Weekend greetings, CharterFolk.
Today I’m pleased to share a CharterFolk Chat with Caprice Young.
You can find the episode on the CharterFolk Website with a transcription, on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube.
For many CharterFolk readers and listeners, Caprice Young needs no introduction. She has had as varied and consequential an impact on our movement as virtually any CharterFolk, having served on the LAUSD Board of Education, founded CCSA, led early efforts at the Arnold Foundation, worked at Knowledge Universe, and led school organizations including ICEF, Magnolia, Learn4Life, and most recently Navigator. Having connected with Caprice about her recent departure from Navigator, I thought it a particularly opportune moment to hear from her some of her latest observations about the state of the charter school movement.
During our hour together we covered many topics including:
- How Joe Lucente and Yvonne Chan, “the troublemakers inside the school district,” got pushed out to the Valley, and how charters spread from there “like crabgrass”
- Why every year of existence has meant a little less flexibility for charter schools, and why the next charter Caprice would write is non-classroom-based – the one corner of California law where flexibility most lives
- Schools being compensated for how much learning a kid achieves rather than how many minutes a kid spends in school – and what COVID proved about fitting the school to the kid instead of the kid to the school
- The challenge of keeping our edge: The Accelerated School’s early phonics advantage, and why 47% proficiency is not a victory
- Considering a period of malaise in education – NAEP scores, “education depression,” and the hundred-thousand-kids-a-year question mark
- Declining enrollment, digital marketing, and how that changes a school’s financial model
- Howard Fuller’s Thanksgiving message, why newcomers won’t naturally get it, and why the stories have to be told again
- Yvonne Chan and Don Shalvey, and the car rides between Oakland and Stockton where a generation got its advice
- Four waves of charter leadership: district mavericks, community organizers, the Teach for America generation, and now charter alumni founding their own schools
- AI, the use of time, and middle schools that could be curiosity-driven instead of compliance-driven
- Why leaders in their 50s and 60s are coming back, and why successful school models have to keep evolving
- The COVID punchbowl pulled away: ’25-’26 as an excruciating year, ’26-’27 as when the deep cuts land, and an LA elementary school built for twelve hundred kids now serving two hundred fifty
- Howard Fuller on the power to exit, and why there’s less of it now, not more
- Reasons for hope, and why Caprice predicts the emergence of many new models in the next few years and is eager to be a part of their creation
- Aspirations for the 60s, and why a cancer survivor counts every moment as a blessing
Show Notes & Resources:
- Navigator Schools
- California Charter Schools Association (CCSA)
- Learn4Life
- Magnolia Public Schools
- ICEF Public Schools
- The Accelerated School
- The Science Academy STEM Magnet (North Hollywood)
- The Education Daly, by Tim Daly
- “The Price You Pay to Make Social Change” — A Thanksgiving CharterFolk Chat with Howard Fuller
- “Exit, Voice, and Loyalty” by Albert O. Hirschman — the book Howard Fuller recommends on the power to exit
I offer a final thank you to Caprice for finding time to share thoughts with us and hope the rest of you find the conversation as enjoyable as I did.