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What is it about charter schools and food? The Hassels say charters are like spaghetti. You try out a bunch of different recipes, decide which ones taste best, and discard the ones you don’t like. Corey Bower says charters are more like pizza. It tastes great, but you can’t eat it all the time. And then there are all the people who argue over whether charters “cream” the best students.

Much of this boils down to two questions: Is there enough of the good stuff to go around? Is the good stuff always good, no matter where and when you serve it? Despite what fire-breathing charter boosters or detractors might tell you, we don’t have very good answers to either question.

Let’s start with Emily and Bryan Hassel and the spaghetti metaphor:

You try ten different variations. Despite your best efforts, three are worse than the original. Five are no better, but two are markedly superior…. [Y]ou avoid the eight bad and OK recipes, make more of the two good ones, and try more new recipes that build on the ones that pleased your palate. Your average experiment in round 1 was a “failure,” but your average meal going forward is going to be pretty tasty.

So charters are as easy to replicate as a good batch of spaghetti? I’m not so sure. We might live in a world where the market offers different tomatoes in different weeks, fresh basil sells out by Tuesday morning, and the stove’s temperature is devilishly difficult to regulate. Can we find enough teachers willing to put in the grueling hours required by many of the charter models? Is student motivation an inexhaustible commodity? Will a charter school that succeeds in one community necessarily succeed in another? (Bower looks at some of these questions in more detail.)

Should these questions dash all hopes of charter school expansion? Of course not. But you'd think they'd prompt a bit more caution among the charter movement's biggest boosters in the media. Don't hold your breath.

Which brings us back to another one of our gastronomic metaphors....  Newspapers have seized on Carolyn Hoxby's study of New York City's charter schools to declare that they do not "cream" the best students from public schools. "'Creaming' is a crock," declares the Wall Street Journal. Hoxby "demolishes the argument that charter schools outperform traditional public schools only because they get the 'best students,'" crows the Washington Post.

Unfortunately, neither newspaper's assessment is true. The strength of Hoxby's study is that it compares students who won lotteries to attend charters to students who enrolled in the same lotteries but lost. The students who "lotteried in" did better that those who "lotteried out" and remained in the public schools, Hoxby concludes. But the charters are still full of students and families motivated enough to join the lotteries. The same can't be said for traditional public schools. Even charter supporter Mike Petrilli argues that "peer effects" could explain the charters' success. It pays to surround yourself with other ambitious students.

This doesn't mean that the best charter schools don't deserve praise--or that there shouldn't be more of them. But it would be nice if the media would stop pushing charters as a panacea. It's not easy to replicate the best ones, and it's far too easy to crank out some pretty lousy ones. (A recent Stanford study of the nation's charter schools found that the lousy ones outnumber the very good ones. You would look in vain for Wall Street Journal or Washington Post commentaries on that study.)

Andy Rotherham and Richard Whitmire argue that the media have abandoned critics of school reform. My sense as an avid newspaper reader is that they’re right. But all too often journalists have also abandoned their critical faculties. And this abdication of their responsibility does not signal the golden age of reform Rotherham and Whitmire think it does. If anything, the premature hype might damage the cause of reform.

We’re all hungry for something better. But let’s make sure our eyes don’t get bigger than our stomachs.

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