Weekend greetings, CharterFolk.
Hope your Thanksgivings were great.
My topics keep evolving.
Let me insert another before a prompt grows untimely.
Namely, the subjects elevated at ExcelinEd this year.
And those not.
Namely charter schools.
Admittedly, I wasn’t there myself, so maybe I’m the last that should be talking here.
And Starlee and Scott Bess headlined a session on charter schools and innovation.
So it’s not like we were utterly evicted.
Just relegated to the basement.
Like we’ve been relegated to the basement of right-leaning ed reform generally.
Which would otherwise feel less conspicuous if it weren’t for the fact that ExcelinEd chose New Orleans as its host city this year.
This being the 20th anniversary of the Katrina storm and the reform effort since, which has created one of the greatest success stories in the history of public education.
A few days after the conference ended, the state announced that the New Orleans school district achieved a B rating.
It’s the first time such a status has been bestowed upon the district, which for decades before the storm was seen as one of the greatest societal catastrophes anywhere.
Yes, Louisiana’s education has been improving statewide in recent years.
But New Orleans has been improving even faster.
Name another place where that is happening.
An urban school district leading a whole state toward something fundamentally better.
This is what the charter school movement has grown to have the potential to achieve.
It’s an example so strong that Indianapolis has learned that it has no reason to be anything other than unapologetic about its quest to arrive in a similar place.
And hold me accountable to this, CharterFolk:
You watch how many other cities will soon proceed down the path that New Orleans has blazed.
Like a magnet.
Like an invisible magnet.
New Orleans’ charter schools pull.
Like they pulled ExcelinEd.
Like they pull cities across America toward the North Star of all-charter systems.
And yes, like the entire national charter school movement pulls.
We are the invisible magnet drawing all of public education toward the better future our students deserve.
Status quo interests, we know, have essentially given up on excellence and equity in public education.
Thus, their efforts to render the two essentially invisible.
Erasing from the landscape evidence that overall learning is decreasing and that achievement gaps are growing.
The polar opposite of where New Orleans is headed.
Meanwhile, ed reformers, or at least those who skew center and right?
Let’s face it, CharterFolk.
What they are advancing visibly, what most of the sessions were about at ExcelinEd …
… are ESAs, and universal non-means-tested vouchers.
Schools that can screen kids out by income and by selective admissions.
Schools that are not being held accountable for results.
This is not some calamity.
It’s just an extension of public education as we’ve always known it.
Not something to throw ourselves on the tracks over.
But is it some big reason for celebration?
A step-function toward something better?
Some great leap forward?
Twenty years from now, we will all be looking back and realizing that the enduring progress that those changes have made toward greater equity and excellence will pale in comparison to the progress that charter schools have made in New Orleans and indeed across the entire country over the past twenty years.
And in comparison to the progress we will keep making over the next twenty.
So it falls upon us, CharterFolk, to recognize the moment that we are in.
We are the invisible magnet of public education in our country today.
Pulling everything toward a better place.
Against the backdrop of a massive storm.
A Katrina that has not tragically engulfed just one city, but our entire nation.
For right now, people may not be keyed into the progress that we have made and that we are continuing to make.
But in the years and the decades ahead, as the storm’s tragic consequences become more undeniable, so, too, will the contribution of the national charter school movement.
As long as we ourselves don’t lose our own anchor.
Or refuse to shoulder the heavy line that has been left to us to pull.
But with heroes like Howard Fuller and countless other heroic CharterFolk as our guides …
… our destiny is to help the nation weather the storm and reach a new shore.
Perhaps not in a couple decades arriving as we have in New Orleans, responsible for literally all of public education.
But much, much more of it than we are responsible for today.
Surely, rather invisibly for many years to come.
But, as the waters eventually recede, more visibly over time.
The strongest magnet our country has ever seen.
Pulling education in the direction it must inevitably move toward.
Or disappear altogether.
A way of educating our young people that is more equitable and excellent than anything that has come before.