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The question today is whether a democratic society needs public schools subject to democratic governance. Why not turn public dollars over to private corporations to run schools as they see fit? Isn't the private sector better and smarter than the public sector? The rise of charter schools has been nothing short of meteoric. They were first proposed in 1988 by Raymond Budde, a Massachusetts education professor, and Albert Shanker, the president of the American Federation of Teachers. Budde dreamed of chartering programs or teams of teachers, not schools. Shanker thought of charters as small schools, staffed by union teachers, created to recruit the toughest-to-educate students and to develop fresh ideas to help their colleagues in the public schools. Their originators saw charters as collaborators, not competitors, with the public schools. Now the charter industry has become a means of privatizing public education. They tout the virtues of competition, not collaboration. The sector has many for-profit corporations, eagerly trolling for new business opportunities and larger enrollments. Some charters skim the top students in the poorest neighborhoods; some accept very small proportions of students who have disabilities or don't speak English; some quietly push out those with low scores or behavior problems (the Indianapolis public schools recently complained about this practice by local charters).

Presumptive GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney has been mulling some big changes to federal K-12 policy if elected, including allowing federal funding to follow students-even if they want to attend private schools-according to a campaign document obtained by Politics K-12. Disadvantaged families and parents of students in special education could choose to spend federal funds at any district or charter public school, tutoring provider, or online course, according to the document circulated over the weekend. It outlines a series of ideas that have been considered by Romney and his advisers, which could be announced as early as this week. Under the proposal, students could also federal money at a private school, as long as that was consistent with state guidelines.

I noted in my blog last week that the visionaries of the charter school idea-Raymond Budde of the University of Massachusetts and Albert Shanker of the American Federation of Teachers-never intended that charter schools would compete with public schools. Budde saw charters as a way to reorganize public school districts and to provide more freedom for teachers. He envisioned teams of teachers asking for a charter for three to five years, during which time they would operate with full autonomy over curriculum and instruction, with no interference from the superintendent or the principal. Shanker thought that charter schools should be created by teams of teachers who would explore new ways to reach unmotivated students. He envisioned charter schools as self-governing, as schools that encouraged faculty decisionmaking and participatory governance. He imagined schools that taught by coaching rather than lecturing, that strived for creativity and problem-solving rather than mastery of standardized tests or regurgitation of facts. He never thought of charters as non-union schools where teachers would work 70-hour weeks and be subject to dismissal based on the scores of their students. Today, charter schools are very far from the original visions of Budde and Shanker.

Yesterday the College Board, the organization that administers the Advanced Placement program and the SAT, announced David Coleman will become its new president in October, and will focus on deepening the curricula on which College Board exams are based. Coleman is controversial, especially among English teachers. A classicist cum McKinsey consultant cum education reformer, he is (in)famous in education circles as the frantically energetic, hyper-intellectual architect of the new Common Core curriculum standards in language arts, which 45 states have agreed-at least theoretically-to adopt in 2014. Currently, about 80 percent of the reading American students are assigned in school is fiction or memoir, and 20 percent is non-fiction. If Coleman gets his way, that balance will soon tilt closer to 60-40. American children will spend a lot less time reading and writing what Coleman calls, somewhat derisively, "stories," and much more time reading and writing about the ideas in "informational" texts by the likes of Richard Hofstadter, Atul Gawande, and H.L. Mencken in high school; John Adams, Frederick Douglas, and Winston Churchill in middle school.

The foundations-idea complex has also set its sights on remaking another of the key institutions of our democracy-the public school-in its own managerial image. There's no other way to account for the distorted, counter-empirical shape of the American debate over education. The overarching trends are plain enough: As wealth inequality swells, so do the coffers of private foundations, even as the recession has caused government budgets to shrink. As long as the motives of government and foundations are aligned, that's not necessarily a problem. But the funders of education reform seek nothing less than the wholesale retooling of public schools, at a time when the nation's school budgets are stretched to the breaking point. And the writing on the chalkboard grows clearer by the minute: Their market-based educational reforms don't work.

On May 23, the Romney campaign released its education policy white paper titled "A Chance for Every Child: Mitt Romney's Plan for Restoring the Promise of American Education." If you liked the George W. Bush administration's education reforms, you will love the Romney plan. If you think that turning the schools over to the private sector will solve their problems, then his plan will thrill you. The central themes of the Romney plan are a rehash of Republican education ideas from the past thirty years, namely, subsidizing parents who want to send their child to a private or religious school, encouraging the private sector to operate schools, putting commercial banks in charge of the federal student loan program, holding teachers and schools accountable for students' test scores, and lowering entrance requirements for new teachers. These policies reflect the experience of his advisers, who include half a dozen senior officials from the Bush administration and several prominent conservative academics, among them former Secretary of Education Rod Paige and former Deputy Secretary of Education Bill Hansen, and school choice advocates John Chubb and Paul Peterson.

The central idea behind standards- and accountability-driven reforms is that, in order to improve student learning, we need to do three things: Clearly define a minimum bar for all students (i.e., set standards). Hold students, teachers, and leaders accountable for meeting those minimum standards. Back off: Give teachers and leaders the autonomy and flexibility they need to meet their goals. It's a powerful formulation, and one that we've seen work, particularly in charter schools and networks where teachers and leaders have used that autonomy to find innovative solutions to some of the biggest instructional challenges. Unfortunately, in far too many traditional school districts, the push for greater accountability has been paired with less autonomy and more centralized control. That is a prescription for a big testing and accountability backlash. 

