The Spongeworthy Problem
The good, the bad, and the ugly of charter school caps
In one of the more memorable episodes of Seinfeld, “The Sponge” (Season 7, Episode 9) (https://www.netflix.com/title/70153373), Elaine learns that her preferred contraceptive sponge has been taken off the market. With a finite supply left in the closet, ordinary dating judgment becomes triage. A prospective partner does not merely need to be attractive or interesting. He needs to be spongeworthy.
This is admittedly an odd way into charter school policy. But it is also a pretty good description of what happens when a state puts a hard cap on the number of charter schools that may operate. Once the available supply becomes scarce, an authorizer is no longer asking only whether an applicant meets its standards. It is also asking whether this applicant is worthy of consuming one of the last opportunities the state may ever make available.
Maine has reached that point. The Pine Tree State is personal to me. I lived there as a small child and probably would have grown up there if my father's heart attack had not pushed us back toward Massachusetts, where he could be closer to his physicians and we could be closer to my older half-siblings. I did not spend most of my childhood there, but Maine has always held a special place in my heart. Its choices about schools do not feel abstract to me. I'm also the kind of skier and education nerd who gets yelled at by his carpool passengers when I see a sign for a charter school on a local road in Maine or New Hampshire and feel compelled to pull over and visit the grounds of an empty facility at 5 p.m. on a Sunday afternoon. This is why it's better that someone else drives while I nap on the ride home.
My family still brings up the time I dozed off for hours during the slog back from Montreal after the amazing 2024 eclipse. That is probably a fair response to my tendency to nap on long car drives in northern New England. Notwithstanding that tendency, I do my best to keep my finger on the pulse of charter-school news in New England. The most significant recent development: MOXIE Public Schools (https://www.moxiepublicschools.me/) opened its founding campus in South Portland last week, welcoming its first 125 students in grades six through nine. In doing so, MOXIE became Maine's tenth operating charter school. Ten is not merely a milestone. Under Maine's current charter law, it is also the limit.
For those of you who aren't from New England, and especially those of you who aren't 70 or older, as I am not, you may not understand what Moxie is beyond an antiquated dictionary entry synonymous with grit and a degree of irreverence. It is also a soda, although calling it that does not quite prepare the uninitiated for the experience. Moxie has bite. It is bitter, herbal, and vaguely medicinal, the kind of drink that can make a first-time drinker step back after the first sip and wonder exactly what just happened. I absolutely love it. My dad introduced me to Moxie. He was a young World War II Marine, and Moxie belongs in the same collection of New England associations I inherited from him and my family: Maine, the Red Sox, Ted Williams, and a certain affection for things that do not particularly care whether everyone else likes them. My father has been gone for years now. Perhaps that is part of why opening a bottle of Moxie still carries more emotional freight for me than any soft drink reasonably should. Ted Williams really did endorse Moxie (https://sabr.org/sabr-rucker-archive/willite01_264/), which helps explain why the connection feels so natural to me. Long after I stopped buttoning the top button of my Catholic school uniform, started dropping the g's at the end of not-so-safe-for Catholic school Anglo-Saxon gerundives, and left my Star Trek novels at home instead of bringing them to read after tests, I still brought Moxie to school. Like Dana Carvey's grumpy old man on SNL, "We liked it!"
I still love Moxie, on those infrequent occasions when I drink soda. I'd probably drink it more if it were available at lunchtime on the go anywhere other than when I occasionally go through the cafeteria line at Sunday River. Maybe part of the appeal is that Moxie does not try very hard to tell you what you want to hear. There is something in that worth remembering when we talk about accountability, too. Good accountability should have some bite. It should occasionally make us step back from a comfortable story and look again at what is actually happening, especially for kids and families. The reality is that Moxie is a rare commodity. It's not at my local Walmart, or even at the local branch of the greatest New England grocery store in the history of the universe, the venerable Market Basket. Moxie is a limited commodity, much like charter schools in many New England states and across the country. In Maine, where Moxie is literally enshrined in state statute, up there on a pedestal with lobster and the less-than-awesome James G. Blaine, MOXIE Public Schools might be the last public educational option ever approved in the Pine Tree State. Under Maine's current state law (https://legislature.maine.gov/statutes/20-A/title20-Asec2405.html), ten charter schools is not just a round number one can tick off on one's fingers. It is the limit.
Beth marked the opening last week with a line that gets at something larger than the opening of a single school: "nothing matters if good ideas fail to reach the kids and families who need them most." Exactly. Creating a good school and making its existence legally possible are not the same thing as ensuring that children can actually reach it.
