This describes the risk we run if we do not remain vigilant and keep New Hampshire charters focused:

The greatest irony in the increasing privatization of public education is that the deficiencies that the “reformers” typically claim to be trying to correct are often exacerbated by the very “reforms” that they are advocating.

There is now a tremendous amount of statistical evidence that, on average, students in charter schools perform worse–and often much worse–than students in public schools. Moreover, if one focuses just on the for-profit charter schools, which do not provide the “public face” of charter schools but do now constitute the majority of such schools, their students’ performance is often simply abysmal.

This grim irony of a supposed solution’s actually compounding the problem is given a further ironic turn when one realizes that the measures for gauging those levels of performance have been designed by the same people who have advocated most strongly for charter schools. So, their students are failing the very tests that they themselves designed supposedly to hold public schools to greater account.

In this arena, rhetoric has simply overwhelmed reality.

….

from A follow-up to “Taking heed from the front lines”.