The Education Gadfly Weekly

On Monday, World Teachers’ Day, friends and relatives of the late Rod Paige released the trailer for a forthcoming film about his remarkable life and career. Titled Paragraphs of a Paige, the appetite-whetting trailer can be viewed here. We at Fordham are proud to be playing a modest role in the evolution of this project, spearheaded by Rod’s family and ace filmmaker Isaac Yowman, as Rod Paige was our friend, longtime board member, colleague in the ed-reform struggle in which he played such a key role, and (for some of us) boss during exciting times at the Education Department during the presidency of George W. Bush.

The film, in fact, opens with a (re-enacted) scene in Sarasota’s Emma E. Booker Elementary School on 9/11/2001, as President Bush was paying a long-awaited visit to a second-grade class. He had just begun to read to the enraptured students when Andy Card whispered into his ear that a second plane had crashed into the World Trade Center and that “America is under attack.” Whereupon the president excused himself from the classroom and invited Secretary Paige to take his place.

Rod was, of course, Bush’s first secretary of education, as well as the former Houston superintendent, college dean, football coach, and lifelong civil rights pioneer.

To be released in full later this year, Paragraphs of a Paige is a hybrid scripted and documentary film chronicling his life and legacy. Through cinematic reenactments, archival material, and documentary storytelling, it traces his journey from segregated Mississippi through decades in education and ultimately to Washington, D.C.

I’ve written before about Rod, his remarkable track record in Houston, his longtime service on the Fordham board, and more. But not until we entered into this film project did I really begin to know the important earlier chapters in his life, such as the day in 1967 when the Jackson State football team, of which he was head coach, played a historic game against Grambling that caused the first-ever integration of Jackson’s Mississippi Veterans Memorial Stadium. (Rod’s team won, Grambling’s only loss that season.) Yes, this was 1967. I was barely into graduate school.

The film trailer hints at some of these chapters. The film itself will do more. Check it out. And as you do, try to remember a time when ed-reform was high on the agenda, even in Washington, and mostly what we meant by it was that all kids needed to learn more and those yawning gaps needed to narrow.

Rod believed and worked for that—and much progress got made.

We continue to miss him.

I recently wrote an essay for The Dispatch about the wave of regret washing over America’s political left…and the wave of regret building offshore of the political right.

But today I want to focus on regret and the “education reform” movement.

The sudden change

As some readers know, I spent much of my early career focused on K–12 education. I shifted away from that in part because, 10–15 years ago, the leading figures and organizations in the ed reform community moved far left and seemed devoted to excising people like me from that world.[1]

It’s not just me. Find any right-of-center person who had happily worked in ed reform when that change took place. They will probably have stories of suddenly being required to attend training sessions that taught that “the American Dream,” “boot-strapping,” and “melting pot” were now considered offensive and unacceptable terms. Of being told to read articles arguing that oppression was baked into all American institutions. Of being told that the slogan “work hard, be nice” perpetuated structural inequality. Of attending meetings and conferences suddenly devoted to a new dogma without any debate. Of being told that immigration laws were xenophobic. That the police had to be defunded. That individual success had to be understood through the lens of unearned privilege.

There’s little value in lingering on these particulars. I’m sure most people reading this are well aware of what happened.

But for the purposes of this column, I do want to emphasize three aspects of this shift.

Consequences of the change

First, the desire—sometimes it felt like a demand—for ideological purity was remarkable. I had been a right-of-center person working in the left-leaning education world for a while, so I had grown accustomed to being a bit of an outsider. But people knew that I’d committed myself to improving America’s schools, especially schools serving disadvantaged kids. I helped start a charter school for low-income students. I advocated policies that were designed to help the underserved. I wrote constantly about the unfairness of assigning students to failing schools. This work was meaningful to me. It was a reflection of my faith and my commitment to expanded opportunity.

But none of this mattered as ed reform took a hard-left turn. If you didn’t agree to the laundry list of new requirements, you were made to feel like part of the problem.

Second, so many of these new requirements had little to nothing to do with actually improving student learning. The new orthodoxy was built on an ideology about power and oppression that led to mandatory policy positions on the police, prisons, student discipline, tax policy, the demographics of newsrooms and boardrooms, housing, marriage, bathrooms, sports participation, immigration, the confirmation of judges, and on and on.

I wanted to help form kids into better people and help them learn more so they could succeed as adults. As a conservative in a mostly progressive field, I knew that I would disagree with other ed reformers on non-education issues. I was fine with that. That’s the nature of a coalition. But I thought that we would, when working together on education issues, focus on education issues. Not so. The new agenda had lots of non-education issues.

Third, dissent became verboten. The new priorities were not subject to debate, much less criticism. Critique an article advocating modern progressive social justice? No. Point out that critical theories assumed too much and demanded extreme action? No. Suggest that organizations’ hyper-progressive policies and public statements had gone overboard? No. Say you preferred a Republican candidate? NO.

So what was the result of all of this?

In just a matter of years, most right-of-center individuals had been exited from leadership positions in ed reform organizations, whether foundations, advocacy groups, service providers, or school operators. The only even-somewhat conservative figures remaining were those who understood that they had to accept the new orthodoxy or not fight against it. It was lost on most of these organizations that while they were advocating diversity and inclusion, they were simultaneously mandating ideological conformity and excluding those who dissented.

Regret

There seems to be some building recognition that the ed reform movement went off the rails. Maybe this is the downstream effect of AOC’s recently admitting that “Woke 1.0 was crazy.” Or the other instances of the left conceding its errors.

But on the education front, the big story is Nikole Hannah-Jones’s viral essay admitting that her ideology caused her to do wrong by her own child. The essay even implies that she understands that her advocacy encouraged others to make the same wrong decisions.

But that’s not all. An education journalist just wrote an essay admitting that he regrets his “misguided six-year foray into ‘social justice journalism’.”

Some of the regret is coming from the outside. Dale Chu, a reform-minded Teach For America (TFA) alum, recently explained how his former organization—arguably the most influential ed reform organization—became a progressive political-ideological enterprise.

Doug Lemov, one of the most respected researchers and practitioners of high-quality teaching, reached a similarly damning conclusion, writing, “Almost no other important organization lost its way as completely as TFA in the last 8–10 years.” Regarding their shift from focusing on education to focusing on ideological commitments, he wrote: “they traded that noble work for a set of political objectives that made corps members feel virtuous at the expense of the very students they claimed to serve.”

Frustration

I’m glad for this shift. Sincerely.

