In my city while the charter school is a free public school (by lottery) but it is not anywhere near as diverse as the traditional public school district. First it is hard because my city is extremely diverse. However the charter school is not just students from my city. The lottery assumes that parents know about it and in reality we have many non English speaking parents. They advertise in some languages but for example the local high school had over 60 languages listed on student’s paperwork for language spoken at home. They said 70 at graduation. Sure Spanish, Haitian, Vietnamese, and Chinese parents could read the literature etc but many others could not. The charter school is well known for college readiness but not for ELL, Special Needs, vocational training etc. Academically overall the charter school is better on paper in terms of test scores but they don’t have nearly as many ELL, special needs etc. If you compare top students to top students they get into the same schools.