Recently, someone representing a state official responded to an Arizona media outlet inquiry about the Empowerment Scholarship 
Accounts program and referred to “tutoring and babysitting.” Consequently, Arizona’s school district industrial lobbying complex went predictably bananas, even though babysitting is not now, nor ever has been an allowable expense under the program. Even though the official has since clarified their statement to note that babysitting is not an allowable expense. Blah blah blah no age requirements for tutoring yadda yadda yadda (move on to the next manufactured outrage).
This is all to do about nothing, but it is worthwhile to pause a moment to note that tutoring centers with strong reputations do routinely hire high school students for tutoring positions. I am aware of this because two of my children tutored math as high school students, and one became an assistant center director as a high school student. The companies establish the mathematical abilities of tutors before hiring them by testing them and then give them established protocols to follow. If they prove ineffective, they lose customers. A great many Arizona high school students are not only completely capable of math tutoring, but I am also willing to wager that neither me nor m(any) of Arizona’s journalism community would fare well against them in a mathematics contest.
Now…about this babysitting business. The Arizona school district industrial lobbying complex and their oh-so-willing media dupes grousing about “babysitting” is too rich for words.
In the 2024 NAEP, 49% of Arizona fourth grade students attending district schools scored “below basic” in reading. I’m not sure what those students were doing over the past five years, but it did not seem to involve much, well, learning. If we break out Arizona district scores apart from the students attending charter schools, eighth grade reading looked like this in 2024:
Usual caveats apply (sampling, raw scores imperfect proxy for school quality etc.) but —cough — if anyone is engaged in babysitting, you don’t want to go searching for it in tutoring centers: Arizona school district reading scores seem to indicate that they have jumped into babysitting with both feet.
Speaking of tutoring math, NAEP also tests math. Perhaps things won’t look so bad for Arizona school districts if we examine the math scores. Or then again, maybe not:
So, there is a brisk trade in tutoring in Arizona, and we are in no position to turn up our noses at bright and capable high school tutors for younger students. As for babysitting, it seems to be in mass production in Arizona’s district schools.
**SPOILER ALERT! DO NOT READ IF YOU ARE UNDER THE AGE OF 8**
Western cultures, for some strange reason, involve rituals where we pretend that various “fairy creatures” exist, particularly with children: the Tooth Fairy, a jolly old elf with flying reindeer who brought me an awesome Big Wheel in 1973, egg and goody hiding rabbits, etc. When I became a parent, I played along with these rituals, but then at some point questioned why I was doing it. On the one hand, I didn’t want my children to be those killjoy types who went around bursting the bubbles of other kids. On the other hand, I did not want to train my children not to trust me. I decided to allow the “fun” to go on until they each reached a certain age, then to explain to them that these things are traditions and that it would be best to allow their friends to figure it out on their own.
So, dear reader, I assume that you have reached a certain age and that you are prepared to know the truth about the last fairy creature. Belief in this one tends to persist much longer than the others and is alas, more detrimental. Sorry to be a killjoy, but here goes:
Philosopher kings are not real.
This was my main thought upon reading Mike McShane’s recent entry in a debate about school choice regulation. Go read it. I’ll wait here.
Go on…
Okay, good. My favorite part involved the Gilded Age meat baron, but McShane made several crucial points. Local school boards, state governments and the federal government all regulate public schools in a very active fashion. I could produce multiple graphs from NAEP, PISA, etc., showing what a pig’s breakfast American academic achievement has become, but you have already seen them, so I will spare you. Why are American schools so wretched despite so much regulation? Oh well, that is simple: regulation is not made by philosopher-kings but rather by politics. Politics has an amazingly consistent record of fouling things up.
The philosopher-king fairies, invented by Plato, are a specially trained and educated aesthetic elite who, disinterested in fame or wealth, love only wisdom and justice. Having thus earned the right to rule over us lesser mortals, we proles should feel deferential and deeply grateful for their sacrifice. Again, sorry to burst your bubble, but these people do not exist in the real world. Out here in the real world, mere humans with all kinds of motivations (political and otherwise), limits to their knowledge, greed, stupidity and other normal human failings create regulations. Those of us fortunate enough to live in a democracy get the chance to throw the bums out when we’ve had enough. Just in case you haven’t noticed, a major subtext of politics these days involves bums that voters can’t throw out.