But I have to admit that I’m also frustrated.

I (and others) raised objections to Nikole Hannah-Jones’s positions years ago. We were ignored or worse. I had repeated conversations with leaders in Teach For America over years trying to get the organization to stop veering hard to the left. I got nowhere. I repeatedly asked journalists to stop acting like political advocates. Again, nothing. I probably talked to a dozen foundations and nonprofits asking—begging—them to hire some right-of-center people to arrest the leftward trajectory, to stop taking political positions on non-education issues, to encourage or just tolerate ideological disagreements. No success.

To be clear, I was not the only one dissenting. With these particulars, I’m only speaking about my personal experiences. There are many ed reform expats.

My larger point is that those who dissented while things were going sideways were often ignored, scolded, shunned, shamed, dismissed, and/or disinvited. If ed reform is going to recover, this should be rectified. They should be brought back into the fold.

Maybe the New York Times and other outlets could hire a slate of right-of-center education journalists to more fairly cover future events. Maybe reform organizations and foundations could hire and offer board seats to those who dissented over the last decade.

In short, meaningful regret includes changing your ways.

Editor’s note: This was first published on the author’s Substack, Governing Right.

If you’ve paid even general attention to Texas education news over the past few years, you’ve likely heard some version of the phrase “local school districts being taken over by the state.” Maybe it registered as a Houston story, since that made statewide headlines. If you missed that, you hopefully didn’t miss that the same thing happened 35 miles west of Dallas on Interstate 30.

Fort Worth ISD lost its elected school board this spring. A state-appointed superintendent and a nine-member board named by Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath now run the district, because one campus, Leadership Academy at Forest Oak, failed the state’s academic standards for five straight years. Most North Texans never heard the countdown happening. Worth noting: as state action became imminent, Fort Worth’s own elected leadership responded by adopting a bold campus transformation strategy. It was the right move, but it came too late to stop what was already in motion.

That countdown to a state intervention in a school district is rooted in a 2015 Texas law requiring the education commissioner to act whenever a single public school campus receives a failing grade from the state for five consecutive years. The commissioner has two choices, and only two: close that campus, or replace the district’s entire elected school board with local residents the state appoints. There is no third option once the fifth year hits. The only thing a district controls is what it does with the four years before that.

Most people call this a “takeover,” but that word describes only one of the two things the law can temporarily do, and it flattens a distinction that matters. The more accurate term, and the one I’ll use, is intervention. A takeover implies a grab for power. An intervention implies a response to need, the same word we use when a family finally confronts a loved one who can no longer help themselves. That is closer to what this law actually is: a last-resort response to schools that have been failing children for five straight years, with no end in sight.

Right now, Austin ISD is living the moment Fort Worth already lived. Two of its middle schools, Burnet and Webb, just posted their fifth consecutive preliminary failing grade, though those ratings are not yet final. About a dozen other Texas districts are watching Austin closely, because they are on the same clock, closer to home than most of us realize. The state publishes annual A–F ratings for every campus in Texas at TXschools.gov. But keep in mind: it only takes one failing campus to trigger intervention for an entire district. In a large district, the campus putting a school board at risk may not be your own child’s school. Look at all of them.

I have watched this happen from the inside, serving seven years on the Dallas ISD board when our district faced this same law and the possibility of state intervention. What I learned is that this law is neither what its strongest defenders nor its strongest critics sometimes make it out to be.

The national research on state intervention does not support the simple proposition that replacing elected governance, by itself, improves student achievement. Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath argues that intervention has improved learning in Texas, and Houston’s recent results provide evidence for that case. But the broader research is far more mixed. The more important lesson may be something different: A credible deadline can change behavior if local leaders act while there is still time on the clock.

The law’s author understood this. State Rep. Harold Dutton, the Houston Democrat who wrote the underlying provision, has described it as a hammer: Don’t let a campus fail five consecutive years, and the state never has to use it. The law grew out of his frustration over chronically struggling schools in Houston, including schools serving generations of Black students, that remained low-performing year after year despite repeated promises of improvement.

Dallas once faced a similar reckoning. In 2012, 34 Dallas ISD campuses were on the state’s failing list, some for multiple years. We hired Superintendent Mike Miles, now Houston’s superintendent, who moved aggressively to change how the district recruited, evaluated, and compensated educators and how it staffed its lowest-performing schools. The politics were brutal. There were public board fights, efforts to remove the superintendent, and even a separate campaign to replace the school district with a home-rule charter. None of that is a footnote. It is the actual texture of change, and all of it happened before the state ever sent us a warning.

Then, in October 2016, the state’s warning became explicit. Commissioner Morath told Dallas and ten other districts, including Houston and Fort Worth, to demonstrate meaningful improvement or risk state sanctions. Dallas ISD chose to accelerate. We expanded reforms that rewarded teacher effectiveness and placed highly rated educators in our lowest-performing schools. Within a year, six of our seven original turnaround campuses came off the failing list. Within two years, the district was down to three failing campuses. We never crossed the five-year line, not because the threat was meaningless, but because we acted with bold urgency before time ran out.

That work did not stop when Miles left. Superintendent Michael Hinojosa’s tenure built durable systems on those early reforms, and current Superintendent Stephanie Elizalde has boldly led that commitment forward. The results Dallas shows today belong to all three eras, not any one of them.

Dallas residents backed that choice with their own money. Less than two years after the state’s warning, nearly 60 percent of voters approved a tax increase dedicated to sustaining those reforms. Voters subsequently supported major bond investments in 2020 and 2026. Not every reform worked perfectly. Some proved too expensive and had to be redesigned. That is the nature of difficult institutional change. But Dallas retained control of its schools because its leaders and community chose to act while they still could.

That is why the debate over intervention too often misses the most important question. Yes, temporarily removing authority from an elected school board should make anyone who values local democracy uncomfortable. But persistent academic failure should make us even more uncomfortable, when we know the children forever impacted by an inadequate education have no vote and will never get those years back.

Houston is further down this road than Fort Worth or Austin, and the most damning account of why comes not from critics, but from inside Houston’s own boardroom. Sue Deigaard, a Houston ISD trustee whose seat was stripped when the intervention began, did not blame the Legislature for what happened to her district. She blamed her own board’s inaction, five years of it, in her own words: “We stole five years from kids.” Her board sat on nine figures in reserves while resisting both real structural cuts and full use of the money it was holding, right up until the state acted.

