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Comment by jimwise | Hacker News Reader

This seems central to Ravitch's argument:

``For many people, these arguments require a willing suspension of disbelief. Most Americans graduated from public schools, and most went from school to college or the workplace without thinking that their school had limited their life chances.''

In other words, her argument seems at least in part based on the assumption that the public schools of today are equivalent in quality with the public schools in which most adults today were themselves educated.

It's not clear to me that this is correct...

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That's not central to the argument at all. The article's first argument is "only 17% of charter schools out-perform matched public schools, so it's unrealistic to expect them to be a silver bullet".

The schools in "Waiting for 'Superman'" are the rare few that are getting exceptional results. Yes, we as a country would be smarter if every public school was a charter school with exceptional results, but that's like saying we'd be smarter if every public college was replaced with Harvard or MIT.

And that's just the first argument. Then it breaks into several more about non-school factors being responsible for the majority of achievement variance among students, and about charter school selection effects[1], as well as a lot of discussion of relevant omissions and factual errors in the movie.

I'm not saying I agree absolutely with the article (I haven't seen WfS yet), but if you're dismissing it based on a fact-free first impression of a throw-away line halfway through it, you're doing yourself a disservice.

[1] - Since only students with parents who are deeply involved in their education even apply to charter schools, those students are at an inherent advantage whether or not they get in.

I thought education can have so much more potential.

If we so desire, there could be a genuine basic electrical engineering classes where kids are taught to assemble their own electronics, build robots, amongst other things.

What we got though, is the uninspired math class, the boring basic computer class, reading plays that are meant to be played out, and so on.

However, formal education must use a metric of some kind. A way to say a neat number. The penchants for mechanization where teachers are taught to "teach", not learn and teach, are widespread. Why don't we have industry professional, scientists, and so on, work with the teacher directly?

Doesn't it alway seem to you that educations are in general, just mediocre. The IQ of kids are more than enough to handle complex ideas.

We don't try very hard, but those who try are more likely to be successful, and seemly much more knowledgeable.

There are a few questionable statements and conclusions in this article, for example her belief that we shouldn't worry about students who score at the 'basic' level on NAEP is highly questionable, although admittedly it's a bad test. In general though I think she's correct that the idea that the free market will fix our school system is absurd. But she wildly overstates both the quality of public schools, as well as the possibility of improving them.

All in all though it's probably the best analysis of the movie I've seen so far, which in itself is kind of sad.

This might not be a correct assumption, but the difficult part about it is defining "quality", and should there be a difference, identifying the culprit.

I suspect that the "back to the basics" ethos of NCLB has done more harm than good (it's amazing how quickly children learn to read when they're read to every day, rather than the current method which seems to involve lots of phonics instruction in spite of English's phonetic weirdness).

This is the same "back to the basics" ethos that was promoted shortly after Sputnik was launched, and the same ethos that was promoted after "A Nation at Risk" was published.

And when that ethos doesn't work, we generally pile even more on it. "Chidren not performing well enough at math? We'll do 2 hours instead of 1! We'll cut recess!"

I don't think I'm disagreeing with you here, but the only successful attempts I've seen to "improve education" have been the ones that offer more engagement and more freedom, with higher expectations placed on students (as well as a willingness to work around student learning, rather than forcing student learning to work around a pre-determined progress chart).

Everything else has been ham-handed, at best.

I thought that claim was weakly stated. She backs it up more convincingly with this point:

"The annual Gallup poll about education shows that Americans are overwhelmingly dissatisfied with the quality of the nation’s schools, but 77 percent of public school parents award their own child’s public school a grade of A or B, the highest level of approval since the question was first asked in 1985."

More central to her argument, however, was her point that once you control for spending and other factors, charter schools seem not to perform significantly better than public schools.

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