The Difference Between Charter School People and CharterFolk, and Why We Want our People Reading CharterFolk

Good morning, CharterFolk.

I need to change tack for this one. A part of me hates to do it. There is so much important stuff to write about in charterland right now. And there is so much great stuff coming from CharterFolk Contributors, like the CharterFolk Challenges discussion that Andy Rotherham hosted last week …

… like the Contributor Colomn that Ruben Felipe offered last week about recent advocacy breakthroughs made in Connecticut …

… and like the trip to the Oxygen Bar that we enjoyed with Linda Brown and friends the week before.

A part of me wants to stay focused on just getting out even more good content like this from CharterFolk.

But the truth is that I need to write a post about CharterFolk itself today. That need arises out of the fact that CharterFolk is going through a period of big growth right now. In the coming days you’ll be hearing more about this. But in advance of that, we are being approached by leaders of various organizations who are contemplating ways to get many people within their orbits access to CharterFolk. As they’re putting those plans in place, they’re requesting a post summing up why it might be a good idea for them to do so. So I thought I’d take a run at that today.

I start out revisiting why we decided to make CharterFolk in the first place.

At its Heart, CharterFolk Exists to Help Charter School People Feel Part of a Something Bigger than Themselves.

It relates to the title to today’s post: “The Difference Between Charter School People and CharterFolk.”

The former are people who work at, or support, or enroll their kids in charter schools, or are, or were charter school students themselves, and they think about their connections to their various schools much as anyone would to any school.

The latter are people who feel that they are part of something bigger than themselves, a movement striving to create great new learning opportunities for students and to build new advocacy strength such that we can help all of public education become more excellent and equitable …

… and because of that feeling of connection to something larger, they are willing to do even more, not just in support of their own school, but in support of the larger cause as well.

To be clear, there is nothing wrong with the first group. Indeed, some of the best teachers I know simply want to teach incredibly well and don’t want to focus on anything other than supporting their students as best they possibly can. Other people are very passionate about particular problems in public education or society – say special education or inadequate education for incarcerated youth – and they value charterness solely for its ability to help them make progress in their passion area. Still others are simply desperate to find a great place for their kids to go to school and they couldn’t care less what kind of school it is that offers them that.

All these are laudable orientations to the world of charterness.

Full stop.

But at its heart, the long-term viability of the charter school movement has been predicated upon the notion that there would always be a sizable portion of charter school people who would become CharterFolk. The reasons for this are straightforward.

When you are a new entrant attempting to push a massively powerful status quo …

… to evolve into something that becomes more excellent and more equitable, you only have a couple reasons for hope.

The first is knowledge that what you are aiming to do is on the side of kids and families and communities, especially those who need it most, which gives you the advantage of fighting on a hill with the weight of history on your side. It’s the simple fact that, sadly, our public education system has not turned out to be as fair and as fabulous as we need it to be, and it is a noble undertaking to try to make it so.

The second is a notion that your people will go above and beyond what is customary because they feel part of something bigger than themselves, which provides your world a heft that is larger than would otherwise be. Every successful social cause in history has had its super-dedicated people who have given the effort the additional energy needed to prevail against all odds. In our world, I call those people CharterFolk.

Those two things together – being on the right side of history and many people going above and beyond – might be just enough for us to survive and thrive despite all the ridiculous challenge and blowback that comes along with taking on an Establishment that is orders of magnitude larger and more powerful than ourselves.

In the early going, a very high percentage of charter school people were CharterFolk. This was a function of the fact that the only people crazy enough to get involved in charter schools were the mavericks, the people who had the cause deeply cooked into their very DNA. They knew full well what they were getting themselves into, and their numbers were so small in the beginning that they had among them a deep sense of camaraderie and shared identity. They were CharterFolk.

Over time, though, the percentage of charter school people who thought themselves CharterFolk began to decrease.

Partly this has been a natural thing. As the charter school sector has grown, it has become more mainstream. So it was inevitable that many new people would jump on board for reasons that were different from the ones that motivated the first CharterFolk.

But another part of the decrease has not been natural at all. It has been a function of the toxic advocacy conditions that we operate within.

As charter schools grew and thrived and began to exert more constructive pressure on the overall public education system, a massive backlash against charter schools was engineered. In response, many charter school organizations began to downplay their charterness. Many stopped referring to themselves as charter schools altogether. Many stopped educating the new people who became connected to their schools about charterness. As attacks became more vicious, some supporters decided that identifying themselves as CharterFolk was something they could no longer do. Many others who would have naturally become CharterFolk were dissuaded from doing so.

Now we are in the middle of a time when it has become much more apparent to our world how costly it is for us to have fewer charter school people becoming CharterFolk. We have seen now the immense weight that the Establishment can mount against us when they make the stopping of charter schools their top priority. There are many new things we have to do to respond to this new reality. Almost all of them have at their heart a critical need to make sure we have an even larger number of charter school people who consider themselves CharterFolk, whether that’s charter school staff, or board members, or funders, or advocates, or policy makers, or students and alumni. So we are starting to see now increased effort across the charter school movement to encourage charter school people to become CharterFolk.

That effort, if it is to prove to be successful, will be a large one. The lion’s share of it will be taken on by charter school operators and charter school advocacy organizations. But other organizations can play a supporting role. That is what CharterFolk is attempting to do, to play that supporting role effectively. If we can help other organizations doing this work by supplementing or enhancing or simply making the task just a little easier or more effective, then we will have played our role successfully.

