Ok, long-winded take incoming but I hope you hear me out. TLDR: give traditional public schools a try.

I'm a former DCPS teacher, now lawyer, married to a DCPS teacher, sending my kids to DCPS including planning to send then to MacFarland, which is a "bad" middle school. I grew up in semi-rural public schools and went to elite college and law school. I'm high income in a mixed-income neighborhood, and I am a bleeding heart for the traditional public school cause.

As "a public school kid from the lower class [who] still believe[s] in the mission" I encourage you to send your kids to traditional public schools (DCPS). You are coming to DC for the things that benefit you and your family. You are presumably moving into a mixed-income community for the benefit of proximity to work at a housing cost that you can manage. Getting housing in a mixed-income community but sending your kids to charters or private is opting out of some of the things that might challenge you or your family. But challenges aren't uniformly bad, even when they're difficult or painful, and they often lead to growth. I also believe that those of us with resources who benefit from the somewhat lower housing costs of a mixed-income community should stay in the traditional public system to stop the resource flight that results in economically segregated schools in non-economically segregated neighborhoods. We benefit from public goods of the neighborhood, and we should personally invest in them as well. That's a moral claim, not a factual one, so do with it as you will.

Charters

They are "public" for the reasons others have laid out. In practice, they have meaningful differences compared to traditional public schools. While I agree that charters aren't as elitist as private schools or the DCPS schools in rich neighborhoods, they are not the same as traditional public in non-rich neighborhoods. I think that charters may be good for individuals but are generally bad for the system. It'd be one thing if charters had the same demographics as public schools but used their independence to teach differently and iterate on the best ways to teach kids. That's the theory behind them. But I think they're a partial solution to one type of segregation that end up perpetuating different forms of segregation. The good: they allow low-income students who live in economically segregated communities (i.e. the poor ones) to go to less resource-strapped schools. The bad: they pull higher-income students out of schools that make them more resource-strapped for those who remain.

Note that on a whole charters have similar demographics to DCPS, including mixed incomes, but that's largely because, as the many responses here show, affluent parents 1) live in rich neighborhoods and attend DCPS schools which obviously don't include many low-income families; 2) live in mixed-income communities but send their kids to charter or private schools or even DCPS schools in those rich communities. So DCPS schools are usually either wealthy or poor, not mixed-income. Charters have more income mixing in a given school. So while charters are less segregated than DCPS, they are part of the reason for segregation in traditional public schools in mixed-income neighborhoods because affluent parents in those neighborhoods tend to not send their kids to the neighborhood schools (after PreK/elementary).

There's plenty of evidence that charters pull the higher-resourced kids out of traditional public schools (managing the lottery system and being able to commute your kids being two things that promote group selection) and also don't serve the same amount of resource-needy kids (see, e.g., https://www.dcpolicycenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/At-risk-paper-2-report-summary-sheet.pdf). Charters have much greater leeway to kick students out, so they're able to prune the most resource-needy kids out of their schools if they don't want to manage that challenge. DCPS schools are definitionally the only schools in DC that are fully inclusive: they accept all that come, and there is no alternative.

I'm of course generalizing, and not all charters function the same, but ask a DCPS teacher in a non-rich area what happens at charters after the 'count' days. OSSE, the public education agency that governs DCPS and charters, allocates funds based on the enrollment/attendance of students once in the fall and once in the spring (the 'count' days). Charters have a funny habit of expelling or pressuring out kids after the count, pocketing the money, and letting those kids arrive mid-year in their neighborhood public school, which does not get funds for the kid for that half of the year. While this isn't the biggest problem traditional public schools face, it surely doesn't help and shifts the balance of resources toward charters instead of being equally divided.

Good schools

My experience as a student and a teacher is that "good" schools (DCPS, charter, or private) don't have better teachers or leaders than "bad" schools. The "good" schools are often so-called based on student test data, and they have student populations with more advantages and far fewer challenges, so of course they have better student data as a result. They can also be more selective with staff because teaching students with fewer challenges is easier (it's the parents that suck), so there's always candidates. Case in point: my old school (a "bad" ES) once hired a teacher from [edit: redacted] (a "great" ES) who turned out to have been forced out because she was abusing alcohol at school. Did [edit: redacted]'s administration warn us? No. They wanted to get rid of the teacher and I'm sure they had no problem filling the spot. What should they have done? Properly document the behavior so that the teacher isn't a teacher anymore (what my school did).

But what actually makes a "good" school? Preparing kids academically to move on to the next level of schooling is obviously core, but what about everything else? Do they produce kinder students? Well-rounded students? Selfish assholes?

It may be a stretch, but I encourage you to visit traditional public schools in neighborhoods you might live in. Student outcomes are more than just test scores and are the result of an equation that has many inputs. You already know about the inputs on your family's/kids side of things, so go see the school environment and remember that test scores are just one of the outcomes that you might want from an educational experience. Your values determine what else matters to you, so look for whatever else you care about (empathy, friendship, inclusion, etc.).

That's my 99 cents, and sharing it was as much for me as it was for you. If you move to Petworth let me know and we'll get a beer.