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 broken structures and start creating new ones. He sees chartering not as a noun, not as a label, but as a verb. Chartering is an action that allows teachers, community leaders, and others who have new ideas on how to better educate kids to put those ideas into action.

In this conversation, we revisit some of Kolderie’s most powerful ideas through archival recordings, with reflections from Kolderie’s long-time colleague Ember Reichgott Junge and Don Cooper.

Kolderie says that one of his great frustrations is how quickly language distorted the chartering idea. To him, calling it “charter schools” risks turning a dynamic process into a static category. He believes the real innovation wasn’t a new type of school—it was the act of creating space for new schools to emerge. That subtle shift in language holds a profound leadership lesson: words don’t just describe reality; they shape it. When we narrow our vocabulary, we narrow our vision.

Kolderie also sees what many systems still struggle to embrace: that teachers are not just implementers, but designers. In the early days of chartering, some schools experimented with teacher-led governance, flipping the hierarchy, and giving educators the power to create. Kolderie knows that when teachers are trusted with autonomy, schools become more responsive, more human, and more effective. It wasn’t a radical belief in teachers’ competence—it was a radical belief in their potential.

Ember describes Koldere’s vision as a big-boat/little-boat analogy. The traditional public school system, she argues, is like a massive ship: steady, important, but incapable of turning quickly. If we want innovation, we need smaller boats—charters—that can take risks, explore new waters, and show what was possible. Ember reminds us that Kolderie’s goal is not to replace the big boat, but to recognize that it wasn’t designed for rapid change. The small boats would test ideas, prove what worked, and ultimately influence the system at large.

What’s striking is how much of this thinking still resonates today. Too often, our debates about chartering get reduced to politics or compliance. But Kolderie’s vision is far bigger. He isn’t tinkering with schools. He reimagines how public education could work. He believes in redesigning systems, not just reforming them; in empowering teachers, not just evaluating them; in building conditions for innovation, not just demanding it from the top down.

For today’s leaders, the challenge is to reclaim that spirit. To ask: why are we still trying to get new results from old designs? Where are we talking about accountability without autonomy, or autonomy without accountability?

Kolderie’s work reminds us that bold leadership is not about patching what’s broken. It’s about creating structures where something new can thrive. That’s as true today as it was when chartering was first imagined on a napkin more than three decades ago.

So, here’s the invitation: don’t just look for new strategies inside old systems. Build the conditions for new systems to emerge. Empower your teachers. Protect your innovators. Ask better questions. And never forget that being bold is less about the title you hold, and more about the choices you make. 

Because being bold isn’t an accident. It’s a choice.

📚 Explore the Founders Library to read the original documents, speeches, and reports that sparked the charter movement.