Some are places for parents of failing students to put their kids during the school day to avoid truancy citations and provide day care--and at the end they get a piece of paper. That's what it's all about--getting that piece of paper. (For them, education is a scam.)
Some are places where parents of failing students put their kids to get a better education. In some cases the kids are failing because of behavior issues. In some cases the teachers are fairly incompetent--issues with classroom management skills or teaching ability or both.
Some are scams. The parents think their kids are going to get help, but they're basically day-care.
Some are places where parents put really good students to get specialized education. I had one kid moved over to charter school because it offered Japanese. The public schools didn't. Others are more structured and provide a safe environment for learning. An acquaintance got a job at one charter school. A friend who worked there suggested she apply. I talked to her a while later--before we lost contact--and she said it was "different." Poor, minority kids in a structured environment, but half the science teachers had PhDs in their fields, and most of the teaching staff had at least MAs. Few "education degrees". So that master's wouldn't be "masters in teaching science", heavy on teaching fads and how to teach simple science, but a masters in chemistry or, like hers, a PhD in nuclear physics.
Some charters are religious--some Xian, some Muslim, some others. Some are ethnic. "Afro-centric education". Sometimes they learn to do math like the Egyptians, and pretty much stop at simple geometry. Or a big dose of Mexican-American studies or Latino studies (since Houston has a lot of non-Mexican Latinos, a lot of the "Mex-Am" stuff is fairly irrelevant to them, except for building ethnic solidarity as "Latinos". A Salvadoran American citizen with a set of Mexican heros is rather a strange thing, but it's apparently better than having Anglo heroes.) In other cases they learn a lot. Some are just day-care centers for older kids.
One series of schools offers project-based learning. Another pushes 21st-century skills.
When you average all of those you find what a physics prof at Rice University found. On average, charter schools are no better or worse than public schools. However, they have a much wider standard deviation. The distribution curve is much flatter.
That last bit means that there are more charter schools much worse than the average public school. It also means there are more above average charter schools. Which is exactly what you predict from having some charter schools be scams and day-care centers (seriously below average in performance) and some more structured or pitched at a higher academic level (above average, if only for a given area). In the end, most of what a school is, however, is the students and what they bring to school.
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