Weekend greetings, CharterFolk.
As we celebrate CharterFolk’s 6th anniversary this week, I recognize that this is a pretty remarkable moment in the evolution of our organization.
First, we have more people voting in the final round of our Brian’s Voice Awards than ever before.
It’s your last chance to get your votes in. Voting closes Wednesday at midnight. Remember, our top three vote recipients will each receive a $1,000 prize – not to compensate the writers themselves, but to give them resources to convene gatherings where the themes raised in their columns can be discussed at even greater levels of depth and commitment.
Get ’em in today, CharterFolk.
Second, we keep receiving more Contributor Columns.
This week, we doubled up, publishing a great one from Mark Medema at FRED and another from Ronald Evans at George Washington Carver in New Orleans.
I confess to not knowing exactly what’s best to do – keep publishing as many great ones as come in and risk snowing you under, or slow things down a bit?
For now, we’ll stay in “jubilee mode,” sharing multiple posts per week until we are on the other side of our national conference. Be on the lookout this week for two posts from Gary Larson at Larson Communications – one focused on what we have learned over the decades about communications efforts related to individual school organizations, and a second laying out what the next chapter of communications needs to look like for our advocacy organizations.
Third, large batches of additional contacts are now coming in through our Organizational Subscription program. I remain guardedly optimistic that achieving 20,000 readers before the end of the year is a stretch goal we might just reach. If you would like your organization to help us make it over the hump, please ping me at jed@charterfolk.org. And for any of you able to offer individual paid subscriptions to support the work, we would very much appreciate it, as costs continue to rise as we work to support this ever-growing community.
Finally, I offer thanks to the many of you who are extending invitations to visit. A new development is schools asking me to come to their beginning-of-the-year staff orientations to talk about why our movement exists and what it means to be a CharterFolk.
I start our 7th year fully aware of the outstanding promises I have made to visit schools in states across the country, and I am making my travel plans accordingly as I continue pursuing my goal of visiting a thousand charter schools.
Last week, though, an accounting matter came up as it relates to that goal.
Heretofore, I have always thought it cheating to count the same school twice.
But should there be special exceptions?
The question came up in the context of making a return to Paradise.
CharterFolk readers who have been with us from the earliest days may remember the second post I ever sent here.
It was about the extraordinary efforts that CharterFolk were making to keep their schools open during the pandemic. As an example of the lengths our movement has always gone to on behalf of students and families, I highlighted what ParadiseFolk did to get their schools back open after the fires of 2018.
A centerpiece of the post was this picture – Folk at Paradise Charter Middle School defending their school from a wall of fire that shot hundreds of feet into the air.
The fire literally melted the paint on the exterior wall of one of the buildings.
But the school survived.
One of the people in that picture was Travis Prendergast.
Today, he is the school’s principal.
And the school is thriving, with more families wanting admission than the school has room to serve.
We were joined there by Mary Cox, the CEO at Core Butte Charter School, who we profiled earlier this year.
Eight years ago, her resource center was in ruins.
Today, she has built a whole new high school building just down the hill from Paradise, and her organization now serves 400 more students than it did before the fire.
Casey Taylor arranged my whole visit, just as she played a lead role coordinating the entire community’s response to the fires.
Her school facility was completely lost during the fire. Today, Achieve Charter School has relocated to a facility that had previously been a private school.
As Casey was showing it to me, she explained that her own connection to the facility goes back decades.
She went to school there herself from kindergarten through 6th grade.
It was one of those details that helps you understand how deeply rooted so many CharterFolk are in the communities they serve. They are not outsiders parachuting in with abstract theories about change. They are people whose own lives are braided into the places they are helping rebuild.
Later in the day, Casey drove me by the land the school has acquired to house not only its growing K-8, but a new high school as well. On the way, we swung by to see Julie Crandall at Home Tech Charter School …
… another school whose building had been completely destroyed and which is now in far better facilities than it ever had before, serving even more students than it once did.