As most people know, one of the big issues in charter school research, common elsewhere as well, is selection effects - the idea that applicants to charter schools are different from non-applicants in terms of unobserved characteristics such as motivation, social networks, family involvement in their education and whether or not they're thriving in their current school. Researchers who wish to isolate the effect of charter schools must address this issue by attempting to control for these differences between students, using variables such as prior achievement, lunch program eligibility and special education classification. When done correctly, this approach can be quite powerful, but it does entail the (unlikely and untestable) assumption that the two groups (treatment and control) do not differ on any observable or unobservable characteristics that might influence the results, at least to some extent.

"The findings reviewed in this section refer to the results for the most appropriate comparison-the sending schools comparison-unless otherwise noted. Full results are in the body of the report or in the appendices. The CMOs included in this particular study included: KIPP, YES Preparatory, Harmony (Cosmos), IDEA, UPLIFT, School of Science and Technology, Brooks Academy, School of Excellence, and Inspired Vision."

"When Teach for America entered the national stage it was applauded as a fresh, innovative approach to education. Now, well into its second decade of providing teachers to struggling schools across the country, is it still a good idea for our children? Has bringing in smart, young college graduates improved the education that American children are receiving?"

"Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has made school choice a foundation of his education agenda, and since he took office in 2002, the city opened more than 500 new schools; closed, or is in the process of closing, more than 100 ailing ones; and created an environment in which more than 130 charter schools could flourish. No neighborhood has been as transformed by that agenda as Harlem. When classes resume on Thursday, many of its students will be showing up in schools that did not exist a decade ago. The idea, one that became a model for school reform nationwide, was to let parents shop for schools the same way they would for housing or a cellphone plan, and that eventually, the competition would lift all boats. But in interviews in recent weeks, Harlem parents described two drastically different public school experiences, expressing frustration that, among other things, there were still a limited number of high-quality choices and that many schools continued to underperform."

The next big idea in "education reform" is online instruction and cyber charters. I know that teachers are doing wonderful, creative activities with technology, and there is no doubt that technology can bring history, science, and other studies to life in vivid ways. But there is a cloud on the horizon, and that is the growth of the for-profit cyber charters. I confess that it troubles me to think of children sitting at home, day after day, with no opportunity for discussion and debate, no interaction with their peers, no face-to-face encounters with a real teacher.

While I was gone, there were any number of classic examples of well-intentioned folks promoting bad ideas under the guise of "reform."

Former state superintendent Paul Pastorek at least gave lip service to the idea that some traditional schools could be acceptable to the State Department of Education. Incoming superintendent White by contrast is a "one trick pony". He plans to tell the East Baton Rouge Parish School Board ( I suggest educators read this revealing Advocate article very carefully) that the one solution to improving schools is to convert as many low performing schools as possible into charters. Charters in White's mind are the be all and end all for improving schools.

It was perhaps inevitable that the political moment that has given birth to the Occupy movement, pitting Main Street against Wall Street and the 99% against the financial elite, would eventually succeed in making some chinks in the armor of the 1%'s favorite feel-good hobby: the school reform movement.

This was written by Mike Rose, who is on the faculty of the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies and is the author of "The Mind at Work: Valuing the Intelligence of the American Worker," and "Why School?: Reclaiming Education for All of Us."

It's an argument that seems to bubble up cyclically. It doesn't matter what the hot policy idea du jour is, someone is bound to assert: What we're doing right now does not serve the needs of the gifted!

The New Republic has published a provocative profile of Diane Ravitch by my friend Kevin Carey, and it serves as a useful companion to the profile of Ravitch I wrote in June. Kevin, who works for the standards and accountability think tank Education Sector, is unsurprisingly more harshly critical of Ravitch than I was. He focuses a great deal of attention on her shortcomings as a historian, and while I think it's fair to point out that an ideological, polemical writing style has colored all of Ravitch's work, it's also the case that many celebrated, serious historians have held ideological worldviews, from Charles Beard to David Hofstadter to the Schlesingers. Gordon Wood's The Idea of America contains a lot of interesting thinking on the contributions and limitations of history colored by contemporary political concerns, and I think Ravitch's style follows the politically-engaged example set by the progressive historians in particular.

I think it is safe to say that most educated people understand that student achievement scores have been, and continue to be, manipulated for political ends. I suspect the truth lies somewhere between genuine concern for improving public education and an insidious desire to destroy public education. On that issue, I will leave you to decide. I would, however, like to give you an insider's view of a state supported scheme to shift our tax dollars to private companies at the expense of our students.

America's leaders have frequently invoked the principle that important policy decisions should be evidence-based. This rhetorical embrace, however, has not always prevailed against the appeal of policy ideas with political resonance or other perceived advantages. The following analysis describes a particularly egregious example of this phenomenon: the approach taken by the U.S. Department of Education in its "Increasing Educational Productivity" project. This example illustrates the harm done when leaders fail to ground policy in high-quality research.