Wealth & Money Quote by Maggie Gallagher

Gallagher’s framing does two things at once: it legitimizes charter schools as “public” while subtly positioning them as a necessary escape hatch from a stagnant bureaucracy. “Outside the system” is the loaded phrase. It flatters the reader’s impatience with red tape and signals reformist bravado, but the hedge “to a certain extent” keeps the claim defensible. It’s rhetoric built for policy fights: bold enough to inspire, cautious enough to survive fact-checking.

The list that follows - “more control over their teachers, curriculum and resources” - is a carefully chosen trio. Teachers implies flexibility in hiring and firing (and, by implication, weakening union power). Curriculum hints at innovation, but also at ideological variance: what gets taught, how history is narrated, whose values make it into the classroom. Resources is the businesslike term that smuggles in managerial freedom, as if schools were startups.

Then comes the twist: “They also have less money than public schools.” This isn’t a neutral budget note; it’s inoculation. By conceding a disadvantage, Gallagher preemptively blunts the familiar critiques (cherry-picking students, draining districts) and recasts charters as scrappy overachievers. If outcomes look better, it’s merit; if they look worse, it’s underfunding. Either way, the moral credit accrues to the charter.

Contextually, the quote sits inside America’s long argument about whether public education’s problem is funding, governance, or culture. Gallagher’s intent is to make “autonomy” sound like the scarce ingredient - and to make any resistance to it feel like allegiance to “the system,” not to kids.