What is your opinion of charter schools?

A bold — for the U.S., anyway — experiment is taking place in Detroit, which recently announced plans to convert nearly a third of its public schools into charter schools as soon as this fall.
Detroit already has a larger percentage of schoolchildren in charter schools than any other city except New Orleans and Washington, D.C.
The Big Easy's transition to charters was driven by the disaster of
Hurricane Katrina; the District's, by the disaster of the D.C. school
system itself. Detroit is moving to charters largely out of fiscal necessity.
Teachers' unions and other usual suspects often object to charter
schools on the grounds that they drain money from the public schools —
a complaint that overlooks one salient fact: Charter schools are public
schools. (Many, however, are not unionized, which does a lot to explain
the union objection.) In fact, some school-reform advocates believe
they will be the salvation of the public-school system, staving off the
voucher campaign and saving public schools from wholesale abandonment.