Have Charters Been Captured By The Wokeness?

Pity the poor charter school advocates. Once upon a time they were the darlings of the "school choice" crowd. But then privatizers and the culture panic crowd saw a chance to pursue their true love-- taxpayer-funded vouchers-- and the charter school fans suddenly found that their prom date was already out the door with someone else.

This is not aided by decisions like the Oklahoma high court ruling that A) charters are so public schools and so B) they have to follow the same rules. Granted, SCOTUS may eventually overturn that, but in the meantime, charters were just a foot in the door, and now that privatizers have wedged the door open, they're just going to stomp on charter toes on their way through.

An excellent example comes from the Heritage Foundation, where scholars Jay Greene, Ian Kingsbury, and Jason Bedrick have issued a Report (aka Blog Post With Professional Grade header) entitled "The Woke Capture of Charter Schools" which uses Woke Panic as a way to discredit charter schools, even as it discards some of the old choicer tropes.

A host of assumptions

To make their argument work, they have to first posit that "woke" is unpopular with parents. Sure, they write, there are some woke-preferring parents out there, but "tend to be a distinct minority." But "past research suggests" that "when parents have more control over the education of their own children, that education tends to be less woke." I would be interesting and looking at that research, but we'll get back to that.

Now we're off and running. The anti-woke parent preference is now a given, as in "Given that parental empowerment is associated with less woke education..." They argue that given that given, charters ought to be less woke than nearby public schools. But what we're going to discover that this is not true--that charter schools are in many cases more wokified than their public school neighbors. 

How could such a thing be? Let's consider the possible explanations:

1) The nearby public schools are not actually very woke at all.

2) The instrument used to measure wokitude is not very accurate.

3) You assumption that a parent-driven education market favors non-wokeness is incorrect.

4) Some outside force is forcing charters to be excessively woke. This would also require us to consider

4a) Market forces that should be forcing the closure of schools built on unpopular values-- for some reason, that market dynamic is not working.

Yes, they're going with explanation four. 

Charter schools, on the other hand, might become less responsive to the preferences of local parents if they have to please state authorizers to be established and remain open and if they are overly dependent on national philanthropies to subsidize their operations. Those charter schools may have to adopt woke values to gain permission to open from the public authorities that grant them their charter and to receive funding, especially for capital expenses, from large donors with progressive values.

So here our assumption is that authorizers and charter-backing philanthropists are themselves in with the woke. The report is going to try address a bunch of the assumptions we have breezed past so far, but first, let's roll out the argument that's really being made here, one more knife in the back of the charter movement. Maybe parents choose charters because they are woke, or maybe because the charter offers safety and quality instruction, so the wokeness is overlooked. 

By contrast, policies that permit private school choice with vouchers or K–12 education savings accounts do not require permission from an authorizer for schools to open their doors and therefore are less likely to require capital funds from donors since they often already have school buildings. That means that private schools are typically more directly accountable to parents than charter schools and so are more likely to reflect the values of the families they serve.

Got it? Taxpayer-funded vouchers provide better, more correct choices. Are we going to do some kind of research to establish that? No.

So let's start looking at the foundation beneath some of our assumptions.

When parents have more control over the education of their own children, that education tends to be less woke

The writers will now cite some surveys. Heritage itself found that 83% of parents nationwide believe their children's school should “engage with character and virtue.” A large survey of using school choice found that religious environment and instruction made the list of top three factors behind their choice. An EdChoice survey found parents want children to learn to discuss contentious topics in a calm and rational matter, and to become patriotic. Same survey found a majority of parents want teachers to keep their politics to themselves, no naughty books, and no discussion of LGBTQ issues. 

They also cite the USC survey "Searching for Common Ground" as proof that parents mostly don't want various topics discussed, without mentioning that the report's delving into wide gaps between different groups of parents (they especially don't mention that respondents overwhelmingly say they would rather their tax dollars go to support public school than to send a child to a private school).

