Do Charter Schools Threaten Public Education? Emerging Evidence from Fifteen Years of a Quasi-Market for Schooling

Supporters of public education have long feared that charter schools will threaten the public system, both by 1) creaming off the most advantaged students and 2) undermining political support for the public system. These fears have not been borne out. Blacks are disproportionately in charters, whites are disproportionately in traditional public schools, and Hispanics are fairly evenly distributed between the two. Looking at class measures, poor students are distributed fairly equally between the two types of schools. And turning to other measures of privilege, the evidence does not point strongly in either direction. My conclusions are not without qualification. The article identifies some domains in which cream-skimming might develop and others where more research is needed. Moreover, the evidence does not support the claims of some charter school advocates that charter schools serve an especially disadvantaged population of students. Regarding the question of public funding, privatization in the education context may have the effect of creating an additional constituency for increased overall education funding. Charter school advocates have moved away from claims that charters will cut costs and instead now focus on securing additional public funding. I argue that the structure of education funding means that charter school efforts to obtain greater public support will likely depend on increasing per pupil spending in all public schools

No Ordinary Success: The Boundaries of School Reform

How much can schools improve the life prospects of children growing up in poor neighborhoods? This question has divided the education community since at least the 1960s, when a group of researchers led by James Coleman attempted to quantify the extent to which segregation hurt black children. Coleman concluded that differences in family background had a greater impact on student achievement than did differences in school quality. Almost 40 years later, former New York Times education columnist Richard Rothstein revisited the question. In a series of lectures at Columbia University’s Teachers College that became the book Class and Schools (2004), Rothstein chronicled the ways in which out-of-school factors undermine low-income children. Poor kids arrive at school knowing fewer words; live in substandard (often lead-poisoned) housing; lack healthcare; spend afternoons, weekends, and summers in neighborhoods without decent parks or libraries; face discrimination in the workplace after they leave school; and so on. This part of Rothstein’s argument was not new to anyone familiar with the lives of poor children. But he made one additional claim that upset many educators. According to Rothstein, the challenges facing low-income students meant that they would always do worse, on average, than their higher-income peers. I devoured Class and Schools when it came out; it seemed an urgent call for our nation to address out-of-school factors holding poor children back. Others saw (and see) Rothstein as defeatist, apologizing for school failure and telling inner-city teachers and kids that they will never beat the odds. The argument erupted again last year when two groups of education reformers set out what were widely seen as competing agendas. The Education Equality Project—led by New York City schools Chancellor Joel Klein, Washington, D.C. schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee, and minister-activist Al Sharpton—emphasized school accountability, tough standards, and changes in how teachers are hired, fired, and paid. The other group, formed by the Economic Policy Institute (Rothstein’s home), called for a “Broader, Bolder Approach,” insisting that schools alone cannot be expected to successfully educate poor students. Schools need help, they said, in the form of expanded health care, afterschool and summer programs, quality early childhood initiatives, and the like. Although the rhetoric from the two camps does not always reflect it, the gap between them is narrowing. Two important new books on schools suggest it should narrow further still

