Editor’s note: This is the first article in a two-part series. Part II explores what this means for education.

As is so often the case, The Onion nailed it:

“Media Condemns Biden For Baseless Claim That Nation Will Come Together Once Election Over.”

Such cynicism is understandable after the divisiveness of the past four years. But we should give peace a chance nonetheless, and heed President-Elect Biden’s plain but true words, spoken during his acceptance speech Saturday night: “It’s time to put away the harsh rhetoric, lower the temperature, see each other again, listen to each other again. And to make progress, we have to stop treating our opponents as our enemies. They are not our enemies, they are Americans.”

Indeed. As David Brooks wrote, “the other side is not going away. We have to dispense with the fantasy that after the next miracle election our side will suddenly get everything it wants. We have to live with one another.” Neither Trumpism nor Wokeism won the election. Rather, they fought each other to a draw. Biden took swing states by the barest of margins, the Republicans seem almost certain to keep the Senate with the narrowest of majorities, and the House defied conventional wisdom to become more closely divided between red and blue. Back to Brooks: “The key is loosening the grip the culture war has had on our politics and governance. Let’s fight our moral difference with books, sermons, movies, and marches, not with political coercion.”

How might we actually “loosen the grip” of our protracted culture war? Let me suggest one simple rule: Empathize, don’t demonize.

—

One of the most painful sentiments I’ve heard expressed in recent days is that 70+ million Americans voted for white supremacy.

That is simply not true.

As Amanda Ripley wrote last week in the Washington Post, most partisans aren’t anything like the caricatures would have you believe. Yes, there are extremists on each side, but they are called that for a reason. Few Democrats are window-smashing socialists; almost no Republicans are hiding Klan robes in their closets. “Both sides are motivated by fear,” Ripley writes. “Some of that fear is based in fact. But a startling amount is based on myth.”

Some of those 70 million Americans voted to protect unborn children from what they view as murder. Many, including Hispanics in South Florida and Texas, voted in opposition to socialism and its history of tyranny, oppression, impoverishment, and famine. Others voted out of fear that another round of Covid-19 shutdowns would shut down their livelihoods. Even on the fraught issue of race, I suspect that there are those—particularly downwardly-mobile, working-class Whites—who voted to give the media, the academy, corporate America, and other parts of the establishment the middle finger. Not because they are racist or bigoted, but because they are tired of being called racist or bigoted for holding views on social issues that were completely acceptable just a few years ago, but that the Woke Police has now declared verboten.

We should listen to their anguish, to the pain they experience as their traditional values come under attack, people who felt seen by Trump and respected again, Americans all.

On the flip side, these Trump supporters also need to empathize with their opponents. They need to understand that when Trump lashed out at Black figures like Colin Kaepernick, many everyday Americans also felt as if they were being lashed by him. That was encapsulated so well by CNN contributor Van Jones’s emotional response to the election results on Saturday, a moment that deservedly went viral.

This is vindication for a lot of people who really have suffered. “I can’t breathe.” That was not just George Floyd. There were a lot of people who felt like they couldn’t breathe….

You spent so much of your life energy just trying to hold it together. And this is a big deal, just for us to be able to get some peace.

I don’t think most Trump supporters wanted to make their fellow Americans feel this way. But they need to understand that their president and some of his superfans had that effect.

Personally, I’ve tried to listen more, empathize more, and demonize less, especially on the issue of race and police brutality. Like so many Americans, I was profoundly angered by the cruelty of George Floyd’s murder. But I also felt a change inside me as I started to understand how afraid so many Black men and women feel when they see the police. What an awful thing to have to experience. How terrible to have to give your Black child “the talk” about how they should respond if stopped by the cops. And that’s even if we understand, as Dave Chappelle said over the weekend, that the cops also feel like there’s a target on their backs.

In this highly polarized era, we all feel like we have targets on our backs. “I know how that feels,” said Chappelle:

Everyone knows how that feels. But here's the difference between me and you. You guys hate each other for that, and I don't hate anybody. I just hate that feeling. That's what I fight through. That's what I suggest you fight through.

You gotta find a way to live your life, you gotta find a way to forgive each other.

Amen.

Next time I’ll explore how we might apply this advice to the culture wars in education.

Education wasn’t explicitly on the national ballot in 2020, but education is always on the ballot, even when you don’t see it. Now that the election is behind us, education reformers can focus again on states and communities, where most of the important decisions about K–12 education get made.   

Before the election, too many jurisdictions were trapped in a stalemate between reformers pushing for more parent choice and choices, such as charter schools, and teachers unions holding fast for the status quo but asking for more money. Fortunately, about twenty urban districts around the country are exploring a more promising “third way”: the creation of autonomous, accountable district schools. Particularly in urban America, it is imperative that we replace centralized, standardized, industrial-era systems with more decentralized, student-centric schools designed for today’s world.

