Good day, CharterFolk.
For the education world, this morning brought news that NAEP scores have continued to crater.
For the world world, they hardly even register.
You have to scroll down multiple screen-lengths to even see them at the Journal and the Post. The Times has them below nearly all other content, right there under a story about SNL performers not being able to maintain a straight face over the decades.
Straight faces can break toward laughter, or toward tears.
One doesn’t know what is harder to keep a straight face over — the NAEP results, or our country’s seeming indifference to them.
Meanwhile, recent posts have elicited responses from many CaliforniaFolk. Some have reached out to say our world needs to express more general opposition to new policies coming out of Washington. Others have said we should be more receptive of some of them. Still others have said that our focus on national news and Los Angeles fires is leading us to miss major stories, like the school districts in Los Angeles and Oakland moving to deny the renewals of many schools
In Los Angeles, you can find literally no news coverage of the denials at all. One reader likened it to the district “moving under the cover of smoke.”
Then Nina forwarded me news that Kiumars Arzani is among the many Folk who have lost homes this month.
It led to a rapid text exchange with Kiumars who sent me a flurry of pictures and blessing to share them here at CharterFolk.
This is what Kiumars house looked like before the fires, after a recent remodeling.
This is what it looked like the day after.
Yesterday was the first day he and his family were allowed back in to survey the damage.
The charter school that Kiumars founded many years ago, one that he had retired from to go on and do additional things in CharterLand, was among those to have been denied at LA Unified this month.
As Kiumars said it. “January of 2025 will go down in my personal history as one of my greatest moments of loss.”
And he said, by the way, that his old school had faltered so much of late, he himself wouldn’t have renewed it. So not everything is attributable to a veil of smoke, though several of the other schools in Los Angeles and Oakland, he is aware, absolutely should be renewed.
We will see now what happens next.
My sense is that Kiumars will be for us in the future what he has been previously.
Nearly a decade ago, Kiumars made it his personal mission to build a relationship with the Assembly Member representing the area where his school was located. Charter school opponents were so certain that the Assembly Member was going to be terrible for charter schools that they made sure he was appointed to serve on the Assembly Education Committee.
But Kiumars engagement with that Assembly Member changed things. He became such a strong supporter of charter schools that opponents had him pulled off the committee after he had served just one two-year term.
Kiumars’s example was so compelling that we created a whole program encouraging charter school leaders across the state to foster similar relationships with their local Assembly Members and Senators.
We also named Kiumars charter school leader of the year.
An example for all to emulate.
When I was in high school, our family lost our home to a fire. I was wrestling at the time. The fire happened on a Monday. I assumed I wouldn’t be wrestling for the foreseeable future, though as providence would have it, the only clothes I still owned were the ones I wrestled in.
My coach called me into his office on Wednesday morning. What he said has lived with me ever since.
“You will remember this week for the rest of your life. Not the fire itself but how you act in response to it will set an example that will serve you through whatever challenges await you. Get yourself ready to wrestle for your team on Saturday.”
I was not a great wrestler, CharterFolk. But I did manage to place first in one tournament in my wresting career. It was the one that happened five days after my family’s house burned down.
We are living in the aftermath of fires in public education. Some, like the ongoing conflagration of abysmal NAEP scores, still burn.
But more than the fires themselves, what will define us is the way we respond to them.
My sense is that the examples that are being be set by Folk like Kiumars and so many others who are acting so heroically to help their school communities at this moment will anchor us to surmount the challenges that await.
One last email came in from CaliforniaFolk last week, this one from people at CCSA, asking that I highlight the fact that the annual conference is coming up soon.
Normally I wouldn’t elevate a particular state’s conference when I can’t elevate them all, but this time I will.
It seems a moment of particular importance for Folk to be gathering.
A time to be reconciling the great loss we have experienced in recent months with the fact that robust overall enrollment growth, contrary to what many so erroneously believe across the country, has continued to make California’s charter school sector a national leader.
I sense that what we talk about at conference will set us on a trajectory for even greater impact for many years to come.
It will be our equivalent of getting ready to wrestle on Saturday.
Finding something deeper inside ourselves than we knew was even there.
Released by the extra motivation and meaning we take from doing it for a team.
Hope to see you there, CaliforniaFolk.
On we go.