texas has been an important player in the emergence of the charter school industry. we test for a competitive effect of charters by looking for changes in student achievement in traditional public schools following charter market penetration. we use an eight-year panel of data on individual student test scores for public schools students in texas in order to evaluate the achievement impact of charter schools. we estimate a model that includes studen/campus spell fixed effects to control for campus demographic and peer group characteristics, and to control directly for student and student family background characteristics. we find a positive and significant effect of charter school penetration on traditional public school student outcomes. (c) 2008 elsevier inc. all rights reserved. the vast majority of literature on school choice, and charter schools in particular, focus on attending an elementary or middle school grades and often focus on test scores or other proximal outcomes. much less is known about the long-term effects of attending a charter school in 9th grade. it is important to fill this information void for a few reasons. first, schools in general affect more than just students' test scores. second, secondary schools (including grades 9-12) make up a larger share of the charter sector. third, school choice depends on freely available information for parents and students to make informed decisions about where to attend, including potential long-term benefits. we add to the empirical research on charter school effects by using a doubly-robust inverse probability weighted approach to evaluate the impacts of secondary charter school attendance on 9th grade behavioral outcomes and individuals propensity to commit crime and participate in elections as young adults in north carolina, a state with a large and growing charter school sector. purpose: school choice policies are expected to generate competition leading to improvement in school practices. however, little is known about how competition operates in public education-particularly in charter schools. this paper examines charter-school leaders' competitive perception formation and the actions taken in response to competition. research methods: using arizona charter-school leaders' responses to an original survey, arizona department of education data, and the common core of data, we examined the factors predicting the labeling of a school as a competitor. we estimated fixed effects logistic regression models which examine factors predicting the labeling of competitor schools and of top competitors. we used logistic regression models to understand charter-school leaders' responses to competition. findings: we find charter-school leaders in arizona perceived at least some competition with other schools, and their perceptions vary by urbanicity. while distance between schools mattered generally for labeling a school as a competitor, distance did not factor into labeling "top competitor" schools. student outcomes did not predict competition between schools, but student demographics were associated with labeling a school a competitor. charter-school leaders responded to competition through changes in outreach and advertising rather than curriculum and instruction. competitive responses were related to the respondent school's quality and the level of perceived competition. implications for research and practice: we found charter-school leaders perceive competition and respond by changing school practices. responses typically focus on marketing activities over productive responses. the novel state-level analysis allows us to test the effects of local market conditions typically absent in the literature. in this special issue, researching 21st century education policy through social network analysis, authors use social network analysis (sna) to explore policy networks, broaden the current literature of sociological approaches to sna, and/or incorporate new lenses for interpreting policy networks from political science or other academic disciplines. this editorial introduction first provides an overview of policy networks and their relevance in education. then, the editors describe existing work applying the tools of sna to education policy and highlight understudied areas before describing the articles included in this issue. these articles apply sna to a variety of education policy issues, including large scale policies such as the every student succeeds act and the common core state standards, charter schools, and the relationship between system and non-system actors. articles highlight multiple applications of sna, including how sna can be used to advance theory, as well as describe and predict policy networks. based on an ethnographic study at a middle school in a midwestern city, this article examines the difficulty in creating anti-racist educational spaces, even in schools with a stated desire to do so. the school's curriculum was mainly based on teachers' abstract ideas of social justice and was not grounded in students' everyday realities. it failed to connect students to larger histories and stories of oppression and resistance, the central tenets of culturally relevant approaches. the school also failed in its attempts to shift its culture around discipline that disproportionately impacted black students. the school's failure to implement culturally relevant and anti-racist curriculum and disciplinary practices illuminates various barriers to such implementation, including a lack of racial and experiential diversity among teachers, a focus on individual behavior rather than classroom and school culture, and a focus on maintaining enrollment as a charter school. this article discusses the globalised phenomenon of public-private partnerships, which involve the private and public sector collaborating to provide infrastructure and service delivery to public institutions. within the education sector, the most commonly known public-private partnerships exist in the united states as charter schools and the united kingdom as academies. discussing this phenomenon in the south african context, this article draws on the collaboration schools pilot project as an example for understanding how the involvement