Weekend greetings, CharterFolk.
Coming to you from the Big Apple this weekend.
And Mother’s Day fun with the fam requires I keep it brief.
Many thanks to Arthur and the team at MESA for hosting me on Friday.
Arthur and Pagee were among our earlier contributors here at CharterFolk.
It’s inspiring to see what MESA has accomplished since.
Opening another high school.
And merging with an existing middle school, allowing them to open a third site.
Amid a broader public education landscape that continues to sadly underperform.
Danyela has been writing about all this for years, including here at CharterFolk.
She and I had coffee where she walked me through the latest at the district level.
Some of the highest spending in the country, with little to show for it in terms of student achievement, and now a new mayor who seems intent on making things worse.
Meanwhile, status quo interests push beholden policymakers to further impede the growth of charter schools.
Despite it all, New York has had some of the strongest charter school growth in the country over the past five years.
And some of the strongest charter school academic achievement.
It’s what I talked about recently:
Policy divergence results in charter convergence.
Some states support charter schools and help them grow.
Others oppose them so strenuously that they end up driving growth too.
When other public options are as poor as they are in New York, more parents turn to charter schools in desperation. Since the beginning of the decade, we have seen charter schools grow to serve about 50,000 more students in New York, despite all the opposition that has been thrown against us.
This week, Hochul signaled she will opt New York in to the new federal tax credit scholarship program.
I don’t think it is an overstatement to say the announcement is sending shock waves across the country.
It reflects, as much as anything else, the broken politics that hold New York schools in a place of fixity.
Give a policymaker direct control to do something, and these are the gestures she makes.
Force her to push proposals through a legislature captured by status quo interests, and what do you get?
A single word of support for lifting the cap on charter schools during the primary …
… producing a tiny change allowing a few new schools to get started.
It wasn’t nothing, obviously. It’s what allowed MESA to expand.
But it was still far short of what we need.
Concurrent to all this, a development is in the works in New York that could become the largest story in charter school advocacy nationally.
A new advocacy organization is being created at the state level, designed to draw New York’s charter school advocacy into something new.
Not casting aspersions here, but charter school advocacy in New York has never been optimal.
Different organizations have focused on different things, with none having the mix of C3 and C4 capacities needed to bring the collective force of upstate and downstate CharterFolk to bear on policy and politics.
So charter school advocacy in New York and New York City has languished.
Hochul’s choice this week speaks to the fact that there is massive latent opportunity available here.
Much more than has been previously perceived, at least by some.
And with places like Rhode Island showing what is possible in resources …
… and other associations across the country demonstrating what C3 and C4 game-changing looks like …
… imagine what such unity and capacity could mean for the state of New York.
180,000 kids putting in $40 a kid?
With New York philanthropy coming in on top of it?
Supporting a community of schools as high performing and ready for additional growth as New York’s??
Earlier this week I applied Leonard Cohen’s quote about love — “Every heart to love will come, but like a refugee” — to charter school advocacy:
Every state to advocacy coherence will come.
But like a refugee.
Has the hour come round at last?
That hour when New York CharterFolk finally opt in to coherence?
We shall see.
If that hour has come round, not only will we see emerge the strongest collective force for young people and communities the Empire State has ever seen.
We might, in fact, see the strongest such force the entire country has ever seen.