The Rise and Fall of School Vouchers: A Story of Religion, Race, and Politics

This Article examines why school vouchers have failed to garner the support that so many assumed would follow the Court\u27s decision in Zelman. The explanation, I suggest, concerns religion, race, and politics. The original rationale for vouchers was what I call the values claim -vouchers protected the right of parents to send their child to a school that reinforced their values. Originally promoted by Catholics, the values claim was adopted by evangelical Christians concerned about the secularization of public schools after the 1960s. Although the values claim was central for most of the history of the voucher movement, in the decade leading up to Zelman, voucher advocates replaced the values claim with what I call the racial-justice claim. This rationale emphasized vouchers as part of a civil rights struggle to obtain academically rigorous private education for low-income and minority parents. Redefining vouchers in this manner had political and legal advantages, and paved the way for the Court\u27s decision in Zelman upholding vouchers. Since Zelman, however, two trends have emerged that spell trouble for the future of the voucher movement. First, there are tensions between the values and racial-justice claims for vouchers, as the two claims lead to very different types of voucher programs that appeal to divergent political constituencies. Second, the voucher movement has been hurt by the rise of the accountability movement in education. No Child Left Behind was enacted the same year that Zelman was decided, meaning that the Court gave the green light to the voucher movement at exactly the same time that state and national education policy began to demand greater oversight of all schools, including private schools accepting vouchers. For schools today, accountability means less local control, more tests, and stricter government standards. Conservative Christians, who once led the voucher movement, reject these intrusions into school autonomy. As a result, they are less likely to support modern voucher programs. My approach in this Article is historical, predictive, and normative. It is historical in that I trace the development of the values and racial-justice claims for school vouchers, exploring the tensions between the two claims. It is predictive because I suggest that the future of this educational reform is much less rosy than voucher supporters thought when Zelman was decided. Thus, I predict that Zelman may end up mattering much less than so many had thought it would. Finally, my approach is normative for I argue that it would be unfortunate if I am right about the demise of vouchers. While voucher defenders have vastly overstated the racial-justice claim, there is some prospect that vouchers might improve educational outcomes for low-income African American children. I argue that vouchers should be permitted at least until they can be more thoroughly evaluated to determine their impact on a group so in need of better educational opportunities

Financing Peace: International and National Resources for Postconflict Countries and Fragile States

This background paper for the World Bank’s World Development Report 2011 discusses current financing arrangements for postconflict countries and fragile states, with a focus on official development assistance. In recent years a consensus has emerged that in these “difficult environments” the core objective is to build effective and legitimate governance structures that secure public confidence through provision of personal security, equal justice and the rule of law, economic well-being, and essential social services including education and health. Yet tensions persist between business-as-usual development policies on the one hand and policies responsive to the demands of peacebuilding on the other. The preferential allocation of aid to “good performers,” in the name of maximizing its payoff in terms of economic growth, militates against aid to fragile and conflict-affected states. Compelling arguments can be made for assistance to “poor performers” if this can help to prevent conflict and build peace, but the difficulties that prompted donors to become more selective in aid allocation remain all too real. The move to selectivity came in response to evidence that in some contexts aid has perverse effects on economic performance. The same dilemma arises when aid is assessed in terms of its impact on peace and conflict: sometimes aid helps to prevent conflict and build peace, but sometimes it can have the opposite effect. This paper considers how international aid can more effectively help to build resilient states and durable peace.aid; conflict; peacebuilding; statebuilding; fiscal capacity

Community Policing and Youth as Assets

Over a decade after it was first introduced, community policing remains the most important innovation in American policing today. Called the most significant era in police organizational change since the introduction of the telephone, automobile, and two way radio, community policing has been supported by the past three Presidents, Congress, every major police organization, and much of the public. A broad cross-section of the legal academy also endorses community policing. Those who seek new ways for inner-city communities to mobilize against disorder and crime support it, as do others whose principal concern is reducing police abuse of minorities