We could dig into the quality of the surveys performed by people with a definite privatized ax to grind, but the bottom, line here is that if this is meant to support the boldfaced assertion, it doesn't. It doesn't show that, for instance, "character and virtue" are somehow incompatible with wokosity. And it certainly doesn't show that when parents have more control over their children's education, that education is less woke.

Regulations beget wokeness

"Given that markets tend to reflect the preferences of consumers and that most parents prioritize the teaching of values and want schools that eschew “woke” values," the charter school sector ought not to be woke. Except those "givens" are both doing huge amounts of heavy lifting. 

Highly regulated and constrained markets are not as effective as freer markers at giving consumers what they want. 

The charter market is highly regulated and constrained. The authors are going to keep saying this without any particular support other than to nod at another Heritage Foundation report by two of the authors of this one that declared that highly regulated states were more woke than less regulated ones. Missing from both that report and this one is any example of a rule or regulation that fosters all the woke. Exactly what rules and regulations lead to all this wokosity? The authors never say.

Heavy regulations make it more difficult to open and operate charter schools, thereby giving more power to charter school authorizers and philanthropies that help charter schools open. If those gatekeeper organizations espouse certain values, then it should be no surprise when charter schools in states with heavier regulations espouse values that are closer to them than to the general population of parents.

Which "certain values," and how are these values translated into specific rules and regulations. Hard to say. Is it just a sort of atmosphere that hangs over the authorizers and philanthropists? We'll get to that.

The woke atmosphere

The National Association of Charter School Authorizers is all up the wokeness, arguing for social justice and equity and vocally in support of DEI.

The Walton Family Foundation is woke! Who knew? But among its priorities in grant making has been DEI. The WFF even sponsored a drag show.

The Gates Foundation? Those guys have been pushing woke math and critical race theory.

NewSchools Venture Fund? All over the DEI. 

Again, we're cutting so many corners. Is DEI woke? Is it an idea co-opted by corporations and implemented as a sort of BS paperwork exercise? Are the corporate hedge fund guys who animate much of the charter industry all that interested in actual DEI, or will the performative type suit them? 

The writers cite KIPP's decision to be less racist as one sign of creeping wokeness, hinting that it was just to mollify authorizers, because the 500-pound gorilla of the charter school sector needs to worry about such things. They also raise the specter of those various LGBTQ charters that "have a focus on indoctrinating students in radical gender ideology." 

Sigh. This is the classic cultural conservative stance. These things that you say are a problem aren't a problem, says I, so therefor your attempts to address the problems must just be made up excuses to try some political trick. Did KIPP have sincere concerns about its treatment of Black students? Are there reasons for LGBTQ students to want a separate educational environment? Heritage is just going to chalk it up to wokeness.

The irony here is that they already know a way to untangle this mess. Let the invisible hand sort it out. Start a hundred LGBTQ charters; if nobody wants that, then 99 of them will go out of business. The report is heavy on explaining why there are an excessive number of wokinated charters, but it doesn't really address why people choose them and the market supports them. "It's not a fully free market" explains why these schools exist, but not why parents choose them. If the argument is that parents choose these schools for academics or safety, well, that's the market saying that it cares more about safety and academics than it does about wokeness. You can argue that the market wants the wrong things, but the invisible hand wants what the invisible hand wants.

Measuring the woke

So how did Heritage reach the conclusion that charters are more wokinated than their corresponding public schools? By going on line and looking at handbooks and scanning for certain woke words that "signal" wokeness in the school.

They "repurposed" the stuff they collected for the previous report, and found 211 handbooks they could pair with local public schools. That left them with 211 charter schools (out of around 7800) to compare with 211 public schools (out of roughly 97,000). The sampling by state is a bit wonky-- Utah is represented by 16 pairs, Colorado by 14, Pennsylvania by 12. Florida gets 4 pairs, California 3, Michigan 5, and Texas and Tennessee just 1. The authors blame this in part on public school handbook availability and say that's probably not a source of bias. I'm wondering if there's a paper in relating wokeness to being forward-thinking enough to put your handbook on line.

