Would it sound too good to be true if you could imagine a city with a set of open enrollment public schools, serving predominately low-income children of color, where students learn at twice the rate of their peers in neighboring schools, and those schools were ready, willing, and able to enroll more students? That is the case in Boston where, remarkably, the powers that be are blocking the city's best schools from growing for the simple reason that they are charter schools. This article addresses the conflict between charter schools and their local school districts which has persisted since the first charter school opened in 1992.