Texas’s intervention model has real defenders, and the numbers give them ground to stand on: Since intervention, Houston has closed the gap to the state average in reading, math, and end-of-course exams, and nearly eight out of ten of its schools now earn an A or B rating, up from three out of ten when intervention began. None of that is easy to square with another number: Houston lost roughly a third of its teachers in a single year, a rate nearly double the state average. But Texas Tech researcher Jacob Kirksey, who tracked every Houston teacher over a decade, offers a clarifying reframe: The question was never how many teachers left. It was which ones. In 2024, Houston’s least effective teachers left at a rate nearly ten points higher than its most effective, and the district’s best teachers ended up concentrated at the campuses that needed them most. Kirksey’s separate research finds that districts using the Teacher Incentive Allotment, a state program that mirrors Dallas’s pay-for-performance work, reduce turnover among their highest-performing teachers by roughly 20 percent.

That’s the outcome of good legislation already on the books. House Bill 3, passed in 2019, and its most recent iteration, House Bill 2, represent the most significant investment in teacher workforce strategy Texas has made in a generation. Baked within them are tools any district can reach for right now: the Teacher Incentive Allotment; resource campus designations that direct dollars to the highest-need schools; expanded pre-kindergarten funding; and outcomes bonus funding tied to college, career, and military readiness. The dollars are in Austin. The question is whether district leaders are willing to do what it takes to unlock them.

None of this erases real, uneven costs. Houston has posted genuine gains at the district level even as the campus that triggered the state intervention, Wheatley High School, shows that its students who are still learning English are losing ground in core subjects. It is also true that this law addresses real neglect of Black and Latino students, and that research shows majority-Black and majority-Latino districts experience intervention at disproportionate rates nationally. I do not think those two facts cancel each other out. I think we owe our children the discomfort of recognizing that doing nothing to address persistent underperformance has the worst effect on those who the system has historically left behind. That is precisely why no district should wait for a warning letter to act.

The debate over intervention has become Manichean: You are either for it or against it, state power versus local democracy, disruption versus the status quo. But that binary misses the most important question entirely. The real question is not whether intervention is inherently good or bad. The better one is why it should ever become necessary. The tools to avoid it already exist, and any district in Texas can reach for them today.

Five years is a long time in the life of a school system. It is an eternity in the life of a child. Austin’s leaders will likely face state intervention because of ongoing struggles at Burnet and Webb. Fort Worth and Houston are already there, with Houston experiencing some important improvements. Other Texas districts still have time. They should use it to act before action is taken.

The greatest threat is not ultimately that the state might intervene. It is that a child can spend year after year in a school everyone knows is failing them while the adults debate what to do. The clock belongs to the adults. But the five years? They belong to the child sitting in that classroom, hoping someone will finally decide she is worth the fight. And once those years are gone, no court ruling, no board vote, no state appointment will ever give them back to her.

Editor’s note: This was first published by the Dallas Morning News.

While four-year college degrees are largely viewed as a direct path into career-ladder jobs (AI fears notwithstanding), two-year degrees and shorter-term certificates are seen as less of a sure thing. A new report from Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce provides a better picture of the jobs that associate degree and certificate earners can access and what their career trajectories look like—essential information to help improve our understanding of non-bachelor’s pathways.

First up, some definitions: Jobs requiring a postsecondary certificate or an associate degree are here termed “middle-skills occupations.” Categories include installation and maintenance of equipment, office and administrative support, computer science, transportation and logistics, and so on. There are hundreds of such occupations across the categories. The Georgetown researchers use a combination of national and metro-area-level data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the U.S. Census Bureau from 2018 through 2023 to estimate wages for workers across the 55 largest metro areas in the country. They identify what they term “springboard occupations”: 159 middle-skills jobs in 22 occupational categories that offer workers above-median earnings at the start of their careers (based on local data) and strong wage growth over time—ensuring that inflation won’t erode their economic security. They use those springboard occupations—some of which provide earnings comparable to some bachelor’s degree-specific jobs—as the basis for their analysis.

The researchers find that just 15 percent of early-to-mid-career middle-skills workers in the largest metro areas are employed in a springboard occupation. The rest are in lower-paid and low-salary-growth fields. Why so few springboarders? Largely because no metro area has jobs in even a majority of the springboard fields available. The highest percentage of springboard occupations in any area is 47 percent; the lowest is just 28 percent. The most common such jobs are electrician, firefighter, general and operations manager, and police officer, but each metro area has a unique combination of springboard jobs. Los Angeles, for example, has the largest number of discrete springboard occupations, while St. Louis has the largest share of middle-skills workers currently employed in springboard occupations. Overall, early-career workers in middle-skills springboard occupations (ages 20–24) have median annualized earnings of $42,500, an amount that increases by 59 percent to $67,500 by mid-career (ages 35–44). By contrast, median annualized earnings for workers in non-springboard middle-skills occupations are $35,600 in early career and just $47,000 in mid-career.

Adding to the low percentage of springboarders is a mismatch between credentials earned and jobs available. The researchers compute a ratio of each metro area’s annual number of middle-skills credential earners (those that align with springboard occupations) to the projected annual number of job openings available in all occupations (both springboard and non-springboard occupations). Their findings indicate a shortage of properly credentialed workers for springboard occupations in each of the 55 metro areas through at least 2034, although the exact nature of the shortages varies from place to place. Indianapolis, for example, overproduces associate degree and credential earners overall, but still faces shortages of properly credentialed workers in six different occupational categories, including architecture, computer science, and business operations. Nashville’s production of properly credentialed workers, on the other hand, is expected to meet a mere 9 percent of the projected annual springboard job openings. The biggest shortages are projected to occur in the construction and extraction; installation, maintenance, and repair; and production occupational groups. Similar shortages can be found in nearly all 55 metro areas.

Taken together, these findings indicate millions of good-paying, high-wage-growth jobs becoming available all across the country for workers with less than a four-year degree. But without changes, knowledge of those jobs and individuals’ access to them will continue to lag availability. The report’s recommendations start in middle school, with an expansion of career and technical education (CTE) programs that introduce students to career pathways requiring less than a four-year college degree. They also recommend partnerships among employers, high schools, and postsecondary institutions to better define—and publicize—the steps needed to earn credentials and to move directly from high school graduation to postsecondary certification to employment. Better alignment between workforce needs and credential programs being offered in a given metro area will also help direct students to credentials in high demand in their area. There’s nothing wrong with earning a credential that is in demand in some other city, but students should be aware of that before they start on a pathway. Data such as those collected in this report will be vital to students, educational institutions, and employers going forward.

