I’ve been watching school choice legislation move across the country the past couple of years, and I’m having a major case of déjà vu.

In 2011, I became the founding Chief of Staff of the Portfolio Office at Chicago Public Schools. CPS was one of a growing number of large urban districts — alongside Denver, New Orleans, Cleveland, and others — explicitly organizing itself around what practitioners called the “portfolio model”: the idea that a district should actively manage a diverse array of school options, held together by common accountability, rational funding, and shared enrollment systems. At the time, debates about school choice mostly centered on charter schools – whether to authorize them, how many to permit, and under what conditions.

Today, the debate has moved to a fundamentally different place. The question is clearly no longer only whether to allow charter schools, it’s whether and how to move public funding beyond the traditional public education system entirely — into private schools, microschools, homeschool co-ops, and Education Savings Accounts that families can spend with significant discretion.

That is a bigger shift. It requires new thinking. But it doesn’t require starting from scratch.

Portfolio districts have been building and refining coherent multi-sector school choice systems for over two decades. Cities across the country are actively managing myriad school options today — and the body of knowledge they’ve developed about what it actually takes to make choice work for families is directly applicable to what states are now trying to build.

The goal of this piece is to begin making that connection explicit — and to offer a framework for how states can apply what portfolio districts have learned.

The Structural Parallel

The are fundamental differences between portfolio districts and statewide parental choice systems. One is district-managed; the other is purely market-driven. One is urban and bounded; the other is statewide. One centers on charter schools operating within a public framework; the other includes private providers operating largely outside it.

But the core design challenge — how to build a coherent system of diverse school options that genuinely works for students and families — is structurally identical. Portfolio districts have spent years grappling with four interdependent design questions that states are now encountering, often for the first time:

• How do you govern a system of diverse school types with different authorizers, oversight bodies, and accountability structures — respecting the goal of independence without the whole thing fragmenting into incoherence?
• How do you fund a multi-sector system fairly — ensuring money follows students in ways that are transparent, sustainable, and don’t destabilize the institutions students and families depend on?
• How do you hold a diverse set of providers accountable to meaningful standards — consistently and fairly across school types, while recognizing that different providers may have different responsibilities? 
• How do you help families find, understand, and access their options — especially the families with the fewest resources and the most to gain from a well-functioning system?

These questions don’t have easy answers. But portfolio districts have been working on them — and getting meaningfully better at answering them — for a long time. States don’t have to start from zero.

First, the Case for Governance

Before getting to what portfolio districts have learned, there is an argument that needs to be made explicitly, because not everyone reading this starts from the same premise.

Many of the legislators and advocates driving statewide choice expansion are, quite intentionally, not trying to build a coherent system of governance. The ideological vision animating much of the current choice movement is closer to the opposite: get government out of the way, empower families, and let markets work. From this perspective, calls for governance infrastructure, accountability frameworks, and enrollment systems can sound like the educational establishment trying to reassert control over a movement specifically designed to escape it.

That skepticism deserves a direct response. The case for coherent systems isn’t a case against school choice; it’s a case for making school choice actually work for the families it’s meant to serve. Governance, which includes establishing vision, policy, and strategic direction, establishes the “rules of the game” and is essential to deliver on a state’s constitutional responsibility. 

Markets need infrastructure to function. Even the most committed free-market economists accept that markets require certain conditions to work: price transparency, quality information, protection from fraud, and rules that apply to all participants. A school choice “market” without enrollment transparency, clear quality signals, and consistent accountability isn’t a free market. It’s an opaque one, and opaque markets reliably advantage insiders over newcomers, the well-connected over the less-connected, and providers with good marketing over providers with good outcomes. If the goal is a genuinely competitive marketplace that rewards quality and does not tolerate failure, the infrastructure that makes markets function is a prerequisite.

Incoherent systems produce fiscal surprises that become political crises. Legislators who don’t want to manage the system still have to fund it. And incoherent choice systems generate compounding, unpredictable fiscal consequences — for districts, for state budgets, and for taxpayers — that eventually become political problems even for legislators who care nothing about governance per se. Portfolio districts learned this directly. The states that are currently expanding choice programs fastest will learn it too, unless they do the fiscal modeling now that portfolio districts had to do after the fact.

Family empowerment requires infrastructure. If the genuine goal is empowering families, and particularly families who have historically had the least power in education, then families need information they can act on, navigation support that meets them where they are, and protection when providers fail them. None of that happens automatically in an unmanaged marketplace. It has to be built. This is not big government paternalism; it’s consumer protection — the same logic that underlies disclosure requirements, professional licensing, and truth-in-advertising standards in every other consequential marketplace. Families making decisions about their children’s education deserve at least as much protection as consumers making decisions about their mortgages.