Such schools are known by a variety of names: innovation schools, partnership schools, renaissance schools, and pilot schools. The most effective models are nonprofit schools governed by independent boards of directors separate from the local school board. In some districts, such as Denver and Springfield, Massachusetts, innovation schools are organized into “zones” with a single board of directors for a group of schools within each zone.

Zone or innovation school boards negotiate schools’ performance contracts with the district, usually for five-year terms. Those contracts include clear metrics for success that the schools must meet for the agreement to renew. This creates an urgency to improve academic growth because the consequences for failure are real, including replacement of the team that runs the school.

In exchange for heightened accountability, innovation schools are granted increased autonomy because students achieve more if those who understand their needs best—principals and teachers, not a remote central office—have the flexibility to make decisions that affect their learning. Best practices dictate, as in the case of Indianapolis’s innovation schools, a blanket grant of autonomy over all day-to-day school operations, including school design, curriculum, personnel, the school calendar, and so on. The board hires the school leader, and the school leader hires the staff.

Innovation schools have the same access to per-pupil dollars, support services, and facilities as do the traditional district-operated schools, and their student demographics and tests scores are included with the traditional schools’ for state accountability purposes. Thus, as they improve, the district gets the credit, with little added cost.

Because the innovation schools usually occupy district buildings, the district can place them where it needs better schools. District leaders are often frustrated by the arrival of independent charter schools that attract enough students to create overcapacity in district schools, triggering fiscal stress for the district. With innovation schools, districts can avoid this by converting buildings rather than adding buildings.  

This third way takes advantage of the autonomy and accountability that have made urban charter schools so effective while leaving districts in the driver’s seat. Someone needs to steer, after all: to monitor and regulate; to define the right mix of schools; to make sure they are in the right spots geographically; to continually adjust the supply of schools to the demand; to replace failing schools with stronger schools; and to ensure equity

This approach is already being used in places as diverse as San Antonio, Indianapolis, Denver, and Camden, New Jersey. In cities where it’s being implemented with fidelity, it is producing rapid improvement. This should spark interest in districts that are still struggling to increase educational equity and grow student achievement, particularly for Black and Brown kids—in much of urban America, in other words.

Of course, the tricky part is figuring out how to do this. To explain, we at the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) created a guide, complete with implementation steps, lessons learned from those doing this work, and “do’s and don’ts.” In places where innovation schools flourish, they are creatures of enabling legislation, so we include model state legislation. It empowers district leaders to establish autonomous schools and zones, exempts those schools from many administrative regulations and statutory provisions, and subjects them to heightened accountability for performance.

Many states require their departments of education to intervene if a district-run school has received a failing grade for a number of consecutive years. It’s a strong incentive, but it doesn’t usually work and often wreaks havoc. Ideally, states should use both this stick and a carrot—innovation school legislation that provides extra money for turnaround schools. That way states can hand districts an effective tool to turn schools around before the state intervenes.

But autonomy should not be reserved for failing schools. Happily, some districts have learned that it also benefits schools that want to go from “good to great”—or even just to move the needle. While innovation schools can be neighborhood schools, schools of choice or a hybrid, they also represent an opportunity to create enrollment systems to increase diversity within schools by race and income.

Though permission and financial incentives from the states can help, this third-way approach will not work unless local leaders buy in completely. The guide addresses the planning and strategizing communities need, from communication plans to strategies to gain central office staff buy-in to the development of talented school leaders.

If timing is everything, and it always is, it’s important to note that the election wasn’t the only “big deal” event in 2020. The traumas of 2020—a pandemic that shut down most public schools and social unrest following police shootings—shocked most Americans. As we wait for a fresh start in 2021—a new administration, a vaccine, and a relentless focus on ending systemic racism—the time is right to ask how we can create a more just and effective system as we reopen our schools.

Our innovation school guide offers a win-win for increasing educational equity, improving student achievement, and modernizing America’s outdated public education system. We urge policy and community leaders everywhere to consider this third way.

It’s been over two years since the Strengthening Career and Technical Education for the 21st Century Act was signed into federal law with overwhelming bipartisan support. The law is a reauthorization of the Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education Act of 2006, and is often referred to as Perkins V. Its primary purpose is to govern how states implement and expand access to career and technical education (CTE) programs, while providing over a billion dollars in funding to states, districts, and community colleges.

Perkins V provides states with much of the same implementation flexibility that previous iterations of the law offered. But there are several significant changes. These include an increased emphasis on equity, streamlined accountability provisions, and the requirement that eligible funding recipients conduct a Comprehensive Local Needs Assessment (CLNA). In a recently published report, Advance CTE examines states’ Perkins V plans to determine how they responded to these changes. The report restricts its focus to plans—not implementation efforts, which are just getting underway—and makes no attempt to determine whether states met the law’s expectations. Instead, the analysis focuses on how states took advantage of the law’s flexibility to address equity and quality.  

