esquire.com – Here’s a debate I’d like to see pursued vigorously within the Democratic Party. (Hey, everybody else gets to complain about this, why not me?)

Resolved: No matter how noble the original motives, public school “reform” as pursued by private interests in general, and by plutocratic dilettantes in particular, has been an abject failure and an almost limitless vista of low-rent scams and high-tech brigandage.

Through the inexhaustible Diane Ravitch, we have found several recent examples of evidence for the affirmative here. First, there was this account in The New York Times about how the ragged remnants of the Detroit public schools were handed over to the charter-industrial complex willy nilly, and how that notion has crashed and burned in spectacular, if entirely predictable, fashion.