After an amusingly selective, misleading account of the charter school movement, Diane Ravitch writes:

Guggenheim ignored other clues that might have gotten in the way of a good story. While blasting the teachers’ unions, he points to Finland as a nation whose educational system the US should emulate, not bothering to explain that it has a completely unionized teaching force. His documentary showers praise on testing and accountability, yet he does not acknowledge that Finland seldom tests its students. Any Finnish educator will say that Finland improved its public education system not by privatizing its schools or constantly testing its students, but by investing in the preparation, support, and retention of excellent teachers. It achieved its present eminence not by systematically firing 5–10 percent of its teachers, but by patiently building for the future. Finland has a national curriculum, which is not restricted to the basic skills of reading and math, but includes the arts, sciences, history, foreign languages, and other subjects that are essential to a good, rounded education. Finland also strengthened its social welfare programs for children and families. Guggenheim simply ignores the realities of the Finnish system.

I’d recommend that Ravitch visit neighboring Sweden, where the school system is strikingly different. I’d also suggest that she consider the state of family structure in Finland before the strengthening of its social welfare programs and after. The demographic composition of Finnish families, the high level of Finnish language proficiency in the under-18 cohort, and many, many other factors flow into Finnish outcomes. Moreover, the results for middle-class American teenagers and Finnish teenagers are strikingly similar. This suggests that maybe, just maybe, disadvantaged American children in environments defined by concentrated poverty, high incarceration rates, and high levels of public transfers might require a variety of different educational approaches, not a bowdlerized version of Finland’s institutions.

I should say that I have no brief for the film in question. Haven’t seen it and I don’t plan to see it. I’m not one for mono-causal explanations. I’m also even more opposed to documentaries that tug at the heartstrings rather than illustrate complex choices when they’re ostensibly on “my side.” I have a bigger stake in “my side” getting things right. So it’s hardly surprising that Ravitch lands some blows: she counters a series of oversimplications with another set of oversimplifications.

But Ravitch should consult the extensive evidence on how public schools in the U.S. actually deploy their considerable resources: the extraordinary increase in per pupil spending in urban districts is a well-documented fact, yet outcomes vary dramatically across schools with the same spending inputs. Josh Barro did a terrific job of explaining some of these issues in the context of education spending in Massachusetts and New Jersey.

One thing we’ve learned about improving the quality of any institution, public or private, is that organizational capital is important, and building organizational capital requires a high-level of flexibility: achieving productivity gains is a trial-and-error process. Autonomy is good. Rigid work rules are generally bad. These are not exotic ideas propagated by the powerful.

I’ll make my bias clear: I wasn’t impressed by Ravitch when she was a right-winger, and I’m not impressed with her now that she is a left-winger. I found her earlier incarnation narrow-minded, polemical, and very selective in how she presented evidence. And that much hasn’t changed.

I particularly enjoyed Ravitch’s discussion about how difficult it is to identify bad teachers. It is, of course difficult to identify bad employees in any firm or institution. But a trial-and-error process rewards firms and institutions that make the right decisions and punishes those that don’t. As a 16-year-old, I was fired from my first job. Could my employers prove that I was a “bad” employee in a rigid, formal proceeding? I seriously doubt it. I think it’s safe to say that I was, according to the relevant criteria, a pretty bad employee indeed. My employers had a fair bit of local knowledge, and the cost of firing me was relatively low. They later found someone who was a better fit. Notice how differently we approach this kind of routine decision in Ravitch’s world, where only experienced educators — presumably people who’ve been trained in ed schools rather than, say, people with expertise in private sector management — can make decisions of this kind.

The best way to ensure that there are no bad or ineffective teachers in our public schools is to insist that we have principals and supervisors who are knowledgeable and experienced educators.

Evidence please? What if the educators in question have failed in the past? If Ravitch wrote about automobile and not education, I have to assume that she’d be scoffing at Tesla and demanding that the Big Three add more chrome to their fuel-intensive automobiles.

What is true is that the charter school movement, and the broader choice movement, has overpromised and underdelivered, for all the reasons Rick Hess has outlined. If you want an honest, rigorous account of the limits of the charter school movement, turn to Rick.