So, searching for the keywords-- diversity, equity, inclusion, justice, restorative, social-emotional, gender identity, and culturally relevant/affirming. The presence of those words is "woke" signalling. Here are the results

Note that they indicate that the ties mostly occur when both schools have zero instances. So one could argue that the results might show that mostly, nobody is wokified.

Or one could argue that such a small, oddly-distributed sampling is not very useful for drawing conclusions about the nation as a whole.

Blaming the authorizers

The report includes a whole section on how NACSA uses its power as a "kingmaker" to push wokeness. I have questions. 

One would be what NACSA board members like Rick Hess (American Enterprise Institute) and Kathryn Mullen Upton (Vice President for Sponsorship & Dayton Initiatives, Fordham Foundation) would have to say about the notion that they are out there pushing woke. 

Another would be just how far reaching NACSA's reach might be. For instance, remember that Pennsylvania is 12 of the 211 samples, but in Pennsylvania, charters are authorized by local school districts. In states where elected school boards are the authorizers, do they belong to, listen to, or care about what NACSA has to say? 

Recommendations

Defund NACSA. Cut them off from state and federal funds, and take away their power, such as it may be. Cut the CSP? That sounds excellent; it has blown a ton of money precisely by not being regulated nearly enough to guard against fraud and waste. 

States should have multiple authorizers of charter schools. You know what would make an interesting study? Compare states like Michigan, where authorizers spring up like wildflowers, so much so that charter hopefuls can go authorizer shopping, and Pennsylvania, where elected school boards authorize. 

Charters should get long term charters, and not be subject to closure for things like test scores or what Heritage calls "the preferences of regulators," as if authorizers are out there shutting down charters on a personal whim rather than a failure to perform. How far we have come from the days when charter fans declared that charters were about trading autonomy for accountability. "Set the terms out in the charter, and if they fail to meet them, shut them down," was the old refrain of charter supporters. But then, as this report suggests, Heritage isn't really a charter supporter.

Last recommendation? More vouchers. 

So what have we got here?

It has been over two years since Jay Greene argued that the "school choice" movement should ditch all attempts to appeal to lefty things like equity and social justice and go all in with the culture panic crowd, and he has certainly done that. But that alliance comes with certain challenges, the biggest being that the culture panic crowd has zero interest in actual school choice.

So choicers can try to use this new frame of "school choice should be about having a school available that reflects the families values," but that's not what culture panickers want. They want a system that reflects their values and their values alone. The real consistent market-based, education freedom, school choice stance would be, "Look, choice is providing schools for lefties and conservatives and LGBTQ kids. Isn't that great."

Instead we get rhetoric about "rooting out DEI" and the evils of tax dollars going to LGBTQ charter schools. Culture panickers want one choice--their choice.

This suits privatizers insofar as it undercuts support for public education and makes that easier to dismantle. For that same reason, it suits them to attack charter schools for being too much like public schools. The foot that once propped the door open is now in the way, and just beyond the door is the land of All Voucher Education, with no oversight, no regulation, no accountability to anything except the market (in which they only believe in some of the time). Maybe if they feed the panic over "woke" (which means nothing in particular and everything about a pluralistic society) will help get enough people to rush the door and push us through it. 

There's a whole other missing piece for this research. DEI, SEL , restorative justice, and the other various woken buzzwords they're searching out are so very often signals for which there's no corresponding action. Is a school "woke" if it puts a bunch of wokified language in the brochure, but barely goes through the motions of implementing actual functional programs?

The whole report is a curious exercise in trying to feed that panic by invoking woke and using it to fill the empty parts of the argument. "We should have more vouchers and less public education!" Well, why exactly? "Look! The woke zombies are coming to get your kids! Run away!" But that gets us to a familiar place. In their conclusion, the authors write

School choice should empower parents to obtain an education for their own children that is consistent with their values.

We've done that. It's exactly how we got segregation academies in the post-Brown world.