Politics, not philosopher-kings, runs regulation, and politics runs on self-interest far more than on benevolent technocratic wisdom. Choice programs must cope with powerful organized interests that yearn to use regulation as a tool to domesticate choice opportunities and find it in their self-interest to do so. The default position of choice supporters should therefore be to view the calls for regulation with a deep skepticism; it is not paranoia when people really are out to get you.
None of this is to say that it is possible to pass choice legislation without regulation; it is not. I am not aware of any program anywhere that operates without some degree of regulation. American parents, however, want a radically different K-12 system than the one government forces them to pay for (see above). The way forward is to allow families to partner with educators to sort through new schools and education methods. Heavily regulated choice systems might get to something close to the K-12 system parents want and deserve before the heat-death of the universe, but then again, they might not.
America’s founders fought a grueling war against the most powerful country in the world based upon what was then a radical idea, that people could live better without royalty to boss them around. The divine right of kings was another myth humanity needed to grow up and discard, and that should include philosopher-kings.
Last week, I had the opportunity to make a presentation about how lawmakers can support teachers who want to start their own schools. The four key features:
2. Formula funding/demand-driven funding: Whoever applies for a choice program should receive funding if eligible.
3. Avoidance of anti-competitive accreditation requirements: Don’t ask your startup schools to operate without funding from the choice program while incumbent/accredited schools receive choice funding.
4. Exempt private schools from municipal zoning: Old hat for charter schools, needed for private schools as well.
Florida is the only state your humble author is aware of that has taken all four of these steps. This makes Ron Matus’ new study "Going With Plan B” all the more important. Despite a statewide increase of 705 private schools, 41,000 Florida families applied for, received, and ultimately did not use an ESA. Matus surveyed thousands of these parents to learn why.
The lack of school space was the No. 1 reason Florida families found themselves as non-participants. Reasons two and three were related to costs, which can also be thought of as a supply issue.
The “Going with Plan B” study is very interesting and should be studied carefully by Florida policymakers. For now, however, let us focus on the other states with choice programs that lack the four critical elements listed above. If FLORIDA has a supply issue, your state, sitting at one out of four, or two out of four, should take note: It is likely to be even worse in a state near you.
Last week, the Heritage Foundation released a study from yours-truly called From Mass Deception to Meaningful Accountability: A Brighter Future for K–12 Education. The basic argument: the good intentions of the No Child Left Behind era were completely undermined by opponents, who both defanged state rating systems and tamed charter school laws. On the first assertion, I offered charts like:
Ooof, and even worse this comparison between Arizona’s school grades in Maricopa County and GreatSchools private ratings for schools within 15 miles of Phoenix (the closest approximation on the GreatSchools site) after converting the GS 1-10 ratings onto a A-F scale:
Charter schools always and everywhere had waitlists, ergo, accountability amounted to “trophies for everyone” state systems and charter school sectors that never matched demand with supply. Take a look at the above chart, however, and you’ll see that GreatSchools is a much, much tougher grader than the state of Arizona. The usual suspects have a much tougher time undermining private rating organizations, and they gather reviews (which research shows families value). Ergo the backgrounder makes the argument that we should not rely upon state rating systems in preference to the already superior, more trusted and versatile private efforts. Furthermore, we should expand rating systems into the broader universe of education service providers active in today’s ESA and robust personal use tax credit programs, specifically to gather reviews accessible to families for purposes of navigating the wide world of choice, which we need much more of.
Okay so a couple of reader requests. First, I was asked if I could create something like the Phoenix chart for a district in Florida. I chose Miami:
So not as much of a contrast as Arizona but…if I were looking for a school in Miami, I would look at GreatSchools.
Next, I received a request about this chart from Sandy Kress:
Putting the NAEP improvement numbers in context: In the 2024 NAEP, the total across the four mathematics and reading exams between the highest scoring state (MA) and the lowest scoring state (New Mexico) was 10%. So, the nation-leading 5% improvement in Mississippi scores should be seen as meaningful. Sandy asked me to look at an earlier period from the mid-1990s until 2011 rather than the 2003 to 2019 period, as his contention was that that period saw a lot more academic improvement before the federal law was defanged on a bipartisan basis during the Obama administration.