of private partnerships within public schooling is being conceptualised by the western cape education department. framed within the debate of public-private partnerships for the public good, the article provides a critical discussion on how these partnerships are enacted as a decentralisation of state involvement in the provision of public schooling by government. the article concludes by noting that the collaboration schools pilot project, which involves significant changes in policy regarding how schools are governed and managed, requires more rigorous and critical dialogue by all stakeholders as the model unfolds in schools in the western cape. i utilize longitudinal data covering all public school students in florida to study the performance of charter schools and their competitive impact on traditional public schools. controlling for student-level fixed effects, i find achievement initially is lower in charters. however, by their fifth year of operation new charter schools reach a par with the average traditional public school in math and produce higher reading achievement scores than their traditional public school counterparts. among charters, those targeting at-risk and special education students demonstrate lower student achievement, while charter schools managed by for-profit entities peform no differently on average than charters run by nonprofits. controlling for preexisting traditional public school quality, competition from charter schools is associated with modest increases in math scores and unchanged reading scores in nearby traditional public schools. what is the fate of charter school policy in the american states? the authors argue that dramatic new policies brought about by a radical reconfiguration of interests and politics are frequently short lived, though new policies are rarely erased; instead, they reach a compromise between competing sets of interests. the authors test this notion in a study of the evolution of charter school policy in michigan and the district of columbia. they find in michigan that the original law, dramatic in the breadth of its change to public education, has slowly reverted to reflect a balance of power between the ideal positions preferred by proand anti-charter school interests. but in the district of columbia, the innovativeness of the new law has largely been sustained, mainly because organized opposing interests largely failed to emerge. public presentations of research about charter schools have been politicized, polarized, and personalized, fueling cynicism about whether research can generate objective knowledge and promote the collective good. this article draws two distinctions: between politics as a corrupting force and politics as a healthy and necessary component of democratic decision making, and between politicization that permeates the research itself and politicization of the ways in which research is communicated to the policy world. using charter school research as a window into broader issues relating to democracy and societal learning, it identifies factors behind politicization, some of which are particular to the way that issue has evolved, some of which have to do with exacerbating factors in the broader political environment. based on this analysis, it outlines what steps might be taken to strengthen institutions and practices that do not so much seek to buffer research from politics as to improve the ways in which research is used in a political world. public-private partnerships (ppps) have a growing presence in u.s. public schools in activities ranging from standardized testing to after-school programs to charter schools. a smaller scale mode of collaboration between public schools and private actors not typically described as a ppp is fundraising by parents and community members through parent-teacher associations or organizations (ptas or ptos) and schoolor district-level foundations. these organizations have dramatically expanded fundraising in reaction to several trends. this article describes case studies of 2 districts in which school board policy was modified to address concerns that such fundraising produces inequity. in newton, massachusetts, and bellevue, washington, policy limits fundraising benefiting individual schools in favor of approaches to benefit the entire district. drawing on interviews and public documents, the article examines how these policies were adopted and what approach they take to address inequity. it concludes by considering this phenomenon in relation to urban inequality and describing policy concerns on the horizon related to philanthropy of this nature. there is a growing abundance of research on outcomes of charter schools for children, teachers, and communities, yet a paucity of research on why and how charter schools form in the first place. this article presents unique data on charter school applications to show how the early stages of school formation are embedded in, if not driven by, an organizational and institutional context. three organizational theories-neoinstitutional, population ecology, and resource dependence-are used to explain the formation of charter schools. the results suggest that educational organizational environments are indeed key in the process of generating charter schools. nonreligious private schools increase the submission of charter school applications, while the density of extant charter schools in local districts-or saturation, in general-decreases the submission of applications. finally, local political environments and legislative support matter as well. implications for understanding the formation of charter schools are discussed, as is the more general importance of understanding educational options as a function of organizational environments. one of the controversies surrounding charter schools is whether these schools may either "cream skim" high-performing students from traditional public schools or "pushout" low-achieving students or students with discipline histories, leaving traditional public schools to educate the most challenging students. in this study, we use longitudinal statewide data from tennessee and north carolina and linear probability models to examine whether there is evidence consistent