Quote:
Originally Posted by bizaro86
Charter schools get the same per-student funding as the public schools and don't get to cherry pick students.
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There is significant self selection with charter schools though. Between supplemental fees and whatnot, as well as a focus on specific academic areas, charter schools essentially screen out a lot of low income and high needs students, leading to a pretty different (and generally far easier to educate) population than the public school system has. There's a reason why the Socioeconomic Status Index for charter schools in Alberta is vastly different than it is for public schools.
You see it in a lot of French Immersion programs too. Kids with significant behavioural or learning difficulties are simply never going to end up in those programs, even if they technically operate on a lottery for admissions.
The net result is, government-funded quasi-private schools for higher income families. If public schools had the resources they need (and what they had in prior decades), it wouldn't necessarily be an issue. But there's only so much money to go around, so investing in charter schools at the full level of per-student funding effectively marginalizes the resources available for the rest of the population (which is generally lower income and with higher needs).