Weekend greetings, CharterFolk.
A challenge I wrote about last weekend is how much there is to write about in CharterLand.
Write about everything and you do none of it justice.
Write about one thing and you leave too much out.
Never do I feel that tension more than when I visit a school.
I leave inspired, determined to write about it immediately. But then something urgent comes up in the movement that I feel I have to write about. Then something else.
One solution I sometimes come to is writing a longer piece with the school visit being a part of it, which makes sense when the substance of the school visit and the movement update feel inherently linked.
But sometimes they don’t. And who wants a story about your school told within the muck of some advocacy drama playing out?
So a recurring theme here is amazing CharterFolk treating me like royalty at some school visit, but then a few weeks or months go by. The visit ends up in the rear-view mirror.
Which is exactly what happened with a visit I made not so long ago to DSST in Denver.
It’s a place that, given its location and the fact that I’ve now been in more than 900 charter schools, I find it hard to believe I had never visited across its first twenty years of operation.
I remember when I first learned about DSST. I was working for the High Tech High Learning Network in the early 2000s. The network consisted of extraordinary schools across the country, many of which are still open and doing great things with kids.
DSST wasn’t formally in the network. They had come along a little too early for that. The organization’s founders were clearly inspired by High Tech High, but they were also explicit that their design of DSST had incorporated learning they had accumulated from having studied dozens of great small high schools across the country.
Still, much of the intellectual DNA overlapped, as did many of the organizations’ values. Like the belief that every student, regardless of background, if properly supported during high school, can go on to college.
I remember meeting one of DSST’s founders, David Greenberg, at one of the Summer Institutes High Tech High hosted.
His nickname for Larry Rosenstock, my old boss at High Tech High, was “The Godfather.”
The Godfather of a new kind of schooling that tried to more deeply reflect what young people actually want and need.
My hometown is Denver. Countless times I made the trip home and never once visited DSST. Not the original campus. Not any of the others that opened in the years thereafter.
I remember hearing they had opened a campus near Manual High School.
Manual was a name I knew well growing up.
My parents were public school educators. Many of their closest friends were as well. Social gatherings where kids would hear adults swapping work stories in the next room were common.
I can’t recall the names of the schools where my parents’ friends worked.
Except for one.
Manual High School.
One set of friends worked there. They would captivate the entire party describing just how tragically broken the school was.
It was the first time I remember hearing about what I would later come to see as a much broader pattern: across urban education in America, schools in communities where improved opportunity was needed most were often the places where society proved least able to provide it.
Years later, DSST would open a campus less than a mile from Manual High School. DSST Cole would go on to become one of the organization’s great successes, producing greatly improved academic results in the very same community where brokenness and disillusionment had once wallowed for generations.
Not even when DSST’s other legendary founder …
… Bill Kurtz …
… joined the board of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, where I also served, did a visit ever quite come together.
Though I mentioned it to Bill on several occasions, and he always stressed I was more than welcome.
It wasn’t until Nella García Urban became CEO of DSST that my first visit finally happened.
Nella had co-authored one of CharterFolk’s earliest Contributor Columns …
… a piece that helped spark the creation of a national organization dedicated to increasing Latino leadership in the charter school movement.
We had also done a CharterFolk Chat together where she talked about the work YES Prep had done to cultivate diverse leadership.
We saw each other at a national conference. I told her I had never been to a DSST school.
She told me we had to correct that.
I agreed.
A few months later I found myself at DSST Green Valley Ranch.
From my first moments inside the school it felt both familiar and distinct.
There were design elements that were easy to trace back to High Tech High. The creative use of space in order to foster community clearly being among them.
But there were also many differences.
Nella walked me through the design of the program. How deeply DSST has leaned into STEM. The number of students taking AP classes. Ways of structuring the school day that look quite different from what you find at many other small middle and high schools.
And then we came to the last room on the tour.
Where it all suddenly felt very familiar again.
It happened to be the final day of Colorado Free Application Days, when students can apply to state universities without paying the application fee.
An entire classroom had been turned into college advising central.
Students were everywhere finishing applications. Advisors moved from table to table making suggestions. It took me a good twenty minutes just to work my way across the room.
Students and staff alike explained the many supports DSST students receive in college advising. Counselor-to-student ratios are far lower than in most schools, and multiple years of guidance help prepare seniors for the college application process.
All of it culminates in something called Senior Signing Day.
