I wrote favorably last week about Charles Murray's Wall Street Journal piece about ed reform, the problems with the ideal of universal higher education, and the necessity of alternative routes to professional certification. I have since read his new book, Real Education, and was both provoked and impressed. But as hard as Murray works to make the case that kids' abilities just are lots more limited than we'd like to believe--as hard as he leans on the obvious point that half the kids are always going to be below average--I still really struggle with the implications of his argument for how hard we ought to try to maximize disadvantaged kids' chances of improving their prospects and deciding their own futures.

I get it that everyone can't be Einstein; I get it that many people go to college who should not. I agree wholeheartedly that we won't resolve the problems with public education by throwing more money at it, and I deeply believe in the most robust system of school choice possible. Those aren't new insights for me. Nor is the idea that we all have limitations, that we can't all be anything we want to be. We are unevenly intelligenced, and, to borrow a trendy phrase, differently abled.

Still, Murray walks a fine line between refusing unreasonably romanticized ideas about kids' potential (everyone can be the best!) and justifying less than stellar schooling because it can't change ability and won't make that much difference in achievement. I don't think that's his goal--but it's lurking there behind a lot of his argument, and that makes a lot of what he has to say hard to swallow. Failing schools are still failing schools--and incompetent teachers are still incompetent teachers, and pathological pedagogies centered on self-esteem and devoid of content remain profoundly damaging to all. Those things aren't the kids' fault--and they really interfere with kids' abilities to realize their potential, whatever that potential may be.

Stories like the one George Will tells about the American Indian Public Charter School in Oakland California seem to fly in the face of the ideas about limitation that Murray presents in Real Education--and they are enormously inspirational accounts of how well kids respond when there is a healthy culture of discipline, expectation, and intellectual seriousness within a school.

Check it out:

OAKLAND, Calif. -- Seated at a solitary desk in the hall outside a classroom, the slender 13-year-old boy with a smile like a sunrise earnestly does remedial algebra, assisted by a paid tutor. She, too, is 13. Both wear the uniform -- white polo shirt, khaki slacks -- of a school that has not yet admitted the boy. It will, because he refuses to go away.

The son of Indian immigrants from Mexico, the boy decided he is going to be a doctor, heard about the American Indian Public Charter School here and started showing up. Ben Chavis, AIPCS' benevolent dictator, told the boy that although he was doing well at school, he was not up to the rigors of AIPCS, which is decorated with photographs of the many students it has sent to the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth. So the boy asked, what must I do?

Telling young people what they must do is what Chavis does. With close- cropped hair and a short beard flecked with gray, he looks somewhat like Lenin, but is less democratic. A Lumbee Indian from North Carolina, he ran track, earned a Ph.D. from the University of Arizona, got rich in real estate ("I wanted to buy back America and lease it to the whites") and decided to fix the world, beginning with AIPCS.

Founded in 1996, it swiftly became a multiculturalists' playground where much was tolerated and little was learned. Chavis arrived in 2000 to reverse that condition. Charter schools are not unionized, so he could trim the dead wood, which included all but one staff member.

David Whitman, in his book "Sweating the Small Stuff: Inner-City Schools and the New Paternalism," reports that in Chicago, from 2003 through 2006, just three of every 1,000 teachers received an "unsatisfactory" rating in annual evaluations; in 87 "failing schools" -- with below average and declining test scores -- 69 had no teachers rated unsatisfactory; in all of Chicago, just nine teachers received more than one unsatisfactory rating and none of them was dismissed. Chavis' teachers come from places such as Harvard, Dartmouth, Oberlin, Columbia, Berkeley, Brown and Wesleyan.

AIPCS is one of six highly prescriptive schools Whitman studied, where "noncognitive skills" -- responsible behaviors such as self-discipline and cooperativeness -- are part of the cultural capital the curriculum delivers. Many inner-city schools feature a monotonous chaos of disruption. AIPCS -- Oakland's highest performing middle school -- stresses obligation, not self-expression. Chavis, now "administrator emeritus," is adamant: "Everyone says we should 'preserve our culture.' There is a lot of our culture we should wipe out."

A visitor to an AIPCS classroom notices that the children do not notice visitors. Students are taught to sit properly -- no slumping -- and keep their eyes on the teacher. No makeup, no jewelry, no electronic devices. AIPCS' 200 pupils take just 20 minutes for lunch and are with the same teacher in the same classroom all day. Rotating would consume at least 10 minutes, seven times a day. Seventy minutes a day in AIPCS' extra-long 196-day school year would be a lot of lost instruction. The school does not close for Columbus Day, Martin Luther King Day or Cesar Chavez Day.

Every student takes four pre-AP (advanced placement) classes. There are three weeks of summer math instruction, three hours of homework a night. Seventh-graders take the SAT. College is assumed.

Paternalism is the restriction of freedom for the good of the person restricted. AIPCS acts in loco parentis because Chavis, who is cool toward parental involvement, wants an enveloping school culture that combats the culture of poverty and the streets.

He and other practitioners of the new paternalism -- once upon a time, schooling was understood as democracy's permissible, indeed obligatory, paternalism -- are proving that cultural pessimists are mistaken: We know how to close the achievement gap that often separates minorities from whites before kindergarten and widens through high school. A growing cohort of people possess the pedagogic skills to make "no excuses" schools flourish.

Unfortunately, powerful factions fiercely oppose the flourishing. Among them are education schools with their romantic progressivism -- teachers should be mere "enablers" of group learning; self-esteem is a prerequisite for accomplishment, not a consequence thereof. Other opponents are the teachers' unions and their handmaiden, the Democratic Party. Today's liberals favor paternalism -- you cannot eat trans fats; you must buy health insurance -- for everyone except children. Odd.