This New Jersey editorial is very well done. Just substitute Kansas for New Jersey, Kansas Policy Institute for Pacific Research Institute, and Koch brothers for Walton Family Foundation, and it is applicable here.
“The school-choice debate is delicate and complex. The core idea of providing students with options to escape an urban jungle is laudable. Charter schools have their place in settings where the need is greatest. But many school-choice advocates have other goals — public funding for religious schools, for example, or a broad privatization of our education system that would, among other things, break teacher unions…
“Every school can improve. But throwing out some cherry-picked test scores with no context to manufacture a problem that can only be solved by more school choice is far from a scholarly approach. The motivation here is political. The lesson: Always know who’s behind any study purporting to conclude anything. And judge the Pacific Research Institute’s findings accordingly.”