Although Perkins V leaves plenty of room for flexibility and interpretation, Advance CTE identified a few common aspects of states’ plans that signal a “comprehensive and cohesive” statewide CTE strategy. These include vision, collaboration, a focus on equity, determining program quality, attracting and developing CTE instructors, and data-driven decision-making. Let’s take a look at each.

A state’s vision for CTE largely determines how leaders choose to distribute its Perkins V funds. For example, the Reserve Fund is an optional pot of money aimed at supporting CTE program quality and innovation. The vast majority of states—90 percent—decided to set aside funds through this option and fourteen states elected to use the maximum amount allowable under law. Among the forty-six states that chose to use the funds, 53 percent pledge to use it to support CTE programs of study, which consist of a sequence of courses and skills that are considered representative of quality programs and can help students transition from secondary to postsecondary programs. Thirty-seven percent of states plan to use the funds to close equity gaps. Another 31 percent will direct the funds to rural CTE.

Given that CTE spans secondary and postsecondary education as well as the workforce, collaboration across sectors is critical. Alignment was a driving factor in reauthorization efforts, and the law provides states with a menu of options for how to align their systems. For example, states are permitted to submit a single plan that fulfills the requirements of Perkins, the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, and several other associated federal programs. Nine states chose to take advantage of this opportunity—Alabama, Delaware, Indiana, Minnesota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Virginia, and Washington. In a win for data transparency, a whopping forty-six states plan to promote alignment by sharing labor market information across sectors. Thirty-two states plan to use a statewide advisory committee with a “diverse membership” to provide input on state, regional, and local efforts. Seventy-eight percent of states report developing feedback loops to gather consistent input from secondary and postsecondary CTE practitioners.

An increased focus on equity is one of the “seismic shifts” of Perkins V according to Advance CTE, and this increased focus is clear in the majority of state plans. For the purposes of this report, Advance CTE defines an equity gap as “an observable disparity in access and/or outcomes for specific subgroups” that are “the result of systemic inequities, implicit biases, and/or outright discrimination.” Eighty-two percent of states will use targeted technical assistance to help close these gaps. Thirty-three states have pledged to use their CLNA or local application processes to prioritize closing gaps. More than half of states plan to provide dashboards or other data tools to help local leaders analyze gaps. And several states plan to direct funding toward equity initiatives. Rhode Island, for example, plans to use a portion of the state’s Reserve Fund to provide equity grants to secondary CTE programs that will be used to address the access, participation, or performance gaps of specific populations.

Another key focus of the reauthorized law is a commitment to measuring program quality and streamlining accountability. The CTE programs of study framework is considered instrumental to quality, so it’s unsurprising that sixteen states have developed programs based on the framework and mandate their use. Thirty-two states allow local grant recipients to develop their own, though they must be approved by the state. The law also introduces three new secondary CTE accountability measures, referred to as program quality indicators. They are work-based learning (WBL), recognized postsecondary credentials, and postsecondary credit attainment through dual enrollment or articulation. When it comes to states’ program approval processes, 55 percent of states use dual enrollment and articulation as a factor in their decision, 47 percent use WBL, and 41 percent use credentials. (It is possible to use more than one.) To ensure that credentials are high quality and valued by employers, 27 percent of states reported that they plan to create or already have state-developed lists of approved credentials.

While equity and quality are key to successful CTE programs, states’ ability to attract, develop, and retain high quality CTE teachers is integral to those efforts. Research also indicates that a diverse teacher workforce can have a positive impact on learner outcomes. Unfortunately, attracting and retaining qualified and diverse teachers remains one of the sector’s most stubborn challenges. Eighty-six percent of state CTE directors reported either a moderate or severe teacher shortage in at least one career cluster at the secondary level, and 60 percent reported similar shortages at the postsecondary level. It’s puzzling, then, that only 27 percent of states report developing explicit recruitment plans or activities, and only five states—Florida, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Oregon, and Washington—identified explicit recruitment activities focused on diversifying the CTE teaching corps. It seems that the majority of states are focusing on development rather than recruitment. Nearly three quarters of states reported that they are offering targeted professional development for specific groups of educators, administrators, or other CTE professionals.

The final piece of a solid state plan is data-driven decision-making. Such efforts must be supported by quality data, public reporting, and meaningful accountability indicators. As mentioned previously, the law gives states three program quality indicator options that must apply to all secondary CTE concentrators: WBL, recognized postsecondary credentials, and postsecondary credit attainment. Nineteen states chose to incorporate more than one indicator. Four states—Delaware, Indiana, Washington, and West Virginia—elected to use all three options. More than one third of states also indicated that they are developing public reporting tools for their CTE programs. One example is West Virginia, which is in the midst of creating CTE data profiles for each county and school district.

