Looks like the only reform they care about is charters. Sad. It’s just not true that charters are the only form of innovation. Millions of kids go to great neighborhood public schools.

Why don’t wealthy suburbs seek gimmicks like charters? Because their schools work for their well-off and well supported kids. Charters don’t actually do any better than neighborhood schools (many do worse even with lower populations of special ed kids and New to English kids than comparable neighborhood schools.)

The other thing in this clip that’s disturbing is the idea that textbook publishers have created a unified national curriculum. Most textbooks are terrible, lowest common denominator (based on TX and CA standards) and so broad (to ostensibly hit all state standards) that they are near useless. Did anyone on this panel actually teach in a public school for more than a year or two? Were any of them administrators for any length of time in a successful school or a school that served low income minority kids?