About Season 2 Episode 5: Chartering the Frontier Every region has its trailblazers. In the early 1990s, California and Colorado became unlikely frontiers for the charter school movement. Their laws didn’t pass by chance. They were the product of bold leadership, creative coalition-building, and relentless persistence. California’s story is one of speed, innovation, and unlikely […]
USA
Bold by Choice Podcast | About S2 E4: Charters Go National
About Season 2 Episode 4: Charters Go National Great ideas rarely succeed on vision alone. They need champions. They need strategy. They need leaders willing to ask bold questions and act when the window opens. That’s exactly what happened when the chartering idea began to move from a spark in Minnesota to a national movement. […]
Bold by Choice Podcast | About S2 E3: The First Law
About Season 2 Episode 3: The First Law Behind every bold law is a bolder story. In this episode of Bold by Choice, we step into the moment that changed everything—the birth of the first charter school law. It wasn’t a straight path. It wasn’t inevitable. And it certainly wasn’t easy. But it’s in the […]
Bold by Choice Podcast | About S2 E2: Ideas to Action
About Season 2 Episode 2: Ideas to Action “You can’t expect new results from old designs.” Those words capture the essence of Ted Kolderie’s legacy—and the heart of this episode of Bold by Choice Podcast. Kolderie isn’t just another policy thinker. He is a systems designer, a civic leader who challenged us to stop patching […]
Bold by Choice Podcast | About S2 E1: The Idea
About Season 2, Episode 1: The Idea Every movement has a beginning. For chartering, it did not start with national policy, but with a bold idea scribbled on paper, shared in speeches, debated in think tanks, and carried into law by people who believed public education could be more than what it was. In this first episode of […]
Is Public Education Obsolete?
How Chartering Can Build a Better Future for Students, Educators, and Communities A Tribute to Ted Kolderie at 95 By Jim Goenner, Ph.D. Everything Becomes Obsolete Everything that stops growing and adapting eventually becomes obsolete. Not because it fails, but because the world keeps changing. The horse did not fail; the car made it unnecessary. Candles did […]
2025: St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School v. Drummond
The First Amendment prohibits the government from establishing or promoting a religion. In this sense, it provides for a separation between church and state. How separate they are, though, continues to evolve. A trilogy of U.S. Supreme Court cases—Trinity Lutheran Church v. Comer (2017), Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue (2020), and Carson v. Makin […]
2022: Resilience, Protest, and Policy Renewal
After more than 118,000 cases in 114 countries and 4,291 deaths, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic on March 11, 2020. Governors in 43 states issued directives ordering residents to stay at home and nonessential business to close. These orders changed how public education could be delivered. Seventy-seven percent of all public schools […]
2016: A Changing Political Climate
Just as the charter schools community was becoming more politically sophisticated, so were supporters of the status quo. This was perhaps most evident in Massachusetts. When that state’s law was first enacted in 1993, the number of charters was capped at 25. The cap was raised three times; however, charter advocates did not believe that […]
2010: Chartering in the National Spotlight
The documentary Waiting for “Superman” portrays the decline of American public education, not through statistics, but through the stories of five children—Anthony, Bianca, Daisy, Emily, and Francisco—who struggled to navigate an unequal system. Though the film does not present an easy solution, it does offer hope for families. That hope is enrollment in a successful […]
