are sitting in washington, d. C. And we have to deal with the politics that deal with the two political questions first it is a federal rule. Is there a federal role in bringing about the reinvented system that youve outlined and if so, what is it . I guess i would also add in the trump deer. Guest as long as you define as those two, the answer is probably no for practical reasons. With 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 of changing anytime soon. Trump is a big Voucher Program and congress isnt going to give them want. There is no interesting that so far. Historically, the federal government has not had a lot to do with education. The constitution left it to the states. Ththe states write the rules of the Public Education system. They define what kind of system we have. Now, starting with Lyndon Johnson in the 60s the federal government stepped in and put money into health. And no child left behind was a huge leap forward in trying to be prescriptive and force the states and districts to work out for the kids and provide better schools for them. And it was a mixed blessing. It was really dumb legislation in a lot of ways. The way they measure success was all wrong. And then the Obama Administration kind of overstuffed with race to the t top. Host but hypothetically, what would it do . Guest i would do another race to the top competition in which you encourage the kind of behaviors im talking about. And we could define them specifically. Host you would use a structured incentive funding system in the states or districts or both may be to encourage them to incentivize as behavior. Guest and i would also, there are how many federal categorical Grant Programs about 100 . Ive lost track of. I would simplify those and much broader grants because they tie the states in the districts hands and denver has been trying to have a weighted student funding system. When a student chooses a school, all the money goes to that school, but they can only get two thirds of the way there. The federal part wont move. Guest and the state park, too. Host lets play about the politics of the state and local levels. On the state board of education i watch this up close, there is a lot of pushback against almost every one of the seven strategies that youve outlined. Not against School Culture and the capacity but a few known good things in any sector but theres an awful lot of pushback against the other one and it succeeds in the kind of strategies you are recommending. Much of it is led by the adult vested interest in the oldfashioned Public Education system. So what is the political path from where we sit today in 2017 to the reinvented arrangement that you and i would like to see happen . Host guest it varies from state to state. The kid kids learn twice as much every year as the kids in the boston Public Schools and we have a cab of 18 . They cant spend more than 18 of the money on the charters and the vote is turned down by 63 go 40 to allow a dozen more charters state per year. Half the voters als also didntw what a Charter School laws and the teachers unions that lead the vested interest told them all kinds of untruths about Charter Schools. A similar thing happened in georgia around a different issue, but it kind of prove to us at the state level we have trouble winning those battles because i think suburban folks dont know what a Charter School is. But in the cities where there are enough triggers, the politics are different and in denver they have four years of the majority for the reform indias battles and School Board Meetings that lasted until one or 2 a. M. And now they have a seven 30 majority reform because it works is because the reformers got smart about running good people and raising the money and theyve been winning the last elections. The same in indianapolis. There was a huge battle, the most expensive fight probably ever for the School Board Seat recently in a pro charter candidate ron and theres now a majority. All that says in the urban penis where theres a lot of charters, you can win political battles. Because you have parents whose kids go to charters and you can organize them, get them to vote and you have a Business Community that now understands that they produce better results and begins to weigh in and you have other interests in the community that represent poor people. There were organizations that were quite critical in supporting reform because they knew their kids were getting a raw deal. They wanted more charters and more choice for their kids, so it comes down to politics. These decisions are made in the election and we have to win those battles and get organized to win those battles and i think it is going to be tough. The unionsare on the warpath and effective and some of these arrangements were not stable and works until the next election at which point they eased back. Guest it is more true with these innovation schools. It has an authorizer and it is much harder to roll that stuff back. Host people value it. Host we are coming to the end of a good discussion that could continue and i hope over the next 25 years as we wait for the next major anniversary we are closer to the arrangement you described and that i endorse. Its a pleasure talking with you and congratulations on your terrific book. Guest thank you. Its been a pleasure for me as well as i look forward to continuing the conversation. Host all the best. Guest thank you