Overall, states took plenty of unique approaches to planning for Perkins V. That’s not surprising, considering that they were given a tremendous amount of flexibility. But there are some common themes threaded throughout the majority of plans. By and large, states seem to have recognized the importance of focusing on equity and meeting the needs of individual learners. Many are using their plans to address longstanding challenges facing the CTE community, and they are prioritizing support for teachers. States have also put a significant amount of work into the development of their first ever CLNAs, and are working to ensure data quality and transparent reporting. Right now, things look promising. But in the coming years, as these plans are implemented and tweaked, it will be critical for stakeholders and advocates to actively monitor progress and hold states accountable.

Source: “The State of Career Technical Education: An Analysis of States' Perkins V Priorities,” Advance CTE (October 2020).

1. A Catholic school in North Canton whipped from fully in-person learning to a fully-remote model last week (cancelling a day of school and weeks’ worth of planned sports and extracurriculars) after 3 coronavirus cases were reported. (Canton Repository, 11/6/20) Meanwhile, seven staffers in the transportation department of Groveport Madison Local Schools tested positive for the virus last week, leading the district to suspend all busing for two weeks, starting today. School continues in hybrid mode in Groveport, meaning that local families will need to figure out their own transportation, but remember that lots of private and charter school kids probably make use of those buses too. Well… I mean they used to. (Columbus Dispatch, 11/6/20)
    
2. Meanwhile, a small nonprofit in northeast Ohio has bought and outfitted a former schoolbus as a mobile virtual learning center. A small group of kids can work on computer stations inside—safely distanced—while up to 200 students can access the bus’s WiFi outside (probably less-safely distanced, but let’s not pick at that scab right now.) Interestingly, to get the bus rolling to your place, you (parents, I assume) must book it—at no cost thanks to a grant and other donations to the organization—via Facebook. (News5, Cleveland, 11/6/20)
   
   

3. Here’s a nice story about this year’s “Academic Challenge” tournament, apparently a long-held tradition of smarty-pants contests in Richland County. This year’s tourney is a virtual one, as you might have figured, with the adults for some reason in awe of kids’ ability to adapt. “I was cautiously optimistic about this new format going into the tournaments,” said one spokesperson, who I assume can only be 800 years old, “and following these events I am excited and relieved that my optimism was well-placed and that the tournaments went so well and nearly seamlessly.” Oh. Maybe he was talking about the adults there. (Richland Source, 11/6/20)
    
4. There was a press conference held last week by legislators working on revamping school funding in Ohio. They gave a few details—all pretty interesting, as you might imagine—and said that their hope is to get it passed during the lame duck legislative session. Who knows when they hope to fund it—to the tune of an additional $1.9 billion per year. But as noted in this piece, a lot of the folks doing the passing of the bill will not be around in the General Assembly in the future for the passing of the hat. So I’m sure it will all work out. (Cleveland.com, 11/6/20)

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Champions required

Ramona Edelin, senior advisor at the D.C. Charter School Alliance, published a timely op-ed in the Washington Examiner on Election Day. In it, she extolled the virtues of charter schools—especially for low-income students and students of color—but lamented the fact that charters “lack the political champions” they need to overcome concerted opposition.

Persevering during the pandemic

Two looming questions for schools in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic is how to measure Covid-related learning loss in students and what to do with the results. An in-depth piece from EdWeek looks at this question and the answers provided by schools across the country. This includes Dayton Leadership Academies, whose principal, Tess Mitchner Asinjo, explained how her school brought students into the building in small, staggered numbers for several hours of assessments this fall. The losses, she said, were overall less severe than her staff feared but that work would begin immediately on remediation. An upside to the effort: kids got to meet their new teachers in person. “It felt more like real school,” said Mitchner Asinjo.

Tussling in West Virginia

West Virginia’s charter school law requires that proposals for new schools be approved by the elected board of the district in which they will be located. No applications have yet been successful. One caveat to the law says that applications will be considered automatically approved if the board in question doesn’t vote within 90 days of receiving the application. A proposal in Monongalia County is at—or past—that deadline, depending on who you talk to. Wrangling is underway.

Settlement

Concept Schools, headquartered in Illinois and managing charter schools in several states including Ohio, settled a civil suit in federal court this week by agreeing to pay $4.5 million in response to claims that it engaged in non-competitive bidding practices with regard to the FCC’s E-Rate Program for technology support.

