My take on charter schools vs. public schools is quite simple really. I firmly believe that all the hype surrounding better test scores (better outcomes) can be solely attributed to the fact that the population is self selecting. As it turns out, public schools are the lowest common denominator when it comes to education. In order to attend a charter school the parent must do something. The fact that the parent must do something in and of itself is testament to the fact that the parent is involved. Any educator, anywhere in the world, will tell you that an involved parent makes all the difference.
It says that often, things that look like overall trends can be split into sub-groups, in which the effect is gone. For example, take the "Public Schools perform worse than Private Schools" idea. If you split both school populations into the children from wealthy parents vs children without wealthy parents (ending up with 4 groups), you'll find that the test scores are the same for the "wealthy" kids, whether they go to private or public schools.
In other words, it doesn't matter whether kids are going to private or public schools, what matters is whether they have wealthy parents or not. It just so happens that more kids with wealthy parents go to private schools.
More details about the paradox, and a link to a study on private vs public schools, can be found in the Wikipedia article.
You underestimate researchers. Recent research on charter schools uses randomized assignment, induced by oversubscribed schools. They often find large positive effects:
Okay. But charter schools can induce involvement among the parents. I have seen no evidence about this effect so I'll just put it out there. Really, the argument of whether charter schools are effective or not should not be important. The environment the child spends his time in is more important than the number of facts crammed into his head. The idea that parents should have their children forcibly relocated and locked inside a building and just pray that it's competently enough run so as not to be filled with poorly supervised violent hoodlums with no alternative cost-effective choices, is evil.
Charter schools can induce nothing. If the parent wasn't already interested enough to take time out of their day to sign their child up there is nothing the charter school can do about it.
On the other hand, if you have a kid and he isn't registered somewhere in the school district (public, private, or home) someone from DCW knocks on your door and "induces" you to send your child to school.
