Use it in: UPK redesigns, budget conversations, early-childhood strategy meetings, and any room where universal access somehow requires another new system.

If you only have a minute:
Colorado promised families universal preschool and built a program with different hour levels, eligibility rules, participating providers, special reimbursement rates, and funding that sometimes has to be “blended and braided.” Oklahoma made a more basic choice: four-year-olds in public pre-K count in school funding, while districts can still work with community providers. If every four-year-old is supposed to have access to publicly funded preschool, maybe the first move is simpler than we have made it: count the kid and fund the seat.

I Have Seen This From Both Sides of the Table

Years ago, I represented the city in Denver Preschool Program board meetings. I was around the work to renew the dedicated tax and watched DPP use public money to help Denver families pay for preschool at providers that already existed.

It worked pretty well. Denver did not build a new network of government preschools. Families picked participating programs, DPP helped pay the bill, and public dollars moved through district schools, community providers, and family child-care homes.

Then Colorado decided to make preschool universal statewide. I watched that happen as somebody who lives here, and then I got to experience the new system as the parent of a preschooler.

That is when the design starts looking a little absurd.

We Took a Simple Promise and Built a Benefits Program Around It

The promise is easy to understand: four-year-olds should have access to publicly funded preschool.

The user experience is something else.

Most families get 15 hours. Some qualify for more. Some can get 30. Your provider has to participate. The schedule has to line up. You have to understand which hours the state is paying for, whether your kid qualifies for additional hours, what your school offers, and what happens to the rest of the time you actually need child care.

Providers get their own version of it. They have preschool-specific rates, service levels, eligibility rules, payment systems, and multiple sources of public money that Colorado literally tells them to “blend and braid.”

Blend and braid.

That is government language for: we built so many separate ways to pay for the same kid that now somebody has to figure out how to weave them together.

I know why Colorado ended up here. We already had district preschool, private programs, Head Start, child-care subsidies, DPP, different schedules, different rules, and a decentralized early-childhood market.

But instead of asking whether universal preschool gave us a chance to simplify any of that, we built a statewide program capable of sitting on top of all of it.

We scaled the workaround.

Oklahoma Just Counted the Kid

Oklahoma made a different choice a long time ago.

A four-year-old enrolled in public pre-K counts in the district’s enrollment for state school funding. The kid is there. The district serves the kid. The kid generates public education dollars.

That is the part I cannot stop thinking about, because Oklahoma did not have to eliminate community providers to do it. Districts can run pre-K themselves or work with Head Start, child-care providers, tribal programs, faith-based programs, YMCAs, universities, and other early-childhood organizations. The financing question and the delivery question do not have to be the same question.

We have spent years talking as if preserving a mixed preschool market requires a separate preschool funding universe. Oklahoma is sitting there saying: the four-year-old can count as a publicly funded student, and we can still figure out where and how that child gets served.

Why Isn’t Four Just Another Publicly Funded Grade?

This is the part where education policy has a habit of making itself harder than it needs to be.

We already have institutions that know how to count students, distribute money based on enrollment, run schools, contract with outside organizations, monitor providers, and send public dollars to educate children.

They are called school systems.

If we decide that public education should start at four instead of five, there is an obvious way to begin: add K4. Give it a per-pupil amount, let districts and charters offer it directly, and let them partner with qualified community providers. Then let the money follow the four-year-old.

This is not particularly radical. It is how we already fund the next thirteen years of the kid’s education.

Yet somehow, when the child is four, we decide the elegant solution is applications, eligibility tiers, separate reimbursement formulas, program matching, and braided funding.

Then the kid turns five and we knock most of it down.

We Keep Building New Systems Next to Systems That Already Do the Job

I have been thinking about this same problem in other parts of education.

We invent education savings accounts, tutoring programs, transportation benefits, after-school subsidies, and other mechanisms that require somebody to determine eligibility, authorize spending, move money, approve providers, and keep records.

Meanwhile, school districts already know who the kids are. They already receive public dollars on their behalf. They already buy services from outside organizations.

Sometimes we need a new structure. But “this policy is new” is not the same as “we need a new system to administer it.”

Universal pre-K is a particularly clean example.

Denver showed that public money can flow through a diverse preschool market. Colorado proved there is political will to make preschool available statewide. Oklahoma shows that you can make four-year-olds part of ordinary school finance without requiring every one of them to attend a district elementary school.

Put those ideas together and the obvious question is sitting there.

Why are we making this so hard?

Count the Kid. Fund the Seat.

If the promise is universal public preschool, start there.

A four-year-old should generate public funding just like a five-year-old does. Decide the amount. Set the rules. Let families use qualified district, charter, or community programs. Build additional systems only where they solve an actual problem.

We do not need to eliminate DPP, Head Start, child care, or community providers. We need to stop assuming their existence requires every future preschool dollar to travel through another custom-built program.

Universal preschool does not have to mean one provider. It also does not have to mean six funding streams and a manual for braiding them.

Sometimes the easier answer really is the easier answer.

Use This

• In your next UPK conversation, ask: “Why doesn’t a four-year-old simply generate public education funding?”

• Separate who pays from who provides. Public-school funding does not require a district-school classroom.

• When someone says mixed delivery requires a separate preschool financing system, ask them to explain why.

• Before building another eligibility or payment process, ask whether the system that already funds five-year-olds could do the job.

The Ask

If you run preschool, a district, or an early-childhood program and there is a real-world reason we cannot simply count four-year-olds and fund them, I want to hear it. Just please do not send me another diagram explaining how to braid the money.

Use it in: budget meetings, grant reviews, school-design conversations, tax-credit fights, and any room where adults defend the system before naming what kids are supposed to get.

If you only have a minute: My LinkedIn feed has started putting two education conversations next to each other. In one, people talk openly about education as a set of sectors, services, investments, and purchases. In the other, American education people keep fighting over which provider deserves protection. The purchasing frame forces a better question: what learning outcomes are we actually trying to buy for kids?

I have started following more people who work in international education and private schools, which means my LinkedIn feed has gotten strange in a useful way. One minute, American education people are having the same provider fight we have been having for twenty years: districts, charters, private schools, homeschooling, microschools, public money, private actors, who counts, who is dangerous, who deserves protection.

Then I scroll again and see ministries, school groups, and investors talking openly about the education economy. Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Education shows up in that stream a decent amount. The language is about investment, growth, services, and the industries sitting underneath schooling.

The investment pitch does not do much for me. Plenty of people have figured out how to make money around education without making education better for kids. But the contrast did make me stop. In one conversation, education is a bundle of purchases. In the other, we keep pretending the real question is which provider deserves moral protection.

That is where my mind went. Not to investment, but to purchasing.

The Bundle Lets Adults Hide

Most education debates start with the provider.

District school. Charter school. Private school. Homeschool. Microschool. Magnet program. Vendor. Nonprofit. Tutoring provider.

Then we fight about the provider. Is it public? Is it private? Is it equitable? Is it regulated? Is it democratic? Is it part of the system or outside the system?

Some of those questions matter. But they also let adults skip the harder one: What are we trying to buy for kids?

A school is not one thing. It is a bundle. It includes adults, curriculum, transportation, food, space, peers, time, safety, relationships, support, and accountability. Some pieces are strong. Some are weak. Some are expensive because they matter. Some are cheap because adults have decided they are secondary, even when kids experience them as central.

The word “school” hides all of that. So does the word “system.”

Every Purchase Carries a Theory of Learning

A parent is not only choosing a school. They are trying to buy some mix of safety, challenge, belonging, convenience, adult attention, opportunity, and hope.

A homeschool parent is not just rejecting the system. They are assembling curriculum, time, community, flexibility, and a learning rhythm they believe will work better for their kid.

A microschool founder is not just launching a cute small school. They are buying or building space, staffing, curriculum, trust, insurance, and enough family demand to make the thing survive.

A district is not just operating schools. It is purchasing learning conditions at scale. Some it builds in-house. Some it buys. Some it regulates. Some it ignores until families with more money buy around the system.

That is where the frame starts to expose things. Once you ask what learning outcomes we are purchasing, food stops looking like a side issue. Transportation stops looking like logistics. Buildings stop looking like fixed assets. Curriculum stops looking like procurement.

They all become part of the purchase. Not because everything matters equally. It does not. Because kids do not experience the system in categories that match adult budgets.

We Pretend Some Costs Are Not Instructional

There is a quiet rule in a lot of education conversations: push as much money as possible toward teachers, curriculum, and direct school operations. Hold everything else as low as you reasonably can.

That instinct makes sense. Nobody wants bloated overhead. Nobody wants money leaking into adult systems that do not touch kids. But the rule can get stupid fast.

If transportation determines whether a child can access a better school, transportation is buying a learning outcome. If food determines whether a child is awake, calm, and ready to learn at 10:30 in the morning, food is buying a learning outcome. If a building is unsafe, chaotic, poorly located, or hostile to the kind of learning adults say they want, the building is buying or blocking a learning outcome.

This is where some of our old arguments start to look thin. We say we care about outcomes. Then we protect the inherited bundle. We say we care about equity. Then we let families with money assemble better learning conditions around the bundle while telling everyone else to be grateful for the assigned version.

We say we care about innovation. Then we treat anything not delivered through the familiar provider as suspect before we ask whether it helps kids learn.

That is the bullshit.

Districts Should Be Better Purchasers

This is one reason I keep coming back to districts as platforms.

Not because districts should disappear. The opposite.

A serious district should be one of the best purchasers in the education system. It should know what it must provide directly, what it should coordinate, what it should buy from others, what it should refuse to buy, and what standards every provider has to meet.

That is public stewardship. Not owning every service. Not pretending the district payroll is the same thing as the public good.

The public obligation is access, quality, transparency, rights, stewardship, and accountability. Sometimes that means direct provision. Sometimes it means partnership. Sometimes it means letting families use dollars in more flexible ways under clear public rules. Sometimes it means saying no to a provider selling magic.

The point is not to worship markets. The point is also not to worship the existing bundle. The purchasing frame makes both sides show their work.

The Tax Credit Is a Purchasing Question

This is also why the federal scholarship tax credit keeps pulling at my attention.

A lot of people want to debate it as a school-choice fight. That is not wrong. It is part of the fight. But it is not the only useful question.

A better question is: what can this money buy for kids, under what rules, and with what accountability?

Tutoring, transportation, career-connected learning, mental health support, better food, and small learning environments are all possible purchases. That does not mean everything should count. It means the design question matters.

Who gets access? Who decides? What qualifies? What happens when the provider fails?

Those are better questions than the bumper-sticker version of the debate.

Use This

• In your next budget or grant conversation, ask: What learning condition are we purchasing for kids, and how would we know if they actually got it?

• When someone defends a school, program, provider, or funding stream, ask: Are we protecting the provider, the bundle, or the outcome?

• Before saying a service should be in-house or out-of-house, name the public obligation first: access, quality, rights, transparency, stewardship, and accountability.

I am not trying to turn education into a shopping cart. I am trying to make adults say what they believe their spending actually buys for kids.

Once you separate the provider, the purchase, the kid, and the outcome, some of our cleanest arguments start to look a lot less clean.

That is usually where the useful work starts.

Use it in: Platform meetings, donor retreats, and any room where education people mistake their own urgency for the public’s.

If you only have a minute:
Education used to sit near the top of the national political agenda. It does not anymore. Parents still care deeply about schools, but they experience them through money, safety, technology, honesty, and whether their children can build stable adult lives. Stop asking voters to enter through your issue. Show them how schools touch theirs.

We Are Still Writing for a Political Moment That Ended

I have worked in education for nearly 20 years. I was also a Democrat for nearly 20 years. For a long stretch, those two parts of my life fit together without much strain.

