Weekend greetings, CharterFolk.
Thanks to so many of you for sticking with me all the way through my post from two weekends ago about public education not being yellow but chicken.
I know these winding, more personal ones aren’t for everyone, but it did have a 52% open rate, meaning it was our first here to surpass 6,000 readers.
And the exceedingly kind comments I got from many of you indicate it struck a chord, at least among you Dylan fans.
As one of you put it:
Jed – holy snickerdoodle! I cant recall a time when I was blown away by a piece of writing that I get from subscribing to an email list. Thanks for sharing both your experience but also your storytelling.
“Snickerdoodle.”
I confess, CharterFolk. In four and a half years of writing, that’s a first.
It keeps spring in my step.
So thanks to you all.
On we go.
Mail Jail
The first topic this weekend is why there was no post last weekend. It happened due to growing pains that we had with our tech platform now that we have thousands more readers. I call it being in “mail jail.”
Daniel managed to get things working again in a few days, but the delay resulted in us having a logjam of content to get out. So I opted to pull my own posts and to keep things going with our Contributor Columns. We’ve had some great ones of late including terrific new posts from Aidé Acosta in Chicago, Amanda Aragon in New Mexico, Jana Wilcox Lavin in Nevada, and Colleston Morgan in Milwaukee.
Thanks to you all.
Meanwhile, LarsonFolk have helped us revive the CharterFolk Extraordinaire Posts series by profiling the extraordinary efforts being made by Jennifer Goodman in Texas, Katie Law in Wyoming, and Eddie Rangel in Indianapolis.
So while we had a few days in mail jail, we’ve managed to stay on stride with our efforts to amplify the voices and elevate the contributions of CharterFolk.
Exactly what CharterFolk exists for.
Needing a Paternity Test
I wrote Not Yellow, it’s Chicken in a St. Louis hotel room. I was in town to see my son’s soccer game. It’s his freshman year at WashU and, a few days before the season opener, he got word that he was going to be starting.
I couldn’t miss that.
Many of our newer readers don’t know me as well as our originalists, so let me make one thing clear.
Ever since Q was little, when our closest friends would observe his athletic ability and remember, sadly, the dearth of my own, they would whisper:
Jed, have you ever thought of getting a paternity test?
It happened so often, I developed a stock response:
Q’s soccer abilities are reason for hope that it’s possible to go from flat to fleet-footed in a single generation.
An Epidemic of Distraction
I wrapped up the post and directed my flat feet toward the campus stadium. There on the sidewalk outside the hotel, I noticed for the first time …
… Eliot’s star.
Part of the St. Louis Walk of Fame.
I had stayed at that same hotel through multiple recruiting trips and a college move-in during which I must have walked over that star, what, 25 times? 30? And never noticed it.
Something about the Eliot reference in the Not Yellow post, I guess, finally punctured my distraction.
Which sparked me musing about the applicability of Eliot’s line to the discussion of public education in our country.
Because, isn’t so much of it just one long exercise of being “distracted from distraction by distraction?”
The Establishment does all it can to prevent focus on what is really happening in our public schools, like the amount of learning our students are achieving.
It was the subject of the last post I wrote before mail jail befell us:
A charter school organization courageously pushing back against school districts trying to hide their performance.
This week was saw the scope of the Establishment’s concealment.
A new report from The Center for Reinventing Public Education lays bare the nationwide distraction that has set in since the epidemic.
The story got picked up in California this week …
… where the star of multiple-measure gobbledygook embedded in California’s public education sidewalk was finally recognized for what it is.
The article’s author quoted the “expert consultant” who testified before the State Board of Education in 2015 when California’s no-accountability walk of shame got its start.
The conversation around what we’re learning and the development of the evaluation rubric obviously applies in the context of accountability at the larger context. So what the specifics of really being able to build a larger system that emphasizes the cohesive framework that leads to a sense of how we are going to operationalize the demands and expectations in Ed Code around the rubric around how the components, then, of an accountability system that focuses on multiple measures and tries to, as several of you have said, weave the pieces together to help think about the context of the state priorities and how the guiding principles are a lens, we want to continue to develop the details.
Word salad.
Distracting from distraction.
Or, as the report’s author (and WonkyFolk guest) Morgan Polikoff put it:
“I have a Ph.D. in education policy and I can barely navigate these sites. How do we expect a typical parent to access this information and make sense of it?”
Undeterred, the Establishment doubled down on obfuscation in Los Angeles this week …
… voting 4-3 to keep from the public any understanding of how ten “community schools” are performing.
Board Chair Jackie Goldberg wanted the vote to happen before her term ends in January.
She considers it her legacy.
A conscious desire to set in cement her star in the no-accountability walk of shame.
It’s happening all over the country these days, CharterFolk.
I consider it another epidemic.
An epidemic of distraction.
Caged Birds
My attention more firmly attuned to the stars passing beneath my feet, a block further I came to another famous literary St. Louisan.
Maya Angelou’s star is accompanied by a nearby mural.
