The political/bureaucratic education reform machine that began with the bogus A Nation at Risk report under Ronald Reagan has been aided and abetted for almost 40 years now by the feckless mainstream media (MSM).

That education reform agenda has been a recurring pattern of overstated and unmerited polices grounded in ideology, but education reformers are powerful advocates, bolstering their reforms with more public relations than expertise; the MSM repeatedly falls for the hucksterism hook, line, and sinker.

In the ugly and harmful lineage of education reform “miracles”—Texas, Chicago, Washington DC, Tennessee, etc.—comes the new darling of education reform mirages, New Orleans:

• Opinion | Following New Orleans’s lead on charter-school education, Emily Langhorne
• How New Orleans Is Helping Its Students Succeed, David Leonhardt

Not surprising, but always disappointing, is that education-related media remain deeply misleading, and thus, complicit in an education reform movement more dedicated to dismantling than reforming universal public education in the name of equity and democracy.

Since I have been refuting these “miracle” claims for many years, I offer here a reader to discredit the two claims above, and the lingering political, public, and media fascination with charter schools and take-over approaches to education reform:

• UPDATED: What New Orleans Tells Us About the Perils of Putting Schools on the Free Market
• UPDATED: Beware the “Miracle” School Claim: “Why not tell the whole story?”
• Rejecting Charter Takeover of Public Schools: A Reader
• Another Disaster of the Accountability Era? State Takeovers of High-Poverty, Majority-Minority Schools
• Thomas, P.L. (2016). Miracle school myth. In W.J. Mathis & T.M. Trujillo, Learning from the Federal Market‐Based Reforms: Lessons for ESSA. Charlotte, NC: IAP.
• How to Make New Orleans Market Ed Reform a Success: Hide RSD Failure Inside an OPSB-RSD Data Blend
• The Unsinkable ASD
• What David Leonhardt Ignores, Denies and Gets Wrong about the 2005 Seizure of New Orleans Schools
• Recommended: Hope Against Hope, Sarah Carr
• “Education” Journalism’s Hollow Echo Chamber: New Orleans Edition
• NPR Whitewashes Charter Schools and Disaster Capitalism in New Orleans
• Endgame: Disaster Capitalism, New Orleans, and the Charter Scam
• See this thread:

1/Brief, belated thread on the research claims about charters in this @DLeonhardt piece https://t.co/ejQslJ7yHl pic.twitter.com/3idc4GhEXr

— Matt Barnum (@matt_barnum) July 28, 2018