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Most test score differences stubbornly continue to reflect parental income and neighborhood/zip codes, not what schools do. As opportunity, health and family wealth increase, so do test scores.

they reduce teachers to test-prep clerks, ignore important subject areas and critical thinking skills

But schools and teachers take the blame for huge social inequities in housing, health care, and income.

Unions have historically played leading roles in improving public education, and most nations with strong public educational systems have strong teacher unions.

The movie touts the benefits of fast track and direct entry to teaching programs such as Teach for America, but the country with the highest achieving students, Finland, also has highly educated teachers.

Charters were first proposed by the teachers’ unions to allow committed parents and teachers to create schools that were free of administrative bureaucracy and open to experimentation and innovation, and some excellent charters have set examples. But thousands of hustlers and snake oil salesmen have also jumped in.

And the Education Report, "The Evaluation of Charter School Impacts, concludes, “On average, charter middle schools that hold lotteries are neither more nor less successful than traditional public schools in improving student achievement, behavior, and school progress.”

The Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University, concludes that only 17% of charter schools have better test scores than traditional public schools, 46% had gains that were no different than their public counterparts, and 37% were significantly worse. While a better measure of school success is needed

While a better measure of school success is needed

While a better measure of school success is needed

It is not a sustainable public policy to allow more and more public school funding to be diverted to privately subsidized charters while public schools become the schools of last resort for children with the greatest educational needs.

In spite of the many millions of dollars poured into expounding the theory of paying teachers for higher student test scores (sometimes mislabeled as ‘merit pay’), a new study by Vanderbilt University’s National Center on Performance Incentives found that the use of merit pay for teachers in the Nashville school district produced no difference even according to their measure, test outcomes for students.

approximately a third of America’s new teachers leave teaching sometime during their first three years of teaching; almost half leave during the first five years.

many of the top students have been lured to careers in finance and consulting.” It’s the market, and the disproportionately high salaries paid to finance specialists, that is misdirecting human resources, not schools.

They ignore the social construction of knowledge, the difference between deep learning and rote memorization.

This is a common theme of the so-called reformers: We are at war with India and China and we have to out-math them and crush them so that we can remain rich and they can stay in the sweatshops. But really, who declared this war? When did I as a teacher sign up as an officer in this war? And when did that 4th grade girl become a soldier in it? Instead of this new educational Cold War, perhaps we should be helping kids imagine a world of global cooperation, sustainable economies, and equity.

So the outcome of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top has been more funding for schools that are doing well and more discipline and narrow test-preparation for the poorest schools.

Waiting for Superman has ignored deep historical and systemic problems in education such as segregation, property-tax based funding formulas, centralized textbook production, lack of local autonomy and shared governance, de-professionalization, inadequate special education supports, differential discipline patterns, and the list goes on and on.

saying that charter schools are vital to promoting innovation in American schools (Obama, 2009)

With so much variation among charter schools, however, significant questions exist regarding how well they are educating students, how they manage their financial responsibilities, and whether creating more charter schools will be better for the nation's schoolchildren.

In 2009, Secretary Duncan made lifting charter caps a key component of qualifying for education funding under the $4.35 billion Race to the Top (RTTT) program. Originally, to qualify for RTTT money, Duncan said states must eliminate any caps on charter schools. In November 2009, Duncan changed the requirement so that states with caps could still receive money if they had other kinds of innovative public schools and as long as the caps were generous enough (The Wall Street Journal, 2009).

Parents' demand for charter schools is outpacing their availability in many locations, with an estimated 365,000 students on waitlists—enough to fill more than 1,100 average-sized charter schools

In Montana, where there are no charter schools and where more than half of the state's school districts have enrollments of fewer than 100 students, Superintendent of Schools Denise Juneau objected to the RTTT focus on charter schools in a July 28 letter to Secretary Duncan. "Montana's rural context and economic status has made it challenging for many communities and the state to support the public schools we currently have," Juneau wrote in the letter, "much less encourage the duplication of infrastructure a charter school would mean in most communities" (McNeil, 2009).

"The charter movement is putting itself at risk by allowing too many second-rate and third-rate schools to exist," he said, in reference to a recent study by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University that found that more than 80 percent of charter schools were performing the same as or worse than their local public schools (2009).

The comparison found that only 17 percent of charter schools were producing gains that were significantly better than their traditional public school counterparts, while 46 percent were similar to their local public schools and 37 percent performed significantly worse (Center for Research on Education Outcomes, 2009).

In contrast, another recent study by Stanford economics professor Caroline Hoxby found that students who entered lotteries and gained admission to New York City charter schools performed better on state assessments than students who entered the same lotteries and were not admitted to the charter schools.

The findings of both studies have been disputed. Critics of the Hoxby study point out that it relies on extrapolations of data, comparing statistical projections of student achievement as opposed to actual student achievement (Ravitch, 2009). Critics of the CREDO study raise doubts about its seemingly contradictory findings that charter schools provided gains for English language learners and poor students while having negative effects on Hispanic and black students (Anderson, 2009).

For middle and high school charters that did have baseline scores, that study found charter schools in five of the seven locations it examined were on average no better or worse than local traditional public schools (Zimmer et al., 2009).

Of the more than 5,250 charter schools that have ever opened, 657 have closed since 1992. Of those, 41 percent closed because of financial deficiencies caused by either low enrollment or inequitable funding; 27 percent for mismanagement; and only 14 percent for poor academic performance (Allen et al., 2009).

A 2005 analysis by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (NAPCS) found that 90 percent of authorizers were local school districts, and two-thirds lacked a dedicated office or staff to oversee the authorizing process (Vanourek, 2005). NAPCS, which has described quality authorizing as an intensive, data-driven process that requires dedicating substantial resources to the task, has called for stricter accountability for local school boards and other entities that authorize charter schools