It’s what many in that crowded classroom called “their favorite day of the year.”
The day when seniors across the DSST network gather together to announce where they will attend college.
Thousands upon thousands attend every year. They have to rent an auditorium large enough to host a rock concert.
A celebration at a scale that not so long ago few people would have thought possible, with Nella clearly in her element as the godfather’s baton passes to its first madrina.
It was an incredible visit.
One that should have turned immediately into a CharterFolk post.
But looking back in the archive I can see how it slipped away.
The week before a great new study about national charter school academic growth had been published. The week after status quo interests unleashed some new attack. Our world wondered how to respond.
Yada yada yada.
Before I know it, a couple of months have gone by.
But the spirit that prevailed on Free Application Day kept beckoning. So I pinged Nella again.
You up for another visit?
This time we met at DSST Elevate.
Only this time, she had a small group of students waiting for me.
A group who could help me see what I couldn’t see before.
What lies on the other side of Free Application Day:
Students with incredible opportunity before them.
Alejandra Gonzalez, a senior heading to Colorado Mesa where she will study pre-med with plans to become an anesthesiologist.
Jemima Badibanga, who came to DSST directly from South Africa and is deciding between DU and CU Boulder as she pursues pre-med on her way to becoming a pediatrician.
Brook Gebremicael, accepted to CU Boulder and planning to study business before making his mark in real estate.
Leo Gallegos, on his way to the University of Northern Colorado where he will study computer science.
And Deeandra James, a tenth grader who recently moved from Louisiana and couldn’t stop talking about how different, and how much better, DSST felt compared with the schools she had known back home.
The conversation quickly turned to what they all loved most about DSST.
The sense of community.
The level of support.
The expectation.
The rigor.
How they balanced it all.
It gave me a chance to offer a bit of historical context.
Not just about my connection to the godfathers of the organization, but about the broader reform story in Denver.
A story that Parker Baxter recently described on WonkyFolk as one of the most successful urban education reform efforts in the country.
These students are direct beneficiaries of those reforms. Without the work of countless godfathers and godmothers, and madrinos and madrinas, they wouldn’t be sitting where they are today.
Policy makers having the courage to do something different. Supported by parents and community members showing up at school board meetings demanding better opportunities for their kids.
Alejandra suddenly sat up straighter.
Something I had said triggered a memory.
She remembered.
She had been there.
One of those meetings.
Sixth grade.
She remembered how packed the room was. How tense the vote had been.
And how DSST had prevailed.
That’s how it happens, I told them.
The education you are receiving didn’t just appear out of Denver’s famously thin air.
It is the result of courageous actions forebears took years ago, sometimes decades ago, guided by a design that brought together a different breed of practice and values.
Before they left I couldn’t help but ask them something.
If DSST, or the broader charter movement, ever needed people to show up again.
At a school board meeting.
At the state capitol.
Would they be willing?
They didn’t hesitate.
Not just willing.
They wanted to.
It’s both a challenge and an opportunity for the charter school movement.
Because if there is anything of which I am sure, it is that the five young people I met at DSST stand ready to serve as the godparents of the charter school movement’s next chapter.
We’ve just got to keep passing the baton.
As they began to gather their things, Senior Signing Day came up again.
They too described it as their favorite day of the year.
They asked Nella what she was going to wear this year.
She said she hadn’t decided yet, but just you wait to see how much DSST pride it will exude.
You really ought to come, the students said as we’re shaking hands.
It’s April 30th this year.
We grab a picture before they go.
Then Nella walks me to my car, and I am gone.
Later that night I tell my parents about the visit.
And about the progress Denver has made.
Of what Parker calls some of the most important progress that has been made in the history of public education in the United States.
With DSST being perhaps the standard-bearer, helping lead a community of charter schools to unleash something profound across an entire city.
Not just Denver’s charter schools growing to offer greatly improved opportunity to thousands upon thousands of new students.
But all schools improving as well.
That school where my parents’ friends used to teach?
Manual High?
What used to be an emblem of the broader system’s brokenness?
Like much of public education in Denver, the school has been …
… transformed.
An outcome I don’t think my parents’ generation could even have imagined decades ago.
I tell them about Senior Signing Day.
Mom asks, when is it?
April 30th, I say.
Our eyes meet.
Your birthday, she says.
My 60th, in fact.
Sure would be great to have you home again.
Hmm, I think.
Where else would I rather be?