with these selective enrollment practices. because school choice programs managed by districts (magnet and open enrollment programs) have a similar ability to cream skim and pushout students, we also examine these outcomes for these programs. across the various school choice programs, magnet schools have the most evidence of cream skimming, but this might be expected as they often have selective admissions. for charter schools, we do not find patterns in the data consistent with cream skimming, but we do find evidence consistent with pushout behaviors based on discipline records. finally, some have raised concerns that students may be pushed out near accountability test dates, but our results suggest no evidence consistent with this claim. student enrollment and transfer patterns between the traditional public and charter school sectors help shape the role of charter schools in the broader educational ecosystem, especially as related to the enrollment and segregation of low-income students, english learners, students of color, and students in special education. we examine patterns of student transfer between traditional public schools and charter schools among four of texas's largest charter networks, which cumulatively make up over one-third of texas charter students. we find that these schools serve fewer special education students than traditional public schools, but a greater share of low-income and english learners. transfers between sectors contribute to enrollment gaps in special education and other classifications, but the findings do not apply uniformly across charter districts, student enrollment classifications, or grade levels. these findings highlight nuanced enrollment patterns between the charter sector and traditional public schools, suggesting that differences in student characteristics between sectors likely stem from a range of sources. policymakers should acknowledge this nuance, consider alternatives to blanket enrollment regulation policies, and conduct similar analyses of enrollment patterns among charter districts. we study how demand responds to the rebranding of existing state schools as autonomous 'academies' in the context of a radical and large-scale reform to the english education system. the academy programme encouraged schools to opt out of local state control and funding but provided parents and students with limited information on the expected benefits. we use administrative data on school applications for three cohorts of students to estimate whether this rebranding changes schools' relative popularity. we find that families particularly, higher income, white british are more likely to rank converted schools above non-converted schools on their applications. we also find that it is mainly schools that are high-performing, popular and proximate to families' homes that attract extra demand after conversion. overall, the patterns we document suggest that families read academy conversion as a signal of future quality gains although this signal is in part misleading as we find limited evidence that conversion causes improved performance. purpose this paper explores how leaders of new public high schools one charter and two innovation schools navigated the journey from school-in-theory to school-in-practice during the school's first three years. school leaders at charter and innovation schools have increased freedom over curriculum, budget, scheduling and personnel when compared to leaders in traditional public schools. design/methodology/approach using case study research, this qualitative, multisite study of school leaders at three schools in an urban district in colorado examined the realities leaders experienced during the first three years of their schools. school leaders participated in semi-structured interviews, which were coded and analyzed for data individual to each school and across the three schools. initial school design plans and district accountability data were also reviewed. findings the study identified two distinct challenges for leaders of these new schools: (1) opening a new school contributes to burnout among school leaders and (2) school leaders face systemic, district-level barriers that impede implementation of a school's founding mission and vision. research limitations/implications a qualitative study of three standalone charter and innovation schools in one urban school district limits generalizability. originality/value the lived experience of school leaders at new, standalone charter and innovation schools is largely neglected in empirical studies. this research illuminates key struggles school leaders experience as they seek to establish new schools with fidelity to district-approved school plans. using new orleans as a site of analysis, this article provides a critical race theory reading of a little studied policy mechanism, the charter school application and authorization process. embedded and competing narratives within charter school applications are analyzed. the authorization process is the central gatekeeping mechanism in the reproduction of charter schools. the authorization process determines who gets to govern schools, including the freedom to set curriculum, discipline policies, personnel, utilization of funds, and their relationship to and role in the communities in which they are located. this article unpacks the community based and "no excuses" discourses within charter applications. it finds patterns of confluence between those narratives and the applicants' racial and educational identities, suggesting that the authorization process worked as a site for the reproduction of racialized neoliberal dominance in post-katrina new orleans, disenfranchising local teachers and communities. education management organisations (emos), for-profit and non-profit management companies engaged in take-over and operation of public education, are becoming big business in the usa and the uk. it is estimated that in the us, emos were projected to generate up to $123 billion dollars in revenue in 2000. in the smaller uk system it is estimated that about pound5 billion of services in public education could be contracted out to private organisations per annum. this paper examines the policy frameworks