What are the admission requirements for charter school?
Charter schools vary tremendously. One of the things about charter schools is that they write their own charter. So they have a lot of latitude to determine what they want to do. They are public schools, they are supposed to be open to everyone. They don't get to discriminate. They're not magnet schools, so they, at least as far as I know, don't... none of them have race requirements or any kind of race balancing that they're trying to do. One of the special things that charter schools can do is they can, for instance, require parental participation, so they can make parents sign a contract or a promise saying they're going to volunteer a certain number of hours a year. They can make students do more. They can require students to come to Saturday school or come to after-school tutoring. So these are little ways that they can kind of weed out the students and families that they don't want, because they can make the families pledge to do certain things. Beyond that, if more students want to attend a charter school than can, it's usually determined by lottery. Sometimes they do a big public thing. I know a school down here where they have a big to-do. They have a night in which everyone comes to the gym, and they pull numbers out of a basket, and that determines who's been admitted to the charter school and who isn't. So there's a whole lot of hoopla, and it's sort of a big celebration as students are admitted into the school.
