New Orleans is an all-charter city. Is that a good thing?

This week, the last five traditional neighborhood schools in New Orleans’ Recovery School district were closed – making it the country’s first district made up entirely of charter schools.

That’s a good thing, right?

If you look at some of the baseline data, it’s hard not to say yes. According to the Washington Post‘s Lyndsey Layton, prior to Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans’ high school graduation rate was just over 50 percent. In 2013, it was just shy of 80 percent. Similarly, student math and reading scores have risen over thirty points higher than they were before the storm. Indeed, as longtime PBS education reporter John Merrow shows in his documentary film, Rebirth, there’s a lot to like about what’s happening in the Crescent City.

Of course, Merrow’s balanced coverage also exposes some of the problems with the reform strategy in New Orleans – from reduced financial oversight to increased social stratification. And community activists like Karran Harper Royal have gone further, arguing that school closures in cities like hers disproportionately affect African American students and families. “This push to close schools  . . . is the new Jim Crow,” she explained, pointing out that New Orleans’ “new normal” means something very different to residents like her. In an all-charter city, she says, “You have a chance, not a choice.”

Which is it? Are charter schools the answer? Or are they the beginning of the end of public education in America?

I’ve been thinking about these questions a lot these days, after spending the month of May traveling around the country to talk about my new book, which is (surprise surprise) all about school choice. What I learned can be boiled down to these two observations: first, school choice feels (and is) very different depending on where you live; and second, the question we ask when we talk about school choice – are charter schools the solution or the problem? – is not the question we should be asking.

With regard to the first point, let’s begin with a city like Washington, D.C., where enrollment in both charters and district schools is rising, and where the district and charter community are collaborative enough to have held their first unified lottery this year. Contrast that with a state like Michigan, where four out of five charter schools are for-profit entities. Then look at a city like Chicago, where more than fifty neighborhood schools have already been closed, where more will undoubtedly be shuttered this fall, and where shiny new ones are opening all the time – and this amid a larger climate of declining enrollment overall (you do the math), and you begin to see that speaking broadly about “school choice” or “charter schools” is appealingly simple, and completely inappropriate.

How choice feels depends on where you live, and how high (or low) the levels of trust, transparency, and cross-sector collaboration are in those communities. Period.

To be clear, school choice should feel different in different places, because different driving forces are at the root of different parts of the movement. Is the goal to build space for more innovation as a way to not just increase the number of charter schools but also create a rising tide that lifts all boats and improves all schools (of all stripes) in a city? I would argue that’s what’s happening, mostly, in D.C. Or is the goal to create a zero-sum game that results in the disappearance of everything old in order to make way for anything new? That’s what it feels like, partly, in Chicago.

Too often, our infatuation with charter schools has led too many of us – from soccer moms to President Obama – to equate them with reform. More charter schools, the logic goes, equals more quality and a reimagined public school system. And, to be sure, I’ve seen a lot more good charter schools in my travels than bad ones. But you can’t improve American public education, systemically, one school at a time (and, to be clear, although cities like New Orleans and D.C. are inundated, less than 5% of children nationwide attend charters).

This is not surprising to anyone who knows anything about systems change. “From a very early age,” Peter Senge writes in his classic book, The Fifth Discipline, “we are taught to break apart problems, to fragment the world.” This reflex makes complex tasks seem more approachable. But the truth is we all pay a price for deluding ourselves into thinking that complex problems can be addressed with piecemeal, or, in this case, school-by-school, solutions.

In Solving Tough Problems, Adam Kahane postulates that one reason we do this is because we fail to recognize the interplay of three different types of complexity: dynamic, generative, and social. “A problem has low dynamic complexity,” Kahane writes, “if cause and effect are close together in space and time. In a car engine, for example, causes produce effects that are nearby, immediate, and obvious; and so, why an engine doesn’t run can be understood and solved be testing and fixing one piece at a time.” By contrast, a problem has high dynamic complexity if cause and effect are far apart in space and time. This characterizes just about any major challenge faced by American public education today. Kahane says such problems “can only be understood systemically, taking account of the interrelationship among the pieces and the functioning of the system as a whole.

