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Recent calls for stronger regulation of charter schools have raised the ire of some charter school movement True Believers. Their over-the-top response says more about the limits of their ideology than it does about the dangers of regulation.

Secretary Duncan, hardly an enemy of the charter movement, called for measures to hold low-performing charter schools accountable for their performance. The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools followed suit with recommendations to strengthen oversight of new charter schools.

“Blasphemy!” cried the True Believers.

Free marketeer John Stossel tarred the Charter Alliance people as “bureaucrats” for even entertaining the idea:

National Alliance bureaucrats weeding out bad schools will fail as government bureaucrats failed….

Sure, some charter schools are lousy. But failure is part of innovation. Parents will quickly figure out if their kids’ school is lousy, and if they are allowed other choices, they’ll pull their kids out. The weak schools will die from lack of customers. The best schools will grow, and help more kids.

Of course, Stossel has long cherished sublime free market theories untainted by supporting evidence. He's not so concerned about recent findings that traditional public schools perform as well as or better than 83 percent of charter schools: Every day, and in every way, the market will make things better and better.

But Stossel doesn’t ask some important follow-up questions: Are families with children in low-performing charters actually voting with their feet? If so, where are they going? To other low-performing charters? Thoughtful charter proponents agree that the best charter models, the ones that grab most of the headlines, are very difficult to scale up quickly.

Many charter and voucher advocates have begun abandoning the market competition justification for their preferred reforms. The evidence just won't back them up. Public school critics are often dismayed by strong public support for even struggling local public schools. Witness, for example, community reactions when districts try to close very troubled schools. And it doesn’t help that parents must contend with bewildering school grading systems drawing often conflicting conclusions from the same assessment data .

What's worse, some families choose to abandon what seem to be very successful charter schools.  For example, Kipp schools in the Bay Area experienced over 50 percent attrition from students and parents, many of whom presumably decided that the schools were not right for them.

So let’s discard the notion that the invisible hand can do all the work of thoughtful regulation. Some, like Stossel and Andrew Coulson, won’t be moved by reason, but I suspect they are actually not all that concerned about quality. Like many free market ideologues, they are content to let freedom from regulation be its own reward.

For the rest of us, thoughtful regulations and accountability systems make sense. They allow us to keep tabs on the quality of all public schools, including charters. If well designed, they can help us create and promote a compelling vision of success. And that vision ultimately has less to do with governance structures than with the policies and practices that affect teaching and learning.

And don’t forget: Both charters and regular public schools can be incubators for innovative reforms.