35 Years In and Still Picking Up Steam: A CharterFolk Chat with Kevin Hall

Kevin hall, welcome so much to Charterfolk Chat. Terrific to have you here.

Jed, it's great to be here with you. Thanks for having me.

Hey, of course, you and I have known each other for a very long time. I can remember you being there in that first few hours after I was announced into the CCSA gig.

But you and I knew each other for a long time before that. We've stayed in contact all sorts of different ways. All your work in Los Angeles, all your work across the country.

I just, I know a lot about everything that you've done, but I'm not sure that all charter folk listeners might know of your background. Can you just talk about a few of the experiences earlier in life that just kind of hooked you in what is your charter school orange origin story?

Why are you giving so much of your life to this cause of ours?

Yeah, Jed, thanks so much for for including me and it's a true honor to to be able to spend some time with you talking about charter schools and charter schooling. So I gu origin story. I was a fourth grade teacher in Compton, California.

I was the executive director in Los Angeles in the early days of TFA and sort of year two and three of Teach for America and then taught elementary school before going to business school. I was an early charter entrepreneur.

I was the COO for the Broad Foundation, Jed, I think that's where we first meet.

And then for the last 15 years I had the great pleasure of working at the CHAR School Growth Fund and being the CEO for the for CSGF for the last 15 years and have got the chance to work with so many incredible education entrepreneurs and leaders to help support them fulfill their dreams to create more amazing schools for, for young people and communities.

Well, thanks for that background, Kevin. I, you're being a bit modest too. Charter School Growth Fund is absolutely one of our pivotal organizations and it was off to a great start.

Had a job as a great founder and all of that.

And yet with your coming to Charter School Growth Fund was a very important moment and you've been able to build just an incredible team and incredible organization.

One thing I, I, I've had a good chance to see you in a lot of different settings where you speak in front of lots of folks and Maybe there are thousands of charter folk that don't know about the level of passion that you bring to the work, some of the speeches that you make, some of just the. The degree to which you're moved to tears.

Just talk to us a little bit about what is it that brings that level of commitment, level of passion for the work.

Sure. Well, j. As maybe some. Some folks on charter folk know, I'm. I'm the. The world's poorest speech maker, so. And I embrace that. I embrace that.

I think, you know, for me, a lot of it is, you know, when we have our gatherings of. Of leaders who lead the networks that. That we support, you know, we.

We really try to create this intentional space that celebrates them and really honors them as leaders and that we're all in service of them and their leadership and their vision.

And I just, I think for me, I know how amazing each and every one of those leaders are and how much passion and belief and energy and skill they bring every day.

And so in some ways, I think for me, just knowing that that is happening across thousands of amazing charter schools across the country is just super moving for me because I know that they are writing and helping their students write incredible stories that are going to change the world, change their individual worlds, and change our collective worlds in terms of what they're able to do. And so for me, I just get super emotional and passionate about that. And frankly, our belief in them, in what they can do and accomplish, it's. It's a.

It's a true gift. And, and it's, you know, it's. It's why I do this work, why I love this work.

That's so great. I love that. Thank you for bringing that out, because I was going to bring it out of you if you hadn't said it. There's just.

We get this chance to work in support of a noble cause.

Young people just not getting the educations that they want, and it's just ridiculous how difficult it is and how the level of personal commitment and the costs that some of our adults working in the charter school space have to endure to make progress on their behalf.

And I would say each time I've seen you moved to tiers, Kevin, it's usually been something some charter school leader pushing through, something just absolutely ridiculous and yes, pretty considerable personal cost, but to achieve amazing for kids. So thank you for all that you've done. And you know, that's an entry point for charterfolk. That's why I do this stuff as well.

Absolutely.

Let me ask you got this unique perch. Fifteen years at the Charter School Growth Fund. We've seen so many political changes, so many dynamic changes happening within the movement.

How would you assess how we're doing right now from your unique vantage point?

The earliest folks that we ended up backing, the Nobles, the ideas, the yes Preps, the Uncommons, the aspires of the world, they were all less than four schools at that point.

And again, sort of going back to that point of time, there wasn't really a. There weren't a lot of examples of people being able to scale and create more great schools.

