I'm genuinely surprised that so few people know the racist history of school choice... particularly how school choice facilitated the growth of charters and an entirely new system for public schools. As with so many racist American problems... it started with Reagan.

There was this idea that was pushed by both Bush 1 and 2 as well as Clinton, that the reason urban schools were performing poorly was because they needed competition. First, the notion that competition = improvement is some birdbrained policy, but it also just ignores racism.

Urban public schools struggled because of white flight, lack of teachers from within the community, lack of resources, and serving a large number of struggling students. So, they added magnets, charters, private schools, etc in DROVES. 40 years removed, we see it was a failure.