Democrats talked about reading, good teachers, standards, accountability, and whether schools could help kids build better lives. The reform movement around those ideas got plenty wrong, but it came of age during a period when voters were actually having an education argument.

In 2000, Gallup found education tied with the economy as the issue most likely to shape a presidential vote. Ninety-one percent of Americans said candidates’ positions on education were very or extremely important. Then came September 11, war, recession, immigration, inflation, and a long collapse in trust.

By July 2026, Gallup’s list of the country’s top problems was led by government dysfunction, immigration, the economy, and inflation. Education was nowhere close.

Parents did not stop caring about their children. The country changed, and education stopped functioning as a separate national political issue.

The Education Field Mistook a Window for a Mandate

Modern education reform was built during a rare stretch when public concern, bipartisan energy, presidential attention, and donor money all lined up. Standards, tests, teacher quality, charter schools, and accountability became more than tools. For a lot of people, they became the work itself.

You can still see the assumption whenever a foundation funds another reset. A memo lands. A coalition convenes. Someone says the field needs a new narrative. By page three, the same people are protecting the same nouns: equity, innovation, whole child, choice, accountability, teacher voice, parent voice.

The public conversation moved somewhere else. Education people kept writing for one another. The old coalition weakened, candidates stopped talking about the issue with much force, and donor attention moved on. People keep launching new tables as if a better deck can recreate 2007.

That is why the field feels so restless. A political window closed, but much of the sector still behaves as though voters are waiting for us to reopen it.

Democrats Own the Contradiction

This is not only a Democratic failure. Republicans have turned schools into a national stage for fights over gender, immigration, race, religion, and whatever grievance is paying that week.

Democrats still own the contradiction. The party says it wants working-class families back while its education machinery continues writing for activists, donors, unions, reformers, and policy professionals. Everyone gets a seat except the voter balancing a grocery bill, a work schedule, and a kid who cannot read.

Democratic education plans usually begin with the institution: defend public schools, invest more, protect educators, expand programs. Some of those things may belong in the plan, but they are not how most people enter the question. Most people enter through their own life.

They are asking whether the school is making that life easier, safer, and more hopeful, or whether it is adding another layer of stress they are expected to absorb.

Parents Care About Their Kids, Not Our Category

I am also a parent now, and the gap is easier to see from the kitchen table.

Parents are worried their kids are anxious, bullied, addicted to phones, behind academically, and headed toward an adulthood they may not be able to afford. They want them safe, honest, hardworking, able to support themselves, and able to find work they do not hate.

Pew’s data has been saying this plainly for years. Anxiety, depression, and bullying sit near the top of parents’ worries. Financial independence and work their children enjoy rank above earning a college degree.

That changes how an education agenda has to reach people. A parent is not asking for a growth model. They are asking whether the school is telling the truth about their child and whether someone is doing something before the gap becomes permanent.

They are not asking for a career-connected learning strategy. They are asking whether the diploma leads to a job that pays rent. They are not asking for a digital wellness framework. They want the phone out of their kid’s hand and an adult willing to help hold the line.

Nobody wakes up wanting a unified enrollment system. They want to know they are not trapped if the building keeps failing their child.

Stop Trying to Move Education Up the List

Education people keep asking how to make schools a top political issue again. That is the wrong assignment.

Voters do not owe our issue more attention. We owe their lives more relevance.

Start with economic security. High school should lead to college credit, an industry credential, an apprenticeship, a job, or a clear next step. A diploma that cannot help launch an adult life is a broken promise.

Start with childhood and safety. Control phones during class. Limit instructional screen time. Deal with bullying, disorder, and the mental-health problems families are already managing at home.

Then prove basic competence. Teach children to read, write, and do math. Tell parents plainly when their kid is behind, and show whether the school is helping them grow.

Choice belongs at the end, as recourse. Lead with the public promise. When a school repeatedly fails to keep it, families need another path. Choice is not the front door. It is the backstop when the public promise collapses.

The old reform movement made the same category error. It turned standards, tests, growth models, and choice into the political identity of the work instead of treating them as tools inside a larger promise to families.

Democrats do not need another education narrative written for people who already care about education policy. Schools sit underneath the issues voters already rank first: income, childcare, safety, mental health, family time, and whether public institutions can still do what they say.

The way back is not demanding more attention for education. It is showing voters that you understand the life they are trying to protect and that schools are one of the places where that life either gets more stable or starts coming apart.

Use This

• In your next platform meeting, ask: “Which fear in a family’s actual life does this proposal answer?”

• When someone says education still polls as important, reply: “Importance when prompted is not the same as what drives a vote.”

• When someone calls this the old reform agenda, say: “The old movement led with its tools. We need to lead with the life families are trying to protect.”

• When a narrative project starts with sector language, rewrite the first page around money, safety, truth, and a stable future.

The Ask

Forward this to the one education person still asking how to make voters care more, instead of asking why our work stopped connecting to the life voters are trying to protect.

Use it in: cabinet meetings, foundation board retreats, state opt-in conversations, 2027 budget planning, and any room where public-school leaders are waiting for private-school advocates to define the opportunity.

If you only have a minute: Private-school advocates wrote the federal scholarship tax credit to expand private-school choice. Then it was capped at $1,700 per individual taxpayer and opened to public-school expenses. That turned it into a small-dollar community fundraising machine and gave public school systems a new local revenue stream for student costs.

Last September, I wrote about this opening in No Scholarships Left Behind because the public-school use case was already sitting there in the text.

Since December, I have been helping build the Colorado table for what comes next. Nearly 40 leaders from more than 30 organizations are now working through SGO infrastructure, district-serving and charter-serving models, rural partnerships, afterschool providers, employers, and public schools use, which most of the national debate still barely acknowledges. Nobody around that table is asking whether public schools are allowed in the room anymore. They are figuring out what to build.

The People Who Wrote This for Vouchers Left the Door Wide Open

The federal scholarship tax credit was written by private-school choice advocates. There is no reason to pretend otherwise. But policy authors do not always control the operating model their policy creates.

The law caps the individual credit at $1,700 for cash contributions to approved scholarship-granting organizations. It requires SGOs to spend at least 90 percent of their income on scholarships for eligible students. It also allows scholarship dollars to cover a broad range of educational expenses for public, private, and religious schools.

That cap changes the fundraising model. Traditional private-school scholarship organizations know how to raise large gifts from a relatively small donor base. This credit rewards something different: reach, trust, and access to thousands of people who already know an institution, care about its students, and can understand where the money will go.

Public-school systems already have those people: employees, families, alumni, local employers, civic partners, and people whose children graduated ten years ago and still wear the school sweatshirt. Most will never write a $100,000 check. But many will redirect $500, $1,000, or $1,700 if the message is simple: this money will help local kids, and you can claim the contribution against federal taxes you would otherwise owe.

Private-school advocates won the policy. Public schools may have the better machine.

Districts Are Still Thinking Like Applicants

This is where public-school leaders can miss the opportunity. They look at the law and ask which existing program could receive a few scholarships. Maybe AP exam fees, tutoring, summer programming, or transportation for one group of students.

That is applicant thinking. It starts with the program that needs money and works backward toward a donor. The stronger move is to ask what local revenue platform the law makes possible.

A district-aligned or community-wide SGO could bring together district employees, municipal workers, employers, families, alumni, vendors, civic donors, and local foundations, then move those dollars toward student costs that families feel directly and that districts already struggle to cover.

District foundations normally ask donors to give more. This credit allows public systems to build a new revenue stream by asking people to redirect money they would otherwise send to the federal government. “Please add another $1,000 to your charitable giving” is a difficult fundraising message. “Put $1,000 toward students in this community and claim a federal tax credit” is a much stronger one.

The Public-School Use Case Is Not a Loophole

Most of the national conversation still treats this as a private-school voucher program with a few incidental public-school applications. That reading is too narrow.

The law defines eligible students using public-school eligibility and household income up to 300 percent of the area median gross income. Qualified education expenses include fees, tutoring, services for students with disabilities, books, supplies, equipment, transportation, extended-day programs, and education technology connected to public, private, or religious schools.

A superintendent should read that list differently than a voucher advocate does:

• AP exams, SAT and ACT preparation, and other college-readiness costs

• CTE fees, equipment, books, supplies, and technology

• Tutoring, extended-day services, and summer programming

• Transportation and services for students with disabilities

These are the quiet costs that determine whether students can access opportunities adults claim to support. They are also costs districts already cover through general funds, grants, foundation dollars, or quiet workarounds.

A district could build a college- and career-readiness package around those costs. A rural partnership could focus on transportation, CTE, and extended learning. A charter network could reduce fees and expand tutoring. A citywide SGO could support after-school providers and summer programs across multiple public school systems.

The exact architecture will depend on final guidance, state decisions, legal structure, and local priorities. That is a reason to design carefully, not a reason to sit still.

Public Schools Do Not Need Permission to See Their Own Advantage

The worst move public-school leaders can make is to spend the next year debating whether they like the politics of the law while private-school organizations build the infrastructure.

Public schools do not have to celebrate why the policy passed, pretend it was written for them, or adopt the private-school movement’s language and goals. They do have to recognize when a policy creates a usable tool for their students.

In states that have already opted in, districts and foundations should be moving now. In states still debating participation, public-school supporters should be making the public-school case directly and without apology.

The people who wrote this law wanted to create a voucher vehicle. They also created a local revenue platform that favors large networks of ordinary donors, trusted institutions, and organizations already connected to thousands of eligible students.

That sounds a lot like public education.

Use This

• Put the federal tax credit on the agenda for your next cabinet or foundation board meeting. Do not title the item “school choice.” Title it “local revenue for student costs.”

• Map the donor base you already have: employees, families, alumni, vendors, employers, city workers, civic groups, and local foundation partners.

• Pick one visible use case, such as CTE, college readiness, tutoring, transportation, or services for students with disabilities. Make the opportunity concrete enough that people can see where their money goes.

• Start designing the SGO structure before every federal and state question is settled. Waiting for perfect clarity is how public systems let other people define the program.

The Ask

Forward this to the superintendent, charter leader, mayor, or district foundation director who still thinks the federal scholarship tax credit belongs to private schools. The donor base may already be there. The machine is the part that still needs to be built.

Use it in: donor meetings, policy design sessions, founder support conversations, and any room where someone is talking about microschools like the hard part is already solved.

If you only have a minute: Microschools can be exactly right for certain kids. That is not the issue. The issue is that the sector keeps talking about them like the main question is educational design, when a lot of the real risk sits in rent, payroll, insurance, billing, and whether one or two families leaving blows a hole in the whole thing. If we want microschools to last, we need to stop selling intimacy and start dealing with survival.

15 kids x $7,000 = $105,000.

That number has been stuck in my head for years.

Not because it proves microschools are a bad idea. It does not. It proves something narrower. A lot of microschool conversations drift toward philosophy before anybody stays with the spreadsheet long enough to ask what the thing can actually hold.

One adult. Rent. Insurance. Curriculum. Software. Background checks. Maybe food. Maybe transportation. Maybe a part-time helper. Then one family leaves.

That is not negativity. That is the model.

Most microschools are smaller than the way people talk about them

A lot of microschools are tiny. Not “small schools” in the broad sense. Tiny. A handful of families. One lead adult. Thin margin. Very little room for error. And a lot of the people starting them are not small-business operators by training. They are educators, parents, community builders, or people who know a certain kind of child needs something different.

Good. That is often exactly why the school exists.

