"Critics claim that charter schools are successful only because they cherry-pick students, because they have smaller class sizes, or because motivated parents apply for charter lotteries and non-motivated parents do not.

OK. Sounds good to me. What's wrong with that?

Why shouldn't bright, motivated students with motivated parents be able to choose challenging schools with smaller class sizes and bright, motivated professional educators who are not afraid to be held accountable for their work?

Why should the fact that some parents don't care enough about their child's education be a reason to deny a good education to a child whose parents do care?

If children get into charter schools by being chosen in a lottery, then the charter schools aren't really cherry picking. They're being cherry picked by motivated parents.

Heh. Not too long ago, I read an article extolling the Finnish school system, which is run by the natioonal government and performs very nicely. Except - after a long stream of words saying that, with the idea of supporting nationalising US schools, it was off-handedly mentioned that each school principal had complete hire/fire authority, and the principal had to satisfy parents in his area or be ousted. Oh, and each school could "adjust" the curriculum from the national standards, within broad limits.

Meh. When I moved to Arizona, I put my daughter in a charter school. It completely sucked, so I tried another one, which also sucked. I gave up and put her in the local public school, where she thrived and ended up getting a great academic college scholarship. I was *completely* satisfied with her public school education.

Maybe I just chose poorly (twice), but based on this, I question whether charter schools are all they're cracked up to be.

This is what drives my teacher friend nuts. She screams "No wonder the damn charter schools score better! They don't have to do what the county and state tell them to!"

Two years ago, she worked at a school that was very strict about following state mandates. She had to go by their learning schedule (no matter where the kids in her class were; if they were struggling with a topic or no). And worse was that when it got time to do the two month prep for the standardized test, she had to actually read from a script the whole day twice a week.

This last year, she didn't have to do any of that. Her class got the *highest* scores of any in her school, and there were NO failing grades on the standardized test from her group.

MikeIRL, for what it's worth, my teacher friend reports that actually, charter schools do *worse* than public schools when the people supplying the data don't cherry pick their schools. However, I don't know where she got this info, so I'm not sure it's honest. It seems believable to me, tho. In my area, we're talking about closing 6 or 7 of the things because they have failing grades. The School Board is trying to stall that, saying that the charter schools haven't had enough time to succeed. I'm not sure what the relationship there is.

My kids go charter. It's an IB certificate school. We adore it. Most of the kids there have very motivated parents and the kids themselves want to be there. Each student AND parent signs a behavioral agreement, and those who don't follow it are gone. No appeals.

The teachers want to be there and have no guarantee of employment year to year. The head of school of primary has started up 2 other IB schools that are still very highly ranked, and the head of secondary came from a charter that's one of the top 15 schools in the country. I have full faith in the experience of the school leadership.

Some of the kids there are problem kids whose parents are sure just need the right school. Annoying.

They have to do the STAAR test every year just like the other public schools, but they don't teach to it.

Our school has a very high percentage of asian and indian/pakistani kids attending, all of which are ethnicities that really stress academic success and don't allow their kids to wear their pants around their knees and skip school. I love the atmosphere, not just the learning.

There is another option besides public, charter, and homeschooling and that is the online schools like Primavera and K12. My daughter is in Primavera, and doing great. It's like homeschooling, but all I have to do is supervise and help with her homework.
I put her in the online school when the brick-and-mortar school admin refused to protect her from bullies, and haven't regretted a thing since.