Which sent me to thinking about the caged birds of St. Louis.
Kids and families trapped in a nightmare they have no way out of.
Did you see what came to light this week?
The school district has not put away nearly enough money to pay its teachers the pensions they were promised, and it now threatens to bankrupt the entire district.
Meanwhile, a month into the school year, kids still can’t get to school.
And there’s no evidence the district has made any progress at all on its leadership crisis.
It makes plain why T.S. Eliot and Maya Angelou belong so close to one another on the St. Louis Walk of Fame.
For what excuse can there be for not hearing the caged birds sing but the sad fact that we are distracted from distraction by distraction?
The Delmar Divide
The St. Louis Walk of Fame is anchored by none other than the Father of Rock-n-Roll, who gets not just a star, but an entire statue to commemorate his fame.
Chuck Berry stands at the intersection of Delmar Boulevard and Melville Avenue …
… the place where, in order to make it to the campus, I had to part ways with one of the most famous streets in our country.
A street that not only houses St. Louis’s Walk of Fame, but also demarks one of our nation’s greatest walks of shame.
In fact, given that the BBC …
… made a whole documentary about the street a dozen years ago …
… an argument could be made that Delmar Boulevard is one of the most famous streets in the world.
It’s worth watching the whole documentary if you can, CharterFolk.
It tells a story we revisit here often – how historical racism and housing redlines came together to create educational redlines that, to this very day, systematically allocate better opportunity to those with means, and worse to those without.
Those stars I walked past are found on just a few blocks of a long thoroughfare that runs for miles.
One one side you find …
… million dollar mansions.
On the other …
… vacant houses crumbling in disrepair.
They call it “the Delmar Divide.”
And yes, it’s a boulevard that runs through St. Louis.
But as we CharterFolk know, it’s a divide that runs straight through the heart of every city in America.
From Flat to Fleet-Footed in a Single Generation
I sat in the stadium where the boys were playing. It’s the same field that hosted the 1904 Olympic Games.
Any guess, CharterFolk, what side of the Delmar Divide WashU is located on?
We were up a couple goals at half-time. It gave me a chance to catch up on email.
One went to Noah Divine, the great new leader running the Missouri Charter Public Schools Association.
A thought he recently shared resurfaced.
Jed, I feel like we’re flat-footed. This implosion happens at the school district in St. Louis, and it seems like those of us in charter schools don’t know what to do. This has happened across the country so many times. Aren’t there things we’ve learned about what to do at a moment like this?
What else could I say to him other than, sadly, the answer is no.
But Noah is right.
This has happened over and over again.
It’s happening in cities across the country as I type.
School districts are going through crises where many are finally seeing the dysfunction …
… and would be open to new ideas if they existed in the landscape.
But because we have been afraid.
Because we haven’t surfaced our ideas.
Because we haven’t surfaced them in advance.
We’re left flat-footed.
Because to surface them in the moment, what would that look like but ambulance chasing?
The time to articulate our vision, CharterFolk, is proactively.
It is not at some moment when our articulation would be confused with opportunism.
It should come literally years in advance.
Precisely when the ideas could be completely out of fashion.
When they could be seen as extreme.
Or, yes, at the least in the near term, when they could induce even more blowback against us.
But then our ideas would be out there embedded in the landscape. Such that when the inevitable moments arise, like this one in St. Louis right now, people are ready to finally see the star they’ve been walking over for years.
And are ready to ask:
That crazy idea you CharterFolk have about how public education can evolve into something that becomes much more successful? I know I said you were nuts when you first shared it, but would you explain it to me again?
It’s what we need in city after city across America.
A playbook to give our remarkable next generation of advocates.
Rather than all of of us old-timers standing around condescendingly pretending that it’s so intuitive what they’re supposed to do, when none of us who went first ever did it ourselves, we finally offer up what our movement needs right now more than any other single thing.
A North Star!
Articulated in advance!
Such that when windows of opportunity open, we are ready to move with an agility beyond what many believe our movement’s DNA permits.
Because mark my words, CharterFolk.
Given the athleticism of our next generation of advocates, we’re not going to need a paternity test to confirm what will become patently obvious to all:
Whether its agility on the soccer field, or excellence in advocacy, it is absolutely possible to go from flat to fleet-footed in a single generation.
Roll Over Beethoven
It’s not that complicated a tune, CharterFolk.
There are only a few chords.
But played again and again with all the verve and vitality that those chords unlock, a whole new generation of music is waiting to be played.
It’s what will ultimately earn us our star on the Walk of Fame.
Not letting ourselves get distracted from distraction by distraction.
Not walking mindlessly down the sidewalk of the Delmar Divide but challenging ourselves everyday to keep acutely aware of the unfairness that has been deeply embedded therein.
Such that we more clearly hear what the caged bird sings, and allow millions of others to hear it too.
Because if there is anything I am sure of, CharterFolk, it’s that public education’s Beethovens are primed to be rolled over.
Don’t you think it’s time …
… we pick up our guitar?