The house of cards and propaganda that sustained the charter industry is beginning to crumble. Despite the Obama-Duncan promotion of charters through the disastrous Race to the Top program, no Democrat in the crowded presidential race will openly endorse charter schools. Not even Cory Booker will support charters, despite two decades of fighting for them.
Now, it is no longer cool for a Democrats to back charters.
Democrats support public schools, not charters, vouchers, or privatization. Thank you, Betsy DeVos, for clearing the air.
Shawgi Tell of Nazareth College in upstate New York describes what happened when Democratic Governor Tom Wolf stated the obvious: Charter Schools Are NOT public schools.
Tell writes:
Calling a charter school public is mainly for the self-serving purpose of illegitimately funneling vast sums of public money from public schools to wealthy private interests who own-operate nonprofit and for-profit charter schools. Charter schools are essentially pay-the-rich schemes masquerading as “innovations” that “save public education” and “give parents choices.”
Charter school owners-operators would not be able to fleece public money from public schools if they were openly recognized as the privatized arrangements that they are. Most people understand that public money belongs solely to the public, not private interests. They understand that public wealth must be used only for public purposes and that private interests have no right to decide how to use public money.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Unfortunately, charter schools do as much damage to minority students as Common Core-aligned standards and tests have done. Few charter schools teach kids in grades 10, 11, and 12, too. These are the crucial grades for earning an authentic high school diploma.
Addition:
“Unfortunately, PRIVATE charter schools do as much damage. . . “
Contractor schools would do more damage to students and to communities if citizens were forced to pay the grifters for 10 through 12th grades.
BTW- ask the bought and paid for politicians to take Gates tests and then report the findings.
Since most charter schools are non-democratically governed, why do most follow the Common Core party line?
Addition:
“Since most PRIVATE charter schools are. . . .”
Probably because they were funded by Gates, who was the sole founder of Common Core.
How do we know they follow CC? Is there any transparency? Given that you are correct, I would hypothize that it is because all of the publishers only write curriculum for CC due to the coup d’etat pulled off by Coleman et al.
Diane We can add “freeing teachers” (from their unions) to The List of Double-Speak Terms used by “reformers” (reforming education to serve racial bias and the rich):
“innovation” (selling technology to schools, replacing real teachers with AI)
“saving public education” (misdirecting public funds to private profits and eliminating public oversight)
“giving parents choice” (“saving public education” through lying to parents about what’s going on)
“freeing teachers” (union busting to take away the group power of teachers’ political voices)
“educational reform” (lying about “bad public schools” and even “badder” teachers)
“public-private partnerships” (biding for time, bells and whistles; fox in the chicken house, camel’s nose under the tent, gas-lighting; waiting for the public to tire so predatory capitalists and religious zealots can do a complete takeover)
Some Playbooks: Animal Farm, Karl Rove, ALEC, Machiavelli’s “The Prince,” etc. CBK
Which of the candidates mention the subject without being trapped into doing so?
While charters are a “pay the rich scheme,” the rich have turned privatization into a cottage industry of waste and fraud. Using their wealth to gain access to politicians, they have turned privatization into a vast pay-to-play plot to gain access to public money with few strings attached. The deregulation that is built into the system ensures that the public will have little understanding of where the money goes. The charter lobby and so-called think tanks are all part of the great hoax. They pay off politicians and write propaganda pieces that attempt to justify the loss of public funding. The main objective of privatization is not “choice.” It is to transfer the value of a public asset into private, wealthy pockets. It is about plundering opportunity for the poor and working class under the guise of education. It is also about destroying unions and middle class jobs while increasing corporate power.
Addition:
“While PRIVATE charters are. . . .”