And I think part of what we've been able to show is that it's possible and it's possible across an array of models, it's possible across array of geographies serving different communities, taking different approaches and with just this wonderful tapestry and mosaic of leaders from all kinds of different backgrounds. And I just think that is something that's just very, very, very special. So I want to sort of start with that which is come right.

And I'm also, I think we actually have a lot of hope for the next 20 years and that I think in a lot of ways the last five or so years have been really, really hard on leaders, on students, on families, on communities.

And I also, we see a lot of sort of emerging hope and momentum for great networks, great entrepreneurs who are starting new schools to really who are really gaining a lot of momentum. And you know, they're doing it in different places maybe than in that first wave in terms of locations where it's happening.

And I think they're all, many of them are also embracing different models that are going after different sort of student populations, different approaches, you know, standing on the shoulders of what we've learned over this last 20 plus years.

But I think for us, we're feeling, we're feeling quite positive and optimistic about, you know, what, what the, what the next decade at least looks like.

Yeah, I couldn't agree with you more. I feel like, I mean, I. Some, you know, Andy Rothram and some of the Bellwether people, they're like, Jed, you're excessively optimistic.

Rose tint colored glasses. But I say to them, come on, you can postulate that there are all these problems for charter schools, but most of it is not supported by evidence.

It's not supported by data, how we're performing academically, how we're continuing to grow. So I continue to think that the skies are blue for charter school growth. I mean, look, there are challenges galore left and right.

Let's not be naive about this. But at the same time, I would say that my own view is that we could be growing faster.

Absolutely.

And, and I, and I struggle to retain a sense of personal tone, rightness on this issue. Now, I always had that at CCSA as well. Hey, you gotta grow more. I know how hard it is at best of times, worst of times.

But I feel right now, in most of my interactions where I'm in a group of 12 or more charter folk, I think I'm more pressing, guys. I think we can grow more quickly. I'm also not hearing Wallace. That's really offensive.

Don't you know how there's actually greater receptiveness to it? But hey, we're at 3.7 million kids in charter schools or thereabouts. I feel like we should be trying to get to 5 million before the decades out.

And I feel like it's within our potential to do it. How do you think about what this. Balancing what's within our potential and what seems to right within our own base.

Yeah, I mean, I think, I guess we sort of think about it from a couple different perspectives. So one is we were. We're huge believers in. It's really hard to create and run one great school. Like that's hard. It's not easy.

And we really believe in that and we honor that and that we think we need more people to go and do that.

We also think then that the people who create that one great school have this incredible opportunity to go create number two or number three or number five or number ten. Right. And that there are building on that.

I think what we've learned over the 20 years is like, if you have a good start and you know what you're doing and you know what is delivering results, then it is absolutely possible and absolutely in the realm for people to go and say, let's go do this again. And in fact, for many of our leaders, like that second time, they're building on all the pieces that they learned in that first one. Right.

In terms of the second one opens more smoothly, they get the higher results earlier. All those kind of things that I just think we've learned.

I think the other piece for us is we now have lots of examples of entrepreneurs who have come out of other settings and have taken that and really created incredible networks right out of the gate. So a couple examples, you know, Oliver Sicat at Ednovate, right. In California. Right.

Came out of Noble, learned a lot about Noble, then came and took his knowledge, experience, key pieces of the Noble model, and then create Ednovate, right. Emily Kimw of Zeta coming out of Success Tree. Todd Dixon at Valor in Tennesee

coming out of Summit. Right.

So I just think we're seeing more and more of those happen and they're able to sort of stand on the shoulders of what they have built before or helped build before. And that second time is, you know, we're just seeing magic happen a lot in those places.

So, yeah, I would just say overall, like, I think, you know, we have some places, you know, New York, you know, Massachusetts, where we should be able to grow. And, you know, though some conditions I'm a big believer in, you know, there are political windows and the pendulum is always going to swing.

And so, yeah, you know, we got a mayor's race in New York City.

Yeah.

Who knows who's going to win? But you could imagine, yeah, certain mayor saying, hey, yeah, you know, I've got 140,000 kids in charter schools. Our student population is declining.

We need more kids in really good schools. And so there's a different deal for a cap lift. Right.

And so, you know, could I imagine another 50,000 plus kids going to charter schools in New York in the next five to seven years? Yeah, absolutely. Right.

