A familiar line in charter school promotional ads is that thousands of children are stuck in “failing public schools” while on wait lists to get into charters. Anytime a reporter digs in, the claim is not quite true.
Isaiah Thompson is an investigative reporter for WGBH in Boston. He heard the claim by pro-charter advocates of Question 2 that 33,000 students are on charter wait lists. So he checked the facts and found that the wait lists had duplicate names, children who had applied to more than one school, children who had been accepted in a charter school but whose names remained on the list, and children who were no longer waiting.
He discovered there are also wait lists to get into preferred Boston public schools, but no one ever talks about them.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Cherry Pick. Cherry pickpick. Cherry pick. Cherry cherry pick pick.
Eva M. said a similar thing last night–that she has a 10,000 student waiting list. She also said something about “financial metrics” and the number of students she needed to accomplish those metrics. I haven’t seen if the Show Me Institute will put up a video of the speech to clarify what she meant. And yes much of what she said was about herself.
There are two reasons that I know charter schools are corrupt (and I used to believe in them):
They are entirely dishonest about wait lists and do their best to overly exaggerate them. Why? If you are non-profit, your prime motive should be HONESTY. Not salesmanship.
The charter movement as a whole has been suspiciously unwilling to look at the attrition rates of the highest performing charters — especially the attrition rates for the at-risk kids whose parents jumped through hoops to attend their school. Those charters should have the lowest attrition rate, but they don’t. Limiting your study to comparing an extremely high performing charter school to failing public schools serving transient populations and saying “see, we’re better than that” is an attempt to deceive. What should be done is a comparison of a high performing charter school’s attrition rate to a high performing public school’s. If a charter school’s is significantly higher, it raises huge red flags. So of course, no study is done.
It’s a psychological trick – give the impression of scarcity and your product becomes more appealing.
Wait till you read David Leonardt’s paean to “high expectations, high support” charters in the NYTimes: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/06/opinion/sunday/schools-that-work.html?emc=edit_tnt_20161105&nlid=26825267&tntemail0=y.
His article, which advocates for Proposition #2, includes this:
“On Tuesday, the state will vote on whether to allow charters to expand. Doing so would have enormous benefits: It would improve the lives of some of the 30,000 children who have lost lotteries and are now on waiting lists.”
And, of course, it overlooks the waiting lists that the public schools encounter as well as several other points. http://wp.me/p25b7q-1Cp
Here’s hoping the grassroots prevails on Tuesday!