Bruce Baker of Rutgers University has written a fascinating analysis of charter schools in New York City and Houston.
Do they enroll the same students as the nearby district schools?
Do they have higher test scores?
Do they spend the same amount of money?
These are very important questions, given the reformers’ belief that charter schools will close the achievement gap and solve the problem of poverty.
Spoiler alert: The charters do not enroll the same students; do not on average have higher scores than nearby district schools; and typically spend more money than district schools.
Please read this article. It has fascinating data.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
In New Orleans, some charters refuse to enroll students on probation for misdemeanors, regardless of the crime. Name a public school in the United States that is not required to provide an education for students on probation for shoplifting?
In Florida, charter schools are demanding equal funding (at least for facilities). I thought they could do it for less?
As discussed elsewhere on this blog, the push for charter schools really is not about finding better schools; it’s about destroying public education and transferring public taxes to the 1%. Charter schools are the current Trojan horse for that purpose, although I think the “distance learning” variant of privatized education is getting wheeled to the gate as we write.
We need to speak up more loudly about the real nature of the game. We need to expose the game and take the true believers and toadies to task for their betrayal of our common good. Of course, demonstrating that charter schools are no better, and dollar-for-dollar often much worse, than public schools is necessary. But the American public is still very much enthralled with the following destructive notions:
(1) “free enterprise” can solve any problem with “efficiency”, usually sold as a have-our-cake-and-eat-it-too proposition;
(2) business-leader “heroes” deserve huge monetary rewards and grants of power, both private and public;
(3) the “market” provides all of the necessary and sufficient oversight over its activities;
(4) a hatred of unions that provide their members protections that the average American worker can’t obtain;
(5) a hatred of “government” that is “known” to be “incompetent”, “inefficient”, and “corrupt”, except of course for the Department of Defense and any agency that the charter school support happens to depend on, e.g., Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid.
The Right has been very adroit in using these beliefs to dodge the sorts of statistics-based criticisms of charters: They just shout about bad government and unions, and then claim their charters are better or the market will take care of all problems.
I think we need to bring more focus on the self-dealing that many politicians who support charters engage in; in other words, follow the money. We also can demand that if we have to accept charters, then they have to meet the same standards and carry the same burdens as the public schools, have the same transparency regarding governance, and be subject to severe penalties for failure (akin to NCLB or RttT). In short, we have to force the sorts of apples-to-apples comparisons, especially on cost vs. results, that can’t be evaded easily.
Interested in any information on the National Heritage Academy Schools. In particular, Riverton Street Charter School. The parent I met who has a child there seemed to think that there’s no cherry picking or counseling out of difficult children, that the school was lottery based and designated for the surrounding community, that that the school was superior to other local schools. Her first grader already knows his times tables up to five and can identify noun, verb, pronoun, adjective in sentences. I thought that was pretty impressive for first grade. I just wondered what the info on this school was.