I believe everyone in the education sector should be looking at evidence, reassessing, making tweaks to figure out what works, I think it's a positive model.

I feel that people have asked me my age I don't actually think that thirty is particularly young for a first book to come out. And I sometimes wonder if a male author would have been asked this question so frequently.

What happens from about 1954 to the late 1980s, is that we see a huge wave of optimism that school desegregation is going to be the way to improve educational outcomes for poor children of color. And we see a consensus build on the left and in the center that this is going to be a transformative education movement like none other we've seen in American history.

A lot of charter schools are non-union schools that take a lot of teachers from alternative tracks, like Teach For America. They do this in part because a lot of charter schools have very strong ideologies around how they want teachers to teach. And they find that starting with a younger or more inexperienced teacher allows them to more effectively inculcate those ideas.

Coming to the civil rights movement in the twentieth century, we begin to have this idea that's still with us today, which is that the main purpose of public education is closing achievement gaps.

The question is rarely asked, "Why is it that so few other Americans have these protections?" The question is more often asked, "Why do teachers have it so easy?"

Younger teachers are definitely more likely to have worked at charter schools as opposed to have just heard of them. Charter schools explicitly look, often, to hire younger people. I've even talked to people who didn't necessarily go into teaching thinking they wanted to work at a charter school or even may have been considered critics of the charter school movement, and found that it was the only way for them to get their foot in the door. So young people just have much more familiarity with the concept.