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Amid the meandering paragraphs and lamentations about how the charter school movement has lost its way, The Center for Education Reform is trying to pinpoint where exactly John Merrow’s blog post went off the rails, and where it ended up.

It might’ve been when he said, “every Tom, Dick and Harry” have been able to open a charter school under a university authorizer.

Central Michigan University, one of the finest charter authorizing models in the country, has received 259 applications for charter schools in the past decade alone, with 22 (8 percent) of those actually becoming operational. So maybe Tom was able to run a charter school, but Dick and Harry weren’t.

But that can’t be right; there were six whole paragraphs before reaching that claim.

Unfortunately, it turns out this post was doomed from the outset, tanked by a weird analogy comparing nondescript signs for charter schools and restaurants.

This led to Merrow giving credence to Greg Richmond’s labeling of CER as the “leading voice of this free market philosophy” surrounding choice and charters.

Merrow and Richmond might be surprised in finding out that the CER offices do not have shrines dedicated to the likes of Friedrich Hayek and Adam Smith, and the organization as a whole does not have a strict ideological adherence to what Richmond calls a, “free market philosophy.”

Shockingly, Kara Kerwin does not wishfully ask every morning how to make the world a little more laissez-faire.

What CER does focus on is sound policy and Parent Power, knowing that quality charter proliferation can only go so far without strong charter laws on the books. This accounts for the 335 additional charter school campuses created in states graded “A” or “B” on the 2014 Charter School Law Rankings & Scorecard.

After two decades, charter schools continue to be “pockets of innovation,” (to use Merrow’s term) and can continue to be with the proper safeguards in place.

Accepting the premise that charters and the students they serve are set up to fail borrows talking points from the opposition, undermining the ability to create more educational options that parents so desperately need.