Accountability protects choice politically. This may be the most pragmatic argument of all. When publicly funded providers produce poor outcomes — and some will — and there are no consequences, no transparency, and no recourse for families, the resulting stories become the political ammunition that kills choice programs entirely. The absence of accountability doesn’t protect school choice from its critics. It validates them. Portfolio districts learned that symmetric, transparent accountability across all school types builds public trust in the whole system. The inverse is also true: choice programs that are seen as publicly funded and publicly unaccountable are politically fragile in ways that ultimately harm the families who have come to depend on them.

The argument, in short, is not for more government but for smarter infrastructure — the minimum coherent architecture that allows a diverse marketplace of school options to actually deliver on its promise. Portfolio districts spent twenty years figuring out what that architecture looks like. 

What Portfolio Districts Have Learned

On Governance: Coherence Has to Be Designed — and Someone Has to Own It

One of the most important insights from portfolio districts is that a diverse system of school options does not become coherent on its own. Coherence has to be deliberately designed and actively maintained — and someone has to be accountable for maintaining it.

In portfolio cities, this has required clear delineation of roles across authorizers: who approves schools, who monitors them, who makes decisions about growth and closure. It has required ongoing coordination mechanisms that cut across traditional institutional boundaries. And it has required what portfolio practitioners have come to call the portfolio manager function — an entity with the authority and capacity to actively monitor quality across school types, model fiscal and enrollment scenarios, plan for school openings and closures, and make or inform resource allocation decisions across the whole system.

Denver’s approach of aligning the district’s portfolio office, the state charter authorizer, and city leadership around a shared strategic framework is a model worth studying. So is New Orleans’ coordinating infrastructure, which was built from the ground up and has been refined over fifteen-plus years. And so is D.C.’s ‘statewide’ system, where there is an independent authorizer for charters separate from the public school district, with the Deputy Mayor for Education serving as a political entry point to support coordination between DCPS and the many charter LEAs.  In these cases, the gains came not from choice alone. They came from choice embedded in a deliberately designed and actively managed system.

The lesson for states is direct: before expanding the number and types of providers in a choice system, invest in the governance architecture that will hold the system together. At the state level, the portfolio manager role is currently undefined in most places. Some combination of the SEA, an independent authority, or a well-governed public-private structure needs to play it. What matters is that it is named, resourced, and durable enough to outlast individual leaders and political cycles. Because portfolio districts have learned that systems built around strong individuals rather than strong institutions don’t hold.

On Funding: Follow the Student, but Acknowledge Realities

Portfolio districts have learned that funding formulas that look clean on paper can create compounding fiscal distress in practice. The reason is straightforward but frequently underestimated: districts have fixed costs that don’t decrease proportionally when students leave. Buildings still need heat. Special education coordinators still need to be paid. The bus still runs. A per-pupil formula that treats enrollment changes as linear and proportional will systematically underfund the remaining system over time — a dynamic that portfolio cities have had to actively design around. 

Portfolio districts have developed more sophisticated approaches in response: weighted student funding that reflects student need rather than just headcount; transition funding mechanisms that give institutions time to adjust to enrollment shifts; and fiscal scenario modeling that lets leaders anticipate the downstream consequences of policy changes before they’re enacted rather than after.

There is an additional funding dimension that tends to get overlooked in state-level choice debates: the legal obligations that remain with school districts regardless of how many students use choice programs. Districts must provide a free, appropriate public education to every student with a disability — and that obligation does not transfer to private providers when a student enrolls using an ESA or voucher. It stays with the district. Districts are also the backstop for students whose choice programs close or don’t work out: every child in their jurisdiction must have a place to go. Mid-year movements are real. District neighborhood schools often have students move in, most often associated with behavioral or academic needs. These obligations carry real direct and indirect cost. Sustainable funding systems have to account for them explicitly — and states designing choice programs should study how portfolio districts have navigated this dynamic, because the fiscal math compounds quickly when it’s ignored.

The principle portfolio districts have arrived at: funding should be transparent about what drives resource allocation, honest about what districts need to remain viable partners in the system, and designed with enough flexibility to evolve as enrollment patterns shift.

On Accountability: Consistent Expectations Across All School Types

One of portfolio districts’ most significant contributions to the field has been developing accountability frameworks that apply consistently across school types — district-run schools, charters, contract schools, and innovation schools — with common metrics, shared transparency, and consequences that apply regardless of school governance structure. 