A disclosure is important here. I submitted a letter supporting Moxie’s application to the Maine Charter School Commission. It wasn't just because I worried about Ted Williams's cryogenically frozen head haunting my dreams. I've known the driving force behind its founding, Beth Rabbitt, for almost two decades. Earlier in her career, her job was to hold the feet of charter school founders, school leaders, and educational entrepreneurs to the fire. She was and is all about outcomes for kids. Her team developed a compelling academic, operating, and business plan focused on what my friend Jim Goenner articulated almost 30 years ago: Will the children learn? Will public funds be taken care of? And will kids be treated fairly? For me, MOXIE passed all of those tests. I believed the school deserved approval, and I still do. Readers should know where I stood before I use its approval to make a broader point about caps.
MOXIE was spongeworthy. The harder question is what happens to the next worthy school.
Personal me is tracking down Moxie the way a parent tracks down a better option for his kids: with enthusiasm, persistence, and a willingness to take a detour when the thing seems worth finding. The authorizer has a different obligation. It has to decide whether the school is spongeworthy, whether it deserves one of the few opportunities the state has made available. Caps sit somewhere in between. They can protect families from weak schools and give authorizers leverage to demand more, but they can also turn a parent's search for a better option into a competition for a scarce legal slot.
The good: Scarcity can strengthen an authorizer's hand
People who have never worked close to charter authorizing sometimes imagine that applications rise or fall on a clean application of published standards. Sometimes they do. But authorizers also operate amid emotional appeals, political pressure, sponsoring boards that can become enamored with an applicant, and the possibility of litigation under a charter law or a state's administrative procedures act.
In that environment, a cap can make a thoughtful no easier to sustain. Staff can tell their board that approval is not simply permission for one more school. It is a decision to consume a public asset that cannot then be used by a stronger applicant. Scarcity can help keep the conversation anchored to standards. It can also give an authorizer leverage before it says yes.
Maine's early virtual charter contracts offer an unusually good example. When schools affiliated with K12, now Stride (https://investors.stridelearning.com/news/news-details/2020/Ed-Tech-Leader-K12-Inc.-Becomes-Stride-Inc/default.aspx), and Connections Education (https://www.pearson.com/en-us/schools/products-services/pearson-virtual-schools.html), originally developed out of Sylvan and acquired by Pearson in 2011, sought approval, the Commission did not simply accept the national providers' turnkey models. The Commission insisted that the initial contracts create meaningful school-side leadership and financial capacity. The Maine Virtual Academy contract (https://www.maine.gov/future/sites/maine.gov.csc/files/inline-files/FY15%20Maine%20Virtual%20Academy.pdf), for example, required that the ESP agreement contain no exclusivity provision, be terminable by the school, and allow the school to remove an ESP employee. They included nonexclusive and terminable management arrangements, controls over recruitment and refunds, and school leaders with responsibility for supervising the provider rather than reporting to it.
Those provisions reduced the risk that a nominally independent school would become a captive client of the company supplying nearly everything it needed to operate. Some of those protections would have been difficult to obtain in a state where the applicant could shop among many authorizers or credibly threaten litigation over a denial. Maine's finite supply of charters, combined with a single statewide authorizer for virtual schools, appears to have strengthened the Commission's negotiating position.
That is the best argument for a cap. Scarcity can support rigor. It can give staff and boards room to say no. And it can help an authorizer turn an eventual yes into a better contract. But there is an important distinction between using scarcity as leverage and making scarcity permanent.
The bad: A smart cap can punish success
Massachusetts offers the clearest example of a cap that began as a smart reform and developed a success problem. Under Massachusetts law (https://malegislature.gov/Laws/GeneralLaws/PartI/TitleXII/Chapter71/Section89), the state generally limits charter tuition attributable to a sending district to 9 percent of that district's net school spending. The ceiling rises to 18 percent for districts whose performance places them in the bottom 10 percent statewide, and approvals above 9 percent are generally reserved for proven providers. The framework was substantially revised by the 2010 achievement-gap legislation (https://www.mass.gov/files/documents/2018/04/24/12275.pdf), which raised the cap for the lowest-performing districts and removed the statewide limit on the total number of Commonwealth charter students. When that approach was adopted, it was a breath of fresh air. Additional charter growth would be directed toward communities with the greatest need and toward operators with a record of serving similar students successfully.