Source: Emma Nyhof McLeod, Catherine Morris, and Jeff Strohl, “Springboards to Opportunity: The Middle-Skills Occupational Landscape in 55 US Metro Areas,” Georgetown University, Center on Education and the Workforce (August 2026).

Kevin Shafer, president of City Fund, joins Mike Petrilli and David Griffith to discuss efforts to expand access to high-quality public schools across the country. Speaking on his experience with school reform in Camden, New Jersey, Shafer discusses what it takes to improve school systems and the role charter schools can play in that work. Is it better to work with districts to build a portfolio of schools, or focus on growing high-quality charters outside the system?

Then, on the Research Minute, Amber Northern examines a new study finding that districts losing students gain more funding per pupil, but much of that additional money goes toward reserves and facilities rather than higher teacher pay.

Recommended content:

• A flexible “third way” option: Partnership schools on the rise —Andy Smarick, Thomas B. Fordham Institute
• Three ways charters reform and improve our schools —Chester E. Finn, Jr., Bruno V. Manno, and Brandon L. Wright, Thomas B. Fordham Institute
• Denver doesn’t spell doom for portfolio-style reform —Paul T. Hill, Thomas B. Fordham Institute
• The Baby Bust Goes to School —Michael J. Petrilli, Education Next
• Robbers or Victims? Charter Schools and District Finances —Mark Weber, Thomas B. Fordham Institute
• Moving Target: The Success and Failure of Missouri’s Charter School Funding Surge—Andrew M. Camp, Collin Hitt, and David Griffith, Thomas B. Fordham Institute (2026)
• The “Would You Rather?” Test —Marguerite Roza, American Enterprise Institute and Thomas B. Fordham Institute
• Enrollment, Fiscal, and Resource Changes in American Public School Districts, 1998 to 2019 —Matthew H. Lee and Benjamin Scafidi, Education Finance and Policy(2026)

Feedback Welcome: Have ideas for improving our show? We would love to hear them. Send them to [email protected]

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Transcript

This transcript was generated with the assistance of AI and lightly edited for clarity and readability.

Introduction

Mike Petrilli [00:00]

Welcome to The Education Gadfly Show.

I'm your host, Mike Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

This week, Kevin Shafer of City Fund joins us to discuss the promise and challenges of district-charter partnerships and his experience with school reform in Camden, New Jersey.

Should we try portfolio-style reform with districts, or just focus on growing high-quality charters outside the system?

Then on the Research Minute, Amber Northern examines a new study finding that districts losing students have more funding per pupil. But much of that money goes toward reserves, facilities, and more staff rather than higher teacher salaries.

All that and more this week on The Education Gadfly Show.

Mike Petrilli [00:56]

Hello, this is your host, Mike Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, here at The Education Gadfly Show and online at FordhamInstitute.org.

Now, please welcome today's special guest, Kevin Shafer.

Kevin, welcome to the show.

Kevin Shafer

Thanks, Mike. Good to be here. Excited to chat.

Mike Petrilli

Yeah, I understand. Longtime listener, first-time caller kind of situation here.

Kevin Shafer

Sports talk radio and ed reform podcasts.

Mike Petrilli

Good. I love it.

Kevin is the president of City Fund. We will talk more about that and Kevin's background in a moment.

But first, let me welcome my co-host, David Griffith.

David Griffith

Hey, Mike. Always a pleasure.

Mike Petrilli

Yeah.

Well, you know, before joining City Fund, which supports the expansion of high-quality schools, including charter schools, in big cities around the country, Kevin was chief innovation officer for Camden City School District, where he worked on transformation efforts and led to the development of Renaissance Schools, which is a partnership between the district and high-performing charter schools.

Which is really the perfect place to start, because we're going to talk about the pros and cons of reformers focusing on districts, or districts doing charter-like things, doing charter things, versus just, hey, let's just try to expand charter schools and forget about those districts altogether.

So let's talk about all that in Ed Reform Update.

Ed Reform Update: District reform or charter growth?

Mike Petrilli [02:26]

So, Kevin, tell us about your experience in Camden, which, as I recall, was a very exciting success story in ed reform.

For those folks out there that may not know, tell us about that and the role that charter schools and the district played together in that.

Kevin Shafer

Yeah. Excited to talk about it.

So I started my career, you know, middle school teacher, Bridgeport, Connecticut, and found myself in 2012 working for Paul Vallas in Bridgeport.

And we tried to do a bunch of things to make schools better and got a lot of the politics wrong, got a lot of the engagement wrong, the community side wrong, and found essentially that our school board flipped on us.

Paul went to go run for lieutenant governor, and I was sort of like, what do I do next?

The state then took over Camden City School District.

It was a rare state takeover where the mayor asked for it and local electeds were saying, come do this.

Hired my boss at the time, an amazing leader named Paymon Rouhanifard. I spent thirty minutes with him and was like, sign me up.

I want to be a part of this because there was just such unbelievable need and unbelievable opportunity to actually make a difference.

So, 2013 Camden.

In a pretty small district, 15,000 students, but 23 of the 26 schools in Camden were in the bottom 5 percent in the state of New Jersey.

There were three students, not 3 percent, three total, that met the College Board's college-ready benchmark.

Something like 70 percent of our buildings were constructed before 1928.

And so it was just an absolute system in total crisis.

And I think I'm going to get this wrong. If Paymon ever listens, he'll call me out on it.

But there was something like ten superintendents in thirteen years before he got there.

And, you know, amazing people in that system working hard for kids every single day.

And the system wasn't working.

It didn't work for kids. It didn't work for families. It didn't work for the community.

And so we saw our job as, really, let's do two things.

Let's do everything we can to help improve the schools that are underneath us.

And also, let's recognize that turning this sort of Titanic around is going to be really hard. It's going to take a really long time.

And, you know, superintendents don't last.

We lasted for five years, and I think that was the longest one in thirty years.

But superintendents don't last very long.

And so what can we actually do that will both make an immediate change and will last?

And so there was this really novel piece of legislation called the Urban Hope Act, which created something called Renaissance Schools, which in Camden's case meant essentially it was the governance of a traditional charter.

So all the autonomy, a charter held by the state, performance standards they need to meet, sort of all those things.

But it was also a partnership with a local district, which meant a defined neighborhood.

So everyone in North Camden got to go to that Renaissance School, had a guaranteed seat, which in a city like Camden was hugely important.

