Curriculum, Coherence, and Change (with John White)

you're talking about this perspective back in 2007, where it was just very normal to think in monopoly terms and that that was appropriate.

You can look since then and say, man, there's been a ton of change.

You mentioned ESAs and there's lots of school choice in general.

Charters have become sort of, you know, part of the fabric.

You still hear lots of people saying, oh, well, it's a monopolistic system and it's dominated by that.

What's the appropriate perspective on how much that sort of monolithic entity factor has changed or or has not changed?

Yeah, I think I think about this a lot.

I think it is.

I mean, it's all semantics in a way.

I would say it is incremental change quantitatively, but significant change philosophically, meaning there is an openness In particular, I think post-pandemic, and you've written about some similar issues, there is an openness post-pandemic to the idea that the monopoly operator, the school boards, do face a set of legitimate competitive threats, not just kind of notional things you can take to your legislature and cry for more money, but existential threats.

that are taking market share.

It's not just charters.

It's also private schools, publicly subsidized.

It's also micro schools and other smaller operators.

And it's online schools.

And I think that's been sort of to good and bad effects in different cases.

But I do think that in general, yes, it's true.

Today's landscape is much more conscious of markets and competition than was the case 20 years ago.

And at the same time, when you're state superintendent in Louisiana, you don't just sit up there and be like, hey, Tensaw Parish, Louisiana, you got 800 kids.

We're now going to invoke our portfolio strategy.

I mean, there are some times, many times, maybe even most times when the most viable path to change runs right through the local public school.

And I think you can say those two things at the same time.

The overall landscape has changed.

The philosophical understanding and our relationship to markets and competition has changed.

That doesn't mean that we should ignore the fact that quantitatively and practically, pragmatically, oftentimes the route to change goes through the traditional public school.