The Atlantic publishes a lot of good stuff; I’ve linked to some of it, here. But it’s disappointing how poor their education coverage can be, and usually for the same reason: a failure to apply appropriate skepticism to self-interested actors making grand claims about the future of education.

This interview with Glenn “Instapundit” Reynolds is not journalism, by any rational definition of the term. I’ve seen tougher interviews of Beyonce. Does Julia Ryan know that it’s her job, as a journalist, to respond to claims about issues of controversy with skeptical inquiry and appropriate pushback? Do her editors know that? (Particularly when the interviewee is selling a book?) Reynolds is a conservative who advocates for typical free-market educational reforms. It’s ed reform boilerplate; you could have read a nearly-identical interview ten years ago. Yet Ryan conducts the interview as though these are revelations from the mountain.

And this particular set of arguments desperately needs to be pushed back against, considering how broadly the reforms Reynolds advocates have failed. Reynolds pushes for “school choice,” in the form of charters and private school vouchers, but both charters and private school vouchers have generally been broadly unable to deliver the promised growth in student performance. Reynolds pushes for more technology in the classroom, despite the fact that educational technologies have been shown again and again to make no meaningful difference in student learning outcomes. Reynolds pushes for more online education, despite the enormous problems online educators have even getting students to complete assignments, to say nothing of our profound lack of information about whether they’re actually achieving learning outcomes, or their near-total inability to control against cheating. I’d say those are important points for Ryan to bring up in this interview.

So the question is: does Ryan not know about how broadly these proposed reforms have failed, in empirical research and real-world implementation? If so, why was she selected to perform this interview? Or is it that she knows but didn’t bother to ask? If that’s the case, how is this piece any different from the paid advertorial that got the magazine in so much trouble in the past? Does anyone believe– anyone at all– that Karen Lewis, head of the Chicago public teachers’ union, would get a similar softball interview? There is a very good reason to react to these types of arguments with respectful, open-minded skepticism: they haven’t been shown to be actually helpful in helping educate children, but each has the promise of making for-profit companies a lot of money. Which, naturally, plays into the interests of an economic conservative like Reynolds. Sometimes those on the left are guilty of similar embrace of revolutionary thinking and defense of ideas that have not borne scrutiny, too– the claim that universal pre-K will be a magical educational salve comes to mind. But it’s rampant in the ed reform crowd.

The frustrating thing is that the magazine has shown an ability to publish good, appropriately skeptical work on these topics. Just this past October, Robinson Meyer took a critical look at the state of MOOCs and online education. Not disrespectful, not dismissive– critical, skeptical, in the sense that I assume journalists should be. But Meyer writes for The Atlantic‘s Technology channel, not their Education channel. Maybe that’s the difference.

We’re suffering, as a society, from an embrace of educational woo-woo that has gone on for far too long. In case after case, ideas that sound good– bring the force of markets to bear on school quality! Expand choice! Let Google fix education!– collapse when they come into contact with reality. Ideas that seem good in theory fail to live up to their promise. It’s okay to test out theories that ultimately don’t work. But the school reform crowd, buoyed by a lot of money from people who want to make a lot more, never stops flogging the same ideas, no matter how broadly the are demonstrated to fail. If The Atlantic‘s education channel is going to be a useful source for education journalism, it needs to cultivate skepticism. Our education debate has been dragged down by aggressive triumphalism for too long.