High up in the Winchester Cathedral in England sits a stained glass window that is extremely unusual for the time in which it was created — the 17th century. It doesn’t represent a scene from the Bible. It doesn’t memorialize a saint.

It’s a kaleidoscope of colors, a very contemporary looking stained glass window. It’s as if someone from the 20th century traveled back in time to the 1600s and designed it.

This window is a relic from a destructive time. Troops from Oliver Cromwell’s army used iron bars to shatter the Winchester Cathedral’s ancient windows and break up all the statues. The troops left the ground outside the cathedral littered with fragments of glass.

What was for so long a unified whole was fragmented into many separate pieces.

The public education landscape looks a lot different today than it did when I was growing up in north Dallas in the late 70s and 80s. When I started kindergarten, I walked a couple of blocks over to my neighborhood elementary school with my best friend, Jon, who lived a few houses down. And then, as the years went by, Jon and I progressed automatically from there to our assigned junior high and high schools. There weren’t any other options to consider, other than private school, as far as we knew.

Consider, now, the patchwork quilt that is public education today. What was once a unified whole is now fragmented into many separate pieces. There is opportunity, though, in the pieces. There are a number of different avenues in Fort Worth by which our children and their families are seeking out a quality education:

• neighborhood schools like the ones I went to and that my kids went to
• district schools of choice like the I.M. Terrell, a school for vocal and performing arts and STEM, or the Applied Learning Academy
• single gender district schools like the Young Men’s and Young Women’s Leadership Academies
• district charter schools like the Leadership Academy Network, which is a partnership between FWISD and Texas Wesleyan University
• special programs of choice within neighborhood district schools
• early college high schools, which are partnerships between district schools and Tarrant County College where kids can graduate high school and receive and associate’s degree at the same time
• a growing number of public charter schools.

The uniform education system of the past has evolved into a dynamic and diverse tapestry—an intricate quilt of many pieces, each contributing to a whole greater than the sum of its parts. This shift, while not without its challenges, has also created meaningful opportunities for growth and innovation.

To build on these opportunities, Fort Worth Education Partnership is dedicated to supporting and expanding this mix of quality schools, ensuring every child in Fort Worth has greater access to the best possible public education.

The unfortunate reality right now is that many children in our public school system are struggling for all kinds of complex social and systemic reasons and are not prepared for academic success beyond high school. Most Fort Worth third graders are not reading at grade level, and studies show that 75% of children who struggle with reading in third grade never catch up and are four times more likely to drop out before graduating.

Thousands of Fort Worth children are mired in generations of poverty, inadequate education, and lack of opportunity. Still, in some of the city’s most underserved areas, schools are achieving remarkable success in providing vulnerable students with access to a high-quality education. Some kids are getting a great public education in Fort Worth. But too many are not.

This is why I am grateful for the patchwork quilt that is public education today—neighborhood schools, district schools of choice, district-charter partnerships, early college high schools, and public charter schools. These options, accessible to all families, help expand opportunities beyond the constraints of a child’s ZIP code.

At our best in Fort Worth we are able to see public education not as a disjointed jumble of adults’ competing interests but as that beautiful patchwork quilt, working together every way possible with the best interests of Fort Worth kids at heart.

The truth is, when we weave our communities together, it is almost always stronger and more beautiful.

The people of Winchester in England were devastated that they lost their beautiful, ancient stained glass windows when Oliver Cromwell’s troops destroyed their cathedral in the 17^th century. It was all they had ever known. What they did in response was gather and save all the fragmented pieces of stained glass that littered the ground.

Years later, when this violent time had passed, one cathedral worker volunteered for the difficult task of re-installing the windows. High on a scaffold, he assembled all those broken pieces into an abstraction of color.

It resembled nothing in Europe at that time, and even today it stands out. And no one can deny that those windows of reconstructed bits of glass are a work of great beauty, a work of art. The light from the sun filters through to illumine the cathedral with a constantly changing mosaic of colors.

Even when the unified social fabric we used to know comes apart, new life and beauty can come from the pieces when they are put back together. The pieces can become raw material for the creation of something new and beautiful — something that establishes connection, builds relationships, offers care, creates trust, educates all our children, and makes our communities better places for all.

And that is beautiful.