SACRAMENTO -- One of my pet peeves about the last two charter school conferences in Milwaukee and Miami was how nice everyone was. Seriously, while well-funded and highly-organized opponents of charters were hard at work plotting how to kill their schools, these gentle charter freaks were meeting and greeting in hallways, talking about nice things like teaching math and ideal social studies projects, etc. (In NYC, reformer SyFliegell often refers to the "Timid Revolutionaries" of the charter world, a reality that really drags down the revolution if you think about it.)

This year's conference started to look the same way, but there is hope that the ratio of fire-breathing charter folks to Charter Chucks may be improving.

The slow start: Former Milwaukee Superintendent Howard Fuller put the crowd on notice, commenting during a tribute to John Walton that he had never before been in a room with 3,000 people that sounded like 200 people. The caffeine kicked in right about the same time as Fuller's 8:30 a.m. pronouncement, and things got a bit more fired up.

California Charter Schools Association President Caprice Young (who spits fire better than anyone) delivered some blistering opening remarks, railing against an overly bureaucratic public school system that isn't serving kids well. (At one point she described a public system that is designed to be "idiot-proof" yet seems to promote the careers of idiots at every turn.)

But it was the morning's keynote speaker who reminded the crowd that this is about a real fight. Moctesuma Esparza, who played an active role in leading East Los Angeles' Chicano Student Walkouts of 1968 to protest unequal treatment and substandard conditions for Chicano public school students, is the chairman and founder of the Los Angeles Academy of Arts and Enterprise - a charter school that opened last fall.

Esparza, who was refreshingly blunt about talking about issues of race and education, described the 10-day student strike that students waged over the injustices of the public education system. He and his fellow strikers were beaten by police, indicted by a grand jury (conspiracy to commit a misdemeanor, which itself is a felony, meaning he was facing up to 66 years in prison once all the counts were added up.)

"I spent my entire career at UCLA on trial," Esparza said, describing how he graduated high school without having to do much work and how we was pushed into UCLA not by his school, but by another Chicano who recruited him. In addition to being the founder of a charter school, Esparza is the producer of a new movie "Walkout" that details the unrest. It is scheduled to air on HBO this spring.

Esparza is a good spokesman for the types of injustices that still exist in society and in our schools. He says he hopes charter schools will push stubborn school systems to finally right themselves all these years later. "[Charters can show] the power of success for our children that will force public schools to transform themselves as well," he said.