You know, if a family didn't have the means to drive their kid across town or if city transportation wasn't reliable.

So that sort of safe neighborhood component was really important.

So it's basically the benefits of a charter with a neighborhood school.

And this piece gets sort of underreported, but it was really, really important: a facilities requirement.

And so it was actually a requirement that every school either was a brand-new construction or significantly renovated.

And so because of that, we were able to leverage the bill and these partnerships to get hundreds of millions of dollars in new school renovation, which was critical to actually getting the infrastructure met.

Which, you know, great schools, I've seen great schools in church basements and in $50 million high-rises. You know, great school anywhere.

And the signal it sent to kids in Camden about how much we value them and their education was real.

Mike Petrilli

Interesting.

So the district role then was what in the facility piece, basically?

Kevin Shafer

Yeah.

So the district, but even this gets to your sort of district-first, charter question.

We had a choice.

You could sort of say, we'll partner and we'll open some Renaissance Schools across the street from a district school, right? Or down the street, right?

If you're sort of, we're going to grow charters next to the traditional system, we could have done that.

The downside to doing that was you're bleeding enrollment from the traditional district school.

It's slower to actually get as many kids into a higher-quality school.

It just takes ten more years, right, if a school starts with kindergarten and grows its way up.

Or can we actually do the work to figure out, can these Renaissance Schools take over an existing building and transform it wholesale?

And so we were lucky enough in New Jersey that we had some amazing school partners.

This was KIPP from Newark, Uncommon from Newark, and Mastery Charter Schools from across the river in Philadelphia.

And all of them were willing and had the ability to sort of do whole-school turnarounds.

And so we actually took a bunch of traditional district schools that were most under-enrolled, had been most chronically struggling to perform academically, and where there was real community demand and parents saying, we would want something different.

And said, we're going to give you, Uncommon, this facility. You're going to take every student in that building. You're going to transform outcomes.

So it was really the district-initiated sort of whole-school turnarounds.

And then we were basically the authorizer, and they ran great schools and have done great things for kids.

Mike Petrilli

So that's interesting.

So you are the authorizer. Okay, so it's not that, you mentioned the contract being held at the state level.

Kevin Shafer

Yeah. I mean, this is the risk of being, like, really wonky and nerdy.

It's both.

So it actually has to get initiated by the district.

The district holds a contract with the operator, but then that contract goes to the state.

And so neither party can amend it or change it without the state signing off.

Mike Petrilli

Oh, interesting.

Your point about sustainability questions, you know, someone comes in and says, I think this is a bad idea.

You have to go convince the state, and both sides have to agree.

So the story goes on.

Some fantastic results at these schools and the district as a whole. Tremendously better results.

Right?

But you guys leave.

And so the concern has always been sustainability, right?

The next guys or ladies come in and just kill it, turn it back into a traditional public school.

The union demands, you know, get rid of these providers.

Is that what has happened? Or has this rule about getting state approval helped to keep it in place?

Kevin Shafer

It has not happened.

The schools have kept growing. They've added high schools. They're now fully K through 12.

Definitely been challenges along the way, as any systems face over the last ten years.

And I think it's sort of two reasons.

One is the policy structure, for sure.

State holds it. That is all true and a big part of it.

I think the other part of it is how it happened.

I think if you do these things to, not with, there's just always going to be some backlash.

I think credit to Paymon and Mayor Dana Redd and local parents and local council leaders.

But this really was done with folks so that these schools were seen as community schools, and there was big public engagement and buy-in and support.

Not everybody was happy all the time, sure. These are hard changes.

But I think that actually people were bought into doing this.

And then, two, the schools delivered.

And I think if these schools were not actually doing better for kids, if they weren't serving all students, if they weren't getting great results, then I think it's a really different conversation we're having today.

Which I think, these strategies, who's running the schools matters way more, just as much, I think, as which policy construct you use.

Mike Petrilli

Well, this is interesting.

And this is good for me to hear, Kevin, because it is challenging some of my priors.

You know, because I have been in this debate forever, somewhat skeptical of what people have called the portfolio strategy, right?

Saying that, you know, people should come in and they should try to devolve power to these charter schools or charter-like schools as district officials.

It just always seemed like, you know, the politics of that would be unsustainable.

You know, maybe that's what you have to do as a compromise organization.

Okay, but why not just instead put all of your focus on starting high-quality charter schools completely outside of the district?

You know, so basically like in D.C., right?

In the District of Columbia, you've got this separate authorizer, separate mechanism.

They've solved the various problems over the years with facilities and enrollment and all the rest.

And so they've built this great system of charter schools that sits right next to the system of traditional public schools.

Versus what we see in, say, Denver, where there was this focus on, you know, having the district partner with these kinds of schools, charters and charter-like schools.

You know, and then the policy shifts, the unions vote in an anti-reform board, and then a lot of it is fragile. It's at risk.

Right?

But you're making a case that says, hey, you know, at least in this New Jersey example, you have, partly because of good state policy that brought in this investment in the facilities, that gave you some leverage, you know, maybe to make sure this came out right, that there were some real benefits.

And this idea that these are takeovers, transformations, they're neighborhood public schools.

I don't know. This all sounds pretty good.

David, what are you thinking about this?

David Griffith [11:18]

Yeah, I mean, I tend to agree.

I think I've made the point a couple times that I at least feel like, in some circles, what we'll call the Denver model, maybe it's the Camden model, is underrated, right?

I think there are these sort of unfortunate transition costs that are associated with the route that the big Missouri districts that we studied are taking, that Indianapolis is sort of finally turning the corner on, right?

Like this sort of rocky road to destroying the district to save it.

And so I don't, you know, as much fun as that looks like, you know, I think we should consider these alternative routes, right?

And one reason, I think, it's sort of been touched on, right, is like if you have enough political support to take a few steps down this road, chances are it doesn't just evaporate completely if there's some, you know, if there's turnover at the school board level, right?

I mean, you can have dramatic changes in school boards. I don't mean to sort of discount that.

But I mean, I don't think that parents woke up in Denver or Camden and felt completely different about charter schools overnight because of something that happened with the school board.

And so, you know, I think there's sort of more latent support, even in these places where reform is struggling right now, than maybe it seems.

So, you know, if you can go this route, like, why not?

I guess the flip side of that, I would also say, is like, you know, the completely external route has its own challenges, right?

And not just sort of educational challenges.