All states began taking NAEP in 2003, so stretching back to the 1990s loses a number of states. Also, 1996 didn’t include the two reading tests, so I substituted 1998. Nor can we automatically attribute the trends exclusively to standards and accountability (other things also going on), but Sandy is correct that NAEP showed a lot more academic improvement during those earlier years:
Accountability hawks/the federal government may have indeed coaxed more productivity out of the public school system. Then on a bipartisan basis, Congress removed federal pressure (passed the Senate 85-12 and the House 359-64). Subsequently a large majority if (perhaps?) not every single state merely went through the motions of “accountability” with trophies for (almost) everyone. Kress can justifiably look at these data to claim, “the juice is worth the squeeze” and I can look at the same data to say, “academic transparency is too important to leave to politicians and their appointees.”
Franklin Roosevelt noted ““It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But try something.” Every state in the union remains entirely free to adopt tough accountability practices, but apparently few if any have chosen to do so. The next something to try in my opinion are enhanced private rating systems and robust choice programs. Temporarily semi-tough accountability systems run by states and charter school waitlists ultimately proved to be a strategy with limited political sustainability.
By Ron Matus and Dava Cherry
Florida’s choice-driven education system is the most dynamic and diverse in America, but it’s facing new tests. This year, 41,000 Florida students were awarded school choice scholarships but never used them.
We wanted to know why, so we surveyed their parents.
The 2,739 who responded had a lot to tell us. Not only about supply-side challenges, but about the extent to which families are migrating between different types of schools, and their expectations for finding just the right ones.
As education choice takes root across America, we thought other states could learn from these parents, which is why we boiled their responses down into a new report, “Going With Plan B.”
We saw three main takeaways:
A third of the respondents (34.7%) said there were no available seats at the school they wanted. This, even though the number of Florida private schools has grown 31% over the past 10 years. Meanwhile, a fifth of the respondents (19.7%) said the scholarship amount wasn’t enough to cover tuition and fees.
Even without scholarships, a third of the respondents (36.5%) switched school types (like going from a traditional public school to a charter school). And between their child’s prior school and the school they ended up in, more experienced a positive rather negative shift in satisfaction (20.4% to 10.5%). We didn’t see that coming.
Two thirds of the respondents said they’d apply for the scholarships again, including 63% of those who switched school types, and 55.5% of those who were satisfied after doing so.
Things got better, it seems, but not better enough.
Perhaps as choice has grown, so too have parents’ expectations.
See the full report here.
Dava Cherry is the former director of enterprise data and research at Step Up For Students, and a former public school teacher.
A recent interview by Tyler Cowen of John Arnold has been making the rounds in ed reform circles, see Michael Goldstein’s write up here. Here is a taste of the interview:
Tyler Cowen: There’s a common impression—both for start-ups and for philanthropy—that doing much with K–12 education or preschool just hasn’t mattered that much or hasn’t succeeded that much. Do you agree or disagree?
John Arnold: I agree. I think the ed reform movement has been, as a whole, a significant disappointment. I think there have been isolated pockets of excellence. It’s been very difficult to learn how to scale that. I think that’s largely true of many social programs or many programs that are delivered by people to people, that you can find a single site that works extraordinarily well because they have a fantastic leader, and that leader might be able to open up a few more sites. But then, when you start to scale it to 50 sites, and start to go across the nation, it all mean-reverts back to what the whole system is providing.
“We’re a dispirited rebel alliance of do-gooders,” Goldstein writes gloomily, but the underlying premises deserve scrutiny, as it strikes me as entirely too pessimistic. Let us for instance look at the academic growth rates for charter schools in Arnold’s home state of Texas as recorded by the Stanford Educational Opportunity Project. Each dot is a Texas charter school, and green dots on or above the zero line display an average rate of academic growth at or above having learned one grade level per year:
This chart deserves a bit of your time to marvel at. While receiving far less total taxpayer funding per student, the Texas charter sector has not only created a large number of schools with high academic growth, but they also place competitive pressure on nearby district schools to improve their academic outcomes. Texas charter schools have not cured the world’s pain, nor have they dried every tear from our eyes. It is hard for me, however, to view it as anything other than a tremendous academic success, and Texas is not alone. Here is the same chart for charter schools in Arizona:
Again, we see far more high academic growth green-dot schools than low academic growth blue-dot schools. Once again, this sector is a bargain for taxpayers, and the sector placed competitive pressure on districts to improve. By the way, Arizona has a larger number of charter schools in low-poverty areas than Texas. That helped crack open high-demand district schools to open enrollment, which is why a real Fresh Prince can go to school in Scottsdale but not in Bel Air or Highland Park in Texas, which opened a vast new supply of choice seats in school districts. The do-gooder rebel alliance, it turns out, made a serious political and educational error when they effectively in a variety of ways excluded suburban areas.
