Charter schools seem to be quite misunderstood in our country for reasons I have yet to understand. My kids are in a charter school (not in MI) and we love it. In talking about it with a co-worker once her comment was, "Oh, they take money from public schools." I had to explain to her that not only was our school also a public school, but in our district non-charter schools actually get more money than ours (this has actually been changed since then, thankfully). Both of her parents were retired public school teachers so perhaps there is some bias coming from that? Or maybe there is a general confusion between charter schools and school vouchers?

EDIT: Formatting

There are people who go to Applebees and enjoy it, too.

Doesn't make it a good restaurant.

(There are, of course, likely to be some genuinely phenomenal charter schools. The article does cite stats for Michigan that say, on average, they're worse than average.)

There are empirical measures of school performance. Anecdotal happiness isn't really one of them.