That's an awfully cynical view of it. An alternate narrative is that public school bureaucracies, perverse incentives for teachers unions, and political meddling from government created a system that was failing to offer students a good education. Mix that in with a very American belief in the power of free choice and free markets, as well as a belief that ability to pay should be no barrier to an education, and charter schools are the solution that has emerged.

I think there's problems with that narrative too. The impact that good teachers can have on kids from very troubled homes is probably overstated, and teachers unions have often been fighting against performance rating systems that unfairly ignore that. But in defense of charters, a performance rating system that doesn't work won't survive very long in the private sector.

Edit: Perhaps a better question, that avoids the nasty politics of the current situation, is: what does the ideal system look like? My inclination is that it would look more like charter schools than like public schools.

The ideal system probably looks a lot like Finland, where teaching is a selective high-status profession with good pay, benefits, professional development, and autonomy; schools are competently managed; students are treated as people instead of numbers in a spreadsheet; and everyone in every wealth bucket receives a solid education.

The precise policy details might not apply in extremely different societies/political systems, but the high-level goals should be the same:

Highly qualified professional teachers with good career prospects and lots of personal responsibility and a culture of continuous professional development, adequate school infrastructure and materials, focus on the individual needs of diverse children, resource equality for students regardless of wealth or social class, work to solve child poverty and other severe social problems that prevent any education system from functioning.

And in finland there is school choice, which means that the money follows the student. If no students choose to go to school X, the school gets shut down. This is quite similar to what the charters in the US represent.

Actually not at all similar to US charter schools.

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/what-ame...

These aspects from the article sound like US charter schools.

"...teachers are trained to assess children in classrooms using independent tests they create themselves. "

"All children receive a report card at the end of each semester, but these reports are based on individualized grading by each teacher."

"If a teacher is bad, it is the principal's responsibility to notice and deal with it."

"In Finland parents can also choose."

But it may be that the finnish model is slipping anyway:

http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2013/06/is-finland-a-choice-les...

"Finnish eighth-graders today perform slightly lower than seventh-graders did in 1999."

I give them two decades.

> These aspects from the article sound like US charter schools.

Some charter schools. A minority. Others are run like tiny military academies, or have gone all-in on high-stakes testing, or profit by relying on low-paid short-term teachers with high turnover, or are mainly financial schemes/scams with schools attached (cf. the alternet link a few posts upthread).

All of the bits you listed actually sound precisely like my southern California suburban public elementary school experience in the mid–late 1990s. Unfortunately the school got constant pushback from the school district and state for not being excited enough about letter grades or standardized tests, but was able to mostly persist its culture through support from local parents.

This seems like a game of chicken. The "teachers, ex-teachers, school administrators" are betting that public elementary and secondary education would have to be much, much worse than it already is in order to justify supplementing it with something, anything else. They're wrong.

That’s horseshit. The public schoolteachers I know closely are dedicated professionals who work 70-hour weeks, agonize over their students progress and personal situations, and buy classroom materials out of their substandard salaries because their schools are broke.

The hard work, mediocre pay compared to alternative professions, and lack of autonomy and social respect they receive takes its toll though, and teacher attrition is higher than ever. Instead of “playing chicken” as you suggest, experienced teachers are retiring in droves and top potential teachers are scared away by poor career prospects, and as a profession teaching is hollowing out. Most states cut education budgets sharply after the 2008 recession and in general those budgets still haven’t recovered. I fear that in another decade or two public education will be in a very tough place, having lost a huge proportion of its human capital with no easy way to get it back. In parts of the US this is already a crisis, but the political response has been to further demonize teachers and push for more standardized testing, voucher programs, charter schools, and so on.

The problem is that teacher compensation has not scaled with educational spending over the past few decades in the US. K12 spending in the public sector has increased faster than inflation * population growth everywhere, yet median teacher pay has gone down (I think average is stable but that's because some senior teachers get really sweet packages).

Even if states cut education budgets sharply in 2008 it shouldn't have been a problem, because it's not like teachers 30 years before that were suffering under much more parsimonious spending. It's just that when they cut those budgets, someone decided to pass the pain on to the teachers instead of figuring out where the real waste was.

The atrocious thing is that the teacher's unions keep clamoring for more educational spending instead of higher teacher pay. Empirically speaking in the US, more educational spending will correlate with lower teacher pay.

There have been proposals to sharply raise pay as part of reforms that make it easier to hire and fire teachers. Teachers' unions have always been extremely opposed.

It's probably accurate to say that the blame lies more with administrators than with teachers, and more with the American public than with either of those parties. The term "hollowing out" is really just another sort of demonization. It doesn't matter though. Taken as a whole, USA public education consumes more resources per student than it did a generation ago, with steadily declining outcomes. There is no law of nature ensuring that children can only learn in such dismal conditions. "In another decade or two", students will get their educations in some other fashion. Hey, it happened to travel agents!