Out here on the frontier, only the hardiest survive. And Paramount Academy is both figuratively and literally on the frontier. The school operates out of a handful of trailers at the edge of a cookie-cutter housing complex in Mesa, Ariz., a rugged desert city that sprouted into a Phoenix suburb two decades ago. But the academy sits on an ideological edge as well: Paramount is a charter school, a publicly funded enterprise that's privately run--in this case, primarily by a former shoe-repair-shop owner who never graduated from college--and free of the bureaucracy that bogs down so much of public education.
To...