And so I do think, you know, those kind of things I believe will happen in some states partly because the pressure from parents on it. I just really, I really believe that. I think there'll be political pressure as performance continues to stagnate. In K12.

And I just think that that is. There's going to be more of a political pressure on a bunch of fronts around that.

Your home state of Colorado is another great reason for optimism. Not that Michael Bennett is guaranteed to win, but that guy's certainly the front runner.

Sure.

And we would have had then eight years of polis as governor and potentially eight years with Bennett, what we could get done in Colorado. Another example, a blue, blue context too, right?

Absolutely. And a place where, you know, 15% of the kids who are K12 go to school in charter schools here in Colorado. Right.

And so you have charter schools that serve students in every county in Colorado and a wide array of school models. And I think, yeah, I think a real chance that there's momentum over this next five to 10 years.

A lot of the building blocks in the ecosystem are here for that kind of growth.

Do you see that the bottlenecks to growth are any different right now than they've ever been? Hey, facilities have been a problem. Hey, leadership. Sometimes it's around authorizing conditions and those kinds of things.

Yeah, I mean, I think there are. So you named, you know, facilities obviously, you know, educator, talent, school leadership, some authorizing piece.

I think, you know, a couple others that I might, might name as well. I think for some people, you know, they, they haven't made it sort of all the way back from what happens kind of in the, the COVID five year period.

And so I think for some there's a push of like, hey, I've really got to get my core academic engine firing on the way that I believe it can be. And it had been, you know, five or six years ago. And so I'm basically, you know, pausing growth until I'm confident I've got that academic engine.

And then once I've got that in place, then I'm feeling way more confident and optimistic that I'm able to grow.

I think the other one happening, Jed, is that you're in a lot of parts of the country, the population of K12 students is shifting. Right.

And so I think more we're seeing that play out in Texas in a lot of places, sort of Houston relative to the ring, San Antonio school district relative to its ring.

And so I think where we're seeing more people try to grow is they'll have maybe started in a, in a San Antonio or a Houston or a Denver, and they're starting to grow outside of, of that ring, really following kids and families right on that, on that journey. And so you also, in some of those places, you don't have a whole lot of charters. And so we'll see that both. There's some authorizing challenges.

Sometimes if you've got a statewide authorizer, it's a lot easier for you to make that journey. But I think we see a lot of people sort of following families and students in that, in that journey.

Let me ask you a little bit about advocacy conditions.

But I think now that I have a few more years to look at the overall experience, I'm thinking that advocacy really consists of two kind of buckets of conditions. One is how good are your policies? The other is how toxic is the environment generally, whether or not it's a policy setback or not.

And, you know, we've seen a lot of breakthroughs for charter schools, policy breakthroughs in red states of late, in Tennessee, in Texas, in Missouri, Ohio, in Indiana, in Ohio. But if you look at it, the policy conditions in a lot of those red states were lagging blue states.

And so what we've really needed was for the breakthroughs in these red states just to get the red states up to a level of parity with what we've previously had in blue states.

And now you look at what's starting to happen in Tennessee, you look at the growth that's happening in Ohio, hey, Indiana seems like it's really poised for something. I'm just wondering, do you see similar dynamics?

Absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely. Jed, I, I believe that there's.

I think you make a really strong point on in some ways, a lot of the places we've had policy wins over the last five years were kind of catching up to, you know, the, the New Yorks of the world or the Washington DC's of the world, or frankly, even the Colorado's of the world.

Sure.

Or where you had pretty close to funding parity. Not perfect. But you, you, you were approaching funding parity. Right. In Ohio, definitely not. You didn't have that.

Indiana, just a big win to get local dollars to be able to follow kids as opposed to fund, you know, districts, fund entities.

So those are really, really, you know, big fundamental wins that we believe frankly unlock even more chances on the sort of entrepreneurial front and frankly also for high performers to be able to grow.

Yeah, right.

So in Ohio, you know, a few years ago, we, we worked hard to try to, to, you know, we identified a set of high performers. People are outliers and many of them were at like two schools or so. And basically they said to us, we can't afford to grow. Right.

The math is it doesn't make sense for us to grow because we're, we're at such a deficit on the per people funding that we don't believe. And they were right. Unless someone was going to back up a huge philanthropic truck for a long, long time, it didn't make sense for them to grow.