But the minute the school opens, the job changes. Now somebody has to handle billing, payroll, rent, insurance, software, forms, background checks, enrollment churn, and the thousand dull tasks that do not show up in a school tour but decide whether the place survives.

That is where the story changes.

The movement says educator. The math says owner.

This is the part the sector still refuses to say plainly.

The pitch around microschools is usually about freedom, fit, flexibility, and human scale. Fine. Those things matter. I have seen kids who were fading in larger systems come back to life in smaller settings. I have also seen families choose microschools year after year because the place felt safer, calmer, and more known.

That is real. But none of that changes fixed costs.

You cannot pay rent with “personalization.” You cannot fund payroll with “parent agency.” You cannot survive enrollment churn with a good theory of learning. A microschool can be educationally real and still be financially fragile.

And a lot of them are.

I watched the charter sector hit this wall already

I served on Colorado’s statewide charter authorizing board. We saw what happened when facilities costs got too high. Over and over, the biggest pressure point was not vision. It was facilities, financials, and operating budget strain.

Once that strain got bad enough, schools slipped into the death spiral.

You cut staff to protect rent. Families feel the shift and start leaving. Revenue drops. Fixed costs stay fixed. Then the next cut comes faster and uglier than the first.

I watched that happen in charter schools with far more scale than the average microschool. That’s why I don’t romanticize this.

Microschools are even less forgiving. They are smaller. They have less margin. They often charge lower tuition. Many depend on a braid of family payments, scholarships, grants, or public dollars that do not always arrive cleanly. A few families leaving is not a dip. It can be the year.

That is why the current conversation feels off. The sector describes these places like learning communities. The math treats them like tiny enterprises with almost no cushion.

Both things are true. Too many adults only talk about the first one.

The beautiful exceptions are doing too much work

There are small schools people point to that are genuinely impressive. I have been in them: Idaho, Colorado, Montana, Georgia.

What stands out quickly is that many of these exceptions are not operating like the median microschool at all. They are closer to 80 to 110 kids. At that point, you are much closer to a small private school than the tiny founder-led model people usually have in mind when they say microschool.

Good for them. But those schools are often doing too much narrative work for the rest of the field.

The median microschool is not sitting on that kind of cushion. It is sitting on a few families, a thin budget, and a founder being asked to be principal, teacher, recruiter, bookkeeper, and amateur CFO all at once.

That is not a serious base model for a movement unless the adults around it decide to make it more survivable.

If it cannot hold, the rest of the conversation is premature

This is the sequence funders and policy people keep getting wrong.

The first question is not academics. Not because academics do not matter. Because a model that cannot hold for three years will never give you a fair read on the academics anyway.

First ask whether the school can survive ordinary strain. Enough families. Enough cash cushion. Enough facilities stability. Enough help with payroll, billing, insurance, compliance, and the other dull costs that kill small schools long before anybody gets a clean read on the learning.

That is not lowering the bar. It is setting the order correctly.

If a microschool cannot hold for three years without being one late payment or one departing family away from panic, then the rest of the quality conversation gets distorted. Families feel the instability. Staff feel it. Founders feel it. The model never gets enough time to become what its advocates say it can be.

So if you are funding these schools, the question is not just whether you believe in the vision.

It is whether the school has enough room to survive.

Use This:

• Before you fund a microschool, ask: How many students can this school lose before it breaks?

• Ask the unsexy question: Who is handling payroll, billing, insurance, lease risk, and enrollment churn right now?

• Do not judge early academics in isolation if the model has no operating cushion. First ask whether it can hold long enough to become legible.

• If you fund launch, fund survival too. Facilities help, small-business support, and back-office relief are part of the model.

The Ask

If you are funding or designing around microschools, send this to the one person on your team who still thinks the first question is the learning model.

It is not. First ask whether the school can hold.

Use it in: accountability conversations, board meetings, grant reviews, and any room where someone says “high quality” like everybody means the same thing.

If you only have a minute: For years, education reform acted like a good school was a school with the right test scores, growth curves, and performance bands. That was never fully true. In a real choice system, it gets even less true. Once families can choose across different models for different reasons, the question of school quality gets harder, not simpler.

I learned this the hard way on the Colorado Charter School Institute board.

I came in with a pretty clean theory. Growth mattered. Mastery mattered. If schools could not get results, you closed them. If they could, you let them grow.

Then I sat in performance conversations long enough to see how thin that frame was.

There were schools strong on growth but weak on mastery. Schools strong on mastery but weak on growth. Schools weak on both, at least on paper, but with deep family demand and real student loyalty. Montessori schools where the academic sequence did not line up neatly with the state’s timeline, but the later results came into focus around fifth or sixth grade. Schools serving kids who drowned in traditional settings but thrived here, even if the standard dashboard did not know how to credit it yet.

That did not make accountability meaningless. It made it harder.

The schools that forced the issue were the ones least built for the standard frame

This became clearest with the Alternative Education Campuses.

These were schools serving kids who were over-age, under-credited, parenting, working, caring for siblings, or carrying adult responsibilities while still technically in high school. They were often schools of last resort. Families chose them anyway. Students chose them anyway.

And those schools kept saying the same thing: the standard growth-and-mastery frame is not enough to tell you whether we are doing right by these kids.

They were right.

That did not mean we let go of outcomes. We did not. I was part of the group that said clearly: this cannot just be about inputs. You do not get credit for telling us about the curriculum you bought, the training you ran, or the model you believe in if it is not leading to something real.

But we also knew the “something real” had to be wider than the state test alone.

So we let some of those schools bring forward other measures. Not random measures. Not vibes. Nationally normed tools. Well-researched assessments. Outcomes credible enough to matter and solid enough to compare.

One school serving teen parents brought forward measures tied not just to student academics, but to parenting capacity and early childhood outcomes. That mattered. Those students were choosing a school not just for themselves, but for their children. If the school was helping them graduate, parent better, and create a stronger start for their kids, that was real. The standard state framework was never going to tell the whole truth about that on its own.

That is when the issue got clearer for me.

School choice makes the quality question harder

This is what some of the sector still refuses to admit. Because once you create a more plural school system, you create a more plural definition of success.

That is not ideology. It is a design consequence.

If families can choose charter schools, Montessori schools, private schools, microschools, homeschool hybrids, schools built for recovery, schools built for work-based learning, schools built for safety, or schools built for belonging, they are going to choose for different reasons.

Some will choose for academic strength. Good.

Some will choose for safety. Or lower bullying. Or stronger student belonging. Or flexibility. Or adult trust. Or because their kid was drowning somewhere else and is finally alive here. Some of what families care about most may not show up in the short term. It shows up later in persistence, stability, employment, confidence, relationships, college success, or simply a stronger adult life.

You do not have to romanticize every choice to admit the obvious: once families have real options, they start using a broader definition of success than the system was built to recognize.

That is the point.

This does not mean “anything goes”

This is where bad thinking rushes in.

The answer is not to shrug and say every family choice is equally valid and every school gets to invent its own reality. That’s just not true.

Academic outcomes still matter. Growth still matters. A school should not get a free pass because parents like it and the culture feels warm. If kids are not learning, that matters.

But it is also lazy to pretend the old frame is enough.

There are schools producing real gains in student life the narrow accountability model misses. There are schools families rationally choose for reasons the performance dashboard does not know how to weight. There are schools serving students for whom grade-level mastery on the standard timeline is not the only honest indicator of whether the school is helping them build a stronger life.

So the job is not to abandon accountability.

The job is to stop pretending one narrow frame can do all of it.

If you want a plural system, say the hard part out loud

A real choice world means parents will sometimes choose schools that are not the strongest academic option on paper.

They may choose the school that is safer. Calmer. More accepting. Better at getting their child out of bed. Better at stopping the bleeding. Better at giving a teen parent a shot at finishing school while caring for a child. Better at helping a student stay alive to the possibility of adulthood.

And if you are serious about choice, you have to be serious about that too.

Not because test scores do not matter. Because they are not the whole thing.

This is the accountability problem that comes with freedom. Once dollars and decisions move toward families, adults in the system lose the luxury of pretending there is one clean definition of a good school.

There is still such a thing as a bad school. There is still such a thing as a weak outcome. There is still such a thing as failure.

But there is no longer one simple answer to quality that every model, every child, and every family must fit under.

That world is gone.

Use This:

• In your next accountability meeting, ask: What is this school producing that the standard dashboard does not fully capture?

• Stop using “high quality” like it only means high test performance. It does not.

• If a school wants credit for something beyond the state frame, require real evidence, not inputs.

• When families keep choosing a school the system underrates, ask why before you dismiss them.

The Ask

If you are building or governing in a choice system, forward this to the one person in your orbit who still thinks one accountability model can cleanly sort every kind of school.

It cannot. And the sooner we admit that, the more honest this conversation gets.

Use it in: strategy meetings, family-policy conversations, and any room where people pretend the evidence is fuzzier than it is.

If you only have a minute: We already know a lot about what most improves a kid’s odds in school and life. The bullshit is not that the list is unknown. It is that the honest list cuts against too many political instincts at once. So adults keep emphasizing the determinants that fit their side and going quieter on the rest.

I have been guilty of this too.

For years, I have made some version of the same line in meetings: education has social determinants too. Usually it lands, people nod, and we move on.

But lately I have been less impressed with my own line. It is a little too neat and a little too knowing. It assumes we all mean the same thing when we say it, and I do not think we do.

Because once you stop being cute and actually ask the question, the answer gets uncomfortable fast. What conditions outside school most improve a kid’s odds of succeeding in school and life? That is where the room stops sounding so confident. Not because the list is unclear, but because no side likes the full list very much.

The List Is Not the Problem

We know more than people pretend. Kids do better when life is not organized around chaos, when there is enough money and stability that food, housing, and basic routine are not constantly breaking down. They also do better with steady adults, a home that carries expectations and language, less chronic stress, safer surroundings, and the health and attendance conditions that let them function every day.

That is not a theory fight. That is the baseline.

You can debate which of those matters most, argue about policy, and fight about what schools can and cannot influence. But the broad shape of the list is not hard to see.

The hard part is saying the whole thing out loud without trimming it for politics.

This Is Where Everyone Starts Editing

The left will usually highlight poverty, housing, health, and safety. Good. Those matter. Then the conversation reaches family stability, adult presence, home order, and whether a kid is being raised inside enough consistency to support learning. That is where a lot of progressive honesty gets thinner.

The right does the mirror image. It will usually highlight family, norms, discipline, and responsibility. Good. Those matter. Then the conversation reaches money, neighborhood effects, instability, and the brute force of chronic stress. That is where conservative honesty gets thinner too.

That is the real pattern. People do not deny the broader list exists. They just emphasize the parts that fit their politics and spend less time on the rest.

Education People Do This Too

The education sector has its own version of the dodge. It likes the determinants that fit inside a school plan: curriculum, tutoring, staffing, school model, accountability, attendance campaigns. All real. All useful.

But once you name the full list, you are admitting something the sector does not love admitting: schools are asked to produce outcomes in conditions they did not create and do not control. That does not let schools off the hook. It just forces a little honesty into the room.

A lot of education talk is really an attempt to keep the conversation inside the building, even when many of the strongest drivers are sitting outside it.

Let’s Just Name It Plainly

The social determinants of education are real. The honest list includes money, family stability, adult educational capital at home, low toxic stress, safer and more stable surroundings, and health, sleep, and attendance. That list is baked into the research. It is also politically inconvenient in every direction.

Which is why most adults do not actually say it in full.

They emphasize the structural parts and spend less time on the family parts. Or they emphasize the family parts and spend less time on the structural parts. Or they emphasize the school parts and spend less time on almost everything else.

