In February 2009, newly elected President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama visited Capital City Public Charter School in northwest Washington, D.C. This was the First Family's first official public-school visit, just a few short weeks after President Obama was sworn into office. Obama's enthusiastic support for charter schools was one of the things that set him apart from his Democratic predecessors and marked him as a "pro-reform" Democrat. Fueled by a confluence of interests among urban parents, progressive educators, and school reform refugees, a small but growing handful of diverse charter schools like Capital City has sprouted up in big cities over the past decade. While it is too soon to say whether they are effective over time or at scale, these diverse charter schools are revealing themselves to be popular, controversial, and--not surprisingly--complicated to operate.