I live in the LAUSD (Los Angeles) school district, which has a pretty strong charter system and has had for a long time. In the case of LA, your assertions are

I live in the LAUSD (Los Angeles) school district, which has a pretty strong charter system and has had for a long time. In the case of LA, your assertions are just not true. They seem to be based on generalities about monopoly markets, and to be un-informed by how charters really play out. The charter school era has been a period of great change - but there are some really bad charters, and some of them fail suddenly during the school year. Some of the for-profit charters have been notably corrupt, and oversight of small charters is hard. As a recent example, a charter near my home closed just a few days after the beginning of the school year, due to insufficient enrollment (http://www.pucschools.org/iprep/ http://www.pucschools.org/iprep/). Now those families are searching for another school. Most of them will end up at their neighborhood school after all. To return to your "market" concept: one of the fundamentals of properly functioning markets is information. It is very hard for parents - even well-informed parents - to gather information about the real quality of instruction at a school. (The things that parents respond to don't really correlate with educational quality.) Another fundamental is liquidity - this is just not a liquid market. People like to stick with one school if possible - for good reasons. Another problem with the "market" concept is that provision of elementary education is not really a market transaction. The teachers are not really in it mostly for the pay. The parents don't treat it as a market either. What was the last time you volunteered time at your local grocery store or lumber yard? You and I agree that there are problems with "monopoly" elementary education - but throwing charters at it as a simple market solution has not worked out well. It seems to be a more complex problem.