Customer Reviews

Politics, Markets, and America's Schools

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Politics, Markets and America's schools was published over 20 years ago, but having stayed current in the debate I can highly recommend this book as still being highly relevant for today's debate on how to reform public education.

First and foremost any one star reviewer labeling this as right-wing propaganda did not read it or is willing to lie about what they read.

The Brooking Institute is hardly a conservative think-tank. In fact it is notably a moderate think tank. At the time of publication both Terry Moe and John Chubb were distinguished professors at Stanford University. They are hardly right-wing ideologues. What they are is very knowledgeable and credible academics concerned about the dismal state of public education.

In fact Politics, Markets and America's schools is a scholarly, yet accessible treatment of the factors that contribute to successful schools.

Moe and Chubb do cross-sectional studies of dozens existing studies that examine educational performance and come to their conclusions based upon real data, not ideology.

This book is not an attack on the concept public education, but instead is a critique of what public education has become and how it is structured. Moe and Chubb point out exactly why pubic education is failing and will continue to fail unless some fairly radical actions are taken.

If you want a book that provides a unbiased view of the state of public education (everything they said in 1990 is even more true today) and then makes concrete suggestions on how to improve it, then Politics, Market's and America's Schools is an excellent read that provides a great foundation for this very important debate.

How can we enhance students' performance in America's schools? This is a question raised by many people. One answer has been to enhance choice--whether through vouchers or charter schools or. . . .

One of the most important recent work advocating choice is Chubb and Moe's Politics, Markets, and America's Schools. They present a three part argument: (1) private schools have lower levels of bureaucratic influence; (2) less bureaucratic influence makes school organization more functional; (3) better organized schools produce greater achievement gains among their students. Three separate multiple regression statistical analyses provide modest support for their contentions.

While I do not see any evidence that there is one single "silver bullet" that can magically transform American schools, this book is important to look at as part of a wider dialogue. I think that choice by itself won't make a huge difference; however, it might be one part of a larger picture. And this book is an important component of that debate. . . .

Chubb and Moe are the worst examples of extreme right wing academics who have no first hand knowledge of public schools and work to replace the world's best system of public education (hardly perfect, but continuously improving --in spite of NCLB, etc.) with privatization. This book is a good example of propaganda intended to mislead, misinform, and misdirect.

I first read Chubb and Moe's views on the purported superiority of private secondary schools in the form of a long paper they presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association in New Orleans in 1984. When it was published as a book-length monograph, I was surprised to see that it's methodological and rhetorical limitations were as damaging as in the original paper. Nevertheless, this book remains an oft-cited staple among proponents of private schooling as an institution that is forced to function effectively because it is subject to market forces. Contrast this with public schooling, an institution which ostensibly operates as a lazy monopoly. The most telling passage in Chubb and Moe's polemic can be usefully paraphrased as follows: schools that give higher-order values precedence over market forces inevitably undercut educational effectiveness. Higher-order values include equality of educational opportunity and the tenets of Catholicism. If Chubb and Moe are right, they are asking us to give up a great deal to make markets work.

Beyond that, it's important to acknowledge that Chubb and Moe never get around to actually comparing public and private schools in term of their efficacy in promoting student achievement. Instead, they identify administrative characteristics that they have found to be more common in private high schools then public ones. At that point, they run regression analyses to determine if the bundle of ostensibly efficacious administrative practices is associated with enhanced achievement. They find miniscule advantages, but one wonders if even the statistical significance of these are not artifacts of their unusually large sample size.

Their regression analyses are rendered further problematic by Chubb and Moe's decision to use achievement gains as their dependent variable. A statistically more powerful procedure is to use achievement at time on as one of the control variables, with achievement at time two as the dependent variable.

Perhaps the most disingenuous and troubling part of Chubb and Moe's book is their second chapter, wherein they a present a long list of bivariate analyses and tacitly invite the reader to interpret the results in causal terms that are consistent with their argument. Not 'til the beginning of the third chapter do the authors acknowledge that causal interpretations of bivariate associations are not warranted. By then, however, for the unsuspecting reader unschooled in statistical methods, the damage is done.

Politics, Markets, and America's School is not only a bad book, based on deeply flawed statistical analyses and objectionable substantive demands, it is a fundamentally dishonest book. I doubt that the authors are so ill-informed that they did not appreciate what they were doing, so it's dishonest by design.

I read this book when I was writing my thesis on vouchers and the use of market theory in education. This book was the part of the ground work for the current push for vouchers/charters/scholarships in public education. They clearly articulated the Repubs position which is part of No Child Left Behind (or No Child Left Standing, which is how I see it).

Some studeis refer to questionable studies.