Here's a brilliant, scathing rebuttal by Chester Finn, made all the most powerful by his long-time, ongoing close relationship with her – he NAILS what's wrong with her arguments (emphasis added in the last sentence):

A lot of innovations and reforms, meant to solve the underlying achievement problem, have failed to do so--hence our essentially-flat test scores and graduation rates these past three decades--and some have had malign side effects. That's what Diane reports and in many areas I agree.

Yet when it comes to the future, we mostly disagree about what course America should follow. She has become more conservative while I have become more radical.

She would undo most if not all of the "structural" reforms that have been put in place in recent years--mayoral control, performance-based pay, charter laws and other choice schemes, reliance on entrepreneurship and market incentives, federal efforts to incentivize and prod the system to change in constructive directions, testing and results-based accountability, and more. She would, instead, look to the "great American school system" and a (somehow) renewed culture and family structure to do right by our children. Yes, she would augment that system with better-educated (and compensated) teachers, a strong core curriculum, a different (curriculum-based) approach to assessment, greater emphasis on behavior and attitudes, and a number of collateral "social" changes such as better families and home environments. At the end of the day, however, she has concluded that, after all the policy fumblings of the past couple of decades, the public-school system and its custodians and employees are best suited to make education decisions that will benefit the nation and its next generation.

I agree about the curriculum part but not much else. The failures of recent years have left me angrier than ever with that system, its adults-first priorities, its obduracy, inertia, and greed, as well as its capacity to throw sand into the gears of every effort to set it right. Unlike Diane, I don't trust teacher unions to do right by children (or to do right by great teachers, for that matter); I don't expect locally-elected school boards to put kids' interests first; I see "neighborhood schools" as education death-traps for America's neediest youngsters; and I think the "Broader, Bolder" social-reform agenda is on the one hand naïve (most of these things just aren't going to happen on their own and can't be made to happen) and, on the other hand, deeply mischievous (because it lifts responsibility from schools for all that they could and sometimes do accomplish pretty much single-handedly).

Where I come out--you can read more in National Affairs' "The End of the Education Debate"--is that America needs not less education reform but far more fundamental and radical reform. I want every child to have quality school choices, I want stronger (and broader) external standards, I want more open paths to becoming an educator, I want empowered school leaders (really empowered, in ways that would also break the union stranglehold) who are compensated like CEOs, I want super pay for great instructors and no pay for incompetents, and I want a complete makeover of "local control." The system needs a shakeup from top to bottom, not a restoration.

Diane thinks my prescription is guided by wishful thinking and unproven theories and would destroy an honorable and needed institution. I think that, while her analyses of past failures are often spot-on and frequently aligned with my own, her prescription for the future is guided by wishful thinking, nostalgia, and unwarranted faith in an antiquated institutional arrangement that was already demonstrating its failure when we founded the Educational Excellence Network and has done nothing since to renew itself.

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