The basic concept of a charter school is that it is free of the burdensome regulations that hamper the regular schools.
But the thing people forget is that today's burdensome are yesterday's glorious high standards that solve problems.
So charter schools are actually designed to suck by the standards in place. To repeat the mistakes that inspired the burdensome regulations.
There is a well-observed and measurable New Program effect. Almost anything new you do in a school will result in dramatic improvements. It doesn't matter what the new program is, it can be utter nonsense, and it will fix things for a while. The only exceptions are ideas bad enough that the damage exceeds the new program effect.
And a lot of charter schools in Wisconsin are that bad.
A number of them were outright frauds. Paid kickbacks to parents and didn't waste money hiring teachers or staff. Some charter schools existed only on paper and collected money for kids who never showed up to classes that were never held.
Even worse: the thousands of day care centers that sprang up so that Tommy Thompson (Remember GWB's idiot health and human services guy who's skill in handling the flu vaccine shortage probably killed more Americans than Bin Laden? He was the Governor of Wisconsin before that.) could End Welfare As We Know it by paying unemployable women to watch each other's kids.