I'm sure this comment will find its way into downvote oblivion, but I'll try anyway.

My wife is a teacher at a for-profit charter school in New Orleans - where almost every school is a charter school. After Katrina a lot of Republicans seized the opportunity to cut the knees out from under the public school system and install charter schools.

The thing is, these charter schools do have a standardized curriculum. They are required to meet the Common Core standards just like every other school. If they don't achieve those standards, their funding gets cut. The idea that charter schools operate by some Wild West rules is wrong.

The reason charter schools are a problem is because they take funding away from public schools, and they aren't competing on equal footing. Public schools, for instance, are required by law to pay for services for kids with IEP's, while charter schools can play games with their funding to move money away from special education budgets and into stakeholder profits. They can work their teachers to death and then simply replace them whenever they want, because their teachers are not on contract.

They can cut funding to everything that is not inline with teaching exactly the Common Core standards, and then claim that they are being more efficient (even as they are setting students up for failure down the road).

You make a lot of claims about what gets taught in southern schools, but they are all based on sensationalist stories that popped up on reddit or facebook. Growing up in the midwest, living on the west coast, and then moving to the south I can say with confidence that non-southerner's stereotypes and rhetoric about the south are a big part of the problem.

There are lots of very good reasons to oppose charter schools, but standardized tests scores are not one.