You live and (hopefully) learn. Speaking of Bel Air, behold the magnificence of the academic growth of California’s charter school sector:
Oh, and then there is the 2024 NAEP to consider:
If you do not live in a state whose name starts and ends with the letter “o” you are likely to be happy with your charter sector’s performance vis-à-vis districts, which admittedly, is a low bar. Of course, all this data is messy and neither the growth measures developed by Stanford nor the NAEP proficiency data above capture long-term outcomes- such as do schools produce good and productive people who are well-prepared to exercise citizenship. We are looking through a glass darkly.
The do-gooder education reform alliance should indeed take stock of which efforts produced meaningful results, and which proved to be costly quagmires, and recalibrate their efforts accordingly. To paraphrase the Bard: the education reform movement has 99 problems, but the inability to scale success in choice programs ain’t one.
ORLANDO, Fla. — The whiplash of uncertainty has buffeted the nation’s charter school movement during the past five years. First, COVID-19 disrupted learning for millions of students . That was, followed by restrictions on federal grant money. Then came a lawsuit challenging the public status of charter schools.
The leader of the National Alliance of Public Charter Schools empathized as the movement’s annual conference kicked off on Monday.
“Starting, running and teaching at a charter school has never been easy,” the alliance’s CEO Starlee Coleman said during her keynote speech to more than 4,000 charter school representatives. She said plenty of changes lie ahead.
“Some of the changes you’re going to like, and some will be hard.”
But charter school supporters also had plenty to celebrate, including the sector’s growth alongside private school choice, students who outperformed district peers on national tests, and state laws that require charters to receive a share of capital funding. The U.S. Department of Education also infused an additional $60 million into the fund for charter schools, bringing the total to $500 million to support charter school expansion.
Leaders also hailed the opportunities created by the rise of private school education savings accounts, or ESAs, which have skyrocketed in popularity in states that have passed them.
“Choice is working. Choice is here to stay,” said Hanna Skandera, CEO of the Daniels Fund and a former secretary of education in New Mexico. Skandera was one of a four-member panel that discussed the future of charter schools.
Leaders in Texas and Florida discussed how to seize those opportunities by offering a la carte courses to students with ESAs. Florida, where in 2023 lawmakers made all K-12 scholarship programs into ESAs that are universally available and created the Personal Education Program for students not enrolled full-time in a public or private school, has already recruited school districts and charter schools to provide access to part-time classes. The latest to sign on is Charter Schools USA, which announced a collaboration with Step Up For Students earlier this week to expand options for students.
"This is the future, and it's great to see,” said Derrell Bradford, president of 50CAN and who serves on several charter school boards. “These sorts of collaborations are what happen when families are in the driver's seat, and they have real resources to direct the education of their children. I hope more states and providers follow them on the path to educational pluralism."
Texas won’t start offering its ESA program until 2026, but in preparation a coalition of charter school leaders has already started a pilot program for private-pay students at four schools. They offer a la carte classes online and in person, including some after school.
“We think this is an opportunity, not as a threat,” said Raphael Gang, K-12 education director at Stand Together Trust.
The panel advised those considering offering part-time services to capitalize on their strengths when deciding what to offer, start small and educate parents on how to access the programs.
In Florida, where education choice scholarship programs have been in place since 1999, representatives shared the history leading up to the state’s 2023 passage of House Bill 1, which converted all choice scholarships into ESAs and made them available to all K-12 students. That law also established a new ESA, the Personalized Education Program, for students who are not enrolled full-time in a public or private school. PEP allows parents to use $8,000 per student to create a customized education for their children.
“It has been a game-changer,” said Keith Jacobs, assistant director of provider development at Step Up For Students. Jacobs, a former charter school leader, works to recruit and onboard charter schools and school districts as providers of part-time services for ESA students.
Jacobs said school choice used to exist only for families who could afford private school tuition or buy a home in a certain ZIP code, but ESAs have taken choice to a new level.
“We have placed the funds in the hands of the parents,” he said.
What does that look like?
It might be a virtual class in the morning, band at a public school in the afternoon, and a session with a private tutor.