The future of charter schools

Following Education Secretary DeVos’ announcement last week that the US DOE would no longer block religiously-affiliated charter schools from accessing federal funds, the Fordham Institute’s Mike Petrilli dug into the two recent Supreme Court decisions upon which DeVos premised her plans. “For better or worse,” he writes, “religiously-affiliated charter schools are on their way.

1. Just your regular reminder, in case you are not a parent in K–12 education in Ohio—that there’s still a whipsaw pandemic going on out there. (Cincinnati Enquirer, 11/4/20)
    
2. The whipsawing between in-person/hybrid learning and all-remote learning models that we’ve seen this fall are the result, we’ve heard, of needing a “balance” between safety and education quality. The point being that in-person models are “quality” and all-remote models are not. Here’s a long piece from Cleveland that attempts to make that point in some detail. However, there appears to be some deeper reality coming out too. An education professor at Plymouth State University (nope, me neither) said she’s worried that parents and schools are focusing on educational apps at the expense of personal interactions and play that are critical to early development. “Obviously, districts are going with these [app] programs because they’re cheaper” than intensive online interaction, she said, neglecting to mention that “intensive online interaction” means actual teachers doing actual teaching via computer. She worries that the low cost will be the deciding factor for schools choosing apps and that “there won’t be an exploration or experimentation with other ways of doing it.” And by “other ways of doing it,” she means actual teachers doing actual teaching via computer. Unless I’m misreading that. (Cleveland Scene, 11/5/20)
   
   

3. Columbus City Schools, which recently decided to remain all-remote for the rest of the semester (except for some CTE students), is somehow suffering from a substitute teacher shortage. To solve it, they are throwing money at the problem. This seems to me to be something of a contradiction to the previous piece--in a couple of regards--but again I could be misreading it. (Columbus Dispatch, 11/5/20)
    
4. And now we come full circle in our clips today (and probably other stuff too): Unable to find enough substitute teachers to cover quarantines and illness themselves, Milford High School in Clermont County is whipsawing back to fully-remote learning starting today. (Cincinnati Enquirer, 11/5/20)

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Divisiveness, anger, frustration, mistrust, and threats. That is the narrative emerging around the 2020 presidential election. What I saw on election day as an Ada County poll worker in Boise, Idaho, couldn’t have been more different. The election I witnessed and served was distinctly positive and hopeful. Turnout was high, with more than 80 percent of registered voters across the state voting. More than 800 citizens came to vote at my polling station alone, and many for the first time ever or for the first time in many years. One guy told me he hadn’t voted in thirty-four years.

I was raised to not cry in public, but watching an elderly son help his ninety-seven-year-old mom wait in line and navigate the election process brought me to tears. She was going to vote no matter what. No pandemic, no lines, nothing would keep her from performing her civic duty. Other elderly citizens also struggled. Some were actually in physical pain as they used their walkers or their canes when waiting in line and voting. They had to sit in chairs to fill out their four-page-long ballots, but they did it. Again, nothing was going stop them from voting.

The recently naturalized American citizens who were voting for the first time were also inspiring. The couple from a war-torn Eastern European country who clapped for each other as they inserted their ballots into the voting machine was but one example. Young people voting for the first time were met with congratulations and acknowledgement. Tough men wearing their work clothes and bright-colored vests showed up to vote even though it was costing them money to do it. “I’m paid by the hour,” one guy shared. Another apologized for making the computer screen dirty with his hands. He was a tow truck driver and came straight to the polls between hauls. The young mom with three young children who struggled to get her driver’s license out of her handbag while she held one child never lost her smile as she registered. She was showing her children the importance of voting.

Many voters had to register with us because they hadn’t voted in years, or they were voting for the first time, or they were new to Idaho. My job was to help them. At the start of the process, I had to ask them two questions. First, are you a U.S. citizen? Second, are you at least eighteen years of age? Per the first question, everyone answered “yes,” and they answered it with pride. The second question brought on laughs. Men and women with gray hair and seasoned smiles would say things like “unfortunately” or “thanks for asking” or “you are so kind.” A few looked at me like I was just trying to be a wisecracker.

One young man showed up to vote about an hour before the polls closed. He didn’t have proof of residence. Our rock star election judge patiently and kindly explained to him what sort of evidence was needed to meet the requirement. She urged him to get it and to come back and vote. Five minutes before the closing of the polls he ran into the polling place with the right evidence. He was our last voter! He hadn’t given up. It was too important.

As inspiring to me as the voters I met were the team working the polls with me. A couple were high school students who couldn’t vote, but who wanted to be involved in the election and to help. They worked fourteen hours with few breaks and adapted to every challenge thrown their way. Two of my colleagues were military veterans, and listening to their stories of service during the few slow times during the day reminded me how lucky we are to have such dedicated, selfless people volunteering to serve us all. One of these fellas unleashed his inner child when he was given the chance to yell outside “the Polls are open!” “Isn’t this great?” he said.

