Right up there with the for-profit prisons.
These scams are supported strongly by BOTH parties.
Here's a recent article talking about Ohio's schools:
http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2013/09/01/charter-schools-failed-promise.html
The charters were doing so poorly that the state stopped publishing the figures "to give them time to adjust", don't you know?
And understand that in almost every case, the charters end up receiving MUCH more money per student than the public districts. Sometimes that is in the direct funding formula. But there are also some other nice tricks, such as:
1) In Indiana, there is a law that says if a public district has a surplus building, they must lease it to a charter for $1.00 per year -- and the public district is still responsible for all the building maintenance. That is a direct transfer of millions of dollars from the public district to the charters.
2) In Indiana, the funding formula pays schools based on their enrollment as of October 1. HOWEVER, charters can dump students back into the public district ANY TIME they want to. They call this "counseling out." The game, obviously, is to keep all students into October 1, then after that, systematically identify the students that are either discipline problems or likely to lower the school's academic numbers, and counsel them back to the public district. The public district has to accept them and doesn't get a penny for those students that school year.
But why do charters suck so badly? Why, given all these advantages, are they still failing at the rate of about 15% a year and failing to produce any academic results superior to the public districts? Well, it is the profits. The law in Indiana says that charters only have to employ 50% of the faculty with teaching certificates. Yes, you read that right. Basically they can and do hire a substantial part of their staff at little more than minimum wage. The profits demand noting less.
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