Charters schools are publicly funded schools, like traditional public schools, but they have more flexibility to experiment with different teaching methods and curricula. They also have more autonomy from state and district regulations. Charter schools receive public funding and are held to the same standards as traditional public schools, but they are often exempt from certain laws and regulations, giving them more freedom to design their own curriculum and implement it. Charter schools also typically have more leeway to hire and retain teachers, as well as to act as their own school boards. Traditional public schools, on the other hand, are bound by local and state laws, as well as rules and guidelines set by the district board.

Are charter school teachers in the Union?

Charter schools aren't unionized. They operate like private schools, except that they are publicly funded.

This gives the schools more freedom, but you may get a lot of younger teachers who didn't obtain a union job and will leave as soon as they do obtain a union job. The same is true of private schools, though.

The quality of student at a charter school may be better simply because of the hoops parents and students have to go through to attend a charter school. And the school may have more freedom to expel troublesome students.

As with any school, research the options because the quality can vary a lot.

No. Also charter schools are less restricted in what teachers they can hire. Most in my area are specifically religious.

Some charter schools are unionized, though many are not. Typically the draw of charter schools are that they are not the local public school. That is to say if a family lives somewhere where the public school is less than stellar, parents often choose charter schools as a “free” alternative to the public school. Some states have also invested heavily in charter schools, often to the detriment of public schools (see PA). This means charter schools have to compete for students, being run like businesses with marketing teams and multiple locations.

This. I work at a public charter school and the main draw is that we aren't the huge, local high school. My largest class is 14. My school is on the campus of a local technical college and we offer dual enrollment courses as well. My state is not heavily into funding public charters (yet), so the principal definitely runs the school like a business. We get zero local tax dollars, so any funding we get is based on number of students. Having worked in private, large public, and now public charter.... School is school. There will be issues everywhere. Is it great that my current students have a free option for a more individualized education? Yeah, especially because many of them were planning to drop out. Are there benefits to a large school that we don't have? Yeah, I am a science teacher who has a TOTAL of 3 beakers. As a parent, pick what your kid needs. Leave the politics out of a major part of your kid's childhood and send them somewhere where they will learn to love reading, thinking, and learning.

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Charter schools operate with public money and have to meet certain requirements, specified in the "charter" they sign with the government. However, they have a lot more freedom in how they operate than traditional public schools. This typically means that they use non-union teachers. They can often have different educational philosophies, with some being more strict (uniforms, lots of homework) and others being less strict (wholistic learning, no grades, etc.)

So the first benefit of charter schools is that they provide an alternative to traditional public schools. If a charter school is unique in a way that you or your child like, then it could be a good fit. The evidence on charter schools being all around "better" than traditional public schools is more mixed. Parents who send their children to public school consistently report being satisfied with their choice, but not all charter schools improve student achievement on things like standardized tests.

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In short, cherry picking or sampling bias

That is completely false. Charter schools are public schools and can not pick and choose students. They enroll based on a lottery and must adhere to all state and federal mandates.

Exactly!

Thank you. This is the only reasonable answer here.

Huge disclaimer (and pet peeve): every state has their own definition and requirements for charter schools and there literally is no level of federal consistency. It's important to find out what the laws and requirements are in your state. For example, I teach at a charter school in Oregon. ALL charter schools here are public schools. Publicly funded, not private, not for profit. We can't "pick and choose" only high achieving students. Our rates of students on IEPs are actually above the rest of our district because these students have often fallen through the cracks elsewhere and their parents seek out an alternative. Our class sizes are smaller and we have independence in curriculum choices. We still have to take all the same SBAC assessments that all public schools take.

I don't doubt that there are other places where CS are very different from here, but please stop with the blanket statements that simply don't apply because there is no standard definition.

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Not in Chicago they don’t. I worked in CPS for a few years and all the SPED and behavior students were kicked back to us. Hell I remember a couple of my students couldn’t get in as their IEP’s indicated they were too low functioning.

I didn't make any claims at all about how students enroll in a charter school. The claim is that charter schools show success compared to public schools because they enforce academic and behavior standards that regular public schools can't enforce. In the rare situations where charter schools don't do this, they perform no better (and sometimes worse) than regular public schools.