“Or it might be ‘My child needs an AP bio class and the charter school down the street has a good bio teacher,’” he said.
Charter Schools USA Florida Superintendent Dr. Eddie Ruiz said the decision to offer courses to part-time students was easy given the demand for flexibility.
“Charter Schools USA believes in innovation,” Ruiz said. “It’s given parents the flexibility to really design their student’s education.”
He said when he approached his principals about the idea, they wondered how it could be done. Ruiz compared it to Amazon.
“Parents can just pick and choose,” he said. “Whatever it may be, they design their educational experience.”
The implementation will look different for each state based on the laws, but in Florida, approved providers can list their offerings and prices on an online platform, where parents can purchase the services with their ESA funds.
Charter schools set their prices based on local costs, said Adam Emerson, executive director of the Office of School Choice for the Florida Department of Education. In calculating those, leaders should not overlook operational costs, such as putting the students in the school information system.
Emerson said serving ESA families is a financial win for charters, but also the chance to make a positive difference for students in their communities.
“Yes, it’s a revenue stream, but it’s also a calling,” he said.
Two of the leading organizations in Florida’s united education choice movement are joining forces to expand access to learning opportunities at charter schools across the state.
The collaboration between Charter Schools USA and Step Up For Students will give Florida’s education choice scholarship students access to individual classes at 62 charter school campuses.
“By opening its campuses across the state for scholarship students, Charter Schools USA is helping set the pace for education innovation,” said Gretchen Schoenhaar, CEO of Step Up For Students. “Working with charter schools in a united movement expands access to flexible, quality learning options for Florida families.”
Florida’s 500,000 K-12 scholarship students are allowed to use their scholarships to purchase individual classes and other services from charter schools and school districts. More than 100,000 of those students use scholarships that allow them to fully customize their child’s education without attending a private school full time.
By the time school starts in August, one in three of the state’s 67 school districts and five charter school networks will offer flexible learning opportunities to scholarship students.
“We are thrilled to work with Step Up on this groundbreaking opportunity to further expand school choice,” said Dr. Eddie Ruiz, the Florida State Superintendent of Charter Schools USA. “By giving parents, especially those who teach their children at home, easy opportunities to access higher level educational opportunities while maintaining their customized scholarship option, we are providing ultimate flexibility. Schooling in the future will be all about flexible options, and this allows us to be on the forefront of this exciting endeavor.”
Keith Jacobs, Step Up’s assistant director of provider development, is a former charter school leader. He has made it his mission to collaborate with school districts and public charter schools to find creative ways to serve scholarship students.
“Charter schools began more than 30 years ago with a mission to bring much-needed innovations to education,” Jacobs said. “At Step Up, we are committed to supporting public schools across the state as they explore new opportunities to reach scholarship families. Charter Schools USA, with its proven ability to serve students across Florida, will supercharge these efforts.”
Education choice is the norm in Florida, where 3.5 million K-12 students attended schools or learning environments chosen by their families, a testament to decades of efforts by the state’s leaders to support a united movement to increase opportunities for students.
David Osborne recently predicted academic doom for red states having recently passed universal private choice programs. “This will accelerate the process of the rich getting richer while the poor fall further behind,” Osborne asserted. Osborne problematically ignored our nation’s actual experience with universal choice programs, making his column more a litany of faith than a clear-eyed analysis.
Osborne predicts a bleak future for states with universal private choice programs, with poor families left behind. Osborne prefers a charter school model of choice, keeping choice within the public realm of regulation and accountability:
"Is there an alternative, other than the status quo of struggling public school systems? Indeed there is. States and school districts could reduce bureaucratic controls, empower educators and increase choice, competition and accountability for performance within the public school system, through the spread of charter schools. Cities that have done so, including New Orleans, Washington, D.C., Denver and Indianapolis, have produced some of the nation’s most rapid improvements in student performance."
Arizona lawmakers created the first universal private choice program in 1997, the nation’s first scholarship tax credit program. Decades passed before another state enacted a private choice law with equally expansive eligibility. Three years earlier, in 1994, Arizona lawmakers had created two de facto public universal choice programs in the nation’s most robust charter school law and a statewide district open enrollment statute. “Large” and “relatively lightly regulated” would accurately describe Arizona choice programs, both public and private. Arizona lawmakers expanded and supplemented scholarship tax credits repeatedly; the Arizona charter sector became the largest among states, and open enrollment between and within districts dwarfed both in combination. Arizona created the nation’s first education savings account program in 2011 and expanded eligibility several times before making it universally available to Arizona K-12 students in 2022.
