The Public School Advantage

The Public School Advantage PDF Author: Christopher A. Lubienski
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022608907X
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 299

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Book Description
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. From the growth of vouchers and charter schools to the implementation of No Child Left Behind, 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. For decades research showing that students at private schools perform better than students at public ones has been used to promote the benefits of the private sector in education, including vouchers and charter schools—but much of these data are now nearly half a century old. Drawing on two recent, large-scale, and nationally representative databases, the Lubienskis show that any benefit seen in private school performance now is more than explained by demographics. Private schools have higher scores not because they are better institutions but because their students largely come from more privileged backgrounds that offer greater educational support. After correcting for demographics, the Lubienskis 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. Even more surprising, they show that 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. Despite our politics, we all agree on the fundamental fact: education deserves our utmost care. The Public School Advantage offers exactly that. By examining schools within the diversity of populations in which they actually operate, it provides not ideologies but facts. And the facts say it clearly: education is better off when provided for the public by the public.

The Public School Advantage

The Public School Advantage PDF Author: Christopher A. Lubienski
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022608907X
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 299

Get Book Here

Book Description
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. From the growth of vouchers and charter schools to the implementation of No Child Left Behind, 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. For decades research showing that students at private schools perform better than students at public ones has been used to promote the benefits of the private sector in education, including vouchers and charter schools—but much of these data are now nearly half a century old. Drawing on two recent, large-scale, and nationally representative databases, the Lubienskis show that any benefit seen in private school performance now is more than explained by demographics. Private schools have higher scores not because they are better institutions but because their students largely come from more privileged backgrounds that offer greater educational support. After correcting for demographics, the Lubienskis 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. Even more surprising, they show that 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. Despite our politics, we all agree on the fundamental fact: education deserves our utmost care. The Public School Advantage offers exactly that. By examining schools within the diversity of populations in which they actually operate, it provides not ideologies but facts. And the facts say it clearly: education is better off when provided for the public by the public.

Public Funds for Church and Private Schools

Public Funds for Church and Private Schools PDF Author: Richard James Gabel
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 882

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Book Description


Public School Choice Vs. Private School Vouchers

Public School Choice Vs. Private School Vouchers PDF Author: Richard D. Kahlenberg
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision upholding the constitutionality of public funding for private religious schools, the debate over private school vouchers has intensified. This volume is a compilation of articles, papers, and discussions on public school choice and private school vouchers.

NeoVouchers

NeoVouchers PDF Author: Kevin Grant Welner
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 0742540790
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 195

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Book Description
While school vouchers have captured the headlines, a different policy has captured the students. Tuition tax credit laws are now entrenched in Arizona, Florida, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Iowa, and Georgia, and they affect far more students. Yet few people understand the nature of these policies or the political and legal issues surrounding them. This book provides a comprehensive analysis of the structure, legality, and policy implications of tuition tax credits, which have garnered only scant attention even while expanding to cover more students than the voucher policies they're designed to emulate. At a time when tax credit policies are becoming a major form of American school choice, this book offers insights into both the strengths and weaknesses of the approach. Book jacket.

The Vatican Exposed

The Vatican Exposed PDF Author: Paul L. Williams
Publisher: Prometheus Books
ISBN: 1615921427
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
Over 50 billion dollars in securities. Gold reserves that exceed those of industrialized nations. Real estate holdings that equal the total area of many countries. Opulent palaces containing the world's greatest art treasures. These are some of the riches of the Roman Catholic Church. Yet in 1929 the Vatican was destitute. Pope Pius XI, living in a damaged, leaky, pigeon-infested Lateran Palace, could hear rats scurrying through the walls, and he worried about how he would pay for even basic repairs to unclog the overburdened sewer lines and update the antiquated heating system. How did the Church manage in less than seventy-five years such an incredible reversal of fortune? The story here told by Church historian Paul L. Williams is intriguing, shocking, and outrageous. The turnaround began on February 11, 1929, with the signing of the Lateran Treaty between the Vatican and fascist leader Benito Mussolini. Through this deal Mussolini gained the support of the staunchly Catholic Italian populace, who at the time followed the lead of the Church. In return, the Church received, among other benefits, a payment of $90 million, sovereign status for the Vatican, tax-free property rights, and guaranteed salaries for all priests throughout the country from the Italian government. With the stroke of a pen the pope had solved the Vatican's budgetary woes practically overnight, yet he also put a great religious institution in league with some of the darkest forces of the 20th century. Based on his years of experience as a consultant for the FBI, Williams produces explosive and never-before published evidence of the Church's morally questionable financial dealings with sinister organizations over seven decades through today. He examines the means by which the Vatican accrued enormous wealth during the Great Depression by investing in Mussolini's government, the connection between Nazi gold and the Vatican Bank, the vast range of Church holdings in the postwar boom period, Paul VI's appointment of Mafia chieftain Michele Sindona as the Vatican banker, a billion-dollar counterfeit stock fraud uncovered by Interpol and the FBI, the "Ambrosiano Affair" called "the greatest financial scandal of the 20th Century" by the New York Times, the mysterious death of John Paul I, profits from an international drug ring operating out of Gdansk, Poland, and revelations about current dealings. For both Catholics and non-Catholics this troubling expose of corruption in one of the most revered religious institutions in the world will serve as an urgent call for reform.

