A friend of mine is a public school teacher, and her specialty is special needs children. She also helped organize a revolt in Austin against charter schools a

A friend of mine is a public school teacher, and her specialty is special needs children. She also helped organize a revolt in Austin against charter schools a couple of years ago, which led to the replacement of the entire school board in the next election, and cancelling the contracts with at least some of the charter schools in the city. She's a friend whose opinions I respect, certainly on an issue where she is vastly better educated than I, so I was more inclined to listen to her, despite having a relatively strongly held belief that charters and market-oriented solutions were the right way forward for education. She thoroughly convinced me, that at least in the case of IDEA (the company that was contracted in Austin) charter schools were not superior, especially for the students most in need of better schools. Her arguments, backed by data (though I'd be hard pressed to find it again, since it's been a couple of years), included pointing out that IDEA schools had performed better specifically because they'd expelled and otherwise removed from their student pool the students least likely to perform well. This served two goals for the charter schools: It insured their standard test performance would be better, and insured that the surrounding public schools (which are required by law to accept those students IDEA had refused to teach) performed more poorly on average, regardless of how well they teach. Similarly, the special needs programs in public schools must accommodate children that charter schools aren't required to accommodate, often through exceptions and guidelines built into the charter program by the legislators who have ideological reasons for wanting more privatization of schools, received contributions from the very companies that will operate the charter schools, and have every reason to see charter schools work, at least on paper. In the case in Austin, there was a pretty wide variety of benefits the charters received that the public schools they replaced did not. For example, a large budget was provided to renovate schools for the charter; when those same school buildings had been in service as public schools for decades, and the budgets were woefully inadequate to keep it up to date. Students obviously do better with better facilities. I'm still open-minded about the possibility of alternative schools. I hate public school, as I know it; always have, as I was very poorly served by public schools (as a bright kid with a learning disability). But, when the political/economic deck is stacked soundly in favor of the charter school, as it was in the one case I really studied, if they perform about the same or slightly better than public schools, I have to assume that the only benefit is to the corporations making a profit on the schools. My confidence in market solutions to problems like education has somewhat waned in the face of evidence that the market tends to favor the best students and forgets those that are challenging. I don't know what the right solution is, but I'm mistrustful of the motivations of the charters I've seen.