But eligibility is a moving target. Massachusetts recalculates the bottom 10 percent annually using two years of assessment results. For the 2026 ranking (https://www.doe.mass.edu/charter/enrollment/CapIncrease/), six operating districts entered the category and six left it. A district that improves can therefore lose access to the additional charter capacity. That sounds sensible until we consider how improvement might happen. Strong charter schools can share practices with district schools. They can create constructive competitive pressure. They can also attract families of students who might otherwise have struggled in the district, meaning those students' later results are attributed to the charter rather than the sending district. A stronger educational ecosystem can help lift a district out of the bottom 10 percent.
The conditions justifying charter growth may disappear partly because the charter sector is working. The practical problem is larger than uncertainty about the next application. The statute does contain protections for previously approved enrollment, but its broad grandfather clause applies only to enrollment approved before July 1, 2014. For a later approval, the protection depends in part on whether charter tuition from the district had already exceeded 9 percent before the district left the bottom 10 percent.
Imagine a school approved after 2014 for a complete K-12 model. It opens with a few grades and plans to grow one grade at a time. It obtains a building and finances it based on the mature enrollment the state has already approved. Then, while the school is serving seventh or ninth grade, one of its principal sending districts leaves the bottom 10 percent.
The school may still possess a K-12 charter. Its building may still have been financed for the enrollment contemplated in that charter. But its ability to admit and receive full tuition for enough students to complete the approved buildout can become uncertain.
This is not merely a hypothetical concern about statutory wording. Massachusetts guidance (https://www.doe.mass.edu/charter/enrollment/fy2025/pre-enrollment-guide.html) warns that full tuition cannot be guaranteed from districts at, near, or exiting their caps, regardless of a school's approved maximum enrollment or enrollment subcaps. Schools can be told to skip otherwise eligible nonsibling applicants, and tuition from an affected district can be prorated across the charter schools serving its students.
Because the limit attaches separately to each sending district, a regional charter may also be pushed to change its geographic enrollment mix. It can admit a child from a community with available headroom while skipping a child selected in the same lottery from a district that has exited the bottom 10 percent. More perniciously, it may result in a charter school passing over a low-income child attending a slightly less well-performing, but still poorly performing, school for an affluent child in an adjacent, higher-performing district. I'm all for diverse-by-design schools that seek to improve outcomes for all kids through intentional design elements. But the initially laudable smart caps that Governor Deval Patrick's administration shepherded through the legislature in 2010 (https://budget.digital.mass.gov/bb/h1/fy11h1/exec_11/hfedstim.htm) as part of the Commonwealth's Race to the Top application (https://budget.digital.mass.gov/bb/h1/fy11h1/exec_11/hfedstim.htm) have not aged well.
The state can approve the school, approve its grade span, and, through MassDevelopment financing or guarantees (https://www.massdevelopment.com/products-and-services/financing/guarantees/), help finance a facility sized for its mature enrollment, yet still make that enrollment financially unsafe. The charter promises one thing, the financing assumes another, and the cap can deliver a third.
That is a cap functioning as a trap.
The ugly: Demand finds another legal form
Caps rarely eliminate demand for additional schools. They redirect it. Operators begin looking for inactive charters that can be transferred or revived. Existing organizations pursue expansions that would otherwise have been proposed as new schools. Policymakers relabel restarts, satellites, and mergers. Lawyers study which kinds of authorizers or schools the legislature forgot to include.
Michigan supplied the classic example (https://www.ag.state.mi.us/opinion/datafiles/2000s/op10311.htm) in the early 2000s. The state had reached its cap on charters issued by public universities, then its primary statewide authorizers. Bay Mills Community College, a tribally controlled community college whose geographic boundary was treated as the entire state, was not subject to the same university cap. It began chartering schools around Michigan. What one side described as a lawful alternative authorizing pathway, the other described as the Bay Mills loophole.
Michigan ultimately dealt with that distortion in a way that also created more opportunity. It did not strip Bay Mills of its statewide authority. Bay Mills can still authorize anywhere in Michigan (https://www.michigan.gov/mde/services/flexible-learning/options/psa/psa-faqs/partners/authorizers). Instead, lawmakers phased out the cap on university-authorized charter schools (https://www.legislature.mi.gov/documents/2011-2012/publicact/htm/2011-PA-0277.htm), raising it to 300 through 2012 and 500 through 2014 before eliminating it in 2015. The legal anomaly remained, but it ceased to be a necessary end run around an artificial bottleneck. More authorizers could consider more qualified applicants through ordinary channels.
That has generally been a positive development. Whatever one thinks of every school Michigan has authorized since, the state reduced the premium on finding a clever exception and expanded the lawful opportunity to propose a school. It attacked the scarcity that made the loophole valuable instead of merely blocking the workaround.
