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BACK TO SCHOOL. So Jonah Goldberg wants to abolish all public schools. All of them. It's a pretty radical claim, all the more so because, so far as I understand it, Jonah doesn't know very much about education policy. That's not a criticism: I don't know very much about it either. But that's a pretty significant policy proposal to toss out if you're unfamiliar with the subject area. "Private, parochial and charter schools get better results," he writes. But do they? Jonah's complaints about the public system seem to come from a searing set of exposes the Washington Post has recently published on the DC public schools. But here's another Post article, one Jonah appears to have paid less attention to:
Thirty of 34 charter school campuses, representing thousands of District students, failed to meet reading and math benchmarks on a new test, according to data released yesterday by the D.C. Public Charter School Board.The poor results on the D.C. Comprehensive Assessment mirror the performance of students in traditional D.C. public schools reported weeks ago. Of the 146 government-run schools, 118 failed to meet academic targets, up from 81 last year. The charter board knew the results for the schools it oversees at the time but declined to release them, saying it would take more time to verify scores and notify parents.As I read that data, 80 percent of the public schools failed to meet the requirements. 88 percent of charter schools failed. Both numbers are grotesque, and unacceptable. But given that the charter schools are doing worse, this is hardly the sort of data that would lead me to embrace them as a broade alternative. But Jonah says that if you closed all the public schools and replaced them with charter schools, "what would change is that fewer kids would get left behind." Clearly, Jonah sees something different in the numbers than I do. Maybe he'd care to explain?--Ezra Klein
