Weekend greetings, CharterFolk.
So much news afoot in CharterLand these days. I’ll see how much I can jam into a midweek whip-around. Meanwhile, I want to get this post off to you which I’ve been meaning to complete for the past couple weeks.
An Organization in Harmony With Its Purpose
Regular CharterFolk readers know that my general assessment is that the charter school world has come through the past half-decade with more momentum than many would have predicted.
We’re growing.
Our academics have improved.
And our advocacy is strengthening.
But in all of these areas, I believe we have the potential to be achieving even more.
Many charter school organizations across the country are already demonstrating that greater potential. But none, in my view, surpasses the momentum and impact currently being created by Harmony Public Schools in Texas.
This fall, Harmony is expanding enrollment by 5,000 students, building upon its decades-long track record of stunning growth.
Think of that.
Last year, the National Alliance reported that the entire national charter school movement grew by 80,000. If that pace holds, Harmony alone would account for more than 6% of all charter school growth nationwide.
One organization!
Now imagine if the entire movement were growing at just half that pace.
We’d add another million kids before the decade is out.
And imagine what our narrative would be if the entire charter school movement were generating academic outcomes like Harmony’s.
Of Harmony’s 61 campuses, over half have been rated A by the State of Texas.
Nearly 4 out of 5 have earned A’s or B’s.
And those results are being achieved while serving a student body that is 70% economically disadvantaged.
Meanwhile, as Harmony grows, it builds its advocacy strength, drawing alumni into efforts to engage policymakers in ways that benefit their alma maters and the charter movement as a whole.
The best way to understand Harmony’s impact, of course, is to see it in person.
Last year, I had that privilege:
Watching STEM instruction in action. Meeting faculty and students. Seeing teachers’ professional development micro-credentials proudly posted beside classroom doors.
It was a portrait of a charter school organization on stride.
In harmony with its purpose.
Which is to make things better for as many young people as they can, as quickly as they can.
This month, I was honored to serve as a panelist at Harmony’s 25th anniversary celebration in Houston.
That event gave me the chance to share something I’ve seen in my travels across the country.
It’s what I call “Harmony Prints.”
Unmistakable marks of excellence left behind by Harmony’s influence.
Places where, when you ask school leaders where they learned to do some amazing thing you’ve just witnessed, they’ll often tell you that they learned it from Harmony.
The Teacher Y Su Maestro
I’ve known about Harmony’s extraordinary impact for many years.
But a personal connection has made it all come home at an even deeper level.
In my second year of teaching at Hooper Avenue over 30 years ago, I had Cristian Luna in my class.
He’s the little guy there in the red shirt.
That year, we mapped the entire neighborhood. Every house. Every apartment building. Every church. Every billboard. Yes, even every fire hydrant.
We assigned students to interview the owners of the businesses dotting Central Avenue, the historic corridor that ran through our school’s attendance boundary.
By the end of the semester, we had created a giant map of the community, and we turned our classroom into a museum. Other classes came in to visit. I’ll never forget kids practically leaping over tables to point to their own homes.
It was an experience that changed my teaching forever.
It’s when I first realized that, where kids and teachers are learning simultaneously, there the learning’s best.
And of all the students I’ve stayed in touch with, and I’ve certainly stayed in touch with many …
… none has taught me more over the years …
… than Cristian and his family.
I had his sister Edelin in my sixth year. If I’d stayed another, I would have had his other sister Evelyn. Our families visited each other often. Cristian’s mother hosted Amy and me for our first-ever mole, made from a recipe she’d brought from Oaxaca. The story of Cristian’s father walking to America was one I could hardly believe.
Like all Hooper fifth graders, Cristian left to attend the middle school in our area.
One cold, dark morning in December, his parents were waiting for me in the school parking lot.
Cristian had been getting beaten up and threatened. So, in fear, he’d done something foolish.
He’d taken a penknife to school.
