Charter Schools and Their Enemies

Sowell’s design is to remove the usual confound. He compares standardized-test results for charter schools and traditional public schools housed in the same New York City buildings — the same neighbourhoods, the same demographics, often the same street address — and finds the charter students substantially ahead, in many cases by margins that close the gap with the city’s affluent districts. The second half turns from the results to the opposition, arguing that the resistance does not come from parents, who enter lotteries in numbers far exceeding the seats, but from teachers’ unions and education bureaucracies whose position the comparison undermines.

Why it’s on the list: It sits in the curriculum’s institutions and public administration section, which is about how governing arrangements evolve and who resists the evolution; charter schools are the section’s live American test case.

Where I saw it: Brendan McCord’s Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List, in the section on Evolution of Institutions and Public Administration. The full 211-entry transcription is on The Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List.

Connections

• Charter Schools — the subject.
• School Choice — the policy question behind it.
• Education — the institution being compared.
• Incentives — the book’s account of who opposes the comparison and why.
• The Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List — the curriculum this came from.