Wealth & Money Quote by Maggie Gallagher

“Go ahead, get a little enthused” is doing more work here than the policy claims. Gallagher isn’t just making an argument for charter schools; she’s staging an intervention for an audience trained to treat education reform as a grim, partisan chore. The imperative lands like permission: you’re allowed to feel optimism about a system that’s usually discussed in the language of crisis, unions, and budget bloodletting.

The sentence structure is a sales pitch sharpened into a moral nudge. Short, declarative beats (“People like them. They cost less money.”) mimic common sense itself, as if the debate has been overcomplicated by elites who ignore what “parents, students and teachers” supposedly already know. That trio is strategic: it preemptively disarms the usual critique that charters are imposed on communities by technocrats or philanthropists. If the stakeholders are happy, who are you to scowl?

Subtext: skepticism about charters is framed as emotional stinginess, not analytical rigor. Enthusiasm becomes a corrective to ideological rigidity. And the choice of “poor kids” is the ethical lever that turns preference into urgency; opposing charters starts to look like denying a lifeline. The claim that they “cost less” folds austerity into virtue, implying that efficiency and justice can be the same thing - a politically convenient alchemy.

Context matters because charter debates are proxy wars over power: who controls schools, whose metrics count, and whether choice is liberation or a slow-motion privatization. Gallagher’s rhetoric tries to close that messy conversation by replacing it with a clean, affirmative story: satisfied families, lower costs, higher scores, moral permission to clap.