That is the bullshit. It is not ignorance. It is editing.

If you only name the determinants that flatter your politics, you are not telling the full truth about what kids need. You are narrowing the conversation to what your side is most comfortable hearing.

Use This

• Ask your team to name the full list out loud. See which parts come easily and which parts do not.

• Notice which determinants your side highlights and which ones it tends to glide past.

• Stop pretending school-only language is honest enough for the outcomes conversation.

• Use the broader list to widen the conversation about what kids actually need.

The Ask

Forward this to the one person in your organization who talks most confidently about student outcomes. If they cannot name the fuller list without editing it for politics, they are still narrowing the truth.

Use it in: school-choice panels, state policy debates, donor conversations, and those familiar moments when someone says “parents deserve options” without asking whether the dollars actually buy one.

If you only have a minute: A family wanting public help to access a safer, smaller, more coherent private school is rational. But a voucher that does not buy a real seat in a real school is not school choice. It is a slogan. And the right keeps selling that slogan like it is full access.

I was rewatching The West Wing recently. In “Full Disclosure,” President Bartlet asks Charlie where he went to high school. Roosevelt, Charlie says. A public school. Then the mayor asks where he wanted to go. Gonzaga. Why? “There’s never been a shooting there. They don’t even have metal detectors. Almost everyone goes to college.” Could he afford it? “Couldn’t come close to affording it.”

That scene works because it names the picture in a student's or parent’s head faster than most policy papers ever will.

Charlie was not imagining some future school that might open if the market got nudged. He was not imagining a lower-cost private model that might emerge three years from now if enough entrepreneurs got excited. He meant a real school that already existed. A building. A culture. A safer hallway. A place with order, seriousness, and a known track record.

That is what people hear when politicians talk about vouchers. They hear access to the actual seat in the actual school they already want.

And that is where the bullshit starts.

Most voucher politics is priced for the gap, not for the seat

A low-income or working-class family wanting public help to access a private school is not a betrayal of democracy. It is a parent trying to do right by a kid.

The problem is not that vouchers are too bold. It is that they are too often too small and then oversold.

Take Texas. The new program is widely described as school choice at scale. EdChoice lists the average account value at $10,500 for 2025–26. Private School Review puts average private-school tuition in Texas at $13,137 for elementary school and $14,494 for high school.

That is the whole argument in two numbers.

If the family hears “choice” and pictures Gonzaga, but the state gives them a subsidy that does not buy the average existing seat, then the politics is trading on an image it did not fund honestly.

That does not mean the money is useless. It may help some families close a gap. It may make certain lower-cost private schools newly reachable. It may help a family already piecing together tuition. Fine. Say that.

But stop acting like you delivered full access to private-school choice when, in a large number of cases, you did not.

Parents are imagining a school. Politicians are offering a coupon.

That is the disconnect.

A parent does not hear “voucher” and think: maybe this will stimulate a future marketplace of more affordable educational providers with varying cost structures. A parent hears “voucher” and thinks: maybe now my kid can go there.

There is already a school in mind. Usually it is safer. Smaller. Calmer. More coherent. Maybe it is religious. Maybe it is not. Maybe it sends more kids to college. Maybe it just feels like adults are in charge.

Whatever the specific draw, the thought is the same: I want that seat for my child.

And the state keeps stepping up with a partial subsidy and a full sales pitch.

That is why this conversation feels so slippery. The politics sounds universal. The purchasing power often is not. The rhetoric says freedom. The actual policy often says: this might help if you were already close.

If you want to defend vouchers, defend them honestly

There is a version of the voucher argument I respect. That I agree with and support.

It says poor families should not be trapped in bad systems because affluent families already exercise school choice with their mortgage, their tuition check, or their zip code. It says a family that wants a different school should not need private wealth to make that choice real. It says the state can help.

Fine. Fund it like you mean it.

Do not tell a family they now have educational freedom when the amount on the table does not buy the thing you know they are picturing. Do not claim victory because you passed a law and attached a number to it. Ask the harder market question: what does this actually purchase in the current world, not the imagined future one?

• If the answer is “not many existing seats,” say that out loud.

• If the answer is “mostly a gap-filler for families already near affordability,” say that out loud.

• If the answer is “we are hoping new lower-cost schools emerge later,” say that out loud too.

Just stop pretending you bought them the seat when you only handed them a coupon.

Use This:

• In your next school-choice panel, ask: What does this voucher actually buy in existing schools in this state?

• Put the voucher amount and average private-school tuition on the same slide. If there is a gap, name it.

• Stop saying “access” when you mean “partial subsidy.” Those are not the same thing.

• If you support vouchers, demand one honest chart: average award, average tuition, average family gap.

The Ask

If you are out there defending vouchers, do one thing before your next speech or op-ed: figure out whether the dollar amount in your state buys a real seat in a real existing school. If it does not, stop selling the dream like it already does.

That is not a minor correction. That is the whole fight.

Use it in: annual review season, funder briefings, grant strategy meetings, and any room where someone is about to confuse motion with progress.

If you only have a minute:
The charter sector keeps celebrating new schools and new seats while ignoring closures, under-enrollment, renewal losses, facilities strain, and talent erosion in existing schools. That is not real growth. It is gross growth masking net decline. If funders want to be taken seriously, they need to stop rewarding launches alone and start demanding proof that the overall portfolio is bigger, stronger, and more stable than it was a year ago.

I got an email recently from a charter-sector funder offering a sneak peek of its annual wins.

The headline was familiar: new schools launched, new seats created, new markets entered. It read like momentum. It was supposed to.

But I kept waiting for the subtraction. It never came.

How many seats did they lose in California? How many schools in New York got squeezed by politics, weak authorizing, or bad local conditions? How many strong operators in places like St. Louis are under-enrolled, financially exposed, or one rough year away from real trouble? How many quality seats disappeared while this organization was still congratulating itself for opening something new somewhere else?

That is the trick. The sector keeps calling addition growth without ever doing the full math.

Gross Growth Is a Vanity Metric

A lot of charter philanthropy still acts like “more schools opened” is a serious scorecard. It is not. It is a partial metric dressed up as impact.

It assumes a new school is automatically a good school. It assumes more charters is always the right end state. It assumes new seats matter more than preserving strong existing ones. And it lets intermediaries brag about expansion even when the broader portfolio is getting weaker.

If you add 250 seats in West Virginia but lose 900 in California, you did not grow the sector. You shrank it.

That is not an argument against serving families in smaller or redder states. They deserve good options too. It is an argument against fake math. Geography does not rescue bad scorekeeping.

The charter sector likes to talk about discipline, accountability, and results. Fine. Then use them. Do the net math. Show whether the total number of strong seats actually went up.

Anything else is branding.

The Sector Overfunds Launch and Underfunds Survival

This is the deeper failure.

Launch is cleaner. It feels optimistic. It gives funders a story and intermediaries a slide. It creates visible motion. Everybody gets to feel like a builder.

Maintenance is less glamorous.

Maintenance looks like bridge funding for a strong school that hit enrollment softness. It looks like facilities help before a lease problem becomes a closure. It looks like paying for serious enrollment work in a city with a declining student population. It looks like helping a high-performing operator hold onto talent instead of watching great people burn out or leave. It looks like defending renewals, stabilizing campuses, and filling seats that should never have gone empty in the first place.

That work is messier. It is also where the real fight is.

I keep hearing from school leaders who do not need another speech about innovation. They need help stabilizing what they already built. They need support filling good schools with the kids who should already be in them. They need the sector to stop acting like survival is somehow less strategic than launch.

It is not less strategic. It is just less photogenic.

A Shrinking Portfolio Is Not a Success Story

This gets especially obvious in cities where strong charter schools are running half-full while weaker seats remain occupied by default.

That should show up as a warning in any honest portfolio review. Instead, too often, it disappears. The half-filled school is treated as a local inconvenience. The new launch across town gets treated as evidence of growth.

That is the scam. The sector hides erosion in the base and spotlights fresh additions at the edge.

If local intermediaries are watching strong schools run half-full while weaker systems keep their students by default, that is already a failure. But when they choose to paper over that failure by opening something new and reporting it to funders as growth, the problem is no longer just execution. It is false accounting.

The question is not how many schools you opened.

The question is whether the charter portfolio is stronger than it was before.

That means net seats. Quality-weighted seats. Fill rates. Renewal survival. Facilities stability. Talent retention. Durable city-level strength over time.

Anything less is theater.

Serious Funders Should Demand Net Strength, Not Gross Activity

Intermediaries will keep selling gross growth as long as major philanthropies keep buying it.

If you are Walton, Bloomberg, Dell, Hastings, Koch, or any major family foundation putting real money into this space, you should be asking harder questions of every intermediary you fund.

Not: How many schools did you launch?

Ask: Did your portfolio gain or lose quality seats this year? Which strong schools became more stable because of your work? Which schools are one bad year away from real trouble? How many seats did you save, not just create? Are the cities you support actually healthier, or just busier?

Because right now too much of the sector is rewarding fresh openings while tolerating erosion in the base.

That is not serious stewardship. It is a growth narrative for people who do not want to look too closely.

If you are funding launches while strong schools quietly weaken, you are not expanding choice. You are rotating logos on a slide deck while families lose durable options.

That may still look like momentum in an annual report. It does not look like strategy in the field.

Use This:

• Replace “schools opened” with “net quality seats gained or lost” on your next impact slide.

• Ask every intermediary leader which strong existing schools are financially, politically, or operationally fragile right now.

• Require a seat-loss narrative next to every seat-growth narrative.

• Treat enrollment, facilities, renewals, and talent retention as core strategy, not cleanup work.

The charter sector does not need less ambition. It needs better scorekeeping.

If you are adding schools while losing stronger ones, you are not building the future. You are covering decline with ribbon cuttings.

That is not growth. That is just opening more schools.

The Ask

Forward this to the one person in your organization still using launch counts as a proxy for sector health. If they cannot show the subtraction, they are not showing the truth.

Use it in: grant reviews, school model design sessions, strategy meetings, and any room where someone is talking about student agency as if it means adults should step back and trust the process.

If you only have a minute: We are drifting toward the same mistake we made with reading. A real and important human capacity is being discussed in a way that gets fuzzy fast on how it is actually built. Agency is not what happens when adults disappear. Agency is what happens when adults create the conditions, model the moves, support the struggle, and then release responsibility over time.

I was in a room recently because a funder wanted a grantee to hear something they were not getting from the usual chorus.

The grantee’s instinct was good. They wanted learning to be more purposeful, more connected to the passions and values of young people, and less trapped inside dead routines. They believed, rightly, that students need more agency and that self-determination matters.

The funder believed that too.

What the funder did not believe was that choice by itself would get them there. That was the point of the meeting.

Not to talk the grantee out of agency. To stop them from making the same mistake a lot of people in this space are about to make, which is acting like agency grows automatically when adults loosen the structure, add a little tech, and get out of the way.

That is the part I do not buy.

Agency Is Not the Opposite of Structure

There may not be a more important long-term goal in education than helping young people become agents in their own lives: people who know what they care about, who can surface values, weigh tradeoffs, make judgments, recover from failure, learn new things, and keep moving in a world that is changing fast.

In a future where knowledge is cheap and intelligence itself may be more distributed through tools, that kind of discernment and self-direction matters even more.

So yes, agency matters. Self-determination matters. Purpose matters.

But kids do not become self-determining because adults back away. They become self-determining because adults build the environment where self-direction can actually develop.

That means safety. Modeling. Practice. Reflection. Feedback. Increasing responsibility. It means adults who know when to support, when to challenge, when to step back, and when to step back in.

That is not a free-for-all. That is design.

