Hell? No.

The Chairman of the House Education Committee in Colorado resigned from his chairmanship after the Rocky Mountain News published an email to a colleague in which he said, "There must be a special place in hell for these Privatizers, Charterizers and Voucherziers."

The tendency of some people to conflate the privatization, voucher, and charter movements is one of the more tedious things you have to deal with in talking about important issues like choice and the place of education in the public and private spheres.

To be clear, there really are people out there who want to privatize and destroy the public schools. They're all voucher supporters, and a lot of them are quite sympathetic to charters, not because they actually care about--or even understand--charters per se, but because they see charters as a step in their direction. I don't know that I'd go so far as to condemn them to Hell, but they're no friends of public education

But tarring charter schools with other people's bad intentions is wrong. The commonly-made distinction between charter schools and public schools is inaccurate; charter schools are public schools. I guarantee that if you were teleported into the classroom of a good charter elementary school here in DC, there would be nothing to tell you that it was anything other than a particularly well-run public school. Same predominantly minority and low-income DC kids, same base funding source, same accountabily under No Child Left Behind. If, on the other hand, you were teleported into a DC private school, believe me, you would know.