The thing that is most irritating about most of the failed reforms is that they began under the leadership of people with no experience in public schools who had contempt for educators and researchers, who they assumed were very inferior to them because they took those low paying relatively low prestige jobs. They thought they were much more intelligent, they had a very romanticized version of markets that ignored the way markets often fail minorities and the poor, and they did not want to learn but simply to impose their obviously superior ideas. They thought that there was no downside risk because of these earlier assumptions and had no notion at all of the scale of damage they could cause in several decades of truly misguided reforms which became the agenda for the Bush-Clinton-Bush-Obama administrations and created another whole system of segregated low quality publicly supported largely unregulated charter schools that divided public resources and put the residual public system into even more difficult financial situations, giving up the idea of common schools and democratic values altogether.
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Bill Ayers 