New York has produced a more elaborate version. State law limits the number of charter documents rather than the number of students or the state's fiscal exposure. It also constrains their geographic use. The New York State Education Department (https://www.nysed.gov/charter-schools/starting-new-bor-authorized-charter-school) expects no charters to be available for new schools in New York City in 2026, even though authority remains available elsewhere in the state. Under that structure, a school serving 200 students and one serving 2,000 each consume one unit. Growth does not stop. It migrates into grade and enrollment expansions, mergers, restarts, and fights over whether the charter of a school that never opened or later closed can be reissued as a so-called zombie charter.
Washington (https://charterschool.wa.gov/our-charter-public-schools/) shows that a state can miss even the number written into its own cap. Its law allowed as many as forty schools during a five-year authorization window beginning in 2016. The state currently has far fewer than forty operating schools, but the authorization window expired and the legislature did not renew it. Until lawmakers act, no new applicant can use the capacity the original law purported to allow.
Connecticut (https://www.cga.ct.gov/current/pub/chap_164.htm) offers an even more candid version of political rationing. Since 2015, the State Board of Education has not actually granted new charters. It grants what the law calls an "initial certificate of approval." That certificate does not become a charter until the General Assembly appropriates money for that particular school. That is not simply a requirement that lawmakers provide enough money for all approved schools. It allows the legislature to decide which specific schools get to exist.
This is not merely an out-of-state case study for me. I have friends and mentors who have been advocating to fund the Danbury school since its inception. Even as someone who commuted back and forth on the 6 train for many years, I never had a problem with Yankees fans as long as they never had a problem with me and my Red Sox cap. Danbury is, regrettably, hard-core Yankees territory. I say that as someone who spent years commuting on the 6 train in a Red Sox cap. The proposed Danbury Charter School applied in 2017 and received its initial certificate in October 2018 (https://portal.ct.gov/SDE/Board/State-Board-of-Education-Meetings/2018-Board-and-Committee-Meetings). Nearly eight years later, it still has not received operating funds. Its organizers have obtained and prepared a building, but classrooms remain empty. In 2026 (https://www.danburycharterschool.org/apps/news/show_news.jsp?REC_ID=1020029&id=0), the legislature funded three newer charter schools.
That's not nothing. But they still paased appropriations again leaving Danbury out. The formal law gives the General Assembly, acting collectively, the power to fund a school. The functional veto operates through legislative custom. The way it has been described to me is a kind of personal privilege: when an appropriation is tied to a named program in a member's district, legislative leaders ordinarily defer to that member or the local delegation. It functions like an earmark with a reverse switch. A local legislator may not be able to fund the item alone, but opposition from the local delegation can keep it from appearing at all.
The public record supports that description even if the phrase "personal privilege" does not appear in the charter statute or in a formal chamber rule I could find. In 2023 (https://ctmirror.org/2023/04/21/danbury-ct-charter-school-budget-amendment/), State Senator Julie Kushner, a persistent opponent of the Danbury school, said that most of the local delegation had taken its opposition to legislative leadership and that she believed appropriations leaders listened, leaving the school out of the budget. An attempt to restore the funding by amendment failed even as the committee chair acknowledged that the budget had room for it. In 2025 (https://www.ctinsider.com/news/education/article/ct-charter-schools-approval-funding-process-21100303.php), Kushner explained the convention even more directly: legislative leaders listen to local delegations because they represent the affected community, and she believed the process was working as intended.
The State Board of Education offered no escape. In a 2025 declaratory ruling (https://portal.ct.gov/-/media/sde/board/boardmaterials100825/capital_preparatory_schools_petition_for_a_declaratory_ruling.pdf?rev=fb67a73d562244d28c32285c757994fe), it concluded that the General Assembly has sole discretion to fund, and therefore to effectuate, individual charter schools. The board can run an application process, evaluate the educational plan, hold a public hearing, and determine that a school deserves approval. A small number of legislators can then keep that approval from becoming real year after year, without having to reverse the board's educational judgment or formally reject the school. To put it less politely, using some Anglo-Saxon verbiage as I unbutton the second button my shirt and press pause on the latest episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, that is fundamentally fucked.
