A while back, I had occasion to talk to a woman named Lillian Lopez about a bold choice she had decided not to make. Lopez, who lives in a barrio on the east side of Oakland, Calif., is a Mexican-American mom with dark red hair and a firm and plain-spoken way of making her point. She was the front woman for a remarkable grass-roots effort by low-income parents to flee Oakland’s famously lousy school system and create a handful of new charter schools.
