Weekend greetings, CharterFolk.
I start today highlighting that the National Charter School Founders Library has released a video tribute to Linda Brown that I highly encourage you to check out.
It’s like a who’s who of legendary CharterFolk.
It starts with Jim Peyser moderating a panel discussion with Shantelle Wright, Mia Howard, Lester Long …
… and Doug Lemov.
Rebecca Cass provides an introduction and Sue Walsh wraps up …
… sharing her remembrances of Linda and announcing the first schools to be recognized by the Linda Brown Legacy Fund.
Additional people offer supplemental video tributes including Roblin Webb, Sarah Tantillo and Shara Hegde.
It’s all great. I hope you find time for all 34 minutes of it.
But, CharterFolk, if all you can spare is 4 minutes and 36 seconds, really, you’ve got to scroll to the 27:30 mark and hear what Howard Fuller had to say.
It’s just so amazing.
Pure Howard-ness.
Conjuring pure Linda-ness.
Such that we feel her singular, irrepeatable, incandescent presence one more time.
And in so doing, Howard reminds us of the importance of Folk-ness more broadly.
Extraordinary people making extraordinary contributions, inspiring the rest of us to find the extraordinary within ourselves such that we might have even more to give.
Thank you once again, Howard.
And thanks to all who made Linda’s tribute such a meaningful one.
Changing Life Trajectories
Shara having been a part of the tribute to Linda, it’s particularly fitting that our CharterFolk Extraordinaire post about her would have run this week.
It’s a column wherein we cite how Linda selecting Shara for the BES Fellowship completely shifted the trajectory of Shara’s life.
The week before that we focused on the trajectory-changing decision Debbie Veney made two decades ago to put her her experience in private sector communications to work for the cause.
The week before that, we highlighted the new trajectory that Brandon Wait experienced after deciding 19 years ago to join the team at Paladin Career and Technical High School.
The changes in life trajectories that are most important for our movement to stay focused on, of course, are the ones we are catalyzing for the millions of students we serve.
New data comes in daily about the scope of trajectory-changing our movement is now achieving.
Whether it’s helping historically underserved students in Washington State …
… or leading the public schools of Brooklyn to ever higher achievement …
… or helping Colorado knock down the redlining walls of public education’s past.
The trajectory of positive student impact being made by charter schools must be what we keep front and center.
But from time to time, it’s appropriate to focus also on the life trajectories of Folk working within the movement that are being changed as well.
Noah Devine deciding to join TFA two decades ago and now ending up the CEO at the Missouri association.
Brandon Brown being in Noah’s TFA class and now going on to lead The Mind Trust where, in addition to changing the educational trajectory of the entire city of Indianapolis, he offers such thoughtful columns here at CharterFolk …
… that friends like Fordham ask if it’s okay to republish them.
Meanwhile, Brandon’s neighbor, Karega Rausch, made a decision to join Stand For Children Indiana twenty-odd years ago and now leads NACSA, affecting the authorizing of literally millions of students attending charter schools across the country.
So yes, we recognize that 4 minutes and 36 seconds of Howard-ness a little space at CharterFolk does not make
But we are, we hope, at least doing justice to the life-trajectories that you are changing.
Your own included.
On we go.
Democratic Splintering – The New Chapter We’ve Been Waiting For?
As it happens, I’ve been fighting off a bug for a few weeks now. So my own pace of writing has been slowed a bit.
During the Thanksgiving week, I was working on a post about Linda McMahon being announced as the next Education Secretary but then realized it was essentially a repeat of the post I wrote last Thanksgiving.
Yes, the charter school movement’s “era beyond the beginning” continues to unfold.
Red goes redder.
Blue goes bluer.
The charter school world, whose bi-partisan support has always been of existential importance to us, is challenged to straddle an ever wider chasm.
And yet, while we diverge as a country on policy grounds, we converge on profligacy. The blues don’t have enough money to prop up their dying urban school districts.
The reds don’t have enough money to afford their new universal voucher programs.
Meaning there is going to be a moment of reckoning at a federal level about whether the different camps are going to allow the other to spend education funding as they see fit, or whether there is going to be a big federal disinvestment in public education.
All that seems as pertinent today as when I first wrote it a year ago. And, yes, I think it provides the most defining frame that McMahon will step into as Secretary.
But there’s one aspect of the post I’d like to step back into in particular because it provides us the chance to focus on one of the most important developments to have happened in Charterland in recent years, enough so it might be fair to describe it as the “second chapter” of the charter school movement’s second era.
It relates to what I believe ended the charter school movement’s first era :
The NEA approving its new charter school policy in the summer of 2017, nine months after Trump won his first election.