The Sector Is Starting to Sound Fuzzy

This is what worries me.

I keep hearing people talk about agency as if the main problem in education is that adults have just not trusted kids enough. There is some truth in that. A lot of schools do underestimate students. A lot of schooling has confused compliance with learning. A lot of young people have been denied real ownership.

But that truth is getting stretched into something much sloppier.

Choice is not the same thing as agency. Freedom is not the same thing as self-direction. Giving kids time, access, and a tech tool is not the same thing as teaching them how to direct their own learning, persist through ambiguity, reflect on failure, and make good judgments.

Those are built capacities. And built capacities require builders.

We Have Run This Play Before

This is why the reading comparison matters.

Reading was not wrecked because adults hated kids. It was wrecked because one view of how children learn to read took over training programs, schools, and materials for a very long time. That approach worked better for some kids than others, especially kids who had more support, more language exposure, and more educational capital around them. Everyone else paid for the gap.

We are still cleaning that up.

Now I can feel a version of that same drift showing up around agency.

A real thing is being overclaimed. Adults are acting like if they reject anything that looks too structured, they will avoid the old harms. So instead of asking what conditions actually help agency develop, they swing toward looseness and hope. They assume that if kids are given enough room, the right capacities will emerge.

Some will. Many will not.

And the ones most likely to be fine are the ones who already have support somewhere else.

Even the Best Self-Directed Models Prove the Point

This is one reason GripTape matters.

People point to it as proof that young people can drive their own learning. They can.

But GripTape does not just hand a kid some freedom and disappear. It pairs that young person with a champion. Not someone doing the work for them. Someone asking good questions, helping them reflect, helping them stay with difficulty, and helping them make meaning out of what just happened.

That is not a side note. That is the model.

The point is not that kids need adults to control them. The point is that agency still develops through relationship, reflection, challenge, and support. Even one of the most youth-directed models in the country knows that.

The adults leaving that part out are not being visionary. They are erasing the hard part.

If We Get This Wrong, Privileged Kids Will Be Fine and Other Kids Will Get a Poster About Agency

This is where the stakes get real.

If agency gets treated as openness without support, the kids most likely to thrive will be the ones who already have people around them helping them make sense of things. Kids with adults who know how to ask good questions, locate opportunities, translate setbacks, and build confidence. Kids whose lives already contain some version of a champion.

Everyone else will get sold a beautiful story and a weaker reality. Adults need to stop pretending that all kids arrive with the same level of outside support for building these capacities.

If schools and programs do not intentionally provide that support, inequality does not disappear. It hardens.

Agency is too important to become another thing well-supported kids get in practice while everyone else gets rhetoric.

If You Want Agency, Build for It

If you say you want self-direction, then show me where students learn to reflect.

Show me where they learn to make decisions with support. Show me where they see good judgment modeled. Show me where they are safe enough to fail, and supported enough to learn from it. Show me where responsibility actually increases over time instead of being dumped on them all at once.

Do not tell me kids need more agency if what you really mean is that adults want to feel less responsible for teaching it.

We are in a moment when a lot of people entering education have seen the bad outcomes of weak instructional thinking. Their instinct is to reject anything that looks too structured. I understand that instinct.

It is still wrong.

If we do not get more precise, we are going to spend another decade talking beautifully about a real human capacity while leaving too many young people without the support to actually build it.

We already know how that story goes.

Use This

• In your next design meeting, ask: “What are the adult moves here that actually build agency?”

• When someone says students need more freedom, ask: “Freedom to do what, with what support, and toward what end?”

• If a model claims to build self-direction, ask where reflection, feedback, mentoring, and gradual release actually live.

• Before funding “agency,” ask whether the model works only for students who already have strong champions outside school.

The Ask

If you are building a school, funding a learning model, or selling a vision of agency, forward this to the person in your orbit most likely to confuse self-direction with adult disappearance.

Use it in: investment meetings, school design sessions, board conversations, and any room where someone is mistaking futurist branding for parent demand.

If you only have a minute: Parents have been telling us the same thing for years. They want smaller, safer, more supportive schools where their children are known, challenged, and prepared for real life.

But a slice of the education world is sprinting the other direction, chasing AI-first school models that sound impressive to adults who live on podcasts, LinkedIn, and venture logic. That is not future-readiness. It is adults building around their own fascinations instead of what children and families actually need.

I keep watching this miss happen in real time.

Not in theory. In rooms. In conversations. In the way people talk when they think they are being sophisticated about the future.

For more than three years now, parents have been remarkably consistent. Across public and private settings, across communities, across polling, journaling, and direct conversations, they keep asking for the same basic combination.

They want schools where children are known. They want needs met. They want real preparation for life. They want support without chaos. They want rigor without dehumanization. And more and more of them want less screen saturation, fewer phones, and less digital intrusion into childhood.

Then you look at what a lot of education adults are getting excited about, and the gap is almost comical. Funders are chasing AI. School leaders are listening to edu podcasters and futurists. LinkedIn is full of adults talking like parent demand has fundamentally changed because large language models exist.

It has not.

That is why the Alpha Schools fascination matters. Not because one school model is singularly evil. Because it reveals who the field is still building for.

Parents Are Asking for Known Children. Adults Keep Selling Prestige Software.

Read the conversation around Alpha and you can feel the adult fantasy leaking through the frame.

Two hours of academics. AI tutors. Personalized pacing. More time for life skills. The future of learning. Children freed from the old model.

It is packaged as if the core parent aspiration was waiting all along for a more elegant interface.

But listen to the parents I talk to on the ground.

The parent in San Jose who chose a charter school did not say, “I wanted a cutting-edge AI learning environment.” They did not mention machine tutors. They did not mention software-driven acceleration.

They talked about mentors. They talked about their child being known. They talked about real-life preparation.

Parents are not asking for a more efficient screen-mediated childhood. They are asking for trustworthy adults, coherent school culture, strong academics, and actual human development.

The fact that elites keep translating that into AI-forward school design tells you more about adult incentives than parent demand.

This is the same old education disease in new clothes. Adults projecting their own preferences onto children, then calling it innovation.

The Anxious Generation Is Not Anti-Future. It Is Pro-Childhood.

A lot of the people chasing AI-school models talk as if screen skepticism is backward-looking. As if parents wanting less phone-based childhood somehow means they do not understand where the world is headed.

That reading is lazy.

Parents are not rejecting the future. They are reading it clearly. As the world gets more digitized, children will need stronger judgment, better attention, more emotional regulation, and more confidence working with real people in the real world. They will need a deeper foundation, not a thinner one.

More real adults. More trust. More coherence. More environments where children are not swallowed whole by interfaces.

The Anxious Generation is not some weird anti-tech detour. It is a signal. Parents are getting more suspicious of screen-heavy childhood, more alert to digital overstimulation, and more interested in schools that feel human, bounded, and real.

And at that exact moment, a slice of the field is trying to sell them premium interface childhood.

That is the miss.

Alpha Sounds Good to Elites for a Reason.

This is the part people do not want to say out loud.

Models like Alpha are highly attractive to elite adults because they combine four things elite adults love: status, speed, quantification, and inevitability.

Status, because AI branding signals sophistication.

Speed, because “two hours for academics” sounds like a productivity breakthrough.

Quantification, because software-heavy models produce metrics adults can screenshot, cite, and pitch.

Inevitability, because once something gets framed as “the future,” weak judgment starts disguising itself as pragmatism.

That is why these models travel so well in podcasts, conference panels, donor meetings, and founder circles. They are easy for adults to admire because they flatter adult psychology.

Small, deeply supportive, low-screen schools do not flatter adults in the same way. Their value is slower, harder to glamorize, and less legible to people who confuse what is marketable with what is wanted.

But that is exactly why parents keep asking for them.

A child who is well known by real adults. A school culture with fewer screens and fewer distractions. Serious preparation for life. Strong relationships. Real responsibility. Real-world competence.

That does not sound as sexy in a future-of-learning keynote. It sounds like school. Which is exactly the point.

Mistaking Attention for Legitimacy.

This category error matters because the wrong adults keep mistaking attention for legitimacy. A funder hears a sharp podcast. A founder sees a Wired headline. A board member hears “personalized at scale.” A school leader starts worrying they will look outdated if they do not have an AI story.

Now the room is no longer asking the right question.

Not: Does this school reflect what children need and what parents are actually asking for?

Instead: Does this school sound like the future to other adults with social capital?

That is how bad bets get made.

Parents are not asking for more interface childhood with better branding. They are asking for schools with real adults, strong culture, and actual preparation for life.

Use This

• In your next school design or funding meeting, ask: “Are we building for family demand or for adult fascination with AI?”

• When someone says a model is the future, ask: “Would most parents describe this as more human, more supportive, and more real-life ready for their child?”

• Use this sentence in the room: “A product that flatters adults is not the same thing as a school families actually want.”

• Apply one hard filter: If the model weakens adult relationships, increases screen dependence, or treats human support as secondary to software, it is probably solving the wrong problem.

The Ask

If you are a funder, board member, or school leader getting pitched an AI-heavy school model right now, send me two sentences on the pitch. I will send you the three questions I would use to test whether it is actually built for children and families, or just designed to impress adults.

Use it in: strategy calls, coalition meetings, webinars, and any room where people say kids need more support and then panic when support shows up in a form their friends might hate.

If you only have a minute: The Democratic education problem is not just bad messaging. It is weakness. Too much of the Democratic education world would rather sound right in front of its friends than take a win for kids. You can see it right now in the SGO fight. The same people who say schools are broke, families need help, and programs are getting cut are working overtime to kill or stigmatize a donor-funded tax-credit mechanism because they are terrified someone in their coalition will call it a voucher.

They Keep Saying Schools Are Broke

I am on calls right now with people in states that are underfunded, losing students, and out of money. Per-pupil funding is low or flat. Programs are getting cut. Philanthropy is thin. Voters will not approve more.

Everybody has the same line ready. Kids need more support.

Fine.

Then SGOs and the new federal tax credit come up. Not a tax hike. Not a bond. Not a raid on the state budget. Donor-backed money that could help pay for tutoring, summer, transportation, therapies, and other things kids actually use.

And the tone changes.

The conversation stops being about whether kids could use the help and starts being about whether the coalition can survive touching it. People who have spent years saying schools are starving suddenly get very brave about turning down money.

That is not principle. That is bullshit.

They Are Taking Cues from the Wrong Audience

Parents, including plenty of parents inside this ecosystem, are asking a basic question: can this help my kid? Can it help pay for tutoring, therapies, transportation, summer, materials, or some other support my family actually needs?

But that is not the question driving the reaction.

The reaction is being driven by adults who are scared of other adults. Scared of the webinar crowd. Scared of peer judgment. Scared somebody in their own world will call them soft, impure, privatizing, or voucher-adjacent.

So the people who understand the opportunity get quiet. They hedge. They hide behind pending rules. They tell themselves they are being prudent.

This is not prudence. It is social fear dressed up as policy judgment.

This Is Why People Do Not Trust Democrats on Education

Parents hear Democrats say schools need more money, more support, more services, more care.

Then a new funding path shows up and too many of the same people start trying to kill it because it arrived through the wrong political channel.

Parents do not experience that as nuance. They experience it as adults playing games while kids need help. They experience it as people who care more about sounding right than doing right. They experience it as another excuse.

And they are not wrong.

It Is Not a Voucher

This is part of the scam. A voucher is public money handed to a family to pay private school tuition. That is not what this is.

This is donor-incentivized money tied to a federal tax credit and routed through SGOs. That money can support private tuition, yes. It can also support tutoring, services, enrichment, materials, and other educational costs. The people smearing all of it as “vouchers” know that. They do it anyway because they know the label scares their side.

