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The education "establishment" and education "reformers" are not so different from one another after all. Just ask the Fordham Foundation’s Mike Petrilli.

As Petrilli suggests, reformers in the charter school community have received a strong dose of reality: It turns out that it’s not so easy to close achievement gaps and raise student performance. Faced with disappointing news about their schools’ performance, charter advocates have resorted to arguments than have long been anathema to reformers: We need more money! Those standardized tests don’t measure what’s really important!

More recently, charter supporters have been changing their tune about regulation. Reformers are discovering that we cannot use a regulatory vise to squeeze higher performance out of traditional schools while trusting that charter and voucher schools will flourish in boundless freedom. Frustration with both No Child Left Behind and lackluster charter school results has prompted people of various ideological stripes to think more deeply about the benefits and perils of regulation.

Growing national attention to charter school accountability has separated the thoughtful education reformers from the ideologues. While a growing number of reformers show a strong commitment to charter school quality and accountability, privatization hardliners have allowed their anti-regulatory (and anti-government) fanaticism to swamp any concern about school performance and equity. John Stossel’s outrage over the National Alliance of Public Charter Schools’ recent call for accountability is a case in point.

But take the extremists out of the equation and you’ll find waning confidence that new governance structures alone will solve difficult education problems. Charter and traditional public schools face similar challenges. Both types of schools must improve the quality of curriculum and instruction. All schools that educate children at public expense must embrace accountability and own up to their shortcomings.

Mike Usdan believes the reformers and establishment could learn a great deal from each other. In a March 2009 commentary, he argued that the establishment could benefit from the reformers' appetite for transformation. The reformers, in turn, could benefit from the establishment’s "frontline practitioner perspectives on the realities of teaching and learning, which the top-down business, political and foundation leaders who are distant from the classroom cannot experience."

Unfortunately, some national columnists prefer to write about pitched battles between the establishment and the reformers. Their shrill and simplistic attacks on the establishment have had a corrosive effect on school reform discussions. Yet such attacks will become more difficult to mount as fresh young reformers become the "new establishment," to borrow Usdan’s phrase. We’re all in the same boat, so all hands on deck!