Charter schools are schools that have a special contract with the school board that exempts them from different public school policies. They can be best described as publicly funded private schools. The reason is money. It's basically a matter of rich and poor. Regardless of how well the students in Jefferson County do, they already have a leg up on Manual, or any inner-city school for that matter.
People can say what they want about the test, but all that's going on is politics and racism.
Politics shouldn't be rearing its ugly head throughout the school systems, but it will. The tests aren't racist, in that they don't know who's rich or poor. The problem starts with the way teachers teach. The teachers have a valid point by saying that they shouldn't have to teach toward a test. The truth is this test wouldn't be a big problem if high school students were already reading at a high school level.