Paying for Private Schools

Paying for Private Schools PDF Author: Howard Glennerster
Publisher: Viking Adult
ISBN:
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description


Public Vs. Private

Public Vs. Private PDF Author: Robert N. Gross
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190644575
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
Americans choose from a dizzying array of schools, loosely categorized as "public" and "private." How did these distinctions emerge, and what do they tell us about the relationship in the United States between public authority and private enterprise? Challenged by the rise of Catholic and other parochial schools in the nineteenth century, states sought to protect the public school monopoly through regulation. Ultimately, however, Robert N. Gross shows how the public policies that resulted produced a stable educational marketplace, where choice flourished.

Academically Adrift

Academically Adrift PDF Author: Richard Arum
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226028577
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
In spite of soaring tuition costs, more and more students go to college every year. A bachelor’s degree is now required for entry into a growing number of professions. And some parents begin planning for the expense of sending their kids to college when they’re born. Almost everyone strives to go, but almost no one asks the fundamental question posed by Academically Adrift: are undergraduates really learning anything once they get there? For a large proportion of students, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa’s answer to that question is a definitive no. Their extensive research draws on survey responses, transcript data, and, for the first time, the state-of-the-art Collegiate Learning Assessment, a standardized test administered to students in their first semester and then again at the end of their second year. According to their analysis of more than 2,300 undergraduates at twenty-four institutions, 45 percent of these students demonstrate no significant improvement in a range of skills—including critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing—during their first two years of college. As troubling as their findings are, Arum and Roksa argue that for many faculty and administrators they will come as no surprise—instead, they are the expected result of a student body distracted by socializing or working and an institutional culture that puts undergraduate learning close to the bottom of the priority list. Academically Adrift holds sobering lessons for students, faculty, administrators, policy makers, and parents—all of whom are implicated in promoting or at least ignoring contemporary campus culture. Higher education faces crises on a number of fronts, but Arum and Roksa’s report that colleges are failing at their most basic mission will demand the attention of us all.

The Constitution & Religion

The Constitution & Religion PDF Author: Robert S. Alley
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 558

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Book Description
"Edited with a carefully prepared historical introduction that places the First Amendment in the context of eighteenth-century debates over religious freedom, The Constitution and Religion offers a fresh analysis of the amendment's origins. In a collection of fifty recent and historical decisions concerning freedom of religion, Robert S. Alley places readers at the heart of the national debate, presenting the cases without editorial comment. By carefully extracting extended footnoting and citations that, in the full text, tend to separate legal opinions from public interest, Alley has cast the justices' thoughts in a format that captures the drama and, frequently, the eloquence of the prose that is, for now, the law of the land."--Jacket.

Between Church and State

Between Church and State PDF Author: James W. Fraser
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN: 9780312233396
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
Today, the ongoing battle between religion and public education is once again a burning issue in the United States. Prayer in the classroom, the teaching of creationism, the representation of sexuality in the classroom, and the teaching of morals are just a few of the subjects over which these institutions are skirmishing. James Fraser shows that though these battles have been going on for as long as there have been public schools, there has never been any consensus about the proper relationship between religion and public education. Looking at the most difficult question of how private issues of faith can be reconciled with the very public nature of schooling, Fraser paints a picture of our multicultural society that takes our relationship with God into account.