Like, I don't know, you have a serious facilities challenge, like we've been talking about, if you're not going to partner with the districts, right?

Like, my understanding is that in North Carolina, for example, it's just like a queue to try to find buildings that look like schools, right?

I don't know.

I don't want to undersell this choice.

I think it's a significant strategic choice on the part of the charter sector.

But I do think there are pros and cons to each side.

And I don't think you can judge it over three years or five years.

I think you have to judge it over twenty-five to thirty years because these are long political cycles.

Mike Petrilli

All right. So that's well said, David.

So, Kevin, all right.

So you've got this experience. You now are in this role at City Fund.

You all raise money from some of those pro-ed reform billionaires that are still out there, Reed Hastings and others, and invest them in trying to grow high-quality seats, what, a couple dozen cities around the country.

Excited that you're working in Ohio and Cleveland.

Woo!

Glad to see that.

So how do you think about these issues now?

I mean, is it a, you're trying to do both-and in a lot of these cities? Or do you kind of pick one or the other?

How's this go?

Kevin Shafer [13:59]

I think both-and.

But I wouldn't want to understate sort of, the nuance really matters here.

And so on the one hand, I look at Camden, I look at Indianapolis as two cities that have come the closest to New Orleans on creating a system that really is about outcomes for kids.

Lots of high-quality choices, performance bar, cycles of accountability.

You know, 70 percent of students or so in both places that are actually going to a charter or charter-like school.

And both Indianapolis and Camden called them something different, and they leveraged some version of this, right?

The innovation law in Indianapolis converted good schools to great and had sort of this turnaround component. Lots of similarities to Camden.

Camden had the Renaissance School piece.

But in both places, they also were protected from the political swings.

Like the state charter in Camden, being like the charter ultimately being held by the state.

In Indianapolis, at an innovation school, if the district decided to tear up that contract, every innovation school has a charter contract.

And so I think there is just a protection in that that, frankly, Denver doesn't have.

And in Denver, an innovation zone, it's at the whim of that board.

And so the families in Denver and leaders of those schools every year have to go fight to defend those schools that have done amazing things because it's not protected in law.

In Texas, the 1882s, it really varies by what the contract looks like.

So there's ones that are really protected and there's ones that aren't.

And so I actually think the nuance of this actually matters more to me than, is it...

Because I think there's no doubt that if you have the operators who can do right by kids, you have the community willing to do it, it is a more efficient, faster route to get more kids into better schools faster.

Can it sustain?

And that actually becomes a policy, it really is a policy question.

Mike Petrilli

Yeah.

Well, that is, so no, it's really interesting.

And so the question, yeah, right.

So for policy people, us policy wonks who think about, hey, maybe, you know, how do we change state policy to be supportive?

Right?

Indianapolis route is one way. Hard politically.

I mean, you know, maybe there's some more red states out there willing to do what Indianapolis, what Indiana has done in terms of taking basically the facilities and the transportation and the money out of Indianapolis Public Schools, giving it to this new independent board run by the mayor.

I mean, that is, I'm still super excited about that, but that's hard.

So this other option then would be to create basically what? This Renaissance Schools policy like you have in New Jersey.

Who knew that New Jersey should be such a great model of state policymaking?

Kevin Shafer

Well, in true New Jersey fashion, this law was available to, like, the five biggest urban districts, and only one was willing to do it.

And it's worth noting, only one was willing to do it that was under state intervention.

And so while there was local support and cover, I think the reality is, if we wait to find the conditions where you get the right law, the right willing district partner to do it this way, we're going to be waiting a long, long time when hundreds of thousands of kids are stuck in systems where they're not getting access to great schools.

So the question of, like, which route to go, maybe it is a both-and.

And, you know, the majority of our cities are every day figuring out, how do I grow a great charter school for the students and families in that neighborhood that's most underserved?

Right?

How do I then grow another one and another one?

And hopefully there's a moment where you can partner with the district or you can figure out a plan for the whole city.

But that's the thing we can control.

They can do right by kids every day.

And then try to create more moments where you have opportunities to work with and go faster.

But those moments are hard, and they've been a lot fewer in the last five years than they were in the ten years prior.

Mike Petrilli [17:31]

All right.

One last question, Kevin.

You know, back to this portfolio model.

You know, the alternative for what districts should do, right, is to do what D.C. Public Schools has done and a few other big-city districts and just try to get really good at running traditional public schools.

Right?

Forget this devolution thing.

It's basically a top-down playbook.

Lean into high-quality instructional materials, a very clear vision around what high-quality instruction is, you know, a lot of support, a lot of training.

Accountability up and down the system.

You know, and it has been proven in DCPS and maybe a few other places that you can do this and you can do it at scale.

And the benefit, by the way, is that in a place where there's a lot of kids in poverty, they move around a lot.

Wherever they land, the curriculum is the same, high quality.

The teachers are using the same kind of language. They're getting the same training.

It's maybe not so different.

And it's a nice complement to this choice-based system that the charter schools have.

Right?

I mean, you can tell I'm a huge fan of what D.C. does, right?

And I still think it's the best of both worlds.

But I mean, to me, that, though, is not what you guys do.

That you are not supporting district reform strategies unless they embrace the portfolio model.

And the question is why?

Like, what's your take on that?

Kevin Shafer

I think it really, I think the progress and results in D.C. have been incredible.

And I think part of the reason the district has been able to sustain this is also because they've done it alongside growing an incredible charter sector.

And I wonder, I don't know, it's a thought exercise, but I wonder whether it would be as sustained if charters were 10 percent of D.C.'s share versus 50, right?

And so it's hard to separate those two things.

And we want to see every city we support have a world where every kid gets access to a great public school.

And if that is 40 percent charter or 50 or 70 or 20, don't really care.

It's ultimately, do kids get access to the school they need and can it last and sustain?

I think what we've seen in places outside D.C. is that playbook works.

It's really hard to execute it well.

Mike Miles in Houston is doing an absolutely phenomenal job of executing that playbook.

Lots of other challenges, but, like, the results are unbelievable.

But it's really hard to actually execute it well, and it's really hard to sustain it.

And what often happens is the average superintendent comes in, spends three years building this up, have their new curriculum, have their new teacher-support program, have their new principal, their new academic team.

Just when they start to see gains, time for a new school board, time for a new superintendent, and a version of the same thing, but a little bit different, happens.

And you're in this sort of constant flywheel.

The miracle of D.C. is that they've been able to sustain this progress for fifteen, twenty years.