Now that's starting to change, you know, thanks to, to, to the leadership and advocacy and, you know, lots of people came together to, to make that happen. So I'm, I'm, I think that's a really an astute point, Jed, that in some ways some of these wins have been sort of catching up.

Yeah.

A little to where we've had the conditions that are good conditions from a funding perspective in, in other places.

I also think the other big one is, you know, where, and you know, this from our time in California together where you have a statewide authorizer or an alternative to the local school district, you're going to see better conditions, you're going to see better operators emerge. You will see the best operators finding a path to be able to grow and serve more kids and families. Because it's a dip.

You know, it's just a different equation in terms of, you know, the, the political calculus and you know, looking at it less from a, you know, I'm McDonald's and I'm authorizing, you know, Wendy's to compete with me. It's more, I'm, I'm just trying to create more great schools in our state. That's what I'm going to be about.

Yeah, I think it's. I think you're right.

I also feel like sometimes though, even in blue states, when you get the policy conditions right, but then the toxicity increase them, it doesn't proviable. So in New Jersey, for example, we hate. We have the state authorizer, but we've got a.

2024, he sags back to basically shutting everything down. Massachusetts, we have a state authorizer, but now they have a superintendent there that's going to vote against absolutely everything.

Every. Everything. Right.

And I just feel as though I may have been putting too much hope in Ezra Klein and his new and maybe you read my stuff and maybe you were rolling your eyes at me. Kevin. I don't know.

A lot of people, you know, rightly should have this idea of an abundance agenda needing to be something that, that the Democrats embrace more broadly, but also certainly an abundance agenda, you know, as it relates to education. Klein decides to take a pass on the education issue altogether in his book. Right.

I just feel as though the conditions of our traditional public schools are degrading so rapidly in these blue contexts that it's not going to be a viable place for them to stand for a long time. I don't know if that means one year, three years.

I don't know if it means we need Bennett to get out there and we need a new mayor in New York to set a total different tone from a national perspective. But ultimately, as toxic as it is, I still remain optimistic in these places that charter schools are going to be able to resume their growth again.

I do too. I mean, again, I sort of am a. Obviously it's in our name, you know, the Charter School Growth Fund.

I think there's both a financial and an academic and frankly, a crisis of confidence, I think in for lots of K12 districts, particularly in many of the, many of the blue states where, you know, enrollment is going down, you know, the Esther money didn't drive results yeah, they hired lots of people. And you know, there's, there's, there, there's. I think a lot of parents are like, I want something very, very different than what's on offer here.

Yeah.

So I just think at, I think at some point there'll be, you know, there'll be a new mayor in New York, there'll be a new mayor in Chicago. There'll be, you know, people will, there'll be a set of people who look at the calculus and say this.

Actually, you know, it's, it can be a political winner for me to try to create more great schools.

Yeah.

Well, you'll remember from my CCSA days, I certainly said all the time in terms of our strategic plans and all that stuff that we, we reserve special effort, special emphasis for growing in areas where kids and communities have been historically underserved. And yet at the same time, in California we wanted to have a movement that was reflective of the demographics of the entire state.

Colorado is probably the story at a whole other level. Right.

But there were a lot of funders and others that just did not embrace the idea of, hey, what schools go into Orange county, let's get, let schools get across this LA Unified line and go east toward Riverside. I mean, there's a dead zone, you know, from the, from basically, you know, LA Unified all the way out to the 10 freeway.

Now, if I'm inferring correctly, are you, are you saying that Charter School Growth Fund would, would be supportive of schools going into a variety of different geographies, going into a variety of different suburban and SES statuses to facilitate further growth?

Yes, Jeb, we are. And we have really been doing this for probably five to eight years.

So have been, you know, quietly backing lots of people across different models, different geography and sort of different mixes of students, some with sort of intentionality around that. So diverse by design models as well as, you know, folks who have gone after student, different kind of student populations in different contexts.

The key for us is we're always looking for outperformance. Right. So we want to see that given the demography you are serving, how are you doing relative to your peers?

We want to see for your low income students, how are your students performing relative to their peers as well as higher income students. So like, for me, one of, one of our favorite examples on this is a group in Florida called True North.

