Jeff Bryant has paid close attention to the ongoing torrent of scandals surrounding charter schools, so of course he was astonished to see New York Times’ writer David Leonhardt acclaiming the “miracle” in New Orleans.

Bryant suspects this is but another example of Democratic centrists selling out those to their left, arguing for a DeVos’ style market-driven reform that disempowers ordinary people whose only power is their vote.

Leonhardt disdains elected school boards, like his fellow Reformers. He likes the market. But he claims that he is fact-based, when he ignores the facts that don’t fit his narrative. Leonhardt, he suggests, is a garden-variety neoliberal, willing to see a community robbed of its votes so that white kids can get the best schools and black kids get the D- and F-rated schools.

Bryant writes:

Ironically, the very next day after Leonhardt’s piece ran, an enormous charter school scandal came crashing to the ground on the opposite coast.

As the Los Angeles Times reports, an operator of a charter school chain in the city, who also served on the district’s school board, had to resign after pleading guilty to using his publicly funded charter school, including its employees (even the low-wage custodians), as a source of funding for his school board campaign, and then lying about it.

The day after, in Pennsylvania, a former head of an online charter school in the state was sentenced to serve 20 months in prison for conspiring to defraud the IRS, siphoning $8 million from the charter school he created to spend on houses, a plane, and other luxuries.

Revelations of these legal and ethical violations on the part of charter school operators are a near daily occurrence.

Yet proponents of charter schools refuse to acknowledge any problems posed by having publicly funded school operations left completely unregulated, bereft of transparency, and accountable only to the very narrow range of test scores they can mangage to produce by using intensive test prep and selective enrollment and pushing out of low performers.

Bryant adds:

In a ten-year retrospective on the New Orleans school reform model, Emma Brown wrote for The Washington Post, “Many community members feel that the city schools are worse off in ways that can’t be captured in data or graphs, arguing that parents have less voice than they once did and that the new system puts some of the neediest children at a disadvantage, especially those with disabilities or who are learning English as a second language.”

Today, over 20,000 children in New Orleans remain in D- and F-rated schools, based on state rankings, and schools are on a three-year slide, dropping 65 percent from 2014 to 2017. Most of the top-ranked schools are more than 50 percent white, and black students are far less likely to be taught by credentialed teachers, to attend schools ranked A or B, and to have access to advanced courses.

So evidence that charter schools have yielded academic gains in New Orleans or anywhere else are muddled at best. Nevertheless, establishment Democrats like Leonhardt argue charter school skeptics are the ones driven by ideology and twisting of facts.

There’s a reason for the desperate arguments promoted by Leonhardt and other charter school proponents.

Just as the general public supports progressive proposals for universal health care and minimum wage, surveys find that Americans have increased confidence in public schools while support for charter schools has dropped by double digit percentages among Democrats and Republicans.

Now there’s some facts for you.

If charters were as beneficent as Leonhardt says, we would expect to see dramatic charter gains in cities like Detroit and Milwaukee. But that hasn’t happened.