Diane Ravitch is wrong!

A few days ago I wrote a blog about an article in which Diane Ravitch is right.  Just finishing reading twitter feeds, I found that all of the tweets that Ravitch writes are about negative events in the charter school world.  She is anti-charter school.  Unless you think that eliminating all charter schools would improve education for children, then she isn't pro-kid. She is clearly more anti-charter school than anything.

Here is why she is wrong.  First, there are great charter schools and they are not the ones that are the same as traditional public schools.  Second, there are charter schools that meet the needs of kids who are different and want a different type of education than many public school districts are able or willing to provide.  Third, there are charter schools that are truly experimental and have been successfully educated children.

In addition, there are huge questions still about what content is important as method.  There are things that kids need that are not measured by standardized testing and many charter schools deliver those things such as increased discipline, self respect and the value of perseverance.  In many cases, even if a charter school isn't showing better test scores than local schools, the school provides other character attributes that may have a higher correspondence to long term success than the short term measures of increased test scores. 

It's not clear at all to me that Ravitch or any other education expert (including charter school leaders) know exactly what students must learn in school to be successful.  While she may be right about certain individual charter schools, Diane Ravitch is wrong about charter schools.