Outgoing New York schools chancellor Joel Klein is right to identify that low-income families deserve to have the best educational options available to them, but he frames the argument for school choice in a way that stops short of advocating for equal opportunities for our most disadvantaged families.

In the Wall Street Journal today, Klein reflects on his tenure running the nation's largest school system and explains how his embrace of charter schools was especially controversial in a district where, he wrote, "bureaucrats, unions and politicians had their way." He writes, "the debate shouldn't be about whether a school is a traditional or charter public school. It should be about whether it's high-performing, period."

Allow us to take his argument a step further, in two ways. First, charter is not the only alternative for underprivileged children. Second, we should take special care when labeling any school as high- or low-performing, because the variation within schools is typically greater than between schools. An International Baccalaureate school is high-performing based on standardized test performance and many other measures, but is not necessarily the best fit for all students. (more…)