And I wonder if that's possible without charters keeping the bar high for progress and accountability.

We haven't seen that anywhere else over a big city over that lifetime.

So I think if you can actually guarantee districts could keep doing that and get a better governance model, it's way easier.

It'd be way easier than trying to grow charters and make it work.

I think unfortunately, we just have thirty, forty years where D.C. is one outlier, and that outlier came when you grew the charter sector to 50 percent.

Mike Petrilli

Yeah. Yeah, no, it's fair.

And look, this reminds me of my good friend Rick Hess's classic Spinning Wheels, right?

This is what we know from urban districts.

I mean, we maybe can point to some others.

Houston is a very good example.

You know, Chicago there for a long time got a lot of credit, especially from Sean Reardon's analyses, for really boosting achievement.

And, you know, there too, it helped that there was a strong charter sector.

But it seemed like the district was doing good things as well on the teaching and learning front.

Maybe, you know, depending on how we define big districts, we could find a few others, maybe a few of the big suburban districts.

But you're right.

Spinning wheels seems to be much more common than the success stories that we are pointing to.

I guess the basic takeaway is no matter what you try, it's hard.

And so we have to stay humble and be willing to be flexible.

But this is great.

Kevin, I really appreciate you coming on the show.

Appreciate what you did in Camden and now what you're doing at City Fund.

And we'll have to have you on again sometime soon.

Kevin Shafer

Yeah. Love talking about this stuff and, you know, grateful to be able to be in the seat and learn from a lot of amazing leaders doing hard things for kids everywhere.

So appreciate you all having me on and would love to come back anytime.

Mike Petrilli

All right. Great.

Again, Kevin Shafer, president at City Fund.

Now it's time for everyone's favorite, Amber's Research Minute.

Research Minute: What happens to district finances when enrollment falls?

Mike Petrilli [22:04]

Amber, welcome back to the show.

Amber Northern

Thank you, Mike.

Mike Petrilli

So, yeah, as you can tell, if you're watching, you know, behind me, the weather has changed here in Washington.

It suddenly feels cooler. It's a little rainy, a little fall-like.

An autumn breeze is in the air.

Is it the same down there in the South where you live?

Amber Northern

It is. Definitely is.

I'm just waiting to go get the pumpkins, Mike.

Mike Petrilli

Oh, are you big into pumpkins now?

Amber Northern

I do a lot of pumpkins on the front porch.

I don't know, kind of a pumpkin aficionado.

I get the different colors and different shapes.

Mike Petrilli

Mums also?

Are you into the mums?

Amber Northern

Yeah, do the mums.

Mike Petrilli

Okay.

All of that. Excellent.

Whereas David has to save all his money for the hordes of children that go to his Capitol Hill house on Halloween, right?

Thousands and thousands. Isn't that the case?

David Griffith

That is the case on East Capitol Street, about four or five blocks north from me, Mike.

It is not the case on Seward Square.

We have a big semi-historic square that nobody really comes to.

But D.C. Halloween is amazing.

It's one of my favorite things about D.C.

Also, it doesn't rain out here like it does in Portland.

So it's a genuinely magical time.

Mike Petrilli

Lovely.

Okay, wow.

And we are, of course, way ahead of time here because, you know, we can keep talking and looking forward to Halloween for a whole other month.

I love it.

Amber Northern

Yes, we can.

David Griffith

And I'm sure you will, Mike.

Mike Petrilli

I will.

I do like Halloween.

I do like dressing up for Halloween.

I was just thinking the other day about my...

[Unclear costume name in the source transcript.]

...costume that I won a little bit of a New York Times newsletter contest in at one point.

And I was always very proud of that.

I thought, you know, but I do have my number two pencil costume. It's always a classic.

Can't come up with anything else that is a classic.

Amber Northern

It is. It is.

David Griffith

Yep.

Fascinating, Mike.

Mike Petrilli

Yes.

All right.

Hey, I digress.

Amber, what's on the research?

Amber Northern [24:11]

We've got a really cool descriptive study.

I think it's sort of like, I feel like we've talked about this before on the podcast, but we've never had, like, a study that actually kind of shows this descriptively.

It's tracking how revenues, expenditures, and per-pupil resources changed across nearly all U.S. school districts as their enrollments grew or shrank over two decades.

It is in the AEFP journal.

It isn't even out yet. It's on, like, just accepted.

So anyway, it literally is, like, not even off the press yet.

But anyway, interesting stuff coming in AEFP.

Data come from NCES Common Core of Data, so we know this sort of bread-and-butter data set.

1999 through 2019.

It covers 12,000 traditional public school districts across 47 states and D.C.

As you can tell, it predates COVID and ESSER, those influxes of dollars.

So we don't know whether these patterns persist into the 2020s.

But regardless, it tracks each district against its own history.

And the study design basically allows the shrinking and growing districts to follow different patterns rather than assuming that the pattern works the same way in both of those growing and declining districts.

Okay, so I'm not going to get into all of the specifics around that, but it's an appropriate methodology.

The authors look at one-year, four-year, and twenty-year enrollment changes to capture both short-run adjustments and long-term trends.

So key finding number one: Declining districts saw significantly larger increases in per-pupil revenues than the growing districts did.

And this held across all three time periods.

So the main driver was local revenue.

I think we know this.

The property taxes and other local sources, they don't fall proportionately when students leave.

Property values don't drop because, you know, fewer kids are enrolled, so the tax base largely stays in place.

Federal dollars also enhance this effect because federal aid is tied to school-age child counts from the Census, not district enrollment.

So when kids move to homeschools or private schools, for instance, the federal dollars largely stay behind as well.

And then the state revenues showed an advantage as well for the declining districts too, partly because states have these hold-harmless provisions which protect districts.

And the advantage there was smaller because those provisions do tend to be temporary, like one to three years.

Number two: On the resource side, declining districts saw much larger increases in staff and teachers per 100 students.

Over twenty years, districts with long-run enrollment declines spent roughly $1,700 more per pupil than the growing districts did.

And they employ 2.55 more staff per 100 students than the growing districts.

So basically, the declining districts were accumulating per-pupil funds even as their headcounts fell.

And on the other hand, these growing districts were absorbing students faster than they could add staff or funds.

Number three: Salary and benefits per employee show no meaningful difference between declining and growing districts.

So those gains in per-pupil funds I was just telling you about weren't going to higher compensation.

So where did the money show up?

It showed up in stronger fiscal reserves and capital projects like facilities.

