Happy New Year, CharterFolk.
I begin 2026 by breaking the first rule of CharterFolk.
In one of my earliest posts, I argued that it is unwise for our movement to declare big, round numerical growth goals. Those kinds of declarations can make us look like we care about expansion for its own sake, especially when we have not always articulated why growth matters.
But my sense is that the time has come to break some of our own rules.
Or, more accurately, to recognize that the world around us has changed so profoundly that we must adjust our rules, not simply make adjustments inside them.
The reasons are many.
The first, of course, is the sheer scale of the learning crisis we are living through.
I keep searching for ways to convey the depth of the moment we find ourselves in.
Here is a new one.
Literacy and the Long Arc of History
Over the holidays I watched a lecture by Yale Professor Keith Wrightson on early modern English society.
In it, he describes how historians measure literacy rates from centuries ago. Their method is simple. Did a person sign his or her name, or did the person make a mark instead?
It’s obviously a rather crude measure, one that is especially unreliable for women, given that many girls were taught to read but not to write.
(Yes, CharterFolk, arguments about the fairness of basic skills measurement and its differential impact across demographic groups actually predate the Elizabethans.)
But even with those imperfections, the measures tell a remarkably consistent story.
Since the year 1500, literacy in the English-speaking world has risen directionally and inexorably.
Nothing stopped it.
Not outbreaks of plague.
Not wars with Napoleon.
Not the American Civil War.
Not the Great Depression.
Not even either of the world wars.
For half a millennium, there was never a directional decline.
Until today.
Literally, CharterFolk.
We have not seen literacy dynamics like the ones we are witnessing now since the Middle Ages.
Policy in a Time of Blind Guides
Meanwhile, on the education policy front, we appear to be living in an era that is positively medieval as well.
Both political parties …
… seem unable …
… to take lessons from their own debacles.
Among those lessons is an inability to develop coherent plans to address our national crisis in reading.
Last month, the Bipartisan Policy Center released polling showing that 70 percent of voters believe literacy should be a top priority, yet only 18 percent believe their governors treat it as one.
70 percent want seriousness on helping students learn to read, yet the only thing reds …
… and blues can agree on is that we should be lowering proficiency standards …
… and reducing the quantity …
… and quality …
… of the data that is available about the depth of the problem we find ourselves in.
It leaves us in a situation of the blind leading the blind, a medieval theme if ever there was one.
Yet here is the paradox of history.
It was literacy itself that helped carry Europe out of the Middle Ages. As reading spread, the world changed. Religion changed. Politics changed. Commerce, science, and civic life changed. The great shift did not begin with armies or with monarchs. It began with people learning.
And yet today, that same force is being allowed to recede, even as the institutions responsible for learning cling to governance structures that look increasingly medieval.
Ultimately, a new era in American education will not be ushered in by the institutions that brought us into crisis. Those institutions continue to grope in the dark, unable to see what must be done.
If we are to arrive at a better future, will be led there not by blind guides, but by sighted ones.
People with the vision needed to see the new era that we are stepping into.
What the Presbyterians Teach Us About the Science of Reading
Some look at the recent passage of Science of Reading laws as evidence that we have finally turned a corner on literacy.
But history offers a sobering reminder, one underscored by another lecture from Keith Wrightson’s course on early modern English society.
England once tried a reform we might call the “Science of Religion.”
After the English broke their church from Rome, leaders updated theology and rewrote the teaching manuals, but they left governance frozen in its medieval form. Authority remained concentrated in bishops and crown appointees, with no mechanisms for replacing ineffective leadership or ensuring accountability.
So nothing took hold.
Presbyterians understood why.
They recognized that practice cannot change without structural change. Where the Church of England preserved its medieval hierarchy, Presbyterian reformers created a new governance model that devolved power to the “presbyteries” – to the groups of local elders who oversaw local congregations, such that new forms of shared authority and communal responsibility could arise.
When many of these reformers later carried those ideas to America, they helped plant the seeds of the democratic civic culture and early schooling traditions of the New World.
The pattern is unmistakable.
When structures evolve, reform stands a chance.
When structures cling to the past, dysfunction persists.
England paid dearly for its mistake. Its refusal to modernize governance became one of the pressures that helped push the nation into the upheavals of the 1640s.
That is exactly where American education stands today, poised on the cusp of seismic change, with a status quo unable to let go and, in its refusal, creating the instability that puts the well-being of millions at risk.
Which brings us, of course, to the work of charter schools.