“A problem has low generative complexity,” he continues, “if its future is familiar and predictable. In a traditional village, for example, the future simply replays the past, and so solutions and rules from the past will work in the future.” By contrast, a problem has high generative complexity if its future is unfamiliar and unpredictable. Think again of the challenges faced by schools, which must depart from the traditional Industrial-era model of schooling to match the needs of students who are entering a radically different world than the one their parents grew up in. “Solutions to problems with high generative complexity cannot be calculated in advance, on paper, based on what has worked in the past, but have to be worked out as the situation unfolds.

“A problem has low social complexity if the people who are part of the problem have common assumptions, values, rationales, and objectives.” This may have been true in the past, when one’s neighborhood school was more likely to attract families of similar faiths, economic levels, and ethnicities. But a problem has high social complexity if the people who must solve it together see the world in very different ways. “Problems of high social complexity,” Kahane says, “cannot be peacefully solved by authorities from on high; the people involved must participate in creating and implementing solutions.”

So how do we identify solutions for a field that is marked by high degrees of dynamic, generative, and social complexity? One step is merely by asking the question, as opposed to debating whether we need more or less charter schools. And another step, impossible to avoid when the opening question is a different one, is to start seeing public schools and the communities they serve as systems, not parallel tracks.

Too often, this interdependence between charters and traditional public schools (not to mention between charters themselves) is given short shrift. Yet our still-nascent experiment in school choice – national and/or local – won’t work until we do. And although New Orleans’ highly localized experiment as an all-charter city may ultimately succeed, its strategy, applied nationwide, is a fool’s errand. “The most profound strategy for changing a living network comes from biology,” Meg Wheatley explains in Leadership & The New Science. “If a system is in trouble, it can only be restored by connecting itself to more of itself.”

So what does this all mean?

To unleash the sort of generative feedback loop that can improve all schools, we must see reform as a both/and proposition. We need to raze and rebuild, and we need to preserve and improve. We need the ingenuity of single-school autonomy, and we need the scalability of whole-community structures. We need to incentivize schools to instill in young people the skills, habits and dispositions they’ll need to navigate this brave new world, and we need to stop rewarding schools that are merely perfecting our ability to succeed in a system that no longer serves our interests. And, finally, we need to realize that as appealing as it may be to assume otherwise, concepts like “choice” and “charter” are not monolithic terms; they are fluid, fulsome, and unfolding before our eyes.

In New Orleans, and everywhere else, we remain in the eye of the storm.

(This column originally appeared in Education Week.)

Sleepless in Seattle? My interview with the Seattle Times

The Seattle Times’ excellent education reporter, Claudia Rowe, published a nice summary of a long conversation we had about school reform when I was in town for an event at the public library. See what you think (and check out the original link here.)

First he was a private school teacher in New York City. Then, briefly, a public school teacher. After that, Sam Chaltain spent years studying schools across the country trying to determine what qualities were common to the very best.

In Washington, D.C., his current hometown, Chaltain got an unusual opportunity to examine two vastly different models up close. For nine months, he observed a new charter program struggling to get off the ground, and contrasted this with the daily ebb-and-flow of life at a 90-year-old neighborhood school. The result is Our School: Searching for Community in the Era of Choice.

Chaltain, 43, insists that he never intended to compare and contrast the schools in order to anoint one better than the other. Rather, he strives to present on-the-ground realities in each, with a mind toward suggesting a path forward. As Washington state prepares to open its own charter programs next year, his experience may have particular resonance for public school parents faced, for the first time, with a choice.

What follows is a condensed version of a conversation between Chaltain and The Seattle Times. He will be discussing his book at Powell’s in Portland on May 21.

Q: As you know, Washington is set to open its first charter schools next year. Can you share any lessons learned from your observations of a first-year program in action?

A: I’d say get away from the false notion that the solution relies on either more — or less — charter schools. Charters and public schools need each others’ strengths. What districts need most is a greater sense of innovation, the ability to think in new ways about old problems. Charters have all those things in spades — by design, everything is up for re-creation, all the way down to report cards.

So ask: How can you ensure that not everything is up for reinvention? Are there structures that can connect district schools and these autonomous charters?

Q: You were a teacher yourself. Why did you step away from the classroom after six months as a public school educator? What was unworkable there?