So I've heard of these guys.

Yeah, they are, they are started by an incredible entrepreneur, a guy named Mike Baleca. And Mike was both a former business guy.

He Also was in the head of the education committee in, in Florida and helped to drive many of the reform and conditions that charters enjoy there. And I think as you know, it's like 13 or 14% of all the kids in Florida are in schools and charter schools now.

Right.

And so Mike launched True north. And what we love, many, many things about True north, it's centered around character and purpose.

They adopted from a whole bunch of different people, including uncommon around the idea of data helping drive and inform their instruction. There is no gap between their low income students and their high income students.

Wow.

They are, they are, you know, top 1%, top 2% schools all, all in Florida. Incredible, incredible places of learning and human development and flourishing.

And so you know, their demographics are probably 25 or 30% low income. Okay. It's mostly Hispanic students.

So it's the sort of median student there would be a middle class Hispanic student, lots of dual language speakers, et cetera, et cetera. So incredible, incredible story. A place that we learned a ton from.

And there's probably, I don't know, 8 to 10 groups similar to that Judd that we're back in around the country now.

One thing that distinguishes the California sector from the Colorado sector in California. California is where I spent most of my life. Colorado is where I grew up. These are natural lenses for me. But they have other comparison points too.

California has a lot of schools in suburban settings, but those schools have turned out to be ones that have almost been contrarians as it relates to somewhere front achievement test. They're mama schools, they're Waldorf schools.

There's project learning schools, maybe some non classroom based schools that are really focusing on just two or three days a week. And these are important options. I'm not saying.

But if you look at Colorado, Colorado has a lot of suburban schools, but they seem more like True north schools. And so when you hear the studies, oh, charter schools in general don't perform any better than district schools. It's of course similar, cocky maybe.

To the extent there is any big statistical issue at play here is with low income kids we way over perform.

Yes.

And then some of these suburban schools we underperform. You add it all up and the overall sector doesn't look as great.

But it seems to me as though the underperformance controlling for demographics in suburban settings is just life the taking. We can just.

And so I mean what you seem to be saying about True north is that seems to be char school growth funds either intuition or your formal analysis at this point.

Yeah, I think that's Right. And so we're looking for people who are out performers on that. Right. And where there's also. We see a lot of demand on it. And so yeah, it's, it's.

We also think from a political perspective, a place like a Colorado, a place like in Arizona, a place like Texas, where you have those mixes we've seen for the most part, those are more politically, the coalition is stronger in those places where you have, you know, suburban parents aligned with low income parents on working hard and fighting for charters.

Yeah, I mean in some of these states where we have ESAs and vouchers happening too. I think it's going to be a very interesting question that we're going to be putting to the suburban communities.

Hey, are you going to take your voucher and then take your kid to a selective admissions school or you're going to add something to your tuition and it basically going to eliminate a lot of low income families from being able to go to that place? Or are we going to make a just totally ass kicking charter school? Right.

That, that you would bring your kids to and you would actually end up being in a more diverse setting. This seems to be like one of the big questions for the next decade of charter school work.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean the early returns on that, I think as you know, it's super early. But like in Arizona, you haven't seen charter enrollment drop.

Yeah, exactly right.

So you, you've, you've obviously seen, you know, private school enrollment or you know, usage of ESAs increase, particularly around certain population, special needs students, et cetera, et cetera. Big increase on those district enrollment. We've seen drop, but we have not seen charter enrollment drop yet. We'll see.

One more question here just about the growth of our sectors and the dynamics at play.

I think that there was a period in the racial reckoning related to the George Floyd era and all of that where there was great additional emphasis placed on getting diverse leadership into our movement. I thought it was a really healthy thing because I actually thought that we were to some extent under emphasizing this.

Now we get to a point and people are being attacked for trying to get diverse educator cores and those kinds of things.

I have to say in my conversations with charter school people, I kind of like the quiet stance we're taking right now, which is we're going to keep diversifying our leadership. This is a long term thing. We got all sorts of people in the shoot. We don't necessarily have to wear it on our sleeve or take it into fisticuffs.

In every public setting. But our movement is diversifying its leadership probably in ways that we're not seeing, you know, in, in across all of public education.