So basically, because these declining districts had higher per-pupil revenues and healthier balances, or bank accounts, the bond markets said, hey, they have more credit.

So that means they got cheaper borrowing for their capital projects.

So they were doing some building.

And then the last finding I'll highlight is on grade-level differences.

They looked at that as well, and they found that this fiscal advantage I've been talking about was biggest for districts losing elementary kids.

It was smaller for middle grades, and the advantage was smallest for high schools.

And they discussed that and basically say that there's more of a fixed-cost problem at the secondary-school level because you can't, you know, just cut a chemistry teacher when your enrollment drops because you still have to offer chemistry.

Whereas at the elementary level, it's a little easier to consolidate positions and that sort of thing.

So bottom line, the conventional thinking, which holds that enrollment decline leads to, like, fiscal crises or disaster, isn't really how it works out, at least in the aggregate, which this study analyzed.

Again, individual districts may look different because, you know, some factory leaves or big employer leaves.

But in the aggregate, these are the patterns, and basically shows that, if anything, the growing districts are the ones who look more squeezed.

And those state formulas have a lag.

The property taxes, which I've already talked about, take time to adjust to new development.

So in those places, the growing districts, the revenues can't catch up to the students coming in.

So anyway, I thought it was a great study.

Just kind of writing some sort of common notions that some of us hold.

And I love that it's descriptive and still landed in a prestigious journal.

Mike Petrilli

That's great, because this is super helpful information to have.

And you look at, you know, you say, oh, this is bad news that these growing districts can't keep up.

On the other hand, we don't have growing districts anymore, so that's fine.

That's not a problem.

Amber Northern

Not many.

Mike Petrilli

We have very few.

We have very few.

Look, I will say that I am proud that way back in something like 2018 or '19, I wrote an article for Education Next about the baby bust and what that was going to mean for schools.

And, you know, I remember just looking at state-by-state spending, and you could see that the states that had already had enrollment declines, even at the state level, their per-pupil financing went up also.

And here I think the phenomenon is that, you know, the state legislatures, they don't think about this in terms of per-pupil funding, right?

They think about, okay, last year we gave $20 billion to the public schools, and so this year we're going to give them $21 billion, maybe without, you know, contemplating that there's fewer kids.

Right?

And so that is exactly what we see happening.

So for all these reasons, yeah, this is not, at least in the short term, a financial catastrophe.

Right?

And the other thing is that this is helping to explain, but also show, that the staffing surge, right?

We just keep choosing more staff over higher salaries.

It drives me so crazy.

How do we fix this?

David, your thoughts?

David Griffith [31:22]

I do not know the answer to that last question, Mike.

It is remarkably consistent, right, across contexts.

It just makes you wonder if there's some, like, political law, right?

Unwritten political law that if, I don't know, class sizes get bigger than a certain amount or teachers make a certain amount and they stop, you know, asking for raises or something.

I'm honestly not sure exactly what it is.

You would think that teachers would want, you know, raises, right, and lobby for that.

I don't know, at least in some of the contexts.

But it seems like it doesn't matter.

I honestly think if someone could figure that out, like one of our brilliant researcher friends out there, I actually think this is a question that needs an answer at the level of politics and causality.

What actually leads to higher salaries for teachers?

Because it needs to happen, right?

Mike Petrilli

I think there's some evidence that unionization helps a little.

Right?

But, and then, the other thing is just what can states do?

It's like, well, something like the Texas Teacher Incentive Allotment, right?

I mean, like, if you give school districts and schools a choice, it seems like they will just keep hiring more staff instead of paying teachers more.

Right?

But so then you've got to, like, force them to raise salaries instead.

Amber Northern

I mean, this tradeoff survey we did not too long ago with Marguerite Roza, and she helped us develop it.

And we actually asked teachers that tradeoff, like, would you rather have more money or would you rather have a teacher's aide?

And if I recall, it was fairly split, you know, where some teachers actually were preferring an aide to help them.

And, of course, you know, it had to, I can't remember how much of a stipend the question posed.

Obviously, that makes a difference, whether it was $10,000 or $40,000.

But I think teachers are also split on whether they'd like another set of hands in a classroom, especially if it's a high, you know, whether they're dealing with discipline problems or something.

David Griffith

I can't help but point out, right, we also did a study, Mike, I know you wrote about this, but we also did a study in 2021 called Robbers or Victims? Charter Schools and District Finances.

And I have to say, all of this sounded really familiar.

Mike Petrilli

Familiar.

David Griffith

Because when we dug in, the study turned out to be about, you know, there were a couple of states that had, you know, special carve-outs for districts that had lost kids to charter schools, right?

New York, Massachusetts.

But honestly, the list is pretty short of states that actually do that.

The dominant story in, you know, thirty-plus states was exactly what Amber just said.

You know, districts lost money to charters, but not local money necessarily.

Right?

And, you know, they lost students, but, like, there were these declining-enrollment provisions.

And so, you know, it took a few years for it to trickle through.

And then it turns out even the federal government, right, there are essentially time-limited hold-harmless provisions written into federal law.

And so at every level of governance, you're actually pretty cushioned from this kind of blow, whether it comes from charters or whether it comes from some other reason.

And I think, honestly, up to a point, that's right, so long as it isn't permanent.

So, you know, I don't know that there's necessarily a problem that needs solving here except the one that you articulated, Mike.

Mike Petrilli

Yeah.

And that, look, you never know.

Like, there could be a real property-tax revolt coming in some of these places where, you know, people notice that their property taxes, you know, the property values have gone up and the property taxes are really high.

And what am I getting for it?

And anyway, I mean, that hasn't happened in very many places yet, but you could imagine it happening.

There was a wave of it back in the '70s, famously in California especially.

But you could imagine that happening, right?

Because it does feel politically unsustainable.

You know, we look at this in the Missouri study you did recently, where we're going to get to the point where St. Louis and Kansas City are going to be spending $50,000 per kid, you know, with their local funding as they keep losing kids.

I mean, at some point, taxpayers are going to notice.

David Griffith

Let's hope.

Mike Petrilli

Let's hope.

David Griffith

No. My property tax bill was way up this year.

Mike Petrilli

No, no, no. Come on now, my conservative friends.

This is great.

All right. We will have to leave it there.

Thank you, Amber. That was a good one.

Amber Northern

Yes, it was.

Mike Petrilli

All right.

But until next time.

David Griffith

I'm David Griffith.

Mike Petrilli

And I'm Mike Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, signing off.