Making Our Mark on the New World of Public Education
Wrightson notes that the rigidity of Anglican governance helped accelerate settlement in the New World, where reformers built new civic and educational structures at a remarkable pace.
In many ways, the charter school movement has done the same.
Our early pace of development, motivated in part by an effort to escape stifling hierarchy, was astonishing.
But is it remaining so?
Are we still building with the urgency and imagination that monumental change demands?
Or have we begun to mirror the stagnation of the very system we seek to replace?
That answer hangs in the balance.
The National Alliance’s latest enrollment report shows that we continue to grow. We added a little over one hundred thousand students last year, while the traditional system lost twice that many.
Growth is strong in a mix of red and blue states regardless of the level of opposition we face.
That is certainly encouraging.
We are leaving our mark, CharterFolk.
No doubt.
But our pace of growth has slowed.
It took us about six years to go from serving one million students to two.
And about the same to go from two to three.
Since then, another ten years have gone by, and we have yet to reach four million.
So yes, as I say, we’re definitely making our mark.
But signing our names?
Putting our collective John Hancock’s across the defining documents of public education’s future?
I would have to say that the answer to that question is no.
Or is at least not yet.
A Movement Approaching Its Own Philadelphia
So in this year of our country approaching its quarter millennium, one stretching about halfway back to the seismic changes that set literacy rates on their altogether different trajectory, it seems to me that we are rapidly approaching our own kind of Philadelphia.
A moment when we will see whether, in the course of human events, the charter school movement issues a declaration of our own.
The clearest indicator will be whether we begin where those in Independence Hall began.
Not just with flowery language about certain truths being self-evident.
But with grievances.
A full list of them.
Our critique of the existing order.
Which gives our effort reason to be.
It takes courage to speak the unspeakable truths. Many in power attempt to stifle us. And yet, of late, we have begun to see our world articulate its critique and advance a vision for the future beyond anything we have ever been willing to do before.
Call it the parchment upon which the charter school story may ultimately be scribed.
Charter school communities in places like Indianapolis show how chartering can help lift entire systems through the creation of fully autonomous schools.
And in places like New Orleans, we see an irrefutable proof point. Not one dependent upon a tragic storm so much as upon new vision, new intent, and new strategy.
For as surely as it required a different approach in New Orleans to move from fifty percent of students in charter schools to one hundred, so too will our strategy for moving from four million to eight million students be completely different than the strategy that took us from zero to four million.
It is why I say I believe our movement is destined for its own moment in Independence Hall.
The governance of American public education cannot be repaired within its old frame. It cannot produce the learning our country now desperately needs.
If a better future is to emerge, it will not come from the institutions that have led us into crisis. It will come from those willing to sign their names to new foundational documents for public education.
We know what needs to be written.
The only question now is whether we’ll prove willing to pick up the quill.
A Collective Renewal and What We Pledge to One Another
In the opening of this piece, I said the time had come to break our own first rule.
Or to modify the rule to fit the times we live in.
More than anything else right now, what our movement needs is a greater sense of momentum.
An aura of greater inevitability.
A sign that thousands of us are ready to take on the work that remains to be done, motivated by the principles that got us started in the first place.
And nothing could better signal that inevitability than growth.
Faster growth.
Serving more students.
Generating policy wins that allow us to do so.
Commanding a greater share of the public discussion about the future of public education.
That is why I am willing to break the first rule I ever made here at CharterFolk.
By calling for this.
Five million students in charter schools by 2030.
A pace about twice what we are doing today.
One roughly approximating the trajectory we were on before.
Most importantly, one that would ensure that dozens more contexts cross the threshold where scholarship suggests that all boats rise and historical gaps close.
Think of it as our collective charter.
And our collective charter term.
A five-year push toward what we need right now more than anything else.
An even better case for renewal.
Such that the entire charter school movement itself feels renewed.
Courageous advocates in recent years have shown the stakes involved for those who dare pick up the quill.
We live in a time when, unlike the founders of our country, it would be an exaggeration to say that we must pledge our lives and fortunes.
But our sacred honors?
Or, as Howard has framed it, our lives of balance?
Perhaps so.
So CharterFolk, I ask you to think of 2026 as the year we approach our own Philadelphia.
A moment when we are not just being asked to make our mark.
We crossed that threshold decades ago.
Now we are being asked for something more.
A whole other level of literacy.
Not just our marks.
But our signatures.
Our very names.
Written large across the face of public education.