That is not honest disagreement. That is frame laundering.

If States Wait, the Money Still Moves

If states do not get ready, the money does not sit there politely. Donors can still move it. They can still take the federal benefit. They can still send it somewhere else.

That means your families do not get it. Your tutoring groups do not get it. Your camps do not get it. Your YMCAs and Boys and Girls Clubs do not get it. Your districts and charters do not get it.

The dollars leave. The need stays.

Then the whole performance gets uglier. The same people who say schools are broke help make sure new money leaves the state. Then they complain that somebody else built the early SGO infrastructure.

Of course they did. You were too busy trying to sound clean.

SGOs Expose the Reflex

SGOs are not the whole education agenda. They just expose the reflex.

A donor-funded support mechanism shows up, and too much of the Democratic education world still asks the coalition question before it asks the family question.

Not: could this help kids here?

But: what will our people say if we touch it?

That is the reflex. That is the weakness. That is why people stop trusting you.

If You Mean It, Start the Work

If you really believe schools are underfunded, act like it.

Organize donors. Identify which students and families could use this money. Map the tutoring groups, summer programs, community organizations, and school-based offerings that could qualify. Figure out what kind of SGO structure would actually serve public school kids, not just private tuition.

Do not tell me families need help and then spend your energy proving you are still ideologically pure.

If your coalition would rather keep schools broke than risk being called voucher-adjacent, stop talking like you are the grown-ups in education. You are not.

Use This

• In your next meeting, ask: “If schools are this broke, why are we fighting donor-backed money that does not touch the state budget?”

• When someone says “voucher,” ask: “You know this is not a voucher. So why are you using a scare word to stop kids from getting more help?”

• When someone says “we need to wait for the rules,” ask: “What part of donor organizing, provider mapping, and SGO setup actually requires us to wait?”

• When someone says “this is dangerous,” ask: “More dangerous than staying broke?”

The Ask

Forward this to the person in your orbit who keeps saying kids need more support and then goes quiet the second donor-backed help walks in through the wrong door.

Use it in: meetings, innovation strategy sessions, and board conversations where someone challenges school quality because “the future is AI.”

If you only have a minute

My LinkedIn feed, and probably yours, is full of newly minted AI experts predicting either doom or salvation. Most of that is just annoying. But it becomes dangerous when those same people start advising foundations, school systems, and boards.

They are talking as if AI has somehow changed what makes a school good. It has not. The more powerful these tools get, the more important strong schools become.

Elite AI talk is becoming a convenient excuse for weak schools.

I was having coffee with a someone who has been around tech and education as long as I have. These days, they advise people on AI and the future of learning. They work with some of the same clients and foundations I do.

We were talking schools. My partner and I have been touring schools for kindergarten. They had too. I mentioned one neighborhood school we toured that completely underwhelmed us academically.

They said they liked it. Then they told me why.

They waved off the school’s ugly academic data. Test scores mostly just show that a group of adults can coordinate around a goal, they said. In the age of AI, they argued, that kind of schooling is not all that relevant anymore.

What really matters, they said, is building a space where kids are loved, cared for, and seen as whole people.

They said it like they had cracked the code. It was meant as a sophisticated dismissal.

I almost spit out my coffee.

That is not just a dumb thing for a smart person to say. It is dangerous advice coming from the exact kind of person funders and education leaders keep treating like an oracle.

My family toured eight schools. And we weren’t looking for less rigor because AI exists. We were looking for more of it: engagement, coherence, high expectations — you know, learning. We looked for it in student artifacts, in adult and child interactions, and yes, in the test scores.

That is still what a good school looks like. It is a structural and necessary reality, not a clever theory about the future of work.

“Whole child” was supposed to deepen the work. Instead, people use it to dodge the work.

This is one of the most poisonous moves in education right now. People talk as if rigor and care are in conflict, as if a school can either love children or teach them well.

That is bullshit.

Yes, schools should absolutely be places where kids are seen as full humans. They should be cared for. They should have adults who understand their interests, strengths, areas of growth, and purpose.

And those same schools should also teach them how to read, write, compute, reason, communicate, recognize patterns, learn languages, and stick with hard things long enough to actually understand them.

Since when did loving a child become an excuse for failing to teach them how to read?

A school where adults coordinate around learning is not the side effect. It is the job.

The line about test scores proving adults can coordinate was supposed to make me less impressed by strong schools. It did the opposite.

A school where adults can coordinate around children’s learning is exactly what parents should be looking for. That is not some accidental administrative detail. That is the institution working.

Teachers, leaders, staff, and families aligned around whether children are actually learning is how you build a place where children have a shot.

And when you look at the data, especially for low-income Black and Brown students, and see that the school is simply not delivering for them, you cannot wash that away with a speech about the future of work. A school where affluent kids are doing fine and poorer kids are getting crushed is not redeemed by good vibes, whole-child language, or proximity to innovation.

AI raises the premium on foundations. It does not erase them.

The logic driving this frenzy is backwards.

If machines can instantly generate average to above average work, then the human advantage shifts upward. The value is in reading carefully, spotting logical flaws, editing for truth, exercising judgment, asking better questions, and knowing when the machine is wrong.

You cannot outsource reasoning if you never learned how to reason. You cannot direct AI through complexity if you do not understand probability, patterns, language, and evidence yourself. The more powerful the tools get, the more important it becomes that the humans using them can actually think.

That means strong schools matter more now, not less. It means adult coherence matters more now, not less. It means the old, unsexy work of teaching children to read, write, compute, and think is still the work.

The future does not excuse a bad school in the present.

Use This

• In your next docket meeting, ask: “Does this proposal make a school better at teaching children to read, write, reason, compute, and think, or does it just make the school sound more futuristic?”

• When you hear the whole-child dodge, say: “A school where adults coordinate around children’s learning is not a side detail. That is the whole institution.”

• Apply one filter to AI proposals: If the plan does not strengthen a child’s ability to read, reason, write, compute, or recognize patterns without a screen, it probably is not improving learning.

The Ask

If you are a funder or board member being pitched a school idea right now, reply with two sentences about the proposal. I will send you the three questions I use to tell whether it is actually about learning or just vibes, or worse AI hype (more on that next week).

This memo is for CEOs and executive directors, as well as the people who work for them.

Use it in leadership team meetings, Chief of Staff check-ins, and moments when the calendar is full, but nothing is closing.

If you only have a minute:
Executive avoidance does not look like disengagement. It looks like motion. Conferences, meetings, feedback, learning, and visibility fill the space where decisions should be. The CEO is active everywhere, and the organization still cannot say where it is going or why.

The Gap Between the Stage and the Balance Sheet

A few weeks ago, a funder called me. They were frustrated, and they wanted a gut check.

They had just opened LinkedIn and seen the CEO of one of their grantees posting photos from yet another national conference. The caption was the sector standard: important conversations, valuable time in the room, learning alongside peers. It looked like leadership as the industry defines it.

But the funder wasn’t impressed. They were nervous.

They knew what was happening inside the building. Key hires were stalled. The core strategy was drifting. No one on the team had the authority to make a move, and the CEO was too busy on the road to make a call.

The CEO thought they were building thought leadership. The funder thought they were burning runway.

While the CEO was on stage discussing the future of the field, the person writing the checks was backstage, wondering whether the organization would even matter in two years.

Executive Avoidance Is Not Silence

This is the part that often gets misunderstood. Executive avoidance does not look like absence. It looks like motion.

The CEO I am describing was one of the busiest people I have worked with. Back-to-back meetings, constant feedback in shared documents, and travel nearly every week. From the outside, it looked like commitment, seriousness, and ambition.

Inside the organization, it felt very different. No one could name the direction out loud. No decision was made long enough for teams to organize around it. The calendar was full, and the future was vague.

How Motion Replaces Leadership

At the executive level, avoidance rarely looks irresponsible. It looks careful and reasonable.

It looks like wanting more input before moving forward. It looks like another round of revisions instead of a call. It looks like asking for more research, more framing, and more options.

All of this feels like work, and much of it is work. None of it resolves uncertainty. Over time, teams learn that clarity is not coming and stop pushing for it.

The High Cost of Fake Motion

When a CEO substitutes motion for decision, the tax is paid by the talent. This is where the damage first appears and is most evident.

VPs stop executing and start guessing. Chiefs of Staff stop building and start mediating. Directors spend their time interpreting signals instead of delivering outcomes.

High performers do not leave because they are tired. They leave because they are tired of manufacturing clarity that leadership refuses to provide.

What the Organization Adapts Into

When decisions do not land, the system adapts around that absence. This is not a moral failure. It is an operational one.

People hedge instead of committing. External partners struggle to explain the work. Messaging fragments because there is no settled direction to anchor them.

Eventually, the organization becomes very good at motion and very bad at progress.

What Leadership Actually Requires

At the top of an organization, leadership is not about being in the most meetings or consuming the most information. It is about deciding with incomplete information and accepting that you will decide again.

Decisions are not final truths. They are moves. Each decision unlocks the next set of facts.

Motion does not produce clarity. Decision does.

Use This

• If you are a CEO, ask where your best people are guessing instead of executing, and listen without defending yourself.

• If you are a Chief of Staff or VP, identify where you are mediating indecision rather than building the future.

• If you feel constantly busy but nothing is closing, stop adding motion and decide on one thing that will change how the organization behaves next week.

The Ask

If you are a CEO who recognizes this pattern and wants a way out that does not involve more motion, reply with one sentence about the decision you are avoiding. I will help you make the next move.

Use it in strategy retreats, budget pauses, funder meetings, and board conversations where real decisions keep getting deferred.

If you only have a minute: Most five-year strategies fail not because the world changes, but because they never make decisions visible. They substitute orientation for judgment and planning artifacts for power shifts. Strategy is not a document. It is a discipline for making decisions under uncertainty in real time and revising them as reality unfolds.

The Scene

Years ago, I started working with a client right after they had finished a major consulting engagement. The firm had delivered a long deck. The organization announced a strategic pause. Work stopped while leadership rolled out the new strategy.

The CEO was genuinely surprised that nothing seemed to change. Staff did not behave differently. Meetings felt the same. Energy did not shift.

The Monday after the rollout looked exactly like the Monday before. Same calendar invites. Same standing meetings. Same people. Same roles. Same goals. Same KPIs. Every Monday after that did too.

The problem was not that people failed to understand the strategy. The problem was that nothing had actually been decided.

When the CEO took the strategy to funders, the same thing happened. Funders did not hear anything new. They did not see changes in staffing, priorities, or spending. They could not tell what was changing or why.

So the conversations drifted. Each meeting pulled toward a different idea. A different grant. A different adjacent opportunity. Without a strategy that anchored decisions, the CEO started chasing. Chasing dollars. Chasing new ideas. Chasing whatever seemed fundable in the moment.

There was no rhythm to settle into because no choices had been made. Over time, avoidance became normal. Waiting felt safer than choosing.

Strategy Did Not Fail Because the World Changed

Everyone says the same thing when a five-year plan collapses. Things changed. COVID. Politics. Leadership turnover. Market shifts. Funding cycles.

That is true. It is also beside the point.

Strategy exists precisely because things change. If your strategy only works in stable conditions, it is not a strategy. It is a wish list with a timeline and a budget code.

What failed in that organization was not foresight. It was judgment. The strategy deck oriented everyone to a story, but it never forced decisions. It never redistributed authority. It never constrained behavior. It never made tradeoffs visible.

So nothing changed on Monday.

Vision Can Be Long. Strategy Cannot.