We take on our role recognizing that the task is not to just do what we did in the beginning. That old world no longer exists, and the reasons why people may become Folk today have to be attuned to the current moment. The ways we engage Folk need to change as well. And we’re not sure, but it is our intuition that people and Folk receiving multiple posts per week coming from a straightforward charter school perspective would be a helpful thing.  The point is not that people will have time to read every post, but that as different ones resonate, they may begin to see some things they hadn’t seen before, and they will engage. Over time, our hypothesis is that the cumulative impact of reading and viewing and considering and contributing will help make charter school people more inclined to become CharterFolk, and will help make those who are already CharterFolk inclined to do even more.

Many of our posts focus on recaps of the news from a charter school perspective.

Not just links to articles but an attempt to draw those stories together into something showing the coherence behind what we’re trying to do. Often those things will focus on the fact that, sadly, much of our public education system is neither excellent nor equitable.

We often show how the underlying conditions that got the charter school movement started in the first place …

… continue to this very day …

… grounding us again in why we exist …

… and motivating us to push on despite all the blowback we have to contend with …

… which plays out in places across the country …

… showing how what we are experiencing in our own neck of the woods …

… is being felt by others, too …

… reinforcing how we are all part of something much, much bigger than ourselves.

We don’t have any communications shop here at CharterFolk.  It’s just me during my evening and weekend hours and a few people working way below market to help with operational matters. I don’t report myself to be a journalist. I, of course, work hard to make sure that nothing I say here is untrue or inaccurate, but we don’t have the capacity here to check every fact as closely as would a mainstream newspaper. Instead, our value-add is being able to write quickly, while having a high hit rate getting the big picture right in state after state. We are able to do that because my day job has me engaged in supporting charter school advocacy in nearly all places where we have charter school laws, and so I have a level of awareness about what is going on , and I have a network of people and trust built up so that when I need to write about Rhode Island or Texas or where-have-you I have some people who I can call quickly to make sure I’m not going to step in it. And looking back over nearly two years of work, while I find sad faults of writing throughout, overall I would stand behind nearly every post that’s been written here as having gotten it right on the most important trends that are affecting our movement.

Now, a lot of this stuff is heady stuff. The subjects we take on are complicated and complex …

… and finding generally broad coherence attached to story and specificity and context takes more space than your typical tweet or op-ed. So, yes, posts here at CharterFolk tend to be somewhat long. To mitigate that, we try some things. First, I try to sprinkle as many visuals as I can throughout the posts …

… with the idea being that a quick perusal of the visuals will often give readers a general sense of the piece if they don’t have time to read the whole thing. And we know that readers can’t have subscriptions to every newspaper in the country. So we we often give readers a visual associated with an article or op-ed …

… designed to help people grasp the meaning of the piece more more deeply and quickly than they would from seeing the headline only.

I also try to bring as much spark to the writing as I can, using every personal connection I have to the work to try to make the stories pop with life, whether that’s stories from my parents who have been lifelong educators …

… or my ex-students who get back in contact with me …

… or the things we can learn about education equity from my son’s soccer team …

… or the visceral lessons I have gathered over the years having had the chance to visit nearly a thousand charter schools in my day.

And yes, within the context of those posts, I’m not sheepish about throwing out my own ideas about the things we’re still struggling with as a movement, like coming to terms with the backlash that has been directed our way in recent years …

… and recognizing that, if we are really going to survive and thrive in our fourth decade, we are going to need a new North Star vision to anchor our work.

But the idea, obviously, is not to make this a platform for just my ideas, but to make Charterfolk, rather, a place where a wide range of opinion is given voice, and where many of the most pressing issues that we face as a movement can be discussed and debated. That’s why I was delighted that in our first year we had 52 CharterFolk make content contributions of one form or another …

… and we appear to be on track for even more doing so during our second year. Contributions have included thought-provoking columns …

… sharing a wide range of perspectives …

… coming from some of the most respected leaders ….

… and thought leaders …

…. in our world. Others just bristle with life, like the story of a school founder who after decades of struggle and triumph, welcomed his great-granddaughter to his charter school this year.

Because this, ultimately, is what CharterFolk is all about …

… extraordinary people …

…. making extraordinary contributions.

They are the heart of our movement. They are ultimately what gives us reason that we will prevail on all the challenges before us, whether that is helping us overcome whatever the advocacy challenge of the moment might be, or helping us recruit to our movement even more CharterFolk. It’s why we make sure that CharterFolk is chock full of CharterFolk. Because above anything else we might do, we know that the best way we can encourage even more charter school people to become CharterFolk is by getting them even closer to amazing CharterFolk who anybody in the right mind would want to emulate.

In taking on this effort, I make mistakes left and right, and I’ve got a heckuva lot left to learn. But I know that what anchors me to the work is a promise that I made to a special friend many years ago …

… and that has become a promise which I have extended to all CharterFolk.

And that anchor is what gives me enough conviction to assert that, supported by an incredible group of people who themselves are Folk, and fully aware that we aren’t anywhere close to having it all figured out yet …

Yes, in fact, we are getting there.

And yes, in fact it is a good idea that even more charter school people read and consider and contribute to CharterFolk.

And, yes, as we learn how to do this work even more effectively in the years ahead, it will become an even better idea the further on we go.