Weekend greetings, CharterFolk.
Quite the week we’ve had at CharterFolk.
The biggest news was the announcement of our winners of this year’s Brian’s Voice Awards. The range of topics taken on by our winning writers provides something of a state of the national charter school movement.
It starts, of course, with making outstanding new places for many kids to go to school, which is the story of LISA Academy, told so eloquently by Fatih Bogrek.
Over decades of effort, LISA has become a place serving over 4,500 students in communities across Arkansas, and Fatih does a great job highlighting the range of things a stellar charter school organization has to get great at in order to achieve such excellence and growth. LISA has also been one of CharterFolk’s earliest and most dedicated partners and has repeatedly invited me to come visit them in Arkansas.
LISAFolk, hear me.
CharterFolk’s seventh year will be the time when I finally come to see your schools!
Until then, I extend a special thanks to Fatih and to all of you at LISA for having created a story that inspires the entire national charter school movement.
Next, once we are on our way to serving many students well, the challenge of advocacy arises, and getting great at bringing parents, alumni, and other supporters connected to our schools into the work becomes central to our success. Adkim’s column explained how that happens as well as any we have had published here at CharterFolk.
It’s an area of our work, frankly, where I think we continue to struggle. Part of it comes down to the fact that we’re all over the map about how to take this on, and that results in organizational instability, little cross-state learning, and sub-optimal building of strength over time.
Adkim’s piece shows how an intentional effort to situate expertise and capacity across school operators and financially stable state associations is a recipe that more state charter school communities should be gravitating toward over time. It’s a recipe that allowed Massachusetts charter schools to push back so effectively against decisions denying high-quality charter schools the right to grow, and ultimately resulted in the state’s schools receiving a significant new infusion of facilities support.
So to Adkim and all our MassachusettsFolk who continue to model the value of wisely situating sustainable community mobilization capacity at the nexus of great schools and strong state associations, I extend another deep thanks.
As excellent student outcomes and strengthened advocacy come together, it’s natural that communities of school leaders and advocates begin asking what happens next. Vashaunta’s column inspires us to bring a design orientation and a vision for the future to the work.
It’s an awareness that I think many CharterFolk are coming to as we now find ourselves halfway through our fourth decade of shared undertaking. Public education needs new architecting, and no one is as well positioned to offer that contribution as the thousands of people who are contributing to our nation’s charter schools.
Thank you, Vashaunta, and thank you to all at the National Charter School Institute for helping leaders across the country take on their design work at whole new levels of impact.
Beyond announcing the Brian’s Voice winners, we started off the week recognizing Sean Stallings at DeLaSalle High School in Kansas City.
Sean is a leader who brings Vashaunta’s design orientation toward everything he does, and is now encouraging leaders in Kansas City to think more broadly about our collective design work. Sean has shared that we might be so lucky as to get a Contributor Column from him on this theme in the months ahead. I can’t wait.
Meanwhile, Gary Larson at Larson Communications gave CharterFolk another first this week – a series of two Contributor Columns, the first focusing on the communications needs of our schools, and the second focusing on the collective communications needs of the broader charter school movement.
As he always does, Gary finds a way to crystallize what is most important for us right now:
Define or be defined.
And remember that we exist not to build a new industry, but to steward forward a movement that exists for a reason. That reason is the plain fact that there are problems in our public education system that we were created to address. We can never lose sight of the fact that, in the define-or-be-defined reality we find ourselves in, defining the problems that we are addressing is the greatest communications challenge we face. Overcome that challenge, and our movement stands ready to step into a period of even greater impact.
Thank you, Gary, for articulating something I think it wise for all CharterFolk across the country to be ruminating on.
As I have been reporting for several weeks now, we continue to receive more Contributor Columns than we can publish, so we’ll double up again this week. Many of you may have seen that Sonia Park announced that she will be leaving the Diverse Charter Schools Coalition this fall after a remarkable run. We are fortunate to be able to share some of her latest thoughts. We are also fortunate to have a Juneteenth-themed piece coming from Rodney Link, the Executive Director at Dr. Howard Fuller Academy in Milwaukee.
Looking across it all – the writers whose work we recognized this week, those who have written here previously, and those whose pieces are now in the pipeline – it is easy to see the unique mix of gifts that allows people to become true voices of our movement.
A deep connection to community.
The insight to understand what is really happening around them.
And the courage to say what needs to be said.
That was the mix that Brian brought to our movement in such extraordinary measure. And it is why the promise I made to him years ago now feels like something larger than any one person. It has become a spirit spreading across many, many CharterFolk across the country – people who, through their own connection to community, insight, and courage, are helping ensure that the voices of individual CharterFolk are heard, and that the collective chorus of the charter school movement rises to levels never heard before.
Over time, that chorus of voices is what defines the charter school movement itself.
In terms of my own writing, I know we risk snowing you under, but I do plan to offer a whip-around mid-week as there is a lot of charter school news across the country to catch up on. And then next weekend, I plan to take on the fact that the Rhode Island legislature has voted to impose a moratorium on the state’s charter schools. What does such a development say about the future of our movement? What does it say about where we stand with the Democratic Party? And what might it suggest we should be doing differently in the years ahead?
Define or be defined, CharterFolk.
Indeed.
Define or be defined.