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I know a white man who is the only white math teacher in a majority black school. Most of his classes are 100% black. He has been horribly treated by the black male students. There are very large adults as permanent hall monitors. When he has a problem he signals and the hall monitor removes the offender. The classes are beginning to settle down as they are much smaller now. (He told one student to stop talking and the boy snapped, “You just be pickin’ on me ‘cause I be black!” He looked around the class which had only black students in it and did not respond.) The teacher brought in the black football coach, a former NFL star, and the coach asked what the problem was. The coach ended up signaling the monitor to throw out a racist ranting student. So far, it’s been hell.

Incidentally, the county is a majority black one. Several years ago the county decided that having 100% black prison population was giving it a bad image. So they traded five black prisoners with my county for five whites. The whites were all hospitalized within the week. I knew one of the inmates as we’d worked together. Talk about PC idiocy.

Regular public schools, on average, are better funded than either charters or private schools. This is invariably suppressed in the debate by the relentless focus by the anti-reformers on the tiny handful of very expensive private prep schools. But there are outlers. Sidwell Friends is expensive. Your neighborhood St. Mary's (Catholic) or St. Paul's (Lutheran) or Gospel Academy (Baptist) is not.

The larger question that HRC is ignoring here is the fundamental choice between one-size-fits-all, which is the default orientation of most public schools, and the willingness to experiment with a diversity of schools for very different students and communities. One-size-fits-all works reasonably well in homogeneous communities, especially if it is stretched a bit with ability grouping, tracking, magnet schools, AP and IB programs, etc. But at some point, one-size-fits-all is defeated by extremes in student diversity.

This issue gets conflated with racial issues, which is unfortunate, but the fact is that a considerable number of students need basic remediation and socialization, will never perform at grade level, and would be best directed towards skilled trades. These kids will be lost in academically rigorous classrooms. Conversely, a school dominated by such students, typically from poor and often single parent families, will be rejected by middle class parents, who will either move or opt for private schools.

Charters can be created to serve students in any niche. There are many charters pitched to children in poor neighborhoods, and they are popular with low-income parents desperate to escape failing public schools. The kids who are left behind, unfortunately, are the children of the incompetent and disinterested. It is difficult for any school to correct for parental default unless we are willing to take kids away from their parents and send them to boarding schools. I'd be happy to make that experiment. Per pupil revenues here in DC are just shy of $30,000. Start here. We have the money.