Well…don’t know if you’ve been following the saga of the Detroit Public Schools, but that district is in danger of failing from flight, falling property values, and mismanagement. The solution that is being sold to Michigan and the people of Detroit is to convert fully half of these schools to privately run charter schools following the repub mantra that the private sector always does thing better than government, but the numbers don’t back that up….that’s never a problem to the repubs anyway….their faith-based system of governance does not rely on numbers or statistics just belief. While some of the charters in Michigan do excel at educating children, on a whole, they perform well below the average in graduation rates, adequate yearly progress, and standardized tests. I will concede that some of the charters take in kids that have failed in other places which will skew the statistics somewhat, but this is small subset of the kids that go to charters both here and across the country. So, what can we divine from these numbers? I don’t want to sound like there is no nuance to this comparison, but one of the biggest reasons that the repubs want charters is that their teachers are overwhelmingly non-union….they care very little about achievement or educating our children…just about scoring political points and furthering their extreme agenda here in Michigan…geez…