So you tell me, CharterFolk.
Going back to see the same school twice?
Obviously not.
But what about schools that have been so completely and utterly reborn?
The Architects of Paradise
Much more important than how I account for school visits is the incredible example now coming out of Paradise.
Today, about 800 of the 2,000 students in the Paradise school district are served by charter schools, and the charter schools are growing.
City planners now estimate that, with all the new sustainable building happening in Paradise and with people gobbling up every new property that goes up for sale, Paradise may end up being a larger town than it was before. The total number of public school students in the area is estimated to grow to around 5,000 early in the 2030s.
And it seems very possible – perhaps even likely – that the charter schools of Paradise will grow to serve a majority of the new students and families who come to the area.
Meanwhile, CharterFolk are now working in both district and charter schools.
It creates a situation much like what we see in New Orleans, Indianapolis, Camden, or D.C., where the charter school world has grown to serve 40%, 60%, even nearly 100% of area students, and where CharterFolk now work across multiple school types.
And when charter schools reach that level of communitywide scale and presence, the questions are no longer just charter school questions.
They become public education architecture questions.
- As people come back to Paradise, does the district simply start drawing attendance boundaries again, telling families where they can and can’t go to school?
- Does the district take all the local facility bond funding for itself and leave charter schools in the cold?
- Are charter schools held accountable for results while district schools are allowed to languish in underperformance indefinitely because no third party ever looks to see what is going on?
- As the system trends more toward becoming “all-charter,” how is special education responsibility divvied up among schools?
- When higher education institutions in the area initiate a K-16 discussion, what is the new architecture that ensures that all schools’ and all students’ interests are served?
We live in fascinating times, CharterFolk.
Not all of it is good.
Goodness knows.
I didn’t do a news whip-around this week, but I need not tell you that the latest is chock-full of both promise and peril for our movement.
But in the biggest picture, what is different today than was the case a decade ago is the presence of charter schools serving percentages of students so large in many communities that we are becoming the architects of what comes next.
Some of that architecture will come out of large cities, no doubt.
But some of it – perhaps some of the most inspiring and most coherent, offering tangible demonstrations of the possible – may very well come out of places like Paradise.
And that means our work can no longer be limited to protecting the schools we already have, or winning the next piece of legislation, or getting through the next news cycle.
We have to sit down among ourselves and begin having the more challenging conversations about what we are actually trending toward.
Because if CharterFolk are going to become the architects of what comes next, then we need a blueprint.
We need North Stars.
Shared understandings within our communities about what a fairer and more excellent system of public education should actually look like, and what role charter schools should play in helping bring that system into being.
Without them, we risk stumbling into the future reactively, fighting the same old fights, defending the same old lines, and missing the chance to build something much better than what came before.
Paradise reminds us that devastation can be followed by rebirth.
But rebirth does not guarantee Paradise.
Without vision, without unity, without the willingness to ask hard questions together, rebirth can leave communities walking back toward another inferno.
So wherever you are, CharterFolk, whatever you have come through, whatever challenges you face in your local environment in the immediate term, I ask you to please consider that you may be on your way to Paradise.
Not a place we call Paradise because it trends toward becoming all-charter for charter’s sake.
But a place we call Paradise because public education is finally trending toward something much fairer and much more excellent than what came before.
To get there, though, sheer resilience will not be enough.
CharterFolk in communities across the country will need to begin defining our North Stars, building our blueprints, and coming together with the sophistication and unity required to play the architecting role that history is now asking of us.
And my sense is that the architects of Paradise in communities across the country will be people like Casey and Mary and Travis and Julie.
People who care deeply about their communities.
People whose own lives are braided into the places they serve.
People who have earned the credibility to help shape what comes next because they are not advocating for communities from afar, but rebuilding the communities they themselves call home.
People willing to ask hard questions with one another.
People determined not merely to survive the fires of the moment, but to build something better on the other side.
People who are, in the deepest sense of the word:
CharterFolk.