By Alan J. Borsuk of the Journal Sentinel

The stars are aligned for good things to happen for the charter school movement in America, the president of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools recently told a couple of hundred leaders of such schools in Wisconsin.

"We have a moment in front of us like none other," Nelson Smith said, a chance to increase quality and the impact of charters as a whole.

Now, he said, if they could just get more people to understand what charter schools are.

So it is for charter schools - growing, providing both exciting and unsettling results, and still trying to establish themselves, both in practice and in the public mind.

In Milwaukee and nationwide, some of the most successful and attention-worthy schools are charter schools. So are some of the schools at the bottom of the spectrum. And a lot are in-between, with achievement results on a par with most other schools and with programs that are not particularly innovative.

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