You should have a long-term vision. A claim about the world you are trying to bend toward. That vision should be durable. It should outlast leadership transitions and funding cycles.

But when vision, strategy, and plan get collapsed into a single artifact, something else happens. Accountability gets deferred.

Long horizons make it easier to avoid hard calls. The farther out the goals, the easier it is to promise everything and choose nothing. Five-year strategies feel responsible because they push consequences out of reach.

That deferral is the tell. It is not a category error. It is a safety mechanism.

When Strategy Does Not Decide, Money Decides

Funders were not confused because they were inattentive. They were confused because there was no signal to read.

No decisions had been made. No commitments were irreversible. No constraints were real.

So funders did what rational funders do. They tested. They nudged. They waited.

When strategy does not make decisions legible, the loudest donor or the newest crisis fills the gap.

From the outside, this appears to be volatility. From the inside, it feels like whiplash. In reality, it is a vacuum. When leaders do not decide, money decides for them.

That is not a failure of relationships. It is a failure of leadership, management, and governance.

Strategy Is Not a Map. It Is a Decision Discipline.

Real strategy does not predict the future. It shortens the loop between reality and choice.

It forces leaders to answer questions like these out loud and in public:

• What are we willing to stop now, not later?

• Who has the authority to make this call without another retreat?

• What would make us change our minds?

• What behavior will look different next week if this is real?

If your strategy cannot answer those questions, it is not guiding action. It is managing discomfort.

The test is simple. If nothing changes on Monday, it was not a strategy.

What This Means for Leaders and Boards

If you are writing your third five-year strategy in five years, the problem is not turbulence. The problem is that your strategy never governed decisions.

If you are calling a strategic pause where all work stops, ask yourself what you are really avoiding. Pauses that do not reassign authority or change constraints are just polished delays.

If you are a funder asking an organization to step back, look for decisions, not language. If you cannot see what will be different in staffing, spending, or priorities, you are not funding a strategy. You are funding a pause.

Use This

• In your next strategy conversation, ask one question: What will be different on Monday if this is real? If no one can answer, stop the process.

• Before approving a plan, require one visible power shift. A decision right that moves. A program that stops. A role that changes.

• If you feel pulled toward chasing new ideas, name it as a signal that strategy is missing, not that opportunity is abundant.

• Replace five-year plans with six, twelve, and eighteen-month decision horizons and explicit checkpoints for revising the course.

The Ask

If you are walking into a board or funder meeting where a strategic pause is on the table, reply with two sentences about the decision you are avoiding. I will send you a way to force the real conversation.

The sector does not need more decks. It needs leaders willing to decide

For decades, the beer industry was dominated by giants: Coors, Budweiser, and Miller. Their advantage wasn’t taste or experimentation. It was scale, consistency, and distribution.

They built systems designed to serve a mass market reliably.

Microbreweries didn’t beat Big Beer by replacing it. They offered something different: local, distinctive, authentic. No single microbrew threatened a giant.

Collectively, though, they changed what consumers wanted. That shift mattered more than market share charts.

Once expectations shifted, the giants faced a choice: imitate or underwrite.

In education, we are still choosing the wrong one.

The Fake-Craft Trap.

When microbrews started gaining loyalty, Big Beer’s first move was imitation. “Craft-style” beers brewed at an industrial scale, wrapped in the language of authenticity.

Consumers noticed immediately. The product didn’t live up to the promise.

This is exactly what’s happening in education.

It’s why so many district “innovation academies,” personalization pilots, and rebranded magnets fall flat. It’s Big Beer trying to brew an IPA in a factory. The structure gives it away every time.

Markets punish fake craft quickly.

Recognizing The Pattern Before Naming It.

I didn’t start with the beer metaphor. I backed into it.

Before I ever named the analogy, I was watching the market move. Through part-time enrollment, contracting authority, and district-sponsored ESAs, I was seeing families assemble learning differently while districts quietly remained the place where money, compliance, and legitimacy lived.

During COVID, as we were building and launching the VELA Education Fund, that pattern accelerated. Microschools and learning pods were expanding. And, they were clearly changing demand. The language of “disruption” wasn’t helping explain what was happening on the ground.

In a conversation with a colleague at Stand Together, someone who thinks in markets, not systems, I finally articulated it: this feels a lot like the beer industry.

That didn’t create the insight. It clarified it.

The Winning Move Is Underwriting, Not Replacement.

Big Beer didn’t disappear. It survived by decoupling production from distribution.

Distribution deals. Minority investments. Acquisitions. Logistics and balance sheets paired with local authenticity. The giants kept doing what they were built to do. The microbrews stayed the same, which made them valuable.

That move stabilized the industry, and education is following the same arc.

Districts are Big Beer. Not because they are bad at teaching, but because teaching isn’t their core advantage. Districts are infrastructure institutions.

• They absorb public dollars.

• They manage transportation and facilities.

• They handle compliance, audits, and liability.

• They operate at scale, under scrutiny.

Microschools are the microbrews: small, authentic, community-anchored programs designed for depth, not volume.

No microschool is trying to replace a district. That framing misunderstands the economics entirely.

The Microbrew Model of Learning.

What we demonstrated through district-sponsored ESAs—the compliance-bank model—is simply the education version of the distribution deal.

The district provides the platform: funding flow, compliance, liability, and infrastructure. Specialized providers create the product: learning districts cannot authentically produce at scale.

When a district enrolls a student part-time or contracts services out, it isn’t surrendering control. It’s underwriting an ecosystem.

That isn’t fragmentation. That’s re-segmentation.

It allows the district to retain the family relationship and the revenue without manufacturing a product the market no longer wants.

What This Model Makes Visible.

If you are funding imitation, you are slowing the market. Platforms and intermediaries matter, but confusing them with school models leads to bad bets. Underwriting changes incentives; imitation adds noise.

If you are a district leader, the question isn’t whether alternatives should exist. It’s whether you will be the distributor or the competitor. You can own the platform, or you can lose the family. You cannot fake the craft.

If you are a policymaker, the market has already moved. Your job isn’t to referee a culture war. It’s about deciding whether public infrastructure evolves with demand or hardens against it.

The real risk isn’t loss of control. It’s misreading the moment you’re in.

Systems don’t decay because small models exist. They decay when they refuse to adapt their function.

Panic is optional. Evolution is not.

If ESAs or vouchers are gaining ground in your state, you might be framing the decision incorrectly.

Most systems see two options. Fight them and bleed political capital defending the status quo. Or copy them and build a parallel bureaucracy from scratch—one that takes years to stand up and routinely fails on fraud control, compliance, and equity.

That framing is comfortable because it keeps the fight ideological. It is also wrong.

There is a third option. It uses infrastructure you already govern, already fund, and already rely on: Build a district-sponsored ESA.

This Is an Administrative Problem

The hard parts of ESAs are not philosophical. They are operational.

Enrollment verification. Payments. Vendor approval. Audit trails. Fraud prevention. Liability when a provider fails.

If you pass a new ESA law, you have to build an entire compliance and payments apparatus from zero. That is expensive, slow, and operationally fragile.

Districts already do this work.

They absorb public dollars. They manage vendor contracts. They clear audits. They operate under elected oversight. They are designed to hold liability and move money at scale.

To a condition-setter, a district is not just primarily a school operator. It is a compliance bank. Abandoning that infrastructure to invent a parallel payment system is not innovation. It is fiscal malpractice.

The Missed Move: Internalize the Market

The smart response to ESAs is not resistance or replication. It is internalization.

Instead of inventing a new way for money to follow students, use the enrollment categories that already exist. Instead of creating a new compliance regime, rely on the CFOs and auditors already accountable to the public.

In Colorado, this approach was not theoretical (see last week’s post for more).

Between 2017 and 2023, districts used existing part-time enrollment authority and contracting power to route approximately $36 million per year to microschools, private providers, community-based programs, and even their own programs and educators.

No new statute. No ballot initiative. No parallel agency. Just existing law, pointed in a different direction.

When the dollars reached that scale, state agencies began tightening rules—not because the model failed, but because it threatened monopoly over custody.

That tightening proved the demand.

What This Changes for Condition-Setters

Your job is not to referee the culture war. Your job is to maximize the utility of public infrastructure.

District-sponsored ESAs do not ask districts to control learning. They ask districts to underwrite it. They allow flexibility and portability now, without waiting for a legislative miracle or expanding bureaucratic surface area.

If districts in your state are only offering seat-time in a world demanding modular, supplemental, and blended learning, they are a distressed asset.

You already have the authority to modernize how that asset is used.

The Diagnostic

If you are setting strategy and cannot answer these questions, you are not ready for the moment you are in:

• Funding: Does money in your state already attach to students fractionally or by enrollment category?

• Authority: What power do districts have to contract instruction or services to third parties?

• Constraint: Is there any statute that explicitly forbids combining the two?

These are not reform questions. They are legal questions. In other states, the answers may reveal a dormant ESA sitting in statute right now, or something else entirely.

Use This

• Policymakers: Stop treating districts as school operators. Start treating them as platforms.

• Funders: Stop funding the political fight. Fund the technical work to unlock existing authority.

• Intrapreneurs: Read the code closely. The capacity is often already there.

The Ask

If you are a legislator, state chief, senior agency leader, or funder who suspects your state has this latent capacity, reply. I will share the statutory crosswalk and diagnostic we used in Colorado and talk through how this shows up elsewhere.

You don’t need to pass a bill to get an ESA. You may just need to wake one up.

For decades, the education sector has acted as if educational freedom exists only outside public systems. As if choice, customization, and flexibility require blowing everything up, passing new laws, launching new bureaucracies, and waging endless political wars.

That story is wrong. Completely wrong.

While the loudest people were screaming about vouchers and ESAs, we already built one of the largest ESA-like systems in the country—inside public education—without permission, without ideology, and without waiting.

And it worked.

Here’s the Part Everyone Somehow Missed

Public school districts already had the power to do the thing everyone keeps arguing about—collect money and pay providers.

In Colorado, like most states, students are funded based on enrollment status, but here we have two types of students: full-time and part-time (the latter is important for this email). Districts and state authorized charter schools can enroll either. They can also contract out academic and enrichment services (with a few caveats) for either.

Here’s the power: simple, legal, and in our case, devastating:

• Authority A: Districts can enroll students part-time (PT=homeschoolers, microschoolers, private schoolers, and hybrid learners).

• Authority B: Districts can contract instruction out to nonprofits, colleges, community organizations, companies, individual providers, and other schools.

In 2017, I realized that if you stack those two authorities, the entire ESA debate collapses.

The flow looks like this:

• A district enrolls a student part-time.

• It captures partial per-pupil funding (about $4,000 per student).

• It directs those dollars to a learning provider chosen by the family.

Same public money. Same audits. Same accountability. Different flow.

That is an ESA. You just don’t need to call it one.

I Didn’t Write About This. I Built It.

I was working at the Donnell-Kay Foundation when I identified this mechanism. I commissioned the legal memo. It came back clean. The authority was unambiguous.

Then I did the work everyone else avoids: I connected the players and the legal frame. Families to districts. Districts to providers.

We launched in the San Luis Valley, Durango, Colorado Springs, and along the I25 corridor. Partners like Justice & Heritage Academy worked with public schools to serve students who didn’t fit the full-time system but still needed structure, funding, and adult responsibility.

This wasn’t a boutique pilot. It wasn’t fragile. It wasn’t theoretical. It was public infrastructure doing what it already knows how to do: enrolling students, capturing funds, passing audits, and moving money legally.

By 2021–2023, roughly 9,000 students were using these mechanisms.

Do the math. That’s about $36 million per year flowing to real learning—statewide—through districts and state-authorized charter schools.

