Charter schools are public schools, just managed by private organizations. And it's not a situation where only rich people can get their kids into charter schools. For example, in D.C. the public schools in rich white neighborhoods (Georgetown, Capitol Hill) are district-run. Charter public schools are concentrated neighborhoods with mostly minority populations.
Charter schools can dismiss students without due process, can kick out or deny students with low grades, and are usually not obligated to provide special education services. They are not public schools. They are corporate-run political organizations that prop up dozens of these PACs pushing an pro-charter agenda.
> Charter schools can dismiss students without due process, can kick out or deny students with low grades
Those are good things. These kids almost always have serious impulse control problems, and it's better for both those kids and for everyone else to have education tailored to those kids' needs. Teachers should be teachers--they shouldn't have to do double-duty as behavioral therapists.
> and are usually not obligated to provide special education services.
We can debate whether they're good things or not, but they clearly confound comparisons with non-charter schools, which do not get to apply those kinds of selection powers to improve their published outcomes.
> We can debate whether they're good things or not, but they clearly confound comparisons with non-charter schools
I don't understand your comment at all, but I am very curious to know what you actually mean. Can you please clarify and expand? To begin, what do you mean by "they" when you say we can debate whether they're good things or not?
I'll try. People often say that students from charter schools outperform students from (other) public schools. If we let charter schools kick students out, we should let all public schools let kick students out so as to level the playing field.
Imagine we compare Denver Broncos against Miami Dolphins. Just a small adjustment. We require Miami Dolphins to let anyone who is a resident of Florida in the team. We put no such restriction on the Denver Broncos (because Go Broncos!) Now, we compare average 40 yard dash between the "average" Denver Broncos player and the "average" Miami Dolphins "player". What do you think will happen?
Those allow charter schools to boost their performance not by actually performing better, but by simply kicking out kids whose results would drag their average performance down. Which means that any comparison with public schools that can't do this is misleading The UK equivalent of charter schools has exactly the same problem.
> Charter schools are public schools, just managed by private organizations.
Charter schools are publicly-funded schools exempted, via the grant of a special charter (hence the name), from some of the generally-applicable rules governing the public school systems of which they are a part (which particular rules exceptions are made for varies from charter to charter.) They may be publicly operated, operated by private for-profit enterprises, or operated by private non-profit enterprises.
> And it's not a situation where only rich people can get their kids into charter schools.
While that may be the case, among the rules that charters are often exempted are ones which prevent them for cherry-picking students on grounds which, while they may not directly relate to wealth, are strongly correlated with it.
> Charter public schools are concentrated neighborhoods with mostly minority populations.
That's actually part of the problem that minority-interest groups have with them; among the problems that this creates is that they often displace schools that are subject to the normal public rules from those areas, forcing children who are not admitted under the charters rules to go to more distant traditional public schools than they would have to if the charter did not exist. (Another is that, for less-selective charters, members of the population may be effectively coerced into attending the charter as opposed to a traditional public school by the lack of access to traditional public school caused by the charter placement.)
Nationally, Charters often have comparable proportions (and in some cases, a larger proportion) of students from disadvantaged groups: http://www.publiccharters.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/NAP....