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The widespread popularity of charter 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.
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.
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.
The widespread popularity of charter 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.
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.
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