Beyond self-indulgence though is common sense.

If you assume parents don’t randomly enroll their kids in charters then they must have a reason. There just aren’t that many reasons for a parent to enroll their child in a charter.

Either their child is doing well in the district school but the parent believes the charter to be sufficiently superior to make the transfer worth the inevitable problems or their child is doing poorly and a charter looks like a better bet then more of the same which is what they’ll get in a district school.

Of the two propositions I’d say the latter is much more likely to be the case. Road-apple picking. Or rather, to make the metaphor a bit more accurate and probably more tedious, road-apple proffering since charters aren’t magnet schools and thus can’t select applicants.

Also, as you point out, charters in most states are aimed at lower-performing populations which stacks the deck in favor of road-apples and not cherries. But I don’t think that the fact that charters are aimed at the hardest to teach and poorest students has much to do with the unions’ relatively tame response to charters to date. Will teachers throw out the current union officialdom in favor of union representatives that’ll make sure charters don’t make off with the easier-to-teach students? I rather doubt it.

The point at which charters become a real danger to the unions is when the possibility exists that charters might replace districts. Unions depend on districts to hold down the cost of bargaining and organizing. If charters replace a district, depending on state law, the union might be faced with the prospect of organizing dozens, probably hundreds, of individual schools each with its own managment. I rather doubt that all those charters would sit on their hands while the unions went about arranging state law to suit their convenience so here’s another fight.

One of the face cards in any such political dustup is poor, black parents who are desperate for the their children’s futures. Steve Barr seems to have come to understand the political potency of such a constituency with his organizing of Parent Revolution but I doubt that’ll be the last such organization. Also, Steve Barr’s not the only politically-astute player who understands the importance of that particular constituency. Democrats for Education Reform isn’t all the well known but they must be feeling pretty good with a president and Secretary of Education who both seem to have nothing but nice things to say about charters.

And since I’ve gone on again at too great a length, I’ll finish by pointing out yet another pro-charter constituency that isn’t yet really aware of its status: mayors.

Charters obviate the necessity for a central office staff and with it the central office staff budget. Mayors may look on those budget dollars covetously and so be tempted to engineer a political deal that aggressively dissolves the school district, replacing the district schools with charters, while seizing the now unnecessary tax revenue. In any such coup they’d be very likely to find support among the various city unions despite teacher’s union unhappiness – what are the fatcats of the school administration to the city’s firemen and cops? – and the current and past charter parents.

Given the amount of money that disappears into the black hole of the central office there might be money enough for a tax cut on top of an increase in city services so it might even be possible to rope anti-tax crusaders into the coalition.

Allen, what exactly in the study gives you the impression that it shows school choice attracts lower performers?

Charter schools probably do attract low performers, because in most states they’re designed to select for those populations. This is one of the reasons charters have such limited potential for real reform – the unions do oppose charters, but they mostly tolerate them without putting up too much of a fight as long as charters are only taking away the students who are hardest to teach. If charters ever threaten to become a broad-based substitute for district schools in the general population, the unions will turn on them with a vengeance.

Since one of the primary complaints of supporters of the educational status quo is the lousy quality of the students and parents this ought to be seen an all around win. The lousy students and their, presumably, lousy parents are foisted off on private schools and at the bargain price of only $3,995/year, a bit more then half of what it would cost if they were being their lousy student selves in a district school.

Shouldn’t district schools, relieved of this baggage show an up-tic in their school scores?