Charter School Failure

    Back in the administration of George Herbert Walker Bush, there was an educational bureaucrat, an Assistant Secretary of Education, named Diane Ravitch.  While perhaps not the main architect of the push for charter schools, school choice, and massive educational testing, she was one of the first to jump on the charter school bandwagon. 

    And under George W. Bush, when the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) act took effect and thousands of charter schools were opened, she was the strongest advocate.  Accountability and school choice were going to save education.

            But on March 9, 2010, in a guest editorial in the Wall Street Journal, she explained how she had come to realize that it was all nonsense, wishful thinking, and outright fraud--and that the main reason for failed educational outcomes is poverty.  She has now written a similar article, entitled “Why I Changed My Mind ,” in the June 14 issue of Nation Magazine.

            You may say, “Yes; we’ve always known that.”   But there were many people, including some intelligent enough that they should have known better, that did not know—and still don’t know. This failed program now drains funding  from precisely those school systems which need it most desperately, yet the fight against this malignant fraud is far from over.  Ms. Ravitch writes in Nation: “I expected that Obama would throw out NCLB and start over.  Instead, his administration has embraced some of its worst features.”

            The confession that this program is not working, signed by one of its strongest advocates, is certainly useful--but only if it is circulated widely among those who need to understand it.

              For Free Market Conservatives, charter schools were an attractive fantasy. If successful, they would not only save education, but vindicate any number of other “free market” approaches to public policy. But in the end, the free market initiatives have helped education about as much as free market derivative traders have helped our pension funds.

            No one likes to confront the abject failure of their most treasured fantasies—but sometimes that has to happen for any progress to be made. Please consider emailing this information to anyone who ought to see it. (Just click on the envelope icon.)