It was the moment when national teacher unions made it clear to prominent Democratic policy makers that the days of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and Jerry Brown and many other Democratic supporters of charter schools were behind us. If they wanted to avoid getting primaried by teacher unions like Republican governors are primarying their own who differ on education policy matters, the Dems would have to toe the union’s new line calling for the destruction of the national charter school movement.
Gavin Newsom was the first previously charter-supportive Dem whose toes were held to the fire.
He moved them to the line.
As did Biden, a couple years later.
Along with the whole field of Democrats running for president in 2020.
Seeing so many toes on the newly-blue-painted line, some surmised that charter schools had lost Democratic support for good.
I harbored no similar fears, primarily because I’ve known that our nation’s public schools are simply not doing what parents and the public want and that will ultimately lead Dems to find ground they can stand on. And that ground does not lie on one side of a line painted by teacher unions.
And surely. we’ve seen some toe-dipping on the other side of the line in recent years, ranging from the cuticle-deep flick of the New York Governor offering a single word of support for lifting the cap on NYC charter schools …
… to the new Denver mayor going up to his knees in support for charter schools in response to the wanton dysfunction that had emerged in his city’s union-controlled school district.
But by and large, I concede, Democratic feet remain unmoved in the aggregate, having been submerged in a concrete sludge by an educationally enfeebled Biden Administration with no vision beyond cement-drying. And it might have held had not a disastrous debate performance thrown everything back into the mixer.
Unfortunately, having avoided a primary process, and thereby having as much freedom to catapult across lines as any Democrat has had in recent history, Harris didn’t have a single thing come to mind about what she might do different.
So she toed.
Or heeled, as the case may be.
Ultimately resulting in defeat, which could, depending on how things play out over the next couple of years, lead to a kind of splintering.
A full spectrum of different Democratic thoughts on public education.
Therein, CharterFolk, lies one of the greatest points of opportunity since the beginning of our second era.
On the one hand we have people like Brandon Johnson and MTA and others who think they have nothing to do but wait for the concrete to firm up.
On the other, we have people like Ezra Klein, people who are clearly progressive Dems but who believe that part of the reason Dems lost in November is that they are seen as being the owners and defenders of status quos that just don’t work. And if Dems are going to be successful in future cycles they are going to have to show that the civic institutions they work to defend can be evolved to be much more successful than they currently are.
What more typifies what Klein is talking about than public education?
And if we look at the Dems who are now positioning themselves for a run in 2028, we can see the full spectrum lining up.
From Andy Beshear in Kentucky trying to position himself as out-Brandoning Brandon Johnson, to Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania embracing not just charter schools, but private school choice as well. And every gradation in between. From Kristen Whitmer in Michigan, having a history of half-hearted attacks on charter schools, navigating a special session where toe-lining Dems are wanting to foist massive harm on charter schools before they lose control of the House next month, to Gavin Newsom who oversaw the most destructive damage to a state’s charter school law in history but has been defending charter schools against further harm ever since, to Jared Polis unapologetically continuing his very Clinton/Obama/Brown-esque championing of charter schools.
This, CharterFolk is the spectrum that is spread out before us.
It is fundamentally different than the toe-lining uniformity of five years ago.
And the question before us is whether the line will hold.
If it does, then we will find ourselves in a continuation of the first chapter of the charter school movement’s second era, one where we will have to wait for the further implosion of public education in blue settings to open up seismic change.
But if the line doesn’t hold – if a scattershot of Dems begin espousing a wide range of supportive positions on charter schools, and if one of them proves successful in 2028, it will be a monumentally important moment in the history of the charter school movement.
It will be that time when the strongest force in the Democratic Party has drawn its line and has had it walked over, if not outright erased, such that it will be extremely difficult, if not impossible, for them to ever draw that line again.
This is the level of opportunity before us right now, CharterFolk.
And it behooves to to remember that the next presidential campaign does not start a few years from now.
It starts today.
What are the policy agendas we begin running, not in a cycle or two, but on the other side of the holidays?
Not ones solely focused on policy breakthroughs accelerating the growth of charter schools, as important as those wins would be, but proposals that also show that our movement has become a force strong enough to evolve the entire public education system to become more excellent and equitable.
CharterFolk!
What is the best way for us to erase blue lines in this country once and for all?
By showing that we can erase red lines in this country once and for all!
Just like we can erase public education of its other historical unfairnesses and general ineffectiveness once and for all!
Not something that we bring up as a theoretical question in a debate three years from now.
But a set of policy proposals that we begin running right now such that they are the frame that every education-related question is fielded within during the next Democratic Primary.
One demonstrating that we have an even clearer track record of standing on the right side of history and can more forcefully address the field:
Democrats, forget the lines you’ve been asked to toe!
Plant your feet!
Where, Democrats?
Where?!
Show us where you stand!