There is a growing danger in the expansion of charter schools. Propelled by the Obama administration’s Race to the Top, charters are increasing wherever they are legal (they are not authorized in nine states). They are supposed to be fonts of innovation, but most are just focused on test scores, to prove they are better than public schools.
But the danger is that when students leave for charter schools, those left behind are disproportionately ELL, special ed, and struggling students. This threatens the future of public education, which enrolls most students in America.
Competition was supposed to make schools better, but it doesn’t work that way. The charters are siphoning off the top students and weakening the whole system. What is odd is that charters on average do no better than public schools, and many are far worse, even with the skimming.
This teacher tells what is happening in her school:
Enlisting parents is no easy task. At least not in my school. Every year more than half my students opt for charter schools. Charters don’t allow pre-k yet so parents have no choice.
Many parents see charters as a magic bullet and those children who are compliant do well.
As a result, my school continues to have more and more high needs students; students whose parents already know that the charters won’t take their child and students who are been “counseled out of a charter” and are back in my school. It’s a downward spiral.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Enrollment-skimming, not whether charters provide a better education or get higher test scores, is the fundamental threat posed by charters.
Charters — by definition — populate their student body via enrollment. This means that all of the students in a charter have parents who were sufficiently concerned/functional to pursue/complete the charter application.
In the low-SES areas — where virtually all charters are located — many parents are too unconcerned/dysfunctional to pursue/complete a charter application. The result: Many/most of the children of the concerned/functional parents go to the charters while all of the children of the unconcerned/dysfunctional parents go to the neighborhood schools.
This passive enroll-by-application segregation operates independently of and in addtion to any affirmative discrimination by the charters against the “problem” students (i.e., ESL, LD, behavior problems) in either the application or the expulsion stages.
This passive enroll-by-application segregation practiced by the charters is, in many ways, analogous to the racial segregation practiced by southern school systems before Brown v. Bd. of Ed.
In the case of the racially-segregated schools, the govt created white schools so the white parents could avoid sending their white children to school with the children of black parents. In the case of charters, the govt creates charters so the concerned/functional (albeit low-income) parents can avoid sending their children to school with the children of the unconcerned/dysfunctional parents.
The charter segregation is not as morally reprehensible as the racial segregation, but poses similar threats to society. The charter schools, like the racially-segregated schools, result in a large group of disadvantaged students (the children of the unconcerned/dysfunctional parents like the children of the black parents) being educated in separate schools that are theoretically equal to the charter/white schools but are, in fact, inferior to the charter/white schools.
Society is still paying a high price for its failure adequately to educate generations of black students in the segregated schools. If we continue the charter experiments, society will pay a similar high price for its failure adequately to education generations of children of unconcerned/dysfunctional low-income/inner-city parents in the neighborhood public schools.
Clearly, the socially-responsible approach is to operate a unitary school system while addressing the problems (i.e., misbehavior, low reading levels) posed by the children of unconcerned/dysfunctional parents via school reforms specifically targeting those problems (i.e. improved discipline, improved reading programs) in that unitary school system.
You might be interested in a discussion that is going on under the entry “How Charter Schools Divide Communities”. I am finding it very interesting and one of the contributors is taking an approach much like yours.
We have not progressed to the point of considering the harm done to communities by charter schools, but several posters (including myself) have asked about the difference between magnet and charter schools. It occurs to me that, with your emphasis on “passive enroll-by-application segregation”, limited enrollment magnet schools are even more problematic. After all, the segregation of the magnet school is passive, but active.
Most of the charter schools in my immediate urban area have now been taken over by the Recovery School District because they have proven little or no academic improvement. and grouped into an achievement zone. What is interesting is that RSD will be looking for other charter groups to take them over. Are we playing the game “Hot Potato”?
In our FL district, a number of charter schools are not aimed at urban families at all, but at middle class families whose zoned schools have between 40 and 60% low SES students. The families simply do not want their children associating with what they consider ‘lower class families’. Our district has long had an interesting concept called fundamental schools which were conceived as back to basics, but have in reality become a private school system within the public school system, sort of charters before there were charters. The fundamental schools require parents to attend a meeting at school once a month, a conference with the teacher four times a year, good behavior on the part of the students, and other required volunteer hours, similar to many charter schools that have grown up. Fundamental schools can ‘kick’ kids out back to their zoned school as charter schools can as well. However, our district has a limited number of seats in fundamental schools so many families do not get a seat through the lottery. So their fall back has become charter schools which are pretty much clones of the fundamental school and, I believe, were created to serve these very families.
As a principal of one of the ‘zoned’ schools who are losing families to both the fundamentals and the charters, a big issue for us is losing the families who are highly involved in their child’s education. These are the parents who can make a huge difference in a school by providing hours of volunteer work and support for programs, the parents who really are the backbone of the school. So while the zoned schools are being left with the struggling students, we are also being more and more left with the uninvolved, don’t want to be involved families, making our jobs all the more difficult. I am not suggesting children from these families do not deserve the very best. Indeed, they deserve to go to school with children of middle class involved families that provide many things to the culture and environment of a school that are crucial to a high achieving learning environment. They deserve an avenue to join the middle class themselves, if a middle class even exists after all the current ‘ed reforms’ gobble up what used to be public schools.
I am curious about the differences between charter, magnet, and these fundamental schools. Do you think that all of these alternatives to zoned schools like yours create the same threat to the zoned school and the students there?