A: In a word, everything. But it was less about that school than my realization that teaching is really unsustainable work. What made it unsustainable were inefficiencies that overwhelmed any sense of reward you got from the kids. We were so clearly undervalued. Think about it. First, there are the pressures of trying to be a good teacher, 180 days a year, five presentations a day, working with 100 to 200 students. Add their parents into that, and it’s managing up to 200 relationships. Teachers are being asked to do things that they’re not fully equipped to do.

Q: You knew a lot going into your year-long school observation project. In the end, did anything surprise you?

A: Yes, the degree to which schools are almost entirely staffed by young, single women who had basically accepted the idea that the way to solve our problems in education was with a disposable work force. That’s insane. You would never have Doctors for America, doing two-year stints as a pit stop on the way to some other career. Yet in teaching we accept this. Part of it has to do with the ongoing misogyny of our culture. Teaching is still seen as women’s work, a sub-profession. Not only is that incorrect, it’s a horrible strategy for dealing with the one institution that offers the closest thing to a silver bullet that we have in American society.

Q: What’s common to good schools — whether publicly or privately funded?

A: The truth is most schools are pretty good. Very few are truly great. But among those you see again and again that they create a culture among the adults that is collaborative, transparent and empowering. Kids pass through. Adults are the keepers of the culture. The way that you make lasting change is by valuing and supporting the adults, the educators. We may give lip service to this, but we lack sufficient examples of how to do it well. The reality is, we’re still more likely to be persuaded by the illusory hardness of the quantitative proof — test scores  even though there is an overwhelming consensus that reading and math scores are not enough.

Q: You seem to be advocating that we take a few breaths and decide, first, how we define success. Then, how to measure it. But isn’t the glacial pace of innovation part of the problem?

A: The question is not: Are charter schools the answer or the problem? It’s not even, how do we close the achievement gap? The question is, what does high-quality teaching actually look like? What all of us need to do is spend some time thinking about what are the old habits that we need to let go of in order to let new ideas come into being? It’s about being clearer in the questions we ask.

Q: About the national picture, are you optimistic? Worried?

A: All of the above. I’m optimistic that we’re starting to shift from the job of the kid is to adjust to the school, and toward the job of the school is to adjust to the kid. After that, I’m worried. We overvalue the things that we can quantifiably measure. We continue to speak in oppositional, two-dimensional terms about one another. You’re either working for the righteous or the damned. But it’s not about pro- and anti-. It’s about to-what-end?

OK, Brown v. Board is 60; Now What?

As I travel around the country this month, participating in public conversations about the promise and peril of school choice, it seems fitting that right as we marked the 60th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, I would end up having lunch with Michael Alves.

For those of you that don’t know, Alves has made a career out of helping communities and districts craft new student assignment policies that promote greater equity throughout their schools.

The 1980 effort to create more diverse schools in Cambridge, Massachusetts? That was Alves. The celebrated effort to merge city and county schools in Raleigh, North Carolina? Alves. Indeed, although as recently as 2000 the number of U.S. school districts pursuing socioeconomic integration policies could be added up on one hand, today there are more than 80 that are using socioeconomic status as a factor in student assignment – and Alves has had a hand in almost all of them.

A bald, jovial Bostonian who raised his six boys in a stately house that was built in 1882, Alves provides a clarity to core questions of equity that I rarely encounter in school reform circles. “The problem with most of the current efforts around school choice,” he explained, “is that we aren’t clear on what the goals are. The goal can’t be a zero-sum game between charters and districts. So how do kids get distributed? In my mind, the purpose of any student assignment policy should be to facilitate the mission and vision of the district. Is our goal to promote greater socioeconomic diversity? Are we motivated by a need to ease overcrowding? Whatever the answer, you can’t craft a good plan unless you really understand the makeup of your community. And the reality is that charters are operating as their own islands, and most school districts don’t know much more than the percentage of their kids that receive free and reduced lunch. That’s not good enough.”

To help districts solve this information problem, Alves has a simple solution: treat student registration the way an obstetrician treats a pregnant mother’s first visit to the doctor’s office. “When a couple makes that first visit to the OB/GYN,” he says, “the doctor gets all kinds of information – not to hurt the child, but to help him. We tell districts to do the same. When that parent registers their child, schools should be asking all kinds of questions (all of which are voluntary): what is the monthly income of the household; how many adults are in the house; how many other children are there in the house; what is the highest educational attainment level of the parents; what sort of preschool program was the child enrolled in; and so on.

