Today, we are honored to profile Patricia Brantley, CEO of Friendship Public Charter School in Washington, DC.
Pat Brantley grew up in a Newark, New Jersey household where public service wasn’t just something you did, but who you were.
It was the family business.
Her mother started working as a teacher before becoming a lawyer and, eventually, a judge. Her stepfather, Ramon Rivera, was the inaugural executive director of La Casa de Don Pedro in Newark, which has grown to provide everything from childcare support for young mothers to programs for seniors.
“I would say that I have been in the world of education and serving my community for as long as I can remember,” she said.
Today, Pat serves as the CEO of Friendship Public Charter School, one of the largest and highest-performing charter school networks in Washington, D.C., serving nearly 5,000 students across 15 campuses. In June, Pat was inducted into the Charter Schools Hall of Fame for her decades of commitment to Friendship and its students.
“It was humbling,” Pat said of her Hall of Fame induction. “When you’re in the midst of the work, what you see most are all the things we still have to get done.”
But Pat’s road to education and, ultimately the Charter Schools Hall of Fame wasn’t a straight line.
Finding Her Own Path to Education
By the time she left Newark to attend Princeton University, Pat expected her career path to veer more toward community planning than classrooms. She was at Princeton during the same time as Wendy Kopp, who was working to launch Teach for America.
“I was hearing a lot about Teach for America, which was interesting because I’d always been around education,” Pat said. She wasn’t quite ready to kick off her own education career. “After Princeton, I ended up going to work for Prudential in New Jersey, which was basically the biggest company I would find.”
She didn’t stay long.
Soon, Pat was in Washington, D.C., working for civil rights leader Dr. Dorothy Irene Height at the National Council of Negro Women. The work was national in scope, but education was always at its core.
“We Could Start Our Own School”
Under Dr. Height, Pat started the Partnership for Academic Achievement, an effort to help families across the country understand the newly-passed No Child Left Behind Act.
It was through this work that Pat first met Donald Hense, who was leading the Children’s Defense Fund at the time and had come to support Dr. Height’s organization. He shared his vision with Pat, which involved taking Friendship House — a century-old DC social services agency with a footprint much like La Casa de Don Pedro’s — and reorienting it entirely around helping children grow, thrive, and contribute to their communities.
“During my time at the National Council (of Negro Women), we would have these grand goals like eliminating poverty or making sure every girl had a chance to graduate from college and have a full life,” Pat said. “We realized those aren’t things where you can always make significant progress in a year. It takes a lot more time than that, so really decided to focus on education in our community over time.”
Pat joined Friendship House shortly after Donald became its Executive Director in the mid-1990’s. A few years later, Friendship Public Charter School opened its doors, and Pat was involved in the school’s initial charter application process.
“We had convened educators and other leaders in the community, which made us start to think that we could start our own school,” she said. “And we did.”
Friendship is Family
After going back to work with Dr. Height for a few years, Pat returned to Friendship as its COO in 2003.
At the time, Friendship was comprised of two elementary campuses, a middle school, and a high school that had just opened. In her first year back, Pat restructured it into DC’s first early college high school, modeled in part on Jobs for the Future programs.
The bet was simple: Prove that Friendship students could do college-level work while still in high school, and colleges would take a chance on them. The school committed to dual enrollment that September. By January, it had delivered.
“The impact can be real, and it can be fast,” Pat said. “You can take the handcuffs off, and you can move as fast as your mission will carry you or as slow as the status quo.”
She still hears from former students — now adults with careers and families of their own — who are grateful for those early college credits because they helped prove to themselves that they belonged in college.
Pat recalls a Friendship student who arrived in the middle of a school year after a violent incident at his previous high school left him shaken and his family in crisis. The school was full. An office manager turned him away, then ran after him moments later when a spot opened up through a family relocating.
That same student’s mother passed away as he entered his senior year. He later told a room of Friendship teachers and staff that when he looked up at her funeral, half of the school’s staff was there. A staff member told him simply: We are all your family now.
“That really comes out when you talk to Friendship students,” Pat said. “They’ll talk about the education, they’ll talk about the opportunities, but they almost always have a story about somebody who did something that just showed the heart of Friendship.”
A Movement That Shows Up
Three decades into her charter school career, Pat points to the people who modeled fearlessness for her early on — Donald Hense and Dr. Height among them — as well as the formal and informal networks that sustain her now, including several language-immersion schools with very different student populations than Friendship’s who still gather to trade notes on teacher retention, financing, and facilities.
Pat chairs the DC Charter School Alliance, which she credits with grounding the sector’s collaboration in shared mission rather than competition.
“If I call another charter leader because they have great results and I want to ask them questions about how they did it, they will usually invite me to come see their classroom instead of getting defensive,” Pat said.
Pat describes her recent induction into the Charter Schools Hall of Fame less as a personal milestone than as a reflection of everyone who carried her to that moment, including Friendship teachers and staff over the decades, as well as every student and family who continue to choose the school each year.
She is excited for the next three decades of Friendship and beyond.
Asked what she’d want fellow charter leaders to know, Pat was direct:
“We’ve got to make sure that we’re going to be here for the next 100 years,” she said. “This movement can’t stop at 30 years. It has to be built to last a century because there will never be a single model that serves every family.”
Read More About Patricia Brantley in CharterFolk:
- CharterFolk Contributor Patricia Brantley — The Geography of Good Intentions
- WonkyFolk Volume 35 – A Conversation With Pat Brantley, CEO of Friendship and the Latest Inductee to the Charter School Hall of Fame
- CharterFolk X Vol 2.2 – Patricia Brantley and Donald Hense, the Friendship at the Heart of One of the Most Important Success Stories Happening in Public Education Today
- Rotherham, Ponce, Peiser, Brantley and Armbrust Kicking Off Our Charter Challenges Series: The Challenge of Growth in Unprecedented Times