Happy Holidays, CharterFolk.
2024 marks the fifth year I have been working on CharterFolk as my little service project to the movement. Prior editions of year end reviews can be found here.
Maybe the biggest news at CharterFolk this year is that we’re becoming something more than “a little project.”
As we round out 2024, I am pleased to announce that we now have over 15,000 readers, twice what we had just six months ago! And with new commitments continuing to come in, who knows? Maybe the cockamamie idea we had to get to 25,000 before June might not be so cockamamie after all.
We’ve also had more CharterFolk Contributors this year than ever before …
… with 72 of us either generating content or being profiled in CharterFolk X posts this year.
The Return of CharterFolk Extraordinaire
Of all the changes that I’m most excited about this year, none surpasses the fact that we have been able to bring back our weekly celebrations of Extraordinary CharterFolk, like the one we published about Kelly last week.
A couple years back, I found I just couldn’t keep up with my regular work and sustain the same level of writing at CharterFolk. So CharterFolk X posts had to go on hiatus for a while. But I vowed that, should we ever get additional resources, the first thing I would do is add CharterFolk Extraordinaire back into the mix. Well, that’s exactly what we did, using the announcement …
… as an excuse to update the community on the extraordinary things that past CharterFolk X have continued to do since their recognition, including Jen Wickens, who along with CharterFolk Board Chair Kristen McCaw, has gone on to found Seminar, a professional development and support platform focused on the needs of Folk playing leadership roles within charter school organizations.
This is the kind of thing CharterFolk can do with additional resources. So to all of you who offer paid individual and organizational subscriptions to CharterFolk, I extend again my deepest thanks.
CharterFolk Contributor Columns
I face the same challenge thinking about our Contributor Columns this year as I do about our CharterFolk X posts. Which ones to highlight? They were all great. And this year we saw so many great ones coming in I occasionally had to crowd out my own writing in order to make room for others. Some of the contributor posts we feel particularly privileged to have published this year include:
- Sonya Park, CEO of the Diverse Charter School Coalition, offering a reflection at the moment of her organization celebrating its 10th anniversary.
- Jay Artis-Wright, CEO of the Freedom Coalition for Charter Schools, sharing her observations growing out of a chance encounter at the Democratic National Convention.
- Lydia Hoffman, CEO of the Colorado Schools Fund, writing at the moment of her new organization’s founding.
- Roblin Webb, CEO of Freedom Prep, arguing for CharterFolk to make accelerated growth in the South a greater priority.
- Noah Devine, CEO of the Missouri Charter Public Schools Association, writing about charter school momentum in the Show Me State.
- Brandon Brown, CEO of The Mind Trust, offering thoughts for education reformers post election.
All were amazing posts, as were so many others. Thanks to all who contributed this year. And to any Folk who may have a column you’d like to publish in ’25, just ping me directly. We have almost all slots filled through the first third of the year, but having too many great ones is a problem we’ll happily find solutions for.
The Most-Opened Posts
In terms of my own posts, I wrote 67 this year. Almost half had open rates of 50% or higher. The five columns with the highest open rates were the following, presented in order:
- CharterFolk Four-Year Anniversary | A New 25x25x25 | No Vision No Voice Revisited | Courage at the Collective in Milwaukee – This post had an open rate above 60%. In it, I set new goals for CharterFolk, including having 25,000 readers by our 5th anniversary and helping at least half of our state sectors achieve greatly improved advocacy before the decade is out.
- CharterFolk Short – What MLB and Public Education Have and Do Not Have in Common – This column pointed out that, while MLB and public education are both seeing declines in attendance, MLB differs from public education in that White people represent a growing share of baseball game attendance and a shrinking share of public school attendance.
- The Schools the System Needs | The Education Abundance Agenda | The Time to Articulate Our Vision is Now – The situation in Chicago is tragic, but it is also instructive. It shows how the status quo is focused on making schools that serve its own needs rather than the needs of students.
- CharterFolk Short: A Wax Museum in Michigan – Students Bring New Imagination to Advocacy – This was a fun one showing how Folk at the Michigan association came up with a creative way to build relationships in the legislature at a time of particular importance for the state’s charter school sector.
- Crushing Down? Lifting Up? The Role of CharterFolk in a World Full of Cacophony – In this post from May, I riffed off an Apple commercial gone wrong to advance the notion that the pace of change and the level of turbulence coming to public education in the coming years necessitates that the charter school movement bring forward an even bolder, more imaginative policy agenda.
Brokenness at the Federal Level
On several occasions this year I felt it important to highlight developments happening at a federal/national level.
- “Slipping Out the Back Door” – What Congressional Dems Think of Parents Wanting Something Better For their Kids. Heading into elections season this year, Congressional Republicans decided to host a committee hearing in order to contrast their support for charter schools against Dem opposition. The Dems did not disappoint, saying some of the most offensive, tone-deaf things about parents seeking better options for their kids.
