Good day, CharterFolk.
Working quickly today. This will be the last whip-around of the year. We have a great Contributor Column tomorrow, and I have a piece about Rod Paige that I will get out over the weekend. Early next week, I’ll get out my Year in Review column, at which point we’ll take a break until the other side of the New Year.
The whip-around this week just puts an exclamation point on the charter school story we’ve been attempting to capture this year.
Indianapolis remains our boldest trailblazer. Tonight local leaders make public their recommendations to the state about how public education in their city should continue to evolve.
2025 was the year of Indianapolis giving the charter school movement its first new North Star in decades.
Look in 2026 to that star becoming a constellation, with points of light emerging in cities across the country.
Florida is twinkling. Here we see the state proceeding with plans to prevent school districts from serving as conflicted bottlenecks to growth.
Eva Moskowitz, heading up plans to bring Success Academies to Florida, contrasts the treatment her organization is receiving down south while pointing to the academic problems of the traditional system up north.
This step back from Cornell shows that charter school enrollment continues to grow in NY despite all the obstacles status quo interests create.
Growth is strong in Nevada, too, while district enrollment continues to drop.
This great celebration of DC KIPP founder Susan Schaeffler serves also as a retrospective on the progress that the whole charter school movement has made in DC over the past 30 years.
Meanwhile, district schools continue to put up sadly predictable opposition.
In New Orleans, a city that has seen its charter schools improve public education like no other major urban area in the country, the district has opened its own school, which is now clearly failing.
School districts in Missouri are using the courts to try to block charter schools from growing outside St. Louis and KC.
In Connecticut, we’re having to sue to get schools funded that have been authorized to open for years.
As they oppose charter school growth, status quo interests continue to demonstrate why it’s so needed.
Here we see the California Teachers Association planning to enact strikes in school districts across the state.
Most of the school districts identified for strikes are the very same ones that are imploding financially.
In Oakland, the Chief Business Officer has quit again.
In Sacramento, they haven’t been able to find a replacement for their CBO who fled months ago.
Ditto that in San Francisco, where the CFO position has been vacant for over a year.
Meanwhile, severe financial distress is emerging in Long Beach …
… and Los Angeles.
It leads to an interesting question:
Between now and the end of the decade, will California end up taking over more school districts, or will Texas?
Or West Virginia?
It’s inevitable, CharterFolk.
Status quo interests will keep on trying to bottle up our growth.
And despite it all, even in the most difficult places …
… charter schools will simply keep on growing.
It leads to the two questions that will frame the charter school experience between now and the end of the decade.
How do we make charter school growth happen even faster?
And how do we make it happen absolutely everywhere?