New Atlantic Column on Charter Schools

I’ve written a fair amount about all of the ways that we get debates about charter schools wrong (and the problem extends to Capitol Hill). But it’s one thing to complain about the state of our current debates and quite another to offer better ways of conducting them. So I wrote a column last week for the Atlantic that takes a stab at framing the charter school conversation differently:

If the old system minimized parental anxiety, it also produced pathologies that fed its destruction. Too often, D.C.’s public schools have mirrored (and tracked) the city’s yawning income inequality gap—for every creative, exceptional program, there are several egregiously ineffective ones. And thus, as you’d expect, parental competition for seats in high-quality schools is intense. Property values in neighborhoods with strong schools have risen well beyond middle-class salaries; even small houses in these areas routinely fetch over a million dollars. In Washington, D.C., great neighborhood schools exist—but they are inaccessible to the middle class. This undercuts the democratic virtue of these schools; there’s nothing equitable about schools that are “open” to anyone whose parents can afford the steep property costs that serve as barriers to entry.

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