“Everything we ask is designed to create an assignment algorithm that correlates to educational readiness while still prioritizing proximity,” Alves continued. “Once districts start to understand, on a more granular level, where their kids are coming from and what their school readiness is likely to be, they have the chance to craft assignment policies that ensure a more equitable distribution of children and families across their network of schools.”

“We have diversity everywhere, except in schools. “Where you live, you live. But that doesn’t mean you have to go to school strictly based on where you live.”

For me, that last point is one we need to take more seriously as we mark the 60th anniversary of The U.S. Supreme Court’s historic decision in Brown – and our inability to fulfill its promise. Too often, we assume that schools and school policies can somehow solve by themselves the intractable, entrenched legacies of race-and class-based inequity in American society. But schools can’t impact economic and housing policies, or deepen our commitment to public health. And even though the Court came within one vote, in 1973, of ruling that the way we fund schools – via property taxes – was unconstitutional, the reality is that many of our most celebrated school reform efforts are actually deepening, not diminishing, our commitment to “separate but equal” schools.

This is why I support school choice – albeit not the limited concept of choice that so many want to promote. Simply put, you can’t solve the equity problem in American society merely by razing the old system and rebuilding everything from scratch. But neither can you solve it solely by preserving and improving what we already have; a both/and strategy is needed, one that creates space for new schools and ideas, and that puts as much energy into renovating the old as it does to revering the new.

What would such a strategy look like? I’d start by having more urban districts mirror the efforts of Boston Public Schools, which has built into its traditional district model the space to seed 21 schools that have charter-like autonomy, and keep them within the larger network of the district. Does the system work perfectly in its efforts to have the best ideas of those pilot schools funnel through the rest of the schools in the district? No. But as Mission Hill principal Ayla Gavins puts it, “what the pilot program does is create the conditions for greater innovation and collaboration to take place; the rest is up to us.”

Next, I’d encourage more schools to adopt intentional, district-wide socioeconomic diversity assignment policies – the sorts of policies Michael Alves has been tinkering with for over thirty years. “I believe a central goal for any district should be to help any kid at any school feel like, “No matter who I am, I fit in somewhere at that school. No one wants to be the ‘only’ anything – that’s the goal; that’s inclusion. And that’s the only way, until these other aspects of our society change, we can get closer to the promise of Brown.”

Raze and renovate. Freedom within structure. And policies that balance individual choice alongside communal commitments to equity.

Would that sort of recipe get us closer to honoring the Court’s declaration, on May 17, 1954, that education is “a right which must be made available to all on equal terms?”

I think it would.

(This article originally appeared in Education Week.)

Is there a good way to close a neighborhood school?

I just spent some time learning about a remarkable public school in Burlington, Vermont — the Sustainability Academy — and perhaps the most remarkable thing I heard was the way it turned a potentially catastrophic community event — the closing of a neighborhood school — into a positive success story that has deepened, not diminished, Burlington’s sense of community.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this issue recently, not least because I’ll be speaking next week in Chicago — a city whose public school closings have been particularly tense and polarizing. So I asked several members of the SA community to help me understand how they could turn a struggling local school in a struggling neighborhood with declining attendance into a vibrant magnet school at which, in the words of parent Maleka Clarke, “because everyone is different, no one is different.”

You can read more about the school’s transformation here, but when it comes to the core ingredients required to remake a school in inclusive, constructive ways, here’s what they outlined:

  • Choice for families, so that no one is being redistricted into something that is not of their choosing;
  • A sense of permission, from the superintendent, to think innovatively and create something different and new;
  • The presence of “positive mediation,” one in which members of the previous school, the current community, and the new leadership are facilitated through some shared strategic planning;
  • Skilled leadership — democratic, participatory, and strategic — that can guide the thinking about what will happen next, and that prioritizes “creating an environment where all voices can be heard, and where a group’s best thinking can emerge”; and
  • Pilot funds that help the school team plan and experiment.

Were any of these elements in place during the school closings in Chicago? Would the presence of any or most of them have helped ensure a more positive result? In short, what must cities start, stop, and keep doing when it comes to making tough decisions about which schools will continue, which schools will be shuttered, and which kinds of schools will take their place?