r than sending their children to public schools are those who are affluent enough to send them to private schools (Lorenzen). With the charter school option, people can send their children to a better and more innovative school at no greater cost than they incur in sending them to public school. Charter schools also empower parents (Lorenzen).
Charter schools give parents the ability to send their children to schools that are much more closely tailored to their cultural and religious preferences or that are exceptionally strong in certain subject areas or skills that parents are more interested in developing in their children (Lorenzen). Christian parents can send their children to Christian charter schools; parents interested in technology can send their children to technology-oriented charter schools.
Another advantage of charter schools is that they can more specifically address the needs of a particular community (ôCharter Schools: What Are Charter Schools?ö). For example, in a community where an ethnic mix makes it important to be able to speak other languages, the charter school can offer languages prevalent in the community that might not normally be offered in the foreign language curricula of public high schoolsùItalian, Japanese, or Greek, for example. Introducing these types of curriculum changes in a public school is difficult, exceedingly slow, or downright impossible, but in a charter school it can be easy and fast. This addresses another advantage of charter schoolsùthe flexibility to rapidly and easily make changes to the curriculum. This capability makes the charter school truly responsive to the needs of the community and in step with the rapid pace of change in the nonacademic world that is impacted by globalization.
This flexibility to change brings with it other advantages that benefit the studentsùinnovative teaching, new teaching technologies, and much greater effi
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