On Thursday, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools released a report outlining reforms states should make to improve the struggling online public charter school sector. The alliance generally supports charter schools, so it’s made plenty of allies with other nonprofit groups that support school choice. Some of those allies pushed back on the report for suggesting, among other reforms, that authorizers should close chronically low-performing virtual charter schools.

“This research lacks the depth and integrity that we need in educational analysis, and ignores the fact that the voluntary choices of parents — when they have them — may not represent others’ conceptions of what works best for their kids,” Jeanne Allen, CEO and founder of the Center for Education Reform, wrote in a press release. “Researchers agree that this view of the data is superficial and ignores who and what is gained by a particular kind of schooling approach… This report is troubling in that it suggests that the measure of a school’s effectiveness is an average of who gets tested, not who gets served and the conditions under which they enter or leave.”