Jack Schneider, historian of education at the College of the Holy Cross, writes in The Atlantic that reformers have constructed a false narrative of educational failure. They say again and again that the “system is broken,” that it needs to be torn apart and built from scratch.

Schneider counters their claims one by one and shows that the system is working better today than it ever did, though it certainly needs to be better still.

Everything must be disrupted, say the reformers. Few of them have ever been teachers or even public school students or parents. But they seem certain that destruction is the right course for American public education.

Schneider marshals a good deal of evidence to show why they are wrong, but he never adequately explains how the reformers came to have these settled and wrongheaded beliefs. He suggests that they live in an echo chamber and only…