Depends on the school, there isn't a blanket answer.

My moms a teacher, and she has gotten a few kids from charter schools.

They are almost always behind the regular curriculum, and they almost always have to be retaught things that other kids don’t need.

Now granted that may just be multiple bias being seen, but from my moms experiences, charter schools here suck educationally compared to public schools

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Reading through these I realize I lucked out with my charter school. But it was definitely because it fit my learning style better, and a lot of kids I know left the school when they realized it didn't fit theirs. But it was focused on the education from what I could see the staff on all levels really cared.

Charter schools are not inherently good or bad. The benefits can be that they usually have a specific purpose (say stem). The biggest problem is that they take tax dollars and then play by a different set of rules. Sometimes they can target the best students. The local public school is then left with fewer resources and a more challenging populous. Politically, don’t be fooled. Conservatives don’t care about charter schools or really think it is a better system. Their plan is to make the already struggling school system worse.

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>and their parents seek out an alternative

That's the important part. Charter schools ONLY get kids whos parents care about their kids education. That means that you're not getting an average student.

It depends on the charter school (like the public school) some are glorified daycares but most provide close to a private school level of education. Also like public schools.

At least my kids charter school focuses on college prep, stem and the arts. The classes are small (max 20 kids per teacher) The teachers want to be there (there are no "waiting for summer" shirts worn). And the kids can learn more than one grade in a class. My son is in 3rd grade. His spelling and writing comprehension are on a 3-4rd grade level. But his math and science is 5-6th grade. So he goes to the 5th and 6th grade classrooms for those classes three times a week. And his robot coding is somewhere in the high school level.

There's a few public schools that he might be able to do this, but they are few and far between.

Charter schools are private schools with a public enrollment program. Instead of collecting tuition from parents, students who enroll are funded at a government-determined rate paid for by the government. It is intended to be a private alternative to public schools.

The concept is that charter schools provide competition to public schools which results in higher quality education for everyone. When a charter school is run better than neighboring public schools, enrollment will be high, the private venture will be profitable and public schools will improve by by adopting the standards and practices of the successful charter school.

The best case scenario does happen. There are some high performing charter schools and sometimes that does pressure neighboring public schools to perform better.

In practice, what generally happens is that the charter schools spend tuition on gimmicks that attract parents and students and they academically underperform. Since public schools are also funded by the number of enrolled students, when they experience a decrease in enrollment they get a decrease in funds. Poor performing schools with even fewer funds perform even worse.

Sometimes this results in a type of segregation where most of the good students attend the charter and bad students attend the public schools. The poor performing public school, having fewer quality students and less money will, surprise, get even worse.

More often charter schools underperform. In many states charter schools are typically founded by religion organizations that push secular requirements to and beyond legal limits.

They do vary wildly in quality. There are good charter schools, great charter schools, bad charter schools and straight up scam charter schools. They work well in some areas. On the whole they don't work well and cause considerable harm to neighboring public schools, but a good argument could be made that this is mostly due to poor oversight.

Another good argument could be made that they are doing exactly what they are designed to do by providing the kind of education that the community wants, even if it's substandard from the perspective of colleges and universities. The drawback of that argument is that it always comes as the cost of taking away funding for public schools harming children and parents who don't want religious organizations teaching their kids.

TL;DR: The charter school system is a chaotic shit show. Which is exactly what many people who wish for higher quality publicly funded education want and many people who wish to subvert and destroy the publicly funded education system want.

I think that there's a tendency for students who are not succeeding to be moved out of whatever school system they're in to the alternative in hopes of better results.

I 100% believe your mom's experience is true. However, it's the same as my experience as a charter school teacher when we get new students from the public school.

That’s the bias im talking about, exactly!

I don't think this is entirely true. I have seen just as many parents wake up to realize their kid is in 4th grade and has the reading level of a lima bean and then they say "the school has failed my child!" Whereupon they shuttle their kid over to the charter school and continue to not be present or proactive in their child's education and, unsurprisingly, they end up with the same results.

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