Ideal Miami-Dade charter student
The Miami Herald continues its investigation into Florida charter schools, finding wild variation in the rates at which they enroll poor students. While severely disabled students are all but excluded from charter schools in Florida, there's a lot more variation in how they deal with poor students. While in Broward county, "the charter schools have a slightly larger proportion of low-income and black students than the traditional public schools":
Miami-Dade charter schools also enrolled a smaller share of poor students: 54 percent, compared to 74 percent in traditional public schools. [...]
In 2010, of the 83 charter schools open in Miami-Dade, more than two dozen had poverty rates more than 30 percentage points lower than the closest traditional public school, a Herald analysis found. The poverty gap was particularly noticeable in South Dade, where the Charter School at Waterstone is located.
Charter schools by definition have the students whose parents are involved enough to have entered them in a lottery and so on, but that's not enough to explain the differences. In Miami-Dade, "some schools have adopted outreach strategies that target high-achieving students and children who live in affluent neighborhoods," and charters tend to be located in the suburbs, not the city. In light of the fact that some charter schools in other locations have been caught excluding students they didn't want from their lotteries, and without state or local oversight of Miami-Dade's charter lotteries, you have to at least wonder.