In Chicago, charter schools are helping the 'underdog' kids get to college

If you’re an underdog kind of kid in Chicago, and you want to go to college and graduate, your chances of success are better now than they were 20 years ago. Much of the credit for that change goes to Paul Vallas and his 1997 decision to focus on cultivating high school charters.

That’s my top takeaway from reading the first-ever report on Chicago charter schools from the University of Chicago’s Consortium on School Research...