No ballot initiative. No culture war. No national branding exercise. Just kids getting what they needed, fast.

When It Worked, the Immune System Attacked

This is the part the sector refuses to say out loud.

As long as this system was small, it was tolerated. Once it scaled—once tens of millions of dollars started moving to “non-traditional” providers—the tone changed immediately.

State education agencies started muttering about “leakage.” Rules tightened. Guidance narrowed. Flexibility vanished.

This was not confusion. It was recognition.

The system identified a foreign object—functional innovation that redistributed power—and did exactly what bureaucratic immune systems do.

It attacked. Not because the model failed. Because it worked.

The ESA and Voucher Crowd Missed This Too

This part should be embarrassing.

For years, ESA advocates insisted that choice had to live outside public systems. They built massive new bureaucracies, fought endless legislative battles, and accepted slow, clumsy rollouts in the name of ideological purity.

Meanwhile, districts already had the pipes: Enrollment systems. Audit capacity. Compliance infrastructure.

We could have been moving money to kids years earlier.

This wasn’t about unions. It wasn’t about the law. It was about adults choosing fights instead of solutions.

Rural Conservatives Should Be Furious

During the Texas ESA battles, rural Republicans opposed vouchers because they feared losing enrollment and funding. That fear was rational.

What’s irrational is missing the alternative.

District-sponsored ESAs would have made those same rural districts central players rather than casualties. They could have enrolled part-time students, captured funding, and circulated dollars locally rather than watching families disappear entirely.

The retention play existed. The sector was too busy yelling to see it.

The Equity Failure Is Even Worse

Pure ESAs reward families with time, flexibility, and the social capital to navigate new markets.

District-sponsored ESAs lower the transaction cost.

They let working-class families access blended learning without abandoning the public system entirely. They preserve elected oversight. They keep the community hub intact.

When states restrict this model, they are not protecting public education. They are concentrating agency in the hands of families rich enough to leave.

That is an equity failure. Full stop.

Let’s Be Honest About the Real Problem

This isn’t a policy failure. It’s an attention failure.

The education sector keeps missing real power because it’s obsessed with symbolic fights. We ran a massive, accountable, publicly governed ESA in plain sight—and instead of studying it, agencies are now trying to bury it.

That should make everyone uncomfortable.

The Ask

If this just rewired how you think about ESAs, vouchers, or “innovation,” reply and tell me where you sit.

I’ll share the legal framework and the autopsy of exactly how this scaled before the system turned on it.

This wasn’t the future. It already happened. And the fact that so many of you missed it is the indictment.

Use it in: kitchen-table conversations, Sunday night check-ins, and the moments where you’re deciding who leans in, who leans back, and what kind of household you’re actually trying to build.

If you only have a minute

We still act as if providing means earning more and running faster, even though the biggest threats to many working families today aren’t financial scarcity but instability. The assumption that two people optimizing careers independently produces a stable family is rarely examined, and increasingly wrong. Families that sequence ambition across time don’t just feel better; they often outperform the parallel-race path in the long run.

The definition of “providing” hasn’t kept up

For most of human history, providing meant protection from scarcity. Food. Shelter. Physical safety. Money. If you could secure those, you were doing your job, which is still true for many families.

For families facing real economic precarity, providing is—and remains—about survival. This email is about what changes after those baseline needs are met.

That original definition still shapes how many high-functioning households operate. Earn more. Don’t lose momentum. Keep both careers accelerating. If income is rising, the family must be fine.

But for many dual-income, professional families, material scarcity is no longer the binding constraint. Instability is. And the systems we built to solve for income are poorly designed to manage it.

What erodes households now isn’t usually a lack of money. It’s destabilization: fragmented time, constant transitions, mental overload, digital intrusion, and two adult careers hitting inflection points at the same time. The old definition of providing doesn’t protect against any of that.

The assumption that quietly breaks the system

There’s a belief most dual-career families inherit without ever naming it: if two adults optimize their careers independently, the benefits will add up for the family.

In practice, that often looks like two people running at full capacity while outsourcing the friction: childcare, camps, logistics, just to keep things moving. The household stays functional, but brittle. Efficient. Expensive. And always closer to the edge than it appears.

Families aren’t two parallel ladders. They’re shared systems with finite attention, energy, and tolerance for shock. When both careers are optimized independently, the system loses margin. Any disruption: a sick kid, a job shift, a leak in the roof gets absorbed by the household itself.

Economists have long described households this way—not as independent earners, but as risk-sharing units that coordinate roles and timing to manage uncertainty.

When providing meant sequencing, not pushing

We ran into this decision directly.

As our life added real weight—a house, a kid, an actual household to run—my partner was offered a role that would move them into a new professional tier. Around the same time, I was the higher earner with momentum. By the old default logic, the answer felt obvious: either my partner delays the step, or we both keep pushing and outsource the early years we knew we couldn’t get back.

But that framing didn’t match the reality we were living in.

What we eventually saw was that this wasn’t about effort or ambition. It was about timing and load. In that moment, my partner had the real growth opportunity. I had more stability—the experience and flexibility to keep the system from wobbling.

If we both accelerated at once, something else was going to pay the price.

So we sequenced. I stepped back.

That didn’t mean stepping away from work. It meant changing its shape. For a season, my role was to protect routines, time, and household stability while continuing to contribute professionally in a way that fit the system we were actually in.

The point wasn’t sacrifice. It was stewardship. We slowed one lever so another could move: buying margin instead of spending it.

That’s what providing looked like in that season.

Why this mirrors what’s breaking in our sector

What’s happening inside families isn’t separate from what’s happening inside schools, nonprofits, and civic organizations.

We see the same failure pattern everywhere: growth mistaken for health, output prioritized over coherence, systems run at full utilization with no slack left for shock.

Margaret Wheatley calls for “islands of sanity”—human-scale systems that protect calm, clarity, and purpose inside destabilized environments. That’s not just an organizational idea. It’s a household requirement.

A family can’t just be a logistics hub for two careers. It has to be a place of return. A source of stability that holds risk so everything else can function.

Flourishing doesn’t come from piling on more. It comes from protecting the conditions that allow people to grow without breaking.

An updated definition of providing

Providing isn’t just about money or motion anymore. It’s about stewardship.

It means seeing careers, family, and childhood as one system across time. It means knowing when to press and when to hold. When to lean in and when to create space so someone else can.

In a world where stability is the scarce asset, providing means protecting coherence. Not forever. Not at the expense of ambition. Just long enough for compounding—and resilience—to take hold.

That’s not retreat. That’s leadership adapted to reality.

Use this

If both careers are accelerating at once, name the trade-off.

Ask yourselves:

• Are we optimizing two careers, or stewarding one family across time?

• Who is holding growth right now, and who is holding stability?

• If the answer is “we’re both doing both,” where is the risk actually living?

The ask

Forward this to your partner tonight and ask one hard question:

Are we running in parallel, or are we sequenced?

Then listen.

This is for the people who point the money and set the scoreboard.

CEOs. Board chairs. Chiefs of External Affairs. CMOs. Heads of campaigns and coalitions.

If you own the comms budget or org chart, this memo is yours. Most leadership teams are still treating communications as a mood board, not as a way to buy specific outcomes they actually care about.

The Report That Tried To Talk To Everyone

I was in a conference room with a client, reviewing their impact report. Twenty-five-plus slides. Beautiful design. Clean theme. Strong examples.

It was also an artifact for everyone and, therefore, for no one. Every audience lived in the same deck: current funders, future funders, sector peers, potential fellows, partners. There was no clear sense of who was supposed to do what after reading it.

We stopped and named their three or four main audiences. Then we walked the deck and asked, slide by slide: which audience is this really for, and what do we want them to do once they see it. We pulled out what mattered most to funders versus future fellows. We separated proof for peers from the story you’d want in front of a potential partner.

By the end, we had a different frame. The 25-slide version would live as a source document. This was the place staff could come to pull what they needed for specific audiences, not the thing you email to everyone.

A month later, they sent me the “real” report. Four pages. Well laid out. Great use of negative space. Clearly written for sector peers, not everyone at once. The ask was clear: learn about us, see how we work, partner with us, contact here.

Same wins. Same stories. Completely different posture. This one was built to buy something.

Comms Is Not a Mood Board

This is the leadership mistake underneath most comms dysfunction.

You are grading communications on how they feel inside the building instead of what they do outside of it.

You praise the story that makes the board feel proud. You chase the video that “captures our culture.” You celebrate the post that gets a spike in likes from the same 400 insiders.

None of that is free. Every time you greenlight a campaign, you are spending staff time, political capital, and real dollars. If you are not clear on what you are trying to buy with that spend, you are not leading. You are commissioning art.

Every Message Is a Transaction

At your level, comms is not about “raising awareness.”

It is about trading attention and money for a specific set of behaviors.

In this world, almost everything you care about rolls up into five buckets:

• Seats: inquiries, applications, enrollment, attendance, retention.

• Dollars: grants, gifts, renewals, upgrades.

• Cover: political support, community backing, reauthorization, key votes.

• Talent: teacher and staff recruitment, retention, referrals.

• Partners: MOUs, coalitions, and district/CMO relationships that actually sign.

If a comms asset cannot be tied to at least one of those, it is decoration.

Brand isn’t magic. Brand is just the accumulation of trust that makes the next “buy” cheaper and faster. If you aren’t measuring the accumulation, you aren’t building a brand. You’re lighting money on fire.

One Audience. One Ask. One Measure.

Most campaigns fail at the design table, not in the edit.

By the time the comms team sees it, leadership has already loaded it with five audiences and six goals.

If you want your comms to buy you something real, you have to enforce a different discipline:

Who is the primary audience for this piece. What do we want them to do in the next 7–30 days. How will we know if they did it.

Anything beyond that is a secondary bonus, not the point.

Your job as a CEO or CXO is to protect that focus, not to add “just one more” audience or talking point because it might help.

Stop Grading on Vibes

As long as your dashboard is built on vanity metrics, your decisions will drift back to vanity comms.

You will keep buying awareness instead of outcomes.

You do not need a complicated model. You need a different habit. Before you approve any big comms spend—campaign, rebrand, video, external firm—ask four questions:

What are we trying to buy with this: seats, dollars, cover, talent, or partners.

Where does this sit in our funnel: attention, interest, action, or follow-through. What will we stop doing or pause to make room for this. In 60 days, what evidence would convince us this worked.

If you cannot answer those questions in plain language, you should not be signing the check.

How This Ties the Comms Set Together

There were a few BullshitED Memos back in November that were about foundations.

First: the money is pointed at the wrong media map. Funders and elites are still buying prestige hits while families live on phones, texts, and local channels.

Second: the writing is built for internal comfort. Eight-sentence paragraphs and Franken-docs that read like grad seminars instead of tools for humans.

This one sits on top.

Even if you fix the channels and the writing, nothing changes if leadership still treats comms as “our brand” instead of a way to buy specific outcomes.

You cannot outsource that discipline to your comms director. It has to live in your questions, your approvals, and the way you talk about results in the room.

The Play/Use This

Pick one major comms asset on your calendar in the next month: a grant, a campaign, a launch, or a big announcement.

Sit with your comms or external affairs lead for 20 minutes and answer, together:

• Who is the primary audience.

• What are we trying to buy from them in the next 7–30 days.

• How will we measure whether it worked, in real behaviors, not impressions.

Then hold that asset to the same phone-first, behavior-first standards as the last two memos: write for where your people actually are, and for what you actually need from them.

If you cannot name the audience, the purchase, and the measure, you are not running a comms strategy.

You are funding noise.