alt Hacker NewsPublic schools are not subsidizing charter schools. Rather per-student money travels with those kids to the school they are actually attending. So since the kids don't go to those schools, neither does the money.
I don't know what state you are in, and there are a number of them where the charter systems are absolute messes and have become fraud paradises (looking at you Florida), but other states things are much better.
Fo instance my kids are in charter schools in California. All charter schools here are required to have tiered lotteries to get in, and after siblings and teachers' kids, the first tier is always kids with an IEP (the problematic/expensive ones). And at my kids school we know one of the kids with a severe problems that the school has bent over backwards to provide the best environment for that little girl.
And every 4 years they have to re-apply for their charter, and one of the front-and-center numbers required for that is how many kids they kick out. And they got grilled on that (which our school passed with flying colors). The charters absolutely had to prove that they are doing things better than the local schools, and our school worked very hard to prove that (and had the numbers to do so). If they didn't, then their charter would have been cut (we heard about other schools that failed this grade).
So I am experiencing a well run charter school, inside a well policed system (California). If you are not, then make that one of the things you cast your vote on: regulations on where your school dollars flow to.
I will note that there is one important advantage that charter schools have: you have to make a choice to get into them. That means that the parents tend to be more involved in their kids' education (if only minority so), and so you get kids that are a bit more motivated to do well. This one area is unfair to the public schools.
> This one area is unfair to the public schools.
One could say it's the entire point of them existing to begin with. Self-selection of the student body is the only thing that actually matters. The rest is a bunch of minor details. Everyone more or less intuitively understands this point but doesn't want to admit it in public.
And no, I do not see that as a bad thing. I see it as a great thing. It's the closest thing to public school academic tracking as we are likely to get. Other western democracies have this one figured out. They don't throw endless amounts of money into bottomless pits with zero expectation of a payback to society.
I would be nothing today if my very working class parents didn't have the ability to opt me out of the local urban school system. I likely would be dead or in prison. What they had going for them was "giving a shit" and a still-functional system where motivated highly engaged parents could opt out of the status quo. Most of my peers would have had similar stories if not for tracking and academically based magnet schools and the like. The system I was able to use to get ahead has since been torn down.
If it had been the choice of "pay for private school" or "go to the local public school" I'd have been forced into the latter with almost zero chance to succeed in life. I ended up back in that system my final year I attended K-12, and the education offered was laughable and perhaps 6-7 year behind what I had become used to. Plus a moderately violent environment on top of it all.