The legislature should decide how much the state can responsibly spend. It should not operate a shadow authorizing process in which individual schools live or die according to their standing with a local delegation. The Connecticut Charter Schools Association (https://ctcharters.org/thetimeisnow/) has repeatedly pointed out the basic contradiction: Danbury followed the approval process, earned the highest applicant score, and still could not open because lawmakers withheld school-specific funding. If lawmakers impose an aggregate funding limit, the State Board should rank approved schools using published criteria and fund them in that order. Political access should not become an unpublished cap.
These mechanisms differ, but they produce the same lesson. A cap does not simply limit growth. It changes who holds leverage, what transactions become valuable, which lawyers get called, and which families are allowed to act.
A cap that gives authorizers credit for saying no
If a state insists on a cap, it should operate as a planning constraint rather than a ration coupon.
First, the state should count authorized seats or projected fiscal exposure, not pieces of paper. A cap on legal charters makes a small community school and a massive network campus equivalent while rewarding organizations that know how to grow without requesting a new charter.
Second, every approval should protect the school's entire authorized buildout. If the state approves a school for grades K-12 and 900 students, those grades and seats should remain available throughout the initial charter term. The protection cannot depend on whether the school filled them before an external performance designation changed. Authorization, operating funding, and state-supported facility financing should all rely on the same enrollment assumptions.
Third, capacity surrendered through closure, revocation, or voluntary reduction should return automatically to a transparent public pool. A charter should never become a privately tradable commodity, and an authorizer should never hesitate to close a bad school because doing so will permanently destroy the opportunity to approve a good one.
Fourth, annual capacity should include a decaying carryforward. Suppose an authorizer may approve four schools in a year but finds only two applicants worthy. It should be able to carry perhaps half of the unused capacity into the next cycle, with that additional authority expiring after two years and subject to a reasonable cumulative limit.
A strict use-it-or-lose-it cap quietly turns a ceiling into a quota. It pressures an authorizer to approve the best applicant available rather than an applicant that actually meets its standards. Full one-for-one banking creates the opposite risk by allowing a very large reserve to accumulate. That can create political pressure and perverse incentives to lower stabdards. MKodels that provide for partial carryforward rewards restraint without eventually defeating the cap.
Finally, a governing board should possess a narrow extraordinary authority to go modestly above its adjusted annual limit. A unanimous vote, accompanied by written findings that the additional applicant meets every standard, that demand is documented, and that the authorizer has adequate oversight capacity, might permit one additional school or perhaps 20 to 25 percent more seats.
The exact numbers are debatable. The principle should not be. An authorizer should never have to choose between approving a school it does not believe in and permanently surrendering the public's opportunity to create a better school later. A wise cap gives authorizers credit for saying no.
From spongeworthy to worthy
MOXIE's approval filled Maine's final available slot with a school I believe deserved it. That is the cap at its most defensible. The Commission could be selective, negotiate seriously, and reserve a scarce public opportunity for an applicant it judged capable of using it well.
But the arrival of the tenth school should trigger a policy conversation, not end one. The next strong applicant should not need to purchase an inactive charter, disguise a new school as an expansion, find a Bay Mills-sized opening in the statute, or wait for an existing school to fail. Nor should the Commission feel pressure to protect a weak school merely because closing it would reopen the only available slot.
Caps can strengthen authorizing when they reinforce standards and provide leverage. They become destructive when they strand approved growth, punish system improvement, convert charter documents into assets, or make political access more important than school quality.
That brings me back to Jim Goenner's three questions: Will the children learn? Will public funds be taken care of? And will kids be treated fairly? Increasingly, I think there is a fourth question hiding inside all three: How will we know?
Not just whether a school has seats on paper or reaches the enrollment number in a budget, but whether families can actually find and reach the opportunity, whether the assumptions behind growth and facilities hold up, and whether the people responsible can see soon enough when reality starts to diverge from the story everyone expected. Accountability is useful precisely when the answer has a little Moxie-like bite.
George Costanza once suggested “Soda” as a beautiful name for a child in “The Seven” (Season 7, Episode 13) (https://www.netflix.com/title/70153373). I would not go that far. But I understand the instinct. Some things are unusual, scarce, and worth pursuing. For a parent, that can mean tracking down a school like MOXIE. For an authorizer, it means deciding whether that school is spongeworthy. A good cap should help make that judgment clearer, not make the school impossible to find.
I look forward to the day when I can drink my Moxie on the 6 train in New York City, wearing my Red Sox cap, and know that the city's children are not being constrained by charter caps that keep them from the schools that best fit them. On a day like that, I might even be carrying my skis for a bus trip up to the southern New England mountains. It sounds a little unwieldy, but believe you me, I've done it before. The only real risk is that I fall asleep on the way and spill my Moxie.