"Why Don't We Have Real Data on Charter Schools?"

I found this article fascinating. Though it did not wholly address the subject the title implies, the lack of data on charter schools, it did bring up several interesting points. Some I agreed with in full while others made me feel sceptical. I thought it was beneficial that the article pointed out that charter schools were first created as "laborator(ies) for innovations that would be applied to public schools." However, the article goes on to show that rather than collaborating with public schools they are competeing with public schools. Many have taken up the mantle of the market based competition model and touted it's ability to create higher accountability within school systems. This too doesn't seem to be working since so little of charter school's inner workings are available to the public. 

I wonder why the theory behind charter schools and the practice of them doesn't seem to align. As I wrote in my issue analysis, perhaps it is the theory exclusively that proponents of charter schools are so focused on despite the fact that they aren't looking at the actual data. It seems to me that charter schools aren't all bad and that there are truly functional models. The problems this article and others have with them seem like simple fixes, the main problem being that there is no public awareness of how funds are being spent. So, why aren't charter school models showing these funds? I would like to know more about the other side of the issue to understand it as a whole.