" Put simply: charter schools are a bad idea. They always were a bad idea. And it is high time we put an end to them.The problem with charter schools isn’t that they have been implemented badly. Nor is it that some are for-profit and others are not. The problem is the concept, itself. Charter schools enroll only 6 percent of students nationwide yet they gobble up billions of dollars in funding. In my home state of Pennsylvania, they cost Commonwealth taxpayers more than $1.8 billion a year and take more than 25 percent of the state’s basic education funding. That’s for merely 180 schools with 135,000 students!"