Talk to me, is it, what, what are your thoughts on this topic?

Yeah, I mean, I think so. One, we're big believers in that and have been for well over a decade. We've been working on this for 12 or 15 years.

So of the 180 networks that we support, a little over 50% are led by a person of color, mostly, mostly African American, Latino, some Asian leaders as well in that. So we're super proud about that. It's been that way for seven or eight years at this point.

And also over 50% are women, which is another thing that we've really leaned into.

And with the idea of like we, we think both of those things are huge strength and we have tried to lean into, break down some of the barriers that, that we had put in place probably in the, you know, in the beginning, five years or seven years of, of the growth fund that you know, we're not anything about performance, but we're about lenses that we had were using as an investor that were sort of shortcuts that ended up, you know, not, not serving us well. Right. So the, our classic example as what the beginning we were like, oh, you have to have a five school growth plan in order for us to look at you.

What that ended up doing is it sort of preference people who are like, okay, I, I've got, I've raised a little bit of philanthropy. I know I can go do this. I can get so and so consulting firm to help me, et cetera, et cetera. So we were doing that had zero bearing on our results.

It was a shorthand for us.

And so for us, we changed how we worked so that we were way more embracing of, you know, kind of neck, what we would call a next school plan, things like that. So you're really building that, building that base and that confidence of a way more diverse leadership pool who are running amazing schools.

And you're creating this, you know, getting rid of sort of the barriers of, of, of, of helping people to be able to do that. So it's, I, I, I think my summary on this is we just got to do the work, right? Yeah.

Whether, whether it's, it's just, it's got to be important in who we are, and we got to do it every day, and we're in it for the long term. And, and we believe that that diversity of leadership and model and geography is a true, true strength for us.

Again, like, we just want more great schools. Right. I think for us, we're like, let's just create more great schools regardless of who runs them. Yeah. That's what families want.

And so the more we can lean into, how do we create more great schools that, that deliver for families and communities? I think that to me is the North Star for us.

That's great. Let me ask you just one more question. Then I'll ask a last piece of advice for charter folk from you. But, you know, my obsession is advocacy.

Whatever happens with the Supreme Court case on the other side, I think our advocacy needs are going to be even higher than they've ever been in the past, and they've been significant in the past.

I also would say that over the last five plus years, we've seen some strengthening in charter school advocacy at probably a pace beyond what we've seen before. I think Starling's example in Texas was an incredible one.

I agree.

Basically showing that that organization could in very short order be evolved into a C3, C4 organization. There was unity across the sector.

One of the great things I think underappreciated about Starlee's success story in Texas is how several of the biggest charter school organizations, the biggest CMOs, really came together and worked together while at the same time sharing governance authority with smaller organizations. All Those organizations together, CMOs and the state associations together. You're uniquely focused.

I know that your organization now consists of a variety of big organizations and small. But if there's anything that we need, I believe it's the coherence of your portfolio of schools coming together with our state associations.

Hey, if our state associations aren't good enough, all right, great. Let's put some constructive heat on them. You know, everybody knows I love the, I love the charter school leaders.

Oh, the CSA leaders, you know, and $25 per kid and all that. I love them. I love them. And I beat on too. You're not good enough yet. You're not good enough yet. Right.

And it's it's fine that we have constructive pressure from our big organizations and our members generally to get better, but when we get separated, I just feel like in Los Angeles it would be the, it would be like the Lakers winning without Kobe. You know, it would be Chicago winning without Jordan.

They have to be on the same team here and the team has to have a shared vision for damn it, we're going to win NBA championships here.

Talk to me about what your view is on how advocacy has done over the last five years and is there anything that I personally or all of us collectively could be doing to encourage us to, toward, you know, what's going to be the strongest long term recipe here?

Yeah, I mean, I think one piece for me is we have way more in common than we have difference. And so I just think embracing that it does be enough to agree on everything.

Like part of hopefully building a wider tent is that we're able to work on important things in terms of delivering for students and families that, you know, maybe many other things that we disagree with people on and that's, that's okay and that's healthy in a democracy, but that the more that we work together, the stronger that we're going to be on this. I think, I think that's one. I think the second is I do think, you know, being clear on these are step by step things. Right?

What's, what do we need to do this year? Yeah, we need to do next year. Where are we going? Right.