Securing Natural Gas: Entity-Attentive Security Research

Natural gas is a troublesome and ‘wayward’ material (Bridge, 2004; 396). Amongst other qualities, it is invisible, intangible, naturally odorless, highly inflammable, and constantly resistant to the forces that contain it. This thesis provides an account of how these qualities both introduce a series of insecurities to everyday social environments, and also make it a challenging material to govern. Specifically, I examine the way that security is performed around gas circulations in the UK’s transmission and distribution pipelines, and I describe how a range of specialized security practices have been developed according to the particular challenges that gas’s materiality presents. In developing this account, I make two claims. First, I argue that performances of security cannot be adequately understood without attending to the specific qualities of the circulating elements around which it is practiced. Here I build upon Dillon’s (1996) observation that security has tended to be treated as a noun that is independent of the elements that it is practiced in relation to. As a consequence, it has typically been framed as a broadly transferrable set of practices that can be more-or-less unproblematically applied to very different elements. I suggest that this abstraction has resulted in the further reduction of security into two broad practices: acts of circulatory filtration (in which risky elements are separated from flows of safe bodies, materials and things), and acts of circulatory maintenance (whereby security is performed by ensuring the continuity of particular circulations). It is my contention in this thesis that security scholars need to pay better attention to the ways in which the specific material qualities of circulating elements are generative of particular forms of securing practice. Indeed, by examining the way that security is performed around gas, I describe a series of practices that far exceed those described in accounts that present security as a matter of circulatory filtration or maintenance. My second claim is that the spaces and scales at which security is analyzed need to be expanded. I demonstrate how the critical security studies and energy security literatures have both tended to focus on security’s practice within particular nodes, at the exclusion of the performances of security (and forms of insecurity) that develop across the journeys of circulating elements; as they move between nodes. Indeed, I suggest that circulation has often been reduced in these accounts to thin, straight, and featureless lines that are largely inconsequential for performances of security. I seek to trouble this reduction, following gas as it travels through the UK gas transport infrastructures, tracing the various forms of (in)security that develop across these journeys. As a consequence of these two claims, security takes quite a different form in this account to its various depictions in the existing security literatures. I describe it as consisting of a series of ontological projects that are enacted across the lengths and breadths of gas’s circulations, and through which the material reality of natural gas is constantly (re)organised in attempts to facilitate, ‘compensate for’, and ‘cancel out’ particular kinds of perceived potential phenomena (Foucault, 2007; 36). Significantly, these performances are shown to be structured, or ‘programmed’ (Latour, 1991), through the coming together of multiple interests that pertain to a variety of heterogeneous actors and manifold referent objects. Different interests are shown to come together across gas’s journeys, and to undergo ongoing processes of negotiation that result in a variety of security performances, through which different imperatives are pursued. As such, I suggest that gas becomes ‘modulated’ (Deleuze, 1992) – it is constantly transformed from moment to moment, across the full duration of its circulatory journeys

The Voices from the Sanctuary: The Female Narrators of J M Coetzee\u27s In the Heart of the Country and Doris Lessing\u27s Memoirs of a Survivor

In both In the Heart of the Country (1977) by J. M. Coetzee and The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974) by Doris Lessing, a female narrator fabricates a sanctuary—mental rather than physical—that enables each woman to challenge, deflect, or adapt to a conflict and that shelters her from a hostile, patriarchal society. For Coetzee\u27s narrator (Magda) in In the Heart of the Country, writing, rewriting, and editing provide the necessary devices to establish her asylum in her quest for identity. For Lessing\u27s narrator (the survivor) in The Memoirs of a Survivor, escaping behind the wall allows her to find refuge from and to bring order to a rapidly disintegrating society. Because the relationship between the author and narrator in these two novels influences the development of these particular features and characteristics of each narrator, an examination of voice provides evidence that the gender of the author does indeed affect the development of the narrators, evident primarily in the images of time and the engendered perceptions of the narrators. Magda writes from the masculine perspective; her voice represents the male-dominated world of Coetzee controlling the situation from a position of power. A dominant first person I helps the reader view her not simply as a spinster in the middle of nowhere, but rather as a member of the patriarchal system found in the outside world. In the situation of Lessing\u27s survivor, her feminine perspective and feminine empowerment project a strong woman who makes the transition from a patriarchal outside world to a matriarchal world behind the wall. Her actions behind the wall show an acceptance of the past and the present, but also a projection of a better future when dealing with both environments. Without this particular attitude and exacting strength, the survivor could not have successfully moved into the world of the wall. This feminine perspective and empowerment influence her writing style and require the inclusion of others\u27 stories. The shelters fabricated by the narrators, examined in the second section of the paper, are defined by the nature of the spatial dimensions (figurative and literal) of the sanctuaries. This concept of sanctuary evolves from writings about ancient Greek cities in which sanctuaries represent places of asylum and refuge. The narrators\u27 sanctuaries are discussed in terms of an asylum for Magda and a refuge for the survivor. Magda establishes an asylum to adapt to her masculine fight against nature, evidenced by the voice she employs to deal with the outside world. In contrast to Magda\u27s mental asylum, the corporeal nature of the refuge behind the wall represents the unity of the survivor\u27s joining of feminine perception and feminine power. Within the two novels, the personalities, actions, thoughts, relationships, decisions, writing style, voice, and construction of the sanctuaries must be understood within the framework of the perspective and empowerment afforded the narrators by their authors