Gene Glass, renowned researcher of education, lives in Arizona, where charter schools are proliferating without accountability or transparency. They are certainly not serving the children with the greatest needs, which was the original purpose of charter schools.
In this post, he describes the state’s most “successful” charter schools.
To sum it up: “They Recruit, They Skim, They Flunk Out The Weak … They are Arizona’s Top Charter Schools”
He cites a blog–Arizonans for Charter School Accountability–which investigated the demographics of the state’s top 20 charter schools. Their enrollments are overwhelmingly white and Asian, unlike the enrollments in any of the state’s public school districts.
Their students are 86% white and Asian, only 2% Black and 11% Hispanic. Some have no ELLs. Some have no students receiving free lunch.
And they are the best charter schools in a state where the governor and legislature want more.
Glass writes:
Eleven of these 20 schools are run by corporations: BASIS and Great Hearts.
One truly weeps.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Diane, I don’t know if you were aware of what is happening today in AZ. Today the House will be voting on an expansion vouchers today. Here’s the Senate version which already passed:
“The expansion approved on a 17-13 vote Monday adds all public students over three years while maintaining existing enrollment caps. But that cap goes away in 2020, allowing all 1.1 million public school students to get a voucher. All but one Republican supported the bill and all Democrats were opposed.”
Read more: http://www.cbs5az.com/story/31297468/arizona-senate-votes-for-vouchers-for-all-school-students#ixzz41ZuQhqXe
It is likely to pass given the makeup of our legislature and its connections to ALEC. The only hope is that Ducey will veto it. He is pro-privatization and under normal circumstances would likely sign the bill but his own proposed funding plan might be in jeopardy if he did so. That means that there’ a chance that he’ll veto it!
I weep for the kids in BASIS (and maybe Great Hearts too, although I know less about them) more than I do for the other kids. BASIS is a torture factory with hours a day both in and out of school devoted to “rigorous” (meaning, not developmentally appropriate) academic work at the expense of extracurriculars and social and emotional development (and even physical health). But what scares me is the tendency of public schools these days to try to “compete” with charters by being exactly like them. More and more I’m seeing public schools also going to various combinations of “rigorous” academics and “no excuses” behaviorism. If public schools are going to compete, they need to go the opposite way and make school a place where students are treated humanely. I went to an open house to look into the possibility of Sudbury school this weekend and some of the other people there whose kids are in public schools had stories to tell worthy of Success Academy.
Such schools are unAmerican and undemocratic. Supporters of such schools should be branded as unpatriotic.
Ironically, it is often exactly the other way around: A massively funded publicity keeps telling everyone in our district that only those who support “choice” are patriotic.