And bringing along, you know, key, key leaders and in, in the movement, that coalition and then, you know, hopefully attracting others including, you know, capital, et cetera, to, and political capital to make that happen.

I do think, Jed, you're, you know, the vision that you've been talking about, you know, that you're pairing C3 and C4 and you're able to play, you know, where those things are complementary.

I think that's really, you know, important and I do think that, you know, the Starlight's example is a great example and she's, Starlight's a terrific leader and I do think where you get that alignment, as you said, we, we actually can get progress and, and, and, and you know, we, we talked about a few of them earlier today where that, you know, that's happened and I do think that, you know, coming out of, you know, there's just a lot of stuff as, you know, happening Supreme Court piece will just be another, you know, layer on it.

But I, I do think that working that partnership of the CSAs and operators is just crucial in terms of trying to make any progress and, and you know, also prevent bad things from happening too.

Cool.

Well, we'll hope that this trajectory continues for, because if it happens for another five or six years in the way that has happened the last five or six, when we look at it over a decade or a 12 year time frame, we're going to see things have gotten a lot, lot better. All right, let me just wrap two, two pronged wrap up here.

Anything that you just wanted to talk about or any other observations around the charter school space would love to hear whatever you might be percolating and then. Okay, go, go with that.

I just like, I, I, for me, Jed, like I'm just super inspired by, by, you know, the, the people who are part of, of Charterfolk, the heart, the heart of, of our movement together. And you know, just like, you know, I was talking with someone who, you know, maybe some people know, many, many people may not. So a guy named Dr.

Bobby Lopez and he runs a small school network in Texas called Bob Hope that started in Beaumont, Texas and they're now expanded to Port Arthur. Now they're expanding into the sort of eastern outskirts of, of of Houston. And you know, just how incredibly talented of a leader and educator he is.

And you know, what he is, what he's built and what he's continuing to build and like his continued, yeah, passion and, and, and just you know, leadership ability just is super inspiring.

So I, I, I just, I, I hope sometimes I feel like, you know, the more you can go and spend a day in a school and just see what's happening, it's just, it's so like, it's, it's so remarkable and, and I kind of feel like some, I think part of what you're doing and such. This is so great, Jed, is you're just elevating so many of those voices who really are the heartbeat of what we do.

And so I'm just, I want to say gratitude to the, all the folks who are doing this and thankful for you, Jed, for, you know, spotlighting so many of them.

That's great. Well, really close to almost what my second question was going to be.

Is there any piece of advice you would offer to the Charterfolk organization, to our board and to others? Is there some incremental thing? We're about ready to celebrate our fifth anniversary here and we're thinking about the next five years.

Anything that you could see that is a gap that just might be right for us to focus even more on.

In our second choice I mean I think one thing that's gonna, you know, we're spending a decent amount of time on and working with leaders and I suspect this will be something that's going to, you know, emerge over this next five years.

I mean I think for us, our at cs Jeff, our kind of three pillars are around growth, which means serving more students and family performance, meaning how are, how our schools are doing relative to their peer set and then innovation really because our belief is particularly for low income black and Hispanic students. The, our sector, we are the innovation engine.

Totally.

You know, we, we are that. I wish that weren't true.

There's, I'm sure amazing things happening in some schools, industries but they're not, they're not, they're not trying to scale. Yeah.

And I think, you know, in, in many ways, like I do think, Jed, this next five years I'm imagining that we'll see some key changes emerging on kind of school model, how schools are run, opening up new ways of thinking about things that I suspect that will be a key theme for the heart of the movement here. So that would, that would be my, my one, my one little pitch to you and, and your, and your board and your, and your community.

I like it. Thank you so much for that.

And I'll just share a little one other piece of good news that you shared, you know, before we started recording here, which is that you're still out there on the soccer field in your mid-50s. And you know, you and I, our work together is getting close to a quarter century in duration, but we were at it almost a decade before we met.

And I can just say, I don't know, Kevin, I think we're 35 years in. We probably got another 35 in front of us. So, you know, stay on the soccer field, stay in good shape, you know. Thank you my friend.

I really enjoyed having this time together. Thanks, thanks so much for, for making time today.

Yeah, thanks so much. Cheers.

Bye.