Before the polls opened at 8:00 a.m. MT, our poll chief asked us why we were doing this work on Election Day. One guy said simply, “this country has been really good to me.” Indeed. I hope we don’t blow it in the coming days, weeks, and months.

Terry Ryan served as an Ada County Poll worker in Idaho. His day job is serving as CEO of the Boise-based education nonprofit Bluum.

Spend a few minutes on education Twitter or listening to the loudest special-interest voices, and you’d think the future of public education hinges on whether Mitch McConnell, Nancy Pelosi, and the president can agree to another stimulus deal. That’s just a short-term Washington game—that will likely soon have a new roster of players. It’s the long game on fiscal policy that should be most worrying school leaders.

It’s obvious that American schools need more funding right now. Live instruction costs more during a pandemic, and while so far the economic impact of Covid-19 on schools is not as dire as predicted, we’re not out of the woods yet—by a long shot. And unless you’ve been sleeping since March, you’ve probably noticed how the coronavirus has laid bare various inequities that pervade our education system.

Still, it’s easy to forget we’re living in what’s been a golden era of education spending. Since World War II, the demographic emphasis of public expenditures has been on the young. Whether it’s the GI Bill, many Great Society programs, or school funding propelled by well-organized teachers unions, the K–12 spending curve has been consistently, as the Rolling Stones might say, going up up up up up.

There is a durable myth in the education world that we haven’t gotten much for that spending. That’s wrong. While reasonable people can disagree about specific impacts, overall, we’ve built a more inclusive school system that doesn’t simply overlook a lot of kids. But that debate misses the point—the nation’s demographic focus is changing.

The Census Bureau projects that by 2034, Americans sixty-five and over will outnumber those under eighteen. That’s unprecedented. As my colleague Jennifer O’Neal Schiess explains, state tax dollars pay for a range of services, with the largest proportion in most states going to K–12 public education. As the older population grows, we’ll see more states going the way of Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Illinois, all of which spent more on Medicaid than K–12 education in 2018. Most states have a balanced budget requirement, so as health care costs take up a larger share, school budgets will have to shrink unless taxes increase.

The challenge will be especially stark in the Northeast and Midwest. In Pennsylvania, the senior population is growing twenty times faster than the overall population. According to its Independent Fiscal Office, the annual cost of providing senior programs is increasing twice as quickly as the revenue sources that fund them. This will create downward pressure on other categories of spending.

As the population grows older, there will also be considerable challenges with managing retirements costs and pensions, both of which could impact state budgets. In 2018, half of all states experienced growing pension debt, meaning future obligations they have promised but not yet paid for. These higher costs typically mean that states will have less money to fund other public services, including education.

The common assumption around the education world is that there is always more money. And there are some measures to raise funding for schools via various tax schemes on the ballot in states like Arizona and California. How they fare with the electorate will be an important signal about the public appetite for raising taxes to pay for new education spending.

Regardless of what happens at the ballot box, schools will also have to focus on productivity and efficiency in ways that have been uncomfortable in the past. We’ve focused on teacher quantity over teacher quality—in other words, more teachers rather than better paid-ones. The education system also resists differentiation in order to get better results—for instance, increasing the size of math classes while making English classes smaller to accommodate more focus on writing. Constrained resources will force hard conversations about these and other choices.

Those conversations are happening. My Bellwether colleagues, for instance, recently published an entire series about the looming fiscal crisis for education. They’re right to sound the alarm on what’s happening today. But we can’t just focus on the here and now and miss education’s fiscal forest for its most visible trees. As dire as things seem today, it’s just a skirmish in the coming war for resources.

Editor’s note: This was first published by The 74.

Are schools essential or aren’t they? Are teachers essential workers or aren’t they? How would Americans respond if large numbers of doctors, nurses, policemen, firemen, and postal workers simply opted to stay home—and their unions defended them? If you’re essential, you go to work. Some of your work you can maybe do from home, but all your work needs to be done and done well because society is counting on you.

My wife and son operate a non-profit medical research lab that’s deemed essential under the state’s rules and that’s stayed open throughout the pandemic (including some Covid-related work). While making allowances for staffers with health issues and childcare difficulties, they’ve been able to count on almost everyone showing up regularly, with some coming in on the days when they cannot effectively do their work remotely.

But the public schools of Montgomery County, Maryland, where we live and where the lab is located, remain completely closed, not because the superintendent and board don’t want them open or haven’t made elaborate plans for getting them open safely, at least for students in greatest need, but because their employee unions are obdurate. This despite strong pushes from the State Superintendent for Montgomery County to join most of Maryland’s other districts in getting kids back to school.

