The core belief driving our work is so simple that it might sound radical. Even the best and most coveted public schools should be open and accessibl… - Tim DeRoche

It was an incredibly fun experience to try an inhabit that voice and try to get into Huck’s head and see Los Angeles from the point-of-view of this naive kid from backwoods Missouri.

What is this peculiar, misshapen thing that we call an attendance zone? It’s an administrative service area. Government bureaucrats carve up the map and determine who gets preferred enrollment at what school. There are no elected officials at the attendance-zone level—and no political representation. The residents of a school zone are not subject to special taxes that go to the local school. An attendance zone is also a license to discriminate. If the school is full (most of the best schools are), then the attendance zone provides the school with the ability to exclude families who live within the district’s jurisdictional boundaries but outside of the arbitrary zone for that school as drawn by district staff.

I started thinking of Huck Finn as a protoypical American myth.