Good day, CharterFolk.
Another thank you to all of you who have already gotten your votes in for the Brian’s Voice Awards, recognitions we offer here at CharterFolk to those who have penned columns that have either helped us deepen our commitment to our movement or to think anew about a shared challenge that we face. I know that all the authors of the 17 Contributor Columns we had last year …
… helped deepen my commitment and helped me think anew about many things confronting our movement.
Whether it was authors encouraging us to think differently about summer school, or educating about the origins of our movement, or celebrating the progress charter schools are making in special education, or challenging us to make more progress on DEI, or recounting the lessons learned in Newark, or reminding us how bad things were in DC before charter schools came along, or sharing perspective gained over a long period of service as an authorizer, or advocating for a new constitutional right to a high quality eduction, or calling out the problem of too little Latino leadership in charter schools, or identifying the Covid moment as a possible turning point for education, or reminding us about the dangers of defensiveness as a movement, or celebrating the emergence of a new generation of diverse leaders, or underscoring the need to insulate charter school authorizers from political dynamics, or announcing the formation of a new national organization elevating Brown and Black voices, or giving advice about how to talk about charter schools on the playground, or pushing us all to think again about the definition of public education, or sharing ideas about how we can get behind policy proposals that could drive a new narrative for our movement …
… without doubt, CharterFolk Contributors have shared great ideas with us over the past year.
That’s why we wanted to make the Brian’s Voice Awards. So get your vote in today for the three columns you most enjoyed last year. We will announce the three (or so) winners next week, with each awardee being provided $500 to host a dinner with other CharterFolk in order to deepen the discussion about the topics addressed in their columns. It only take a few seconds to participate. So why not vote right now?
Another thing we have wanted to do is to more effectively curate our Contributor Columns on the CharterFolk Home Page. You’ll see we’ve added a new link designed to do just that.
But I also want to underscore that these aren’t the only contributors we had to CharterFolk in our first year. We also had three CharterFolk Group Columns last year:
- CharterFolk Speak! 16 Leaders Offer Thoughts on Vision
- CharterFolk Contributors Respond to Arne Duncan’s Challenge to Involve Parents
- Part 2 – CharterFolk Contributors Respond to Arne Duncan’s Challenge to Involve Parents
All told across those three group posts, we had an additional 19 contributors to CharterFolk.
And that doesn’t include our additional 16 CharterFolk who participated in our 10 CharterFolk Chats last year.
Add that all up and we have 52 people whose voices we had the privilege of getting in front of the CharterFolk community last year.
52 contributors! Talk about a full deck of smarts and perspective coming together!
To all of you who contributed content last year here at CharterFolk, thank you so much.
And be on the lookout. Our Contributor Columns start up again on September 2nd with Illinois Network of Charter Schools Chief of Staff Ariel Johnson teed up to tell us about how the charter school community in Illinois managed to hold off an unprecedented legislative attack last year in Springfield.
Ariel will be the first of what I know will be another full deck of contributors during CharterFolk’s second year.