Given Osborne specifically cites four jurisdictions with the sort of choice programs of which he approves- Denver, Washington D.C., New Orleans, and Indianapolis, it seems in order. The Stanford Educational Opportunity Project provides academic growth data by jurisdiction (schools, counties, and states) and student subgroups for the 2009-2019 period. Comparing the rate of academic growth for low-income students in each of these four jurisdictions with those of Arizona counties in Figure 1:
Academic growth is a very important academic measure. While raw scores are very strongly correlated with student demographics, growth is much less so. Scholars widely view academic growth as the best measure of school quality. Many years into exposure to universal choice programs, Arizona’s low-income students seemed to be too busy learning to suffer Osborne’s predicted calamities. Greenlee County is a rural and remote area of Arizona with approximately 1,500 students and (alas) no charter or private schools during the period covered by the data. In this measure, a “zero” basically entails having learned a grade level worth of material per year on average, so the performances for Denver, DC and Orleans Parish are respectable, Marion County (host county of Indianapolis) less so.
The Stanford Educational Opportunity Project also measures the gap in learning rates by subgroup, which is measured by subtracting the learning rate of poor students from that of non-poor students. The four jurisdictions lauded by Osborne ranked first, second, third, and fifth in comparison to Arizona counties in terms of the amount of learning rate inequality between poor and non-poor students. There was exactly one state that had a positive rate of academic growth for both poor and non-poor students and had a faster rate of academic growth for poor students. It is the state marked “1” and spoiler alert…it is Arizona, the host of multiple universal choice programs.
Osborne’s hypothesis held that what some would regard as wild, lightly regulated “let it rip” choice programs would prove to be a disaster for low-income students, and conversely, well-regulated choice programs should advantage the poor. In practice, however, we find evidence to support the opposite conclusion. These results would not have surprised Milton Friedman in the least:
The results in the above figure also sit comfortably with the diagnosis of John Chub and Terry Moe, who identified politics as the central flaw of the American public school system. The American public school system does not do a terrific job on average in educating students, but it does a fantastic job in maximizing the political power and revenue of employee unions and their associated fellow travelers. Attempting to set up a governance structure of politically disinterested technocrats who will give families just the right amount of freedom and just the right amount of regulation comfortable for technocrats is an appealing theory. In practice, the most powerful and reactionary forces in modern American politics hijack the project easily unless a powerful, supportive constituency rises to defend the programs.
EdChoice has an interesting survey question comparing what sort of school parents would prefer (district, charter, private or home) and comparing the results to actual enrollment patterns. In 2024 it looked like this:
There is a lot happening in that chart, starting with the apparent desire of approximately 50% of the parents of district students to have their students somewhere else. Of course, a great many legal and practical constraints stand between preference and reality, which is why we have an education freedom movement and why we find so much opposition from the insecure K-12 reactionary community. Taking the surveyed demand as a part of a thought experiment around “what would it take to give families what they want?” can be illuminating. Of course, in the real world, these things change only gradually. Arizona has the highest percentage of students in charter schools at 21% or so, but it took three decades to get there for all kinds of reasons, including the need to have school space, which involved a great deal of construction and debt. We live in a world of charter and private school scarcity relative to demand, and keeping up the previous (inadequate) pace of construction may prove difficult.
Using my advanced skills acquired in the Texas public school system between 1972 and 1986, I have used this surveyed demand to calculate an implied demand for an additional 1.1 million charter school spaces. Don’t hold your breath waiting for them. It took almost three and a half decades to reach 3.7 million, and if you’ll now take a look at the first chart above, you’ll see that most of that three-and-a-half-decade period involved relatively low and almost continually declining long term interest rates between 1991 and 2021.
After 2021, both interest and building costs went up for charter school construction. Interest rates of course could go down, but they could also (gulp) go further up. A slowdown in the rate of new charter openings happened before the increase in interest and construction costs:
The little green force mystic taught us “always uncertain the future is,” but it appears to me that circumstances will require the rise of different school models that create seats sans debt. The old expression holds that God doesn’t close a door without opening a window, and the recent rise in interest rates happened almost simultaneously with the rise of pandemic pods and a la carte learning.