Across the line in D.C., schools chancellor Lewis Ferebee has just been forced by the obduracy of his teachers union to cancel carefully-made plans to bring needy elementary students back to school next week.

And some kids I know well (names redacted to protect the innocent) who go to expensive private schools that were planning to get them back in class at least a couple of days each week have just been advised that only a handful of teachers will actually be present in person, leading the schools to suggest that families may wish to change their plans and stick with virtual education from home.

This is insane and irresponsible. We know from a thousand sources that almost all kids are better off in school, both for purposes of academic learning and for all manner of social, socialization, and SEL benefits. We know that poor and minority students are harmed the most by not going to school. We know that millions of parents’ lives have been dealt extremely damaging blows by having to forego their jobs and other obligations in order to care for their out-of-school children. We know that there’s ample guidance about how to reopen schools in ways that minimize the risks to the health and safety of both children and adults

We also know that hundreds of schools and school systems are actually doing this. When the Washington Post surveyed the country’s fifty biggest districts a couple of weeks back, it found that “twenty-four have resumed in-person classes for large groups of students, and eleven others plan to in the coming weeks.... Four more have opened, or plan to open, for small groups of students who need extra attention.” Many private schools are managing this, too, including both day schools and fancy boarding schools. So are lots of charter schools.

Nobody should be cavalier about this. Covid-19 is real and on the rise. A number of teachers and other school staff are elderly or have preexisting medical conditions. Social distancing and ventilation are challenges for many schools, and most that have reopened are on split-shifts for kids, with some instruction online, with some instructors working from home, and usually with full online options for families that prefer it and kids who can’t risk entering the building.

Given the choice, lots of families are opting for the online version. But at least they have a choice!

The pandemic situation is obviously in flux, and many schools and districts have had to change plans, most often shifting from in-person or hybrid to fully online, sometimes because of the medical situation in their communities—but, sadly, sometimes because of teacher resistance to coming back to work, no matter the schools’ careful planning to bring them back safely. That has happened in the charter sector, too, showing that unions aren’t always the reason for teachers’ resistance to returning to their classrooms.

Nor is it entirely partisan. Though some people doubtless concluded that if Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos want schools open, it must be a bad idea, in a number of cities—e.g., Washington, San Francisco, even New York—Democratic mayors have pushed their schools to reopen.

But it’s not nonpartisan, either. While Trump has pressed schools to open, Joe Biden has excused them for staying closed on grounds that Uncle Sam hasn’t ponied up enough money to cover the costs of opening, the suggestion being that obdurate Republicans are the problem. (If more stimulus dollars get appropriated post-election, will all schools swiftly reopen?) 

I understand that getting schools reopened is complicated and carries real risks. The big-picture question is whether those risks are greater for our kids and our society than keeping schools closed and kids at home.

Complicated, yes, and when done intelligently and safely it’s not cheap. But it’s not impossible! That’s true of labs and hospitals, too, of fire departments and police stations and post offices. But to my knowledge, they’re all open. Because they’re essential. And so are the people who work in them.

Are schools essential or aren’t they? If they are, weren’t they also essential in September? Now it’s November, for Pete’s sake. How many schools and school systems wasted the past two months negotiating or dithering or hoping instead of taking decisive action—action that’s arguably tougher to take today because of the virus resurgence.

In the final analysis, do schools exist for the benefit of kids and parents and taxpayers and American society or for the benefit of their employees? If some are open, more could be. If many are open, most could be. When most are open, almost all could be. Why wasn’t that happening yesterday? Why is that not happening now?

Ever since the first charter schools emerged almost thirty years ago, the sector has shown a remarkable ability to address the concerns of its sharpest critics, especially progressives. Many on the left detested charters run by for-profit companies—and the proportion of such schools has dropped precipitously. Critics argued that charters were facilitating racial segregation, whereupon “diverse by design” charters popped up nationwide. Others worried that too few charter schools were led by educators of color; initiatives to address that concern started making real inroads.

Now, however, a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision is introducing a new type of charter school to the movement that’s likely to cheer conservatives but alarm many progressives: the religiously-affiliated charter. Regardless of who wins the nation’s tightly contested election, such charter schools are likely coming to a neighborhood near you. So those of us in the charter movement need to figure out how to keep them from splitting the charter coalition.

What’s essential to understand is the distinction between religiously-affiliated charter schools and charter schools that can actually offer religious instruction. The first is probably now required in states that allow charter schools under the U.S. Constitution, as interpreted by the current Supreme Court. The latter might be—but that’s still an open question. That’s why Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos recently said that religious organizations would no longer be prohibited from applying for federal Charter School Program grants—but didn’t go so far as to say that such entities could actually provide religious instruction in their schools.

