Good day, CharterFolk.
This weekend, I wrote that there is no Superman in the national charter school movement, only SuperFolk, thousands upon thousands of people who get superhuman things done because of our collective effort.
I stand by all of that.
But if there is a single CharterFolk who most approaches Superman status, it’s Howard Fuller.
A new documentary about him has been released this week by PBS.
It’s truly great, a Fuller expression of what our movement is all about than anything I’ve seen of late.
Meanwhile, we encounter ample evidence of charter school momentum continuing to build.
In Iowa, the governor has included historic funding for charter schools in her state budget.
In Tennessee, in addition to proposing increased voucher funding, the governor included $40M in additional support for charter school facilities.
At a federal level, new financing guarantees are meaning that new state funds allocated to charter school facilities can be leveraged to greater impact.
In Missouri, there are at least a handful of bills proposing to expand the geographic footprint of charter schools in the state.
In West Virginia, the state’s supreme court has said charter school openings can proceed.
Recent approvals at the state level in New Jersey will result in significant charter school growth in Patterson.
Press this week in North Carolina points to the state having added over 125,000 students to charter school over the past ten years.
In Alabama, there’s encouraging evidence of strong bi-partisan support for charter schools.
We saw this week a fascinating, lengthy article about the groundbreaking work that is being done in Indianapolis to redesign public education, as the picture shows, over the unruly objection of a loud minority of status quo protectors.
Speaking of unruly objection, the New York teachers union is doing all it can to stop the growth of charter schools.
They do so despite evidence continuing to mount that New York’s charter schools are generating unprecedentedly great outcomes with the kids and communities that need them most.
Meanwhile, a heads up that Available to All is releasing a report in a couple weeks about redlining attendance boundaries preventing many families in New York from accessing better public education. I’ll remind you when it’s out.
This story from Florida shows how the opening of just one charter school forced a redrawing of those menacing lines across an entire country.
On the re-design front, we had another meaty article come out, this one in Idaho explaining how charter schools being truly accountable entities must steward their financial resources differently in order to build prudent reserves.
Meanwhile, Terry Ryan and Matthew Joseph give a primer on why requirements that charter schools spend funds within prescribed buckets hampers their ability to innovate.
To wrap, I better end where I began.
A Fuller expression.
Maybe the Fullest yet.
It’s truly fantastic. So inspiring.