Financial support is flowing away from the main student body. Decisions are not being made by locally elected board members. But they can market. The public is being sold incessantly the myth that public schools are bad. For-profits will eventually dominate the educaitonal field which will increasingly resemble managed care and the HMO industry, but until then competing theologies and ideologies are vying for public money thus fracturing communities.
Equity is lost.
There is already evidence that charter schools are increasing ethnic segregation in Arizona. For-profit charter operators are trying to avoid their responsibility to teach students with expensive disabilities. And our own Department of Education has already signaled its desire to minimize charter responsibilities in the realm of special education. Unity of community is threatened. Ethnic and other forms of social balkanization are ominous enough.