The research is limited (and admittedly from biased sources), but it indicates that higher rated charter authorizers (which are government-designated entities responsible for approving, monitoring, and closing public charter schools) are more likely to result in stronger charter schools. In theory and through this limited evidence, strong authorizers — those with clear performance frameworks, proactive oversight, and genuine willingness to act on underperformance — have produced stronger school portfolios over time. While this is worthy of more study, the implication isn’t just about charters. It’s about what accountability infrastructure should look like to produce results.

This is where states designing choice systems face one of their most significant decisions. If public funding follows students into private settings, meaningful accountability needs to follow too. This doesn’t mean identical regulation across all providers, because different school types have legitimate differences in governance and mission. But it does mean common transparency requirements, honest outcome reporting across all publicly funded options, and clear standards that help families make genuinely informed decisions. Accountability that applies only to public schools while exempting private providers creates the kind of asymmetry that erodes public trust in the whole system. 

The goal is symmetric accountability paired with the support to meet it: consistent expectations applied up, down, and across the system, with every program connected to the same shared purpose for kids.

On Enrollment: Navigation Is the Equity Intervention

Perhaps the most underappreciated lesson from portfolio districts is the power of well-designed enrollment systems to determine who actually benefits from school choice.

Before cities like Denver and New Orleans built unified enrollment systems, the families with the most information and social capital were reliably the ones who found and accessed the best options. The families with the most to gain from a well-functioning choice system — those with fewer connections, less time, and more complex needs — were the least likely to navigate successfully. The marketplace worked well for families who already knew how to work it.

Unified enrollment changed that dynamic meaningfully. A single application window, lotteries and admissions criteria that put all children on a level playing field, transparent placement criteria, and active outreach to historically underserved families measurably increased access for the students who most needed better options. In both Denver and New Orleans, the introduction of common enrollment was one of the most consequential equity interventions in the entire portfolio strategy.

I live in a heavy school choice state now. I have a significant professional background in this space. And I’ll tell you honestly: I struggled to navigate the options for my own oldest when he was entering Kindergarten. If that’s the experience for someone with my background, it tells you something important about what families with less time, information, and institutional access are facing every day. States that expand choice programs without investing in enrollment infrastructure are not building systems that work for families. They are building systems that work for families who already know how to work systems, which is precisely the inequity that school choice is supposed to address.

The framing that portfolio districts have arrived at: unified enrollment is not a bureaucratic inconvenience. It is the equity intervention and a system stabilizer.

Both/And, Not Either/Or

A truism portfolio district practitioners understand deeply — because they’ve navigated it in real communities, with real families, over real years — is that this work is not about charters. It’s not about more choice or less choice. It’s not even necessarily about public schools versus private schools. It’s about building systems that actually work for the students and families they’re meant to serve, and providing quality education.

Different options can meaningfully improve services for students not well served by current offerings. They can drive innovation and policy change that benefits entire systems. They can engage families who feel disconnected from traditional institutions. At the same time, school districts are the backbone of public education in this country, serving children (including those with the most complex learning needs) that no other institution is designed to serve. District schools are schools of choice. Supporting them contributes to robust family options for everyone.

It can be both/and. Portfolio districts are living proof of that. But only when we approach it through a systems design lens, with coherent governance, sustainable funding, aligned accountability, and enrollment infrastructure that works for families. The goal shouldn’t just be more options but better options — for the students who need them most, in systems coherent enough for any family to actually navigate and all providers to thrive.

The ideas are here. The policies are spreading. Now it’s time to build the systems.

An Invitation

Those of us who have spent years inside portfolio districts and other school choice efforts have hard-won knowledge that is directly relevant to what states are now trying to build. That knowledge has not yet been systematically brought to bear on the current policy moment. I think it should be. 

And I believe the most powerful way to do that is to bring practitioners together — across states, across roles, across perspectives — to articulate what we’ve collectively observed and learned and what it means for the field right now. 

If you led portfolio work and you’re watching the statewide choice movement with the same sense of recognition, your experiences matter more than ever. If you’re leading new state-wide family choice funding programs like ESAs or vouchers, you know the goals and non-negotiables to get there. If you’re positioned to build governance infrastructure at the state level, you understand the unique realities of state-wide planning, including navigating competing political priorities, funding pressures, and stakeholder needs. If you’re in these roles and this prompts ideas or concerns, we’d like to hear from you. 

The conversation the field needs is one that takes both the promise and the complexity seriously, and that draws on real experience to move from fragmentation to coherence, from policy to true impact.

Let’s talk.