Christopher A. Lubienski – författare

Nearly the whole of America's partisan politics centers on a single question: Can markets solve our social problems? And for years this question has played out ferociously in the debates about how we should educate our children. Policy makers have increasingly turned to market-based models to help improve our schools, believing that private institutions - because they are competitively driven - are better than public ones. With The Public School Advantage, Christopher A. and Sarah Theule Lubienski offer powerful evidence to undercut this belief, showing that public schools in fact outperform private ones. Decades of research have shown that students at private schools score, on average, at higher levels than students do at public schools. Drawing on two large-scale, nationally representative databases, the Lubienskis show, however, that this difference is more than explained by demographics-private school students largely come from more privileged backgrounds, offering greater educational support.After correcting for demographics, the authors go on to show that gains in student achievement at public schools are at least as great and often greater than those at private ones, and the very mechanism that market-based reformers champion-autonomy - may be the crucial factor that prevents private schools from performing better. Alternatively, those practices that these reformers castigate, such as teacher certification and professional reforms of curriculum and instruction, turn out to have a significant effect on school improvement. Offering facts, not ideologies, The Public School Advantage reveals that education is better off when provided for the public by the public.

Nearly the whole of America's partisan politics centers on a single question: Can markets solve our social problems? And for years this question has played out ferociously in the debates about how we should educate our children. Policy makers have increasingly turned to market-based models to help improve our schools, believing that private institutions - because they are competitively driven - are better than public ones. With The Public School Advantage, Christopher A. and Sarah Theule Lubienski offer powerful evidence to undercut this belief, showing that public schools in fact outperform private ones. Decades of research have shown that students at private schools score, on average, at higher levels than students do at public schools. Drawing on two large-scale, nationally representative databases, the Lubienskis show, however, that this difference is more than explained by demographics-private school students largely come from more privileged backgrounds, offering greater educational support.After correcting for demographics, the authors go on to show that gains in student achievement at public schools are at least as great and often greater than those at private ones, and the very mechanism that market-based reformers champion-autonomy - may be the crucial factor that prevents private schools from performing better. Alternatively, those practices that these reformers castigate, such as teacher certification and professional reforms of curriculum and instruction, turn out to have a significant effect on school improvement. Offering facts, not ideologies, The Public School Advantage reveals that education is better off when provided for the public by the public.

Education policymakers often demonstrate surprisingly little awareness of how popular reforms impact teaching and teacher education. In this book, well-regarded scholars help readers develop a more robust understanding of the nature of teacher preparation, as well as an in-depth grasp of how popular policies, practices, and ideologies have taken root domestically and internationally.

When charter schools first arrived on the American educational scene, few observers suspected that within two decades thousands of these schools would be established, serving almost a million and a half children across forty states. The widespread popularity of these schools, and of the charter movement itself, speaks to the unique and chronic desire for substantive change in American education. As an innovation in governance, the ultimate goal of the charter movement is to improve learning opportunities for all students—not only those who attend charter schools but also students in public schools that are affected by competition from charters. In The Charter School Experiment, a select group of leading scholars traces the development of one of the most dynamic and powerful areas of education reform. Contributors with varying perspectives on the charter movement carefully evaluate how well charter schools are fulfilling the goals originally set out for them: introducing competition to the school sector, promoting more equitable access to quality schools, and encouraging innovation to improve educational outcomes. They explore the unintended effects of the charter school experiment over the past two decades, and conclude that charter schools are entering a new phase of their development, beginning to serve purposes significantly different from those originally set out for them.