The Don Shalvey Story
Chapter 1: Foundations
South Philadelphia Beginnings and the Origins of “College for Certain”
Decades before there was even the concept of a charter school, before any charter school laws had been passed, before California had its first charter school or the nation had its first charter management organization, and yes, decades before the founder of the Gates Foundation was even born, there was a boy named Don Shalvey growing up in South Philadelphia.
Don’s childhood unfolded in a working-class Catholic family shaped by parish life, neighborhood loyalties, baseball, music, and high expectations. The year he turned six, Philadelphia celebrated as the “Whiz Kids” Phillies won the National League pennant, and baseball became one of the central bonds between Don and his father, Vincent Shalvey. Vincent introduced his son not only to the game itself, but to the rhythms and values of city life: loyalty, resilience, competitiveness, and connection to community.
Vincent also brought the world of music into Don’s life. An accomplished trumpeter, he would challenge Don to identify songs after hearing only a few notes – a game Don would continue playing with friends and colleagues for the rest of his life. Vincent’s musical talent eventually became a professional endeavor. Hanging prominently on the wall of the family home was a framed dollar bill: the very first dollar he had earned playing music. Over time, every dollar Vincent earned performing would be set aside for Don’s education. What began as a practical savings effort gradually evolved into a defining family philosophy: “College for Certain.”
For Vincent and Florence Shalvey, college was not treated as a distant aspiration or abstract hope. It was understood as a commitment requiring sacrifice, discipline, and collective effort. Their investment in Don’s future shaped many aspects of his upbringing, including their determination that he attend some of Philadelphia’s strongest Catholic boys’ schools.
Those schools combined high expectations with unusually personal forms of care. The nuns taught well, demanded much, and knew their students closely. Don experienced school not simply as a place of discipline, but as a community where structure, effective teaching, and deep adult commitment worked together. That combination – high standards joined to genuine love for young people – would become the model he aspired to recreate throughout his career.
Even in elementary school, Don displayed the combination of academic excellence and mischievous independence that would later define his leadership. His report cards tended to show strong academic performance alongside noticeably lower marks in “obedience” and “self-control” – early evidence of a boy who could master the work in front of him while still managing to ruffle the feathers of school authorities.
Then, midway through his senior year, Vincent died suddenly. The loss devastated the family and altered Don’s plans. Though he had earned admission to M.I.T., Don chose to remain in Philadelphia so he could stay close to his mother as she rebuilt her life. He enrolled instead at nearby La Salle University, continuing his education within the Catholic tradition that had shaped him since childhood.
As Don made his way through college, “College for Certain” began extending beyond his own future. Continuing work he had begun in high school, he served as a counselor at a summer camp for younger children. There, a camp tradition named cabins after colleges, encouraging children to see higher education as part of their own lives. In group photographs, Don repeatedly positioned himself holding signs bearing those college names – an early glimpse of a practice he would later carry into his schools, where classrooms at Aspire would be named for colleges and students would be encouraged to imagine themselves on a path toward higher education.
And so it was that Don Shalvey – lifted by a loving family and buffeted by profound loss – made his way forward, supporting his mother as she needed it, forging his own path toward the certain completion of college, and lifting up other young people in the hope that they might claim that dream as well.
Heading West and Finding a Home
After graduating from La Salle, Don was preparing to begin his career in Philadelphia when an unexpected telegram arrived. Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington, was offering him a fellowship in school counseling.
Just a few years earlier, family circumstances had made leaving home impossible. Now, with his mother successfully rebuilding her life, Don was able to consider opportunities beyond Philadelphia. He accepted the offer and headed west, continuing his education within the Catholic institutions that had shaped him since childhood.
At Gonzaga, Don quickly became part of a close-knit community of graduate students. His classmates affectionately nicknamed him “Shalvs, the Philly Dog,” a reflection of both his Philadelphia roots and the energy he brought to every room he entered. More importantly, Gonzaga gave Don an opportunity to think deeply about schools and the role they play in young people’s lives.
Many of the lessons he absorbed there were not entirely new. They echoed what he had experienced years earlier in Catholic schools staffed by teachers who demanded excellence while making students feel known and cared for. But Gonzaga added to Don’s intuition by grounding his beliefs in emerging scholarship that would guide the rest of his career. Relationships are not secondary to learning. They are central to it.
By the time he completed his master’s degree in 1967, Don was ready to put those ideas into practice. But it was music, as much as career ambition, that pulled him farther west. The Summer of Love was unfolding in San Francisco, and the sounds of the era seemed to beckon him toward the Bay Area.
As Don was finishing at Gonzaga, he was recruited to take a position in the Merced school district. When he asked two cousins who lived in the Bay Area where Merced was, they assumed it was near Lake Merced, close to where so much of the music scene was playing out in San Francisco. So Don accepted the offer believing he was headed toward the Bay Area – only to learn when he arrived at the San Francisco airport that Merced was actually 130 miles inland, deep in California’s Central Valley.
But he went. And what he found there drew him in.
In the very year he accepted the position, local headlines captured the complexity of Merced’s schools. One story reported that the district had delayed the start of the school year to accommodate the harvest, reflecting how closely schools were tied to the agricultural rhythms of the community. Another urged voters to support a tax measure for local schools, followed by front-page coverage announcing its passage. At the same time, an NAACP protest over district practices revealed the inequities and exclusions that also marked public education in the era.
Taken together, those headlines showed Don a school system deeply embedded in its community, struggling with real inequities, and still capable of collective investment in its children. That combination – challenge, commitment, and possibility – helped Don recognize how fortunate he had been that happenstance had brought him to Merced at the start of his career.
