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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

> Charter schools can dismiss students without due process, can kick out or deny students with low grades

Those are good things. These kids almost always have serious impulse control problems, and it's better for both those kids and for everyone else to have education tailored to those kids' needs. Teachers should be teachers--they shouldn't have to do double-duty as behavioral therapists.

> and are usually not obligated to provide special education services.

That's just false. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act's (IDEA) requirement to provide education appropriate to individuals with disabilities applies to charter schools: https://www2.ed.gov/offices/OCR/archives/charterqa/chardisab....

> corporate-run

Those aren't dirty words. Do you want your school run like an Apple Store, or like a DMV location?

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We can debate whether they're good things or not, but they clearly confound comparisons with non-charter schools, which do not get to apply those kinds of selection powers to improve their published outcomes.

> We can debate whether they're good things or not, but they clearly confound comparisons with non-charter schools

I don't understand your comment at all, but I am very curious to know what you actually mean. Can you please clarify and expand? To begin, what do you mean by "they" when you say we can debate whether they're good things or not?

I'll try. People often say that students from charter schools outperform students from (other) public schools. If we let charter schools kick students out, we should let all public schools let kick students out so as to level the playing field.

Imagine we compare Denver Broncos against Miami Dolphins. Just a small adjustment. We require Miami Dolphins to let anyone who is a resident of Florida in the team. We put no such restriction on the Denver Broncos (because Go Broncos!) Now, we compare average 40 yard dash between the "average" Denver Broncos player and the "average" Miami Dolphins "player". What do you think will happen?

Those allow charter schools to boost their performance not by actually performing better, but by simply kicking out kids whose results would drag their average performance down. Which means that any comparison with public schools that can't do this is misleading The UK equivalent of charter schools has exactly the same problem.

Thank you for pointing out the falsehood.

The charter school I work for puts a special emphasis on SpEd. I don't know if we are required to, but we do. And we are pretty damn good at it.

>it's better for both those kids and for everyone else to have education tailored to those kids' needs

OK so who provides that?

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