- Money and Control | The Ladies Doth Protest Too Much | What We Do When Representatives Aren’t Representative. Later in the spring, a different committee hearing happened where Democrats went off on charter schools. It provided an opportunity to explain how committee assignments are determined in legislative bodies, which invariably makes the Democratic Party look more anti-charter than it actually is, something Republicans used to their political advantage.
- Strength and Vitality vs Weakness and Frailty – The Charter the Charter School Movement Needs Now. In July, I wrote a post comparing the Republican Party Platform’s bold positioning on education near the top of the document with the Democrats’ decision to bury anything related to education within an obscure sub-section of their platform, and I called on the charter school movement to articulate our own platform.
- The Fascinating Charter School Implications For Harris’s VP Choice. Biden’s decision to drop out handed Harris the nomination without her having to go through a primary process which would have forced her and other candidates to kowtow to status quo interests. It gave Harris greater latitude on education policy than any Dem has had in quite a while, as was demonstrated by the main contenders for her VP selection.
- Elections Debrief Part One | When “Not a Thing Comes to Mind” Becomes Your Vision | The New Straddle that Awaits | The Post-Biden Era. Ultimately, Harris chose a VP candidate, and an overall policy positioning that was essentially a carbon copy of Biden’s, a choice that carried profound consequences in an election when many voters were seeking change.
The Next Chapter In Charter School Advocacy
For all sorts of reasons, it is clear that a new chapter in charter school advocacy has opened in 2024. Posts that focused on this theme include:
- An Inspired Hire | Lessons from the Magical Mystery Tour | Suiting Up. In this post, I congratulated the Board of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools for having hired Starlee Coleman as the new CEO of the organization.
- Overcoming the Challenge of Elections Denial, Bringing All Our Work Together as One. In this last post before the election, I encouraged our world to remember that, whoever would win, the need for our movement to build political capacity will be even greater in the years ahead.
- Starlee-ness | Walls | Bradford-ness | Chinese Walls | Colombian Dismantling | Contrasting Referenda | Rock and North Stars. I’ve had high levels of confidence that Starlee would prove successful leading the Alliance. In one of her early interviews, she showed that she is already well on her way to becoming a rock star in the role and is well-poised to help us identify the new North Star that we need.
- Elections Debrief Part Two – The Shift Within the Non-Shift | Reds Conforming While Blues Fracture | The Starlee Play | 30x30x30. The second part of my elections debrief this year looked forward, including to a day not too far in the future when many more state sectors are able to run the political play that Starlee and her team mastered in Texas.
- 4 Minutes and 36 Seconds | Changing Life Trajectories | Democratic Splintering – The New Chapter We’ve Been Waiting For? In one of my last posts of the year, I wrote about how the likely candidates for the 2028 Democratic Presidential Primary demonstrate a wide range of views on charter schools, which opens up a period of great opportunity for us.
Some of My Personal Favorites
This year some of the posts I felt best about (and heard some of the most positive comments about) were my columns celebrating CharterFolk who we had recently lost like Ramona Edelin and Don Shalvey. But there were several others that I put a lot into that also resulted in many comments coming in from readers.
- The 64,000 Question – What Does Universal Really Mean? This column explored the meaning of “universal” in the context of new voucher programs whose expense and selective admissions ensure that not all kids and families will achieve access to the most sought-after schools.
- The Danger in Drawing Conclusions from Amelia Bedelia. In this one, I had some fun with an article that had tried to argue that education reformers were to blame for kids losing a love of reading.
- As We Gather in Boston, Which Anniversary is Most Important? The 70th? The 50th? Or the 25th! I put a lot of time into this post, showing the charter school movement’s origins grew out of the same unfairness that gave rise to Boston’s infamous forced bussing program, which was started a half-century ago.
- A Welcome To New Readers – Public Education’s Not Yellow. It’s Chicken. In this post, I tied together Bob Dylan lyrics, a great professor I once had, and the decades long-quest we’re all involved in to overcome status quo protectors in order to provide improved opportunity to all students.
- The Large Language Model Threatening Public Education Today. AI’s use of massive amounts of human-generated information provides the launching point for a post showing how public education is being threatened by mountains of stifling regulation.
WonkyFolk
It was also great to be able to get out eight WonkyFolk conversations this year, with maybe the highlight being the chance to record at a Charter School Growth Fund event in the spring.
Next year, Andy and I look forward to continuing our monthly recordings. I will also resume our CharterFolk Chat series giving me a chance to have one-on-one conversations with prominent CharterFolk sharing observations about our shared work.
Next Year More Broadly – Our Little Project Grows Up
As I wrote a year ago at Education Next, what has distinguished our movement in recent years is the fact that, unlike nearly all other reform efforts in public education, charter schools are that thing that just “keeps on keeping on.” The fact is that we’re getting there, CharterFolk. Despite all the opposition we face, we keep growing and keep expanding our impact. And the growth of CharterFolk itself is emblematic of the momentum the charter school movement continues to have.
In June, CharterFolk will hit its 5th anniversary. It will be a time to reflect and to make plans for the future. I can’t say yet what our Board will decide to do. But this much I know:
CharterFolk is growing up.
To all of you who have helped raise us, I say thank you once again.
On we go.