Beginning as a seventh-grade teacher and soon serving as a counselor, Don looked for ways to bring families more fully into the life of the school. In 1971, he launched LEAP – Language Enhancement Augmented by Parents – a program that drew thousands of people to school events and attracted the attention of the local newspaper.
The community’s response confirmed for Don that schools could become places of connection, celebration, and shared purpose. Those results also accelerated his rise within the district. Within a few years, he was making front-page news as Merced announced his appointment as a new school principal. Over time, his influence expanded beyond a single campus as he helped other educators build the same kind of energy and connection in their own classrooms, eventually directing the district’s Professional Development Center.
Across two decades in Merced, Don became one of the district’s most respected educational leaders. Colleagues frequently remarked on his ability to bring people together and inspire educators to rediscover their love of teaching.
Over time, that reputation began opening new possibilities. Other districts saw in Don a leader who could help schools work better for children, families, and educators. When Lodi, a school district 80 miles north, offered him an assistant superintendent position, Don realized he was ready to step into a new level of impact.
But the announcement of his departure sparked something Don had not expected: an outpouring of gratitude and affection from the colleagues with whom he had worked for more than two decades. It was a testament to the deep impact he had made in a community whose very location he had been unsure of when he first arrived.
As it turned out, the move to San Joaquin County opened a new chapter across his whole life. There, Don would meet Sue, build a family, and establish roots in the community he would never leave.
But more than helping Don find the place he would call home, the move to Lodi marked another kind of coming home, a confident settling into a vision for public education that he would also never leave behind, one defined by high expectations, deep human connection, and an unwavering belief in the potential of every child.
Don believed that vision would find its fullest expression in work rooted in that community. But as fate would have it, changes were coming to public education that would place him at the center of one of the most important reforms in generations, and carry the vision he had refined over decades into the national landscape.
A Miracle in Sacramento
By the early 1990s, Don’s reputation and personal network continued to grow. As he would tell colleagues for the rest of his life, “if you’re not networking, you’re not working.”
It was a mantra that led to opportunities to lead professional development throughout the West, including speaking engagements as far away as Alaska. Those experiences expanded Don’s influence and exposed him to promising practices emerging in other communities. Again and again, he found the most encouraging work taking place where educators were empowered to develop innovative responses to the needs of students and families rather than simply implementing solutions handed down from above.
That perspective, together with his growing reputation, made him an attractive candidate for even greater leadership roles. When the San Carlos School District began searching for a new superintendent, local connections invited Don to serve on the search committee. As the process unfolded, committee members found themselves increasingly impressed by the educator helping evaluate candidates. Before long, both the committee and the school board reached the same conclusion: the person best suited to lead the district was already sitting at the table.
Don Shalvey became superintendent.
Even as his responsibilities grew, so did his commitment to learning. He enrolled in a doctoral program offered by USC through its Sacramento Center, a program that attracted educators interested in innovation and improvement within public education. There, he joined a cohort of school leaders who gathered regularly to study leadership, examine emerging ideas, and explore new approaches to meeting the needs of students and families.
Much of their attention focused on a remarkable development taking place far from California. In 1991, Minnesota had passed the nation’s first charter school law. For educators like Don and California Department of Education official Dave Patterson, the idea was immediately compelling. Here was a model that promised greater freedom for educators while remaining firmly rooted in public education. Throughout 1991 and early 1992, newspapers across the country reflected the sense that something profound might be changing.
But for educators in Sacramento in the early 1990s, enthusiasm was tempered by a deep understanding of a political establishment fiercely resistant to any significant challenge to the status quo. Minnesota might have opened a new door, but few expected California to walk through it anytime soon.
Two charter school bills had been moving through the California Legislature that year, but they were not remotely alike. One, sponsored by Delaine Eastin, proposed creating a charter school law whose limitations would have rendered it essentially toothless. The other, sponsored by Gary Hart, promised reforms far more transformational than even Minnesota’s breakthrough legislation. But everyone following the discussion closely knew there was virtually no chance Hart’s bill would make it through.
Then something of a miracle occurred.
Sue Shalvey remembers a telephone call arriving late one evening in late August of 1992. On the other end of the line was Dave Patterson, breathless and speaking quickly.
Don would never believe it, he said.
Eastin had reneged on her agreement to keep working on the two bills together, which all parties understood meant the entire chartering concept was being mothballed. But Hart, indignant that Eastin had gone back on months of promises to continue negotiating in good faith, pulled off a parliamentary maneuver that would be talked about for decades. That night, opponents in the Capitol, desperate to counter Hart’s shocking ploy, reportedly shouted from the gallery and launched business cards onto the Assembly floor with “Vote No” scrawled on the back in a last-gasp attempt to stop the bill.
All to no avail.
Finally, Don had to interrupt him.
“Dave, just … what are you saying? What does it all mean?” Patterson later recalled Don asking.
“It means the damn bill’s gotten through essentially unamended. Don, this charter thing’s for real!”
Three weeks later, Governor Pete Wilson made it official, signing California’s charter school bill into law, a development that sent shock waves across the nation.
But Don hadn’t been waiting for the news to break. The morning after receiving the call from Patterson, he was already assembling colleagues and moving forward with characteristic urgency. Within weeks, they had drafted a charter petition and secured approval from the San Carlos School Board. Their application moved so quickly that it reached Sacramento before the state had formally established many of the procedures surrounding the new law.
Watching Don make repeated visits to the Department of Education, Patterson eventually couldn’t restrain himself.
“What are you up to, Don Shalvey?” he finally asked one day.
The mischievous boy whose elementary-school report card reflected struggles with obedience and self-control offered his trademark grin.
“Dave, you know if I’m going to do this thing, I’m damn well going to be first.”
On February 11, 1993, the State Board of Education acted.
San Carlos Charter Learning Center received Charter #1.
California’s charter school movement had begun.
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