“The critics are trying to dull the impact of the results because of their political stance,” Woodworth says. “On the other side, advocates are playing up the results, saying all charters are wonderful. That’s not true either.”

While online charters have been a bust, and rural ones produced mixed results, urban schools were the success story in the study. These charters, which are filled with black and Latino students, gained almost 30 extra days of learning in both English and math, a significant advancement.

What’s more, the best of them have been cracking the toughest nut in public education: the achievement gap...

Hold on just one second! Are they closing the achievement gap in an antiracist way? Is this Kendi-approved?

United’s formula – high expectations and lots of rules and consequences for breaking them – is commonplace in inner-city charters. The first three days of school each year are culture camp, where students are told what’s expected of them: Sit up in class, pay attention to the teacher, avoid disruptive chatter, stand in straight lines, and so on.

As a result, Boy says, his classrooms are calm and conducive to learning. He can count on two hands the number of fights at United’s schools over a dozen years. By comparison, a nearby public school had 250 acts of violence in one year, creating a culture of chaos.

Progressive educators say charters like United are not a solution to the problems of urban education. They say the strict rules of behavior snuff out independent thinking, and worse, reinforce a racial hierarchy of control over students of color.

Well, we can't have that, can we? Sorry kids, we'll have to shut this down; we can't have you learning to read in a racial hierachy of control.

Go be drug dealers or something.