America and It’s “Boutique” Love Affair

America and Americans love to celebrate small wins these days, especially when it comes to public education.

Several years ago, I attended the Teach for America (TFA) 20^th anniversary celebration in Houston, Texas. Wendy Kopp, founder of TFA, was the event’s special guest and main speaker for the evening. I remember watching three large screens at the front of the banquet hall celebrating gifts made that night by the thousands of supporters assembled to celebrate such an important occasion. These weren’t announcements of $10 or $20. These were repeated announcements of $1,000, $5,000, $10,000, and some higher. After all the money was raised, it was Kopp’s turn to congratulate the Houston TFA organization for 20 years of supplying young, bright classroom leaders for one of America’s most urban school systems – the Houston Independent School District (HISD).

Kopp began her remarks by stating that “Over the past 20 years, TFA has placed 2,000 teachers within HISD.” Applause followed. I started to do some math in my head, so I apologize for not being able to remember what Wendy said next. Or after that. In fact, I missed most of the rest of her speech, as the dollars continued to roll in on the big screens in front of the banquet hall. And here’s what the math in my head told me. At the time, there were about 10,000 teachers within the Houston school district. If the superintendent wanted to fire and hire all those positions, she would have 10,000 moves a year, or 200,000 moves over 20 years. Wait! I’m sitting here, watching this organization earn thousands and thousands of dollars (I wouldn’t have been surprised if TFA raised over $1 million that evening) and we are celebrating a teacher supply organization that offered 1% market penetration on an annual basis over 20 years. 1% of Houston’s potential teaching force over 20 years came from TFA, and that night’s donors were going goofy throwing money at Wendy and her gang. And Wendy was loving it.

I call this phenomenon the “boutique success love affair.” America can’t find success with their larger public education system, so it finds “boutique operations” like TFA to celebrate. Charter schools fall into this “boutique” category also. Several charters, like KIPP, Imagine, Harmony, IDEA, Uncommon, Aspire, and Uplift (and the motivating descriptors go on and on) have met with quite a bit of success competing for and educating under-represented kids better than their traditional school competitors. But if you look at the overall enrollments of these successful charters (KIPP has 79,000 students, Imagine and Harmony around 33,000, IDEA around 29,000, with Uncommon, Aspire, and Uplift having 15,000 each,) one can’t help but notice their growth targets over the past 20 years have been conservative at best. In fact, all U.S. charters (whether operating their own schools or contracting with traditional systems) amount to a little over 3 million students enrolled, based on a 2016-17 National Alliance for Public Charter Schools study. Currently, there are around 50 million young people enrolled in America’s public schools, charter or other.

Big Picture Learning, considered by many as the learning system having the most progressive personalized learning strategies around, has 175 schools worldwide, with each school having an average enrollment of 500 kids. Their market penetration, because they are a worldwide learning venture, is miniscule.

Why is this happening? Why is America, and may I say most of the entire world, so desperate for wins in their public education space? If you’ve been reading social media lately, it’s not a difficult question to answer.

Here in America, our public school system has hit the skids. Over the past 30-40 years, our young learners have flat lined on what we call the Nation’s Report Card, or the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Education Week, probably the most well-respected of the national media covering our public schools, has given the U.S. a big fat “C” when it comes to excellence in reading, writing, and problem-solving skills.

So America, instead of fixing the larger system, has gone in the direction of “celebrating the boutique.” Most parents think today as long as they can send their kid to a successful “boutique school,” then their family will be o.k. And they are willing to pay, and get others to pay, large amounts of money to be associated with these “boutique” operations. Private schools have been operating this way for years.

This “boutique” love affair we are having is costing us mightily when it comes to giving all our kids a smarter and stronger learning plan. Believe me, charters won’t build schools fast enough over the next 50 years because of their reliance on talented teachers and motivated parents. Given most charter school’s history, once teacher talent and parent motivation become rarified, charters slow their growth.

The only solution I can think of to pull our country and others out of this “boutique” love affair we are having is the creation of a new system of learning. Charters tried to convince us that they were that new system of learning nearly 50 years ago, but they were wrong. To me, this new system of learning is built on two inventions – the learning cohort and the learning coach.

Learning cohorts can be formed whenever 20-25 young learners come together and want to learn together. We do this every year with our 5-year-olds. It’s called kindergarten. Learning cohorts, sometimes referred to as learning pods, became popular during 2020 at the beginning of the COVID pandemic.

Most problematic, but not insurmountable, is the creation of the learning coach – the adult learning leader hired to guide the learning cohort. Currently, it’s hard to find a place willing to train these types of coaches, since most institutions of higher education continue to insist that their calling is to prepare teachers for traditional public schools.

Finally, even when you identify a learning cohort and coach, paying for it is a challenge since traditional schools continue to monopolize public money assigned to public learning. If you don’t believe that just ask your local charter school operator how hard it was (and still is) to get public money to pay for their learning operations. But there are “boutique” (there’s that word again) wins out there right now when it comes to paying for learning cohorts or pods and learning coaches. ReSchool Colorado just sponsored a bill that became law providing poor families financial support for out of school learning. Michigan may become the first state to provide a voucher to families to pay for alternative learning other than traditional school.

It’s time for a new learning system! And it’s time to stop celebrating our “boutique” successes. Because the longer we celebrate the “boutique,” the longer is will be before all our young learners are liberated when it comes to accessing a promising future.