Weekend greetings, CharterFolk.
We knew when we released my latest CharterFolk Chat with Howard Fuller that Thanksgiving week was not the optimal moment. But I had at least a dozen conversations last week with people who brought up how meaningful they had found it, and so its views and listens continue to rise.
I really encourage you to check it out.
A challenge talking to Howard is that he says so many insightful things that it is hard to know what to emphasize. The conversation migrated into unexpected and frankly very personal territory about the price people pay if they are serious about making social change. Howard says that if what you most value in your life is balance, and he is clear that he does not hold in judgment anyone who makes that entirely understandable and defensible decision, there is only so much social change you can bring about.
I thought it such a clarifying way to understand the moment we find ourselves in that I chose to title the whole discussion along those lines. And I do not second guess that choice, because what Howard is talking about applies not only to us as individuals but to our entire movement. If what we value as a collective is balance, it will limit the amount of social change we can achieve.
All sorts of forces encourage us toward balance. Some are very smart ones. In some circumstances, charter schools are so vulnerable politically that we have no choice but to keep our heads low. Embracing greater risk and lack of balance would not achieve anything anyway, so why do it?
But in more settings than we want to acknowledge, we default toward balance for the same reason individuals do. We recognize our unique potential to bring about great social change, but over time more and more of us question whether we should pay the price, because we are growing to value the balance that comes from having achieved something decently better than what was available before.
We know there are things that must be said about the problems in public education today. We see that no one else is saying them. And we know that no one else is going to say them.
But woe is to the one or ones who do. So we say nothing.
We saw a version of this dynamic play out in recent school board elections in Denver, where reform candidates were widely reported to be saying the same things as union-backed candidates …
… even though the candidates hold diametrically opposed views on innovation schools and charter schools.
In the end, status quo interests have regained majority control of the DPS board, and the chair position is now going back to the board’s most rabidly anti-charter member …
… whose prior service as chair made the DPS board, as Denverites described it …
… “a national embarrassment.”
These are exactly the kinds of dynamics Jim Goenner cautioned us about in his Contributor Column last week …
… where he urged us to leave behind any notion that we are a sector and instead embrace our long history of having been a movement. Sectors watch out for themselves, Jim reminds us, just like trade associations and interest groups do. Movements, on the other hand, carry forward in support of something bigger than themselves, even when it puts parochial interests at risk.
If we define a movement as something that cares less about its own parochial interests than about its potential to make social change, remaining a movement becomes steadily more challenging as change efforts grow. For nearly 35 years now, we have been unmistakably a movement. But with nearly four million kids in charter schools …
… we have more to lose than ever before.
This makes it harder than it has ever been for us to retain our bearings as a movement. We have more and more kids and families whose futures are put at risk every time we push assertively for something even bigger.
And at exactly the moment when we need to be investing more than we ever have to sustain our commitment to being a movement, we are doing less than we ever have.
A symptom of that is our people beginning to take for granted that charter schools are simply going to continue to exist, whether we keep fighting for them or not.
Which is what made Howard want to do the chat with me in the first place. You see him make that point in the first moments of our conversation.
Less than a week after our chat, a column was published in Howard’s hometown cautioning the entire state of Wisconsin not to take charter schools for granted.
Proving Howard prescient yet again.
This is part of the rationale for having created CharterFolk in the first place: the recognition that our people, our Folk, are our most important resource. As long as our people keep becoming Folk, as long as our people feel that they are part of a noble effort that is bigger than ourselves, we have nothing to worry about.
For many years, even decades, this need for our newcomers to become Folk seemed to take care of itself. The early comers to the charter school movement knew how dysfunctional, broken and unfair the traditional system was, and they appreciated massively the opportunity to try something new. They talked incessantly about their experience, and the people who followed them into charter school organizations were continually educated about why we exist and taught to appreciate the unique opportunity for impact we have.
But as our movement matured, new dynamics emerged.
First, our FoundingFolk retired, meaning their experience base no longer grounded the movement.
Second, status quo forces evolved to make stopping charter schools their top priority, and in the process began to fill the public sphere with negative messaging about charter schools. Over time, that messaging started having as much impact on newcomers to our movement as anything we were communicating ourselves.
Third, and most importantly, and most inexplicably from my standpoint, we consciously chose to stop talking about why we exist, about the brokenness and unfairness of the traditional system. We made that choice externally as a broader communications strategy, but even more significantly, we made it internally.
In many organizations, we simply stopped talking about the fact that we work in charter schools, and more importantly, why we chose to build our organizations as charter schools in the first place.
And over time, it became the biggest thing our movement has ever taken for granted: the belief that people simply coming to charter schools would become CharterFolk as committed as those who came first.
So we find ourselves in the circumstance Howard describes: a movement with a deepening complacency, one that no longer knows as deeply why it exists or why it is a noble thing to be CharterFolk. And that, in turn, puts us at risk of what Jim pointed to: charter schools becoming a sector, and not a movement.
You can count on CharterFolk to continue doing our part to encourage us all to stop taking this biggest thing for granted. But ultimately, this is not about what CharterFolk the organization does. It is about what CharterFolk after CharterFolk within charter schools and advocacy organizations across the country do, day after day.
Perhaps the most important and ultimately helpful recognition emerging now is the awareness that this is not a problem that will take care of itself.
It is something that we are going to have to consciously take on.
The way we hire people. The way we onboard people. The way we build organizational cultures. The way our advocacy organizations host their conferences and communicate what we are trying to do writ large.
These are not peripheral matters. They are the mechanisms by which newcomers become Folk, which may be as important an imperative as we find anywhere in CharterLand today.
So expect this to be one of the biggest foci for 2026: helping build a deeper understanding of how we ensure that our newcomers truly become Folk.
In the meantime, if your organization has gleaned some insights about how to take on this challenge effectively, please reach out to me at jed@charterfolk.org.
Because the biggest thing we have taken for granted must now become the biggest thing we commit ourselves to fixing, knowing that the most effective solutions will come from CharterFolk ourselves.