Good morning CharterFolk.
Today we are pleased to share a Contributor Column from Peter Anderson, Head of Schools and CEO at Washington Latin Public Charter Schools.
We provide a bio for Peter below.
Peter Anderson brings more than 30 years of experience in education as a teacher, administrator and school leader. He become the Head of Washington Latin in 2016, bringing his commitment to equitable access to a Latin education to students across the nation’s capital. Mr. Anderson serves on the boards of the DC Charter School Special Education Cooperative, DC Charter School Action, and the DC Common Lottery Board (which runs the MySchoolDC lottery). He was a member of the Pahara-Aspen Education Fellowship (2018 cohort), and continues to serve his alma mater in a variety of capacities. Mr. Anderson holds a BA from Haverford College, a Masters in Sociology from the London School of Economics, and a Masters in Education from New York University.
The Long Way Home: How My Journey from Jamaica to Washington D.C. Became a Mission for Educational Equity
There is a particular kind of clarity that comes from watching a child carry a pot for miles just to fill it with water. No textbook captures it. No lecture can replicate it. It is the kind of clarity that reshapes a life.
I am Peter Anderson, Head of Schools and CEO of Washington Latin Public Charter Schools, and that clarity arrived for me early — in the backyard of my family’s home in Jamaica, where I stood with a garden hose, filling containers for children who had walked distances I could barely imagine. They were barefoot. Their clothes were tattered. And they were not in school.
“Where did they come from?” I remember wondering. “Why weren’t they in school? Where were their parents? Why didn’t they have shoes?”
Those questions, asked by a child too young to fully understand their weight, became the animating force of my life in education — one that has taken me from the Caribbean to the UK, from New Jersey and New York to the nation’s capital, and from a classroom to the helm of a classical education LEA serving more than 1,200 students across Washington D.C.
I grew up in a household where giving was not optional — it was simply what you did. My parents were not wealthy, but they were comfortable, and they understood comfort carried responsibility. Neither had graduated from college, yet both were voracious readers, intellectually curious, and deeply principled. My father had supervised infrastructure projects for the local government, earned multiple certifications, and even came out of retirement to serve as a bookkeeper in a family business. My mother, by example and by deed, modeled what it meant to see a neighbor in need and respond without hesitation.
They opened their home to strangers. They donated food, clothing, and money. They gave what they had to people who came to their gate asking for help.
It was in this household I first learned the connection between values and action — that believing in human dignity meant doing something about human suffering. It was not an abstract commitment. It showed up at the gate. It showed up in the backyard. It showed up every time a child arrived with an empty pot and left with it full.
When I immigrated to the United States as a teenager, the questions I had been carrying from Jamaica did not quiet — they multiplied. The U.S., for all its promise, was not without its own profound inequities, and I saw them clearly through eyes that had already been trained to look.
I studied sociology in college, seeking frameworks for the injustices I observed. But I did not stop at theory. I became a race relations workshop facilitator, organized intercollegiate conferences on racial understanding, wrote about equity for the college newspaper, and brought speakers to campus — including the former Prime Minister of Jamaica — to advance conversations that many institutions preferred to avoid. I immersed myself in cross-cultural dialogue with racial and religious organizations, building relationships and broadening my own understanding of how systemic inequity operated across different communities and contexts.
My plan, in those years, was to return to Jamaica and work on education policy. I believed education could be an engine for social and economic development, and I wanted to help steer it. I went to graduate school in the United Kingdom, studying economics and sociology. Then I came to New York to study education more directly, and I took a job teaching middle school math and history — not because I planned to stay, but because I believed good policymakers needed frontline experience first.
Then something shifted.
Working with NJ SEEDS, a nonprofit serving high-achieving, low-income students in New Jersey, I encountered something that arrested my trajectory. The opportunity and achievement gaps I had observed in Jamaica, the inequities I had studied in sociology classrooms and documented in op-eds — I was seeing them up close again, this time in American schools, affecting children who looked like me.
The return to Jamaica kept getting postponed, and the reason was always the same: there was too much important work to do right here.
At 26, I became the principal of a parochial school. I told myself it was temporary — just more experience to add to the policy résumé. That was more than two decades ago.
Today, I lead Washington Latin Public Charter Schools, where I have tried to weave together two seemingly distinct traditions: the rigor of classical education and the urgency of equity work. Washington Latin draws on Latin, Socratic discussion, and the great texts of Western civilization — not as gatekeeping mechanisms, but as tools of empowerment, available to every student regardless of ZIP code or family income.
It is, in many ways, the fullest expression of everything I have been working toward since I stood in that Jamaican backyard. The children who once walked miles without shoes to fill their pots with water — their counterparts are sitting in Washington Latin classrooms today, reading Cicero and debating Aristotle and being told, emphatically, that their minds are extraordinary and their futures are open.
Washington Latin is currently navigating its 20-year charter review, raising $12 million for capital improvements, and preparing to celebrate two decades of mission-driven work. The challenges are real and the stakes are high. But I have never needed simple circumstances to find clarity about what matters.
I learned that in a backyard. From children with empty pots.
Some questions, it turns out, take a lifetime to answer — and the answering is the whole point.