Twenty years ago there was one charter school in Los Angeles and it was progressive and unionized. Today there are more than 250 and my experience as a university education dean was quite mixed.
I never saw the need for charters even though the legislation encouraged innovation. I saw little or none. I also saw outlandish admin salaries, extremely overworked teachers and of course no union to protect them.
They have taken support from our local true public schools and only in rare instances have provided when they were designed to do which was innovate. Imagine how much better resourced our local schools could be if they had the support and money that the charters get from sources like the conservative DeVos and Walmart families?
In most cases they harm our local schools and Abbot Elementary hit the nail on the head.
Progressive Teachers Network 
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