At the time, the district had a zero-tolerance policy for any kind of weapon possession. Within a few days the district had started expulsion proceedings against him.
It was a situation the Lunas simply couldn’t understand.
Thus their appearance in the parking lot that morning.
After many months of twists and turns, we finally discovered a way out.
California law, we learned, wouldn’t allow the district to expel a student under the age of 13.
Cristian was 11 at the time.
So instead of being expelled, he was placed in a special program on a nearby campus with a one-on-one teacher.
And that teacher turned out to be extraordinary.
That year, Cristian learned more than he had in all his prior years combined.
Yes, paradoxically, being expelled from school turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to his learning.
Years later, Cristian and I decided to write a screenplay about the experience.
It was a story he told at Amy’s and my wedding.
We called it:
“The Teacher y Su Maestro.”
Because it captured the essence of our relationship.
One of us was the teacher.
The other, the student.
But neither of us knew who was who.
For surely, I have learned at least as much from Cristian and his family as they have ever learned from me.
Harmony Prints
That connection has stayed strong to this very day.
Eventually, Cristian and his family moved to San Leandro, a town just south of Oakland. He took a job at Whole Foods. By the time I visited him there, he’d become the manager of the butcher department.
A few years later, Cristian converted to Islam. He met Lamyaa, who was from Morocco. They got married. Soon they had their son Bilal.
Yes.
A man whose father walked to the United States, named Cristian, converts to Islam, marries a woman from Morocco, who learned impeccable English as a young person listening to heavy metal music, and together they raise a son named after a heroic figure from the Quran.
Only in America, CharterFolk.
But, as happens so often in America, or at least in some parts of it, life can be exceedingly difficult.
Though Cristian had been promoted several times …
… and had become an assistant store manager at Whole Foods, there was no way he and Lamyaa could afford a house in the Bay Area. And the schools nearby were terrible.
So Cristian let his supervisors know he was interested in moving to Houston.
Thus, the family found themselves in Sugar Land, having purchased a home at a price few Californians would believe.
And the schools?
Bilal, now four, has a speech delay. He was receiving services through the area’s district school, and Cristian and Lamyaa were reasonably satisfied.
But when I told them about Harmony’s presence in Sugar Land, they visited and saw the potential.
After a few anxious months waiting for lottery results, they received the good news:
Bilal will start kindergarten at Harmony this fall.
Cristian, who grew up in a time and place where charter schools didn’t yet exist, now finds himself in a world where the movement has progressed just fast enough to ensure that his children (yes, Lamyaa is now expecting their second) will benefit from an education far superior to what was available a generation ago.
It’s something Cristian and I were able to celebrate together with Mr. Fatih, Harmony’s CEO, at the 25th anniversary event.
Harmony Prints indeed.
An Entire Movement in Harmony With Its Purpose
So when we ask ourselves, CharterFolk:
Why do we push ourselves to grow?
Why do we strive to make our academics even stronger?
Why do we work so hard to build advocacy strength for our movement?
This is why.
Because we never know when that final increment of effort might change the entire trajectory of a family’s life.
My trip to Sugar Land this month afforded me a chance to revisit the lessons of “The Teacher y Su Maestro.”
At this vantage point in life, I see a few things that I couldn’t before:
Not just the fundamental truth that learning is best when teachers and students are learning simultaneously.
Nor that it’s best when no one is sure who is the teacher and who is the student.
But the even deeper truth.
Which is that learning is often at its very best, when it happens like that across decades.
Across generations.
Such that we might more fully grasp the entirety of our contribution.
And yes, get additional perspective on the transformational impact of the charter school movement.
And its potential.
Because, CharterFolk, when we are truly on stride …
When we are acting with proper clarity, urgency and resolve …
We become an entire movement in harmony with our purpose.
Which is to serve as many kids as we can, as well as we can, right now.
While leaving prints across the landscape.
Harmony Prints.
Charter Prints.
The early markings of an even greater impact still to come.