At issue is the Free Exercise Clause under the First Amendment. In the 2017 decision in Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia v. Comer, the Court ruled 7-2 that it was unconstitutional for a state to discriminate against religious organizations when making grants to non-profit organizations for non-sectarian purposes. (At issue in that case was a program to pay for safety improvements for pre-school playgrounds.) Then, in June 2020, a 5-4 majority ruled in Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue that this reasoning applied to tax-credit scholarship programs as well; if states want to fund private school scholarships they cannot exclude religious schools from their programs, as that violates the Free Exercise Clause.

What does that mean for charter schools? Especially given that federal law allows grants under the Charter Schools Program to flow only to non-sectarian schools, and that states also prohibit charters from being run by religious organizations or teaching religion? (Churches and other religious organizations have housed legally distinct charters in their buildings from almost the beginning. And some religious schools—especially Catholic ones—have converted to charter status.) As education law expert Joshua Dunn explained in Education Next, it comes down to a distinction between religious “status” and religious “use”:

In Trinity and Espinoza, the states had discriminated solely on the basis of the religious status of the institutions. The court left the door open a crack to possible state-funding restrictions if those constraints were based on religious use. That is, the courts might distinguish between funding for a playground and funding for religious education.

However, it seems the majority has little appetite for such limitations. In Justice Neil Gorsuch’s concurrence in Espinoza, he asserted that the status-versus-use distinction does not work under the Free Exercise Clause. He noted that the clause guarantees exercise of religion, not just the right to believe or hold a religious “status.” Believers must be able to act on their beliefs.

But Justice Breyer, writing in dissent, did not agree. Dunn again:

Breyer, who joined the majority in Trinity Lutheran, said Espinoza was different because Montana’s scholarship program clearly subsidized religious instruction, as opposed to the funding of playground resurfacing, which he views as categorically different….“What about charter schools? States vary widely in how they permit charter schools to be structured, funded, and controlled. How would the majority’s rule distinguish between those States in which support for charter schools is akin to public school funding and those in which it triggers a constitutional obligation to fund private religious schools?”

The “status” versus “use” debate also featured prominently in an unanimous ruling by a federal court last week, which found that Maine’s “tuitioning” program does not violate the U.S. Constitution even though it excludes religious schools. For over a century, some sparsely populated towns in Maine and elsewhere in northern New England have paid the tuition for students in their catchment zones to attend private high schools, rather take on the cost of building and running their own public schools. But parents are not allowed to choose religious private schools. As Education Week’s Mark Walsh explained:

The appeals court said it was significant that the Supreme Court rulings were based on the religious status of the institutions denied participation in the funding programs at issue. Maine's program imposes a prohibition based on religious "use" of the state aid, the court concluded.

"From this vantage, we find it significant that Maine provides tuition assistance only to those who cannot get the benefits of a free public school education directly from" one of the state's 260 school administrative units, or SAUs, the court said.

This likely won’t be the last word. The Institute for Justice has already announced that it will appeal the decision to the Supreme Court, which it hopes will clarify that religious “use” is no reason to exclude religious schools from programs like these.

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Back to charter schools: DeVos is probably right that it’s unconstitutional to prohibit religious organizations from applying to create charter schools, even if it’s not yet clear whether the Constitution would protect their ability to run those schools as religious entities. To see the consequences, it’s helpful to examine how state laws currently handle the issue. Let’s look at Ohio, where the Thomas B. Fordham Institute’s sister organization, the Fordham Foundation, is a charter authorizer.

Sections 3314.029 and 3314.03 of the Ohio Revised Code state that a proposal for a charter school must include a statement promising that the proposed school will be “nonsectarian in its programs, admission policies, employment practices, and all other operations, and will not be operated by a sectarian school or religious institution.” Thus, as an approved authorizer operating under contract with the Ohio Department of Education, we at Fordham reject any application that proposes to be sectarian or to be operated by a sectarian school or religious organization—even if the application would otherwise lead to a fine school that would warrant our serious consideration.

Most likely, the State of Ohio, and authorizers like Fordham, are now violating the U.S. Constitution by enforcing the prohibition on schools “operated by a sectarian school or religious organization.” But it’s not yet clear whether we may continue to reject a school just because it is sectarian “in its programs, admission policies, employment practices, and all other operations.”

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Time will tell what this will mean for the charter school movement and the politics surrounding it. It seems likely that the creation of religiously-affiliated charter schools will broaden the racial divide on the left when it comes to support or opposition for charter schools. Black and Hispanic churches may see chartering as a great opportunity to serve the children in their communities in new ways. White liberals—a group that increasingly identifies as non-religious—will likely find this to be yet another reason to oppose charters. Especially, if some day, the U.S. Supreme Court rules that churches that run charter schools may also provide religious instruction.