This National Charter Schools Week, we should learn from charter schools and the ways in which their model helps students succeed, especially when it comes to bureaucratic management.
May 16, 2026
Why Charter Schools Have Succeeded Where Traditional Public Schools Failed
IW Features • Neeraja Deshpande
When schools are weighed down by bureaucracy, children often pay the price—but the post-pandemic success of many charter schools points to another possibility. For families and educators longing for schools with conviction, coherence, and room to recover older wisdom, this piece offers a hopeful glimpse of what can happen when freedom is joined to high expectations, moral seriousness, and a clear vision of formation.
IW Features
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What does it take to remain fully human in an age of distraction? In this conversation, Christine Perrin speaks with Dr. Jeanne Schindler about attention, technology, homeschooling, civic life, and the quiet disciplines that help us fight for what is real. Together they consider how modern devices flatten experience, weaken our sense of place, and make presence harder to practice, while also pointing toward a better way, one rooted in community life, embodied friendship, serious thought, and shared public spaces. This is a conversation about recovering the habits that make a human life deep, relational, and truly lived. Drawing from her own intellectual formation, Dr. Schindler reflects on childhood influences, her shift from history to political theory, her decision to leave tenure and devote herself more fully to home and family, and the rewards of lifelong learning through homeschooling. She and Christine also explore AI, the limits of technology, the strain placed on civic discourse, and why restlessness should not always be medicated by screens, but instead received as a summons to seek truth, communion, and a richer form of life.
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