Imagine you have to get your drivers license. Now imagine everyone working at the license renewal place is barely qualified but have all been there 20 years. It’s falling apart, and you show up at 8am, right when it opens, but you are still there at 3pm waiting for your number to be called. It’s finally called at 4:30pm, you’ve missed a day of work, but they made a mistake an you have to come back tomorrow. You call the license headquarters, in charge of this branch, but they are equally slow and poorly managed by nepotistic hires and you leave a voicemail that’s never returned.

This is the very real license experience for many people around the country. But we are talking about public schools.

Now imagine the license was required for your job, in addition to driving a car. And you are black, grew up in poverty, and you can’t go to another license center in your city, even though there are 10 other ones. The ones in the white areas are clean, brightly lit, with newly paved parking lots and pretty, landscapes greenery. Your friend gets to go to one like that, and she tells you she was in and out in less than 30 minutes.

Now imagine there’s a private license place, one that you are free to go to, even though you are black and poor, the city doesn’t say you can’t go to this nice, new location.

But for some reason someone tells you the only reason you want to go there is because “you want to masturbate to the free market”. The person who says this is supposedly an “ally” of “people of color” but there, from the comfort of her gated community, she criticizes you for simply wanting the choice of a better opportunity.

Charter schools, despite their problems, doubled the graduation rate of New Orleans students 10 years after Katrina, and increased their standardized testing from low 20s to around mid-70th percentile.

For cities entrenched in intractable poverty and decades of redlining, and the affects of institutionalized racism - the real kind, not the Twitter variety - charters are a lifeline to educationally equality.

Unfortunately it goes against the self-interests of the very powerful Teacher Unions, who are the second-largest contributors to Democratic PACs. Beto was for them. Booker was for them. But they can’t be for them in 2020 when the Democratic platform has millions riding on their opposition against them.

In short, charter schools give choice to the most disadvantaged students in struggling districts that through corruption or simply not having enough property taxes to fund them, left their students long ago. For black students, a lot of this was literally built into the system itself.

Charter schools lets them stand up and say, “No.”