The Myth of Charter Schools by Diane Ravitch in The New York Review of Books is a review of the movie Waiting for “Superman”,

Had I not read this review before seeing the movie (which I have not seen yet), I might have fallen for the premise of the movie.  (Perhaps I might have guessed at some of the information in this review.)

Just a few selected examples from the review follow:

Some fact-checking is in order, and the place to start is with the film’s quiet acknowledgment that only one in five charter schools is able to get the “amazing results” that it celebrates.

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Perhaps the greatest distortion in this film is its misrepresentation of data about student academic performance. The film claims that 70 percent of eighth-grade students cannot read at grade level. This is flatly wrong.

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Another highly praised school that is featured in the film is the SEED charter boarding school in Washington, D.C. SEED seems to deserve all the praise that it receives from Guggenheim, CBS’s 60 Minutes, and elsewhere. It has remarkable rates of graduation and college acceptance. But SEED spends $35,000 per student, as compared to average current spending for public schools of about one third that amount.

Read the rest of the article to understand some of the other “tricks” SEED uses to get the results that it does.

If we want public schools to achieve the success that some charter schools achieve, then we must know the entire suite of techniques that the Charter Schools use.  If we pick a few techniques that fit our preconceived notions of the cheapest way to achieve good results, we will be astonished to find that public schools cannot make the same achievements.