that have enabled emos to take-over and progressively contribute to the privatisation of public education in two national settings, the usa and england and wales. the british scene is distinctive because government policies that have sought to expand the role of the private sector, via public-private partnerships, in the provision of public sector services and its strong accountability system, have provided opportunities for emos to be engaged in, or take-over, schools and educational administrative services formerly provided by leas. in the us, in the mid-1990s, emos were invited to take over school districts and specific schools. however, this practice has been succeeded by a new focus on taking over the management of charter schools. a large capital market that is able to finance enterprises involved in educational services supports the development of emos in the us. our research findings, however, point to halting progress by emos in public education in the us. there have been well-publicised failures to deliver the promised better education at a lower cost and also well-documented failure to raise student performance levels in school and school districts. the paper concludes with reflections on the extent to which emos have taken forward privatisation and its implications for the governance of education. objective. the purpose of this study is to assess if students enter charter schools at an academic disadvantage compared to students who make other types of school-choice decisions, such as transferring between district schools, from a charter to a district school, or staying in the same school. we assess the demographic and academic characteristics of students prior to choosing to attend a charter school in comparison to students who made other types of school-choice decisions and broaden the operational definition of a "disadvantaged" student when exploring differences between charter and district students to include academic achievement prior to entering a school. methods. the analysis is conducted with student-level panel data and a progressive series of ancova models that were estimated using ordinary least squares (ols) regression. this methodology allows for a comparison of the mean differences in academic achievement among students who made different types of school-choice decisions while controlling for student-level covariates. results. students who transferred from district to charter schools had the lowest levels of prior academic achievement compared to students who made other types of choice decisions. conclusions. when arizona charter authorizers face the deluge of renewal decisions that are approaching, the quality of education available to the next generation of charter school students is at stake. renewal decisions will impact what choices are available going forward and, given the comparative academic disadvantage of charter school students prior to entering, those decisions should take into consideration the starting point for students entering charter schools. access to private schools and public charter schools might improve parent and student satisfaction through competitive pressures and improved matches between educators and students. using ordered probit regression analysis and a nationally representative sample of 13,436 students in the united states in 2016, i compare satisfaction levels of parents and students by school sector. i find that public charter schools and private schools outperform traditional public schools on six measures of parent and student satisfaction. respondents with children in private schools also tend to report higher levels of satisfaction than respondents with children in public charter schools. these results tend to support the theory that access to public charter and private schools could lead to higher levels of satisfaction for families and students. however, although several control variables are included in the analytic models, the results may still be affected by selection bias. nearly 30 years since their inception in the united states, charter schools are now a well-established educational option for parents and students. although they are an important education provider schooling more than 3.1 million students nationwide, we know little about their ability to accumulate fiscal savings for weathering rainy days and sustaining smooth service. unlike most other fiscal savings studies focusing on the unrestricted fund balance, we examine both restricted and unrestricted fund balances across pennsylvania charter schools, this study's unit of analysis. using a newey-west regression and data spanning the years 2011-2019, we show that charter schools consider all fund balance classifications when making savings decisions; albeit the unrestricted was their primary savings vehicle. given their limited revenue portfolio, they are left with only a few options for accumulating fiscal savings. surplus from tuition payments and additional revenues from private funding sources appear as main fund balance boosters. surprisingly, special education enrollment significantly increases the unrestricted fund balance, a finding that requires further attention from legislators and policy makers. concerns are also raised about participation in the state pension system as it absorbs a significant amount of slack that otherwise could be used for other purposes. overall, most charter schools retain inadequate fiscal savings not capable of insulating their operation from revenue volatility and other contingencies. statutory fund balance minimums and the adoption of formal fund balance policies articulating how savings are accumulated, used, and replenished should, therefore, be considered. the expansion of school choice in recent years has potentially generated demographic imbalances between traditional public schools and their residential attendance zones. demographic imbalances emerge from selective opting out, when families of certain racial and/or ethnic backgrounds disproportionately choose not to enroll in their neighborhood-based public schools. in this article, we use a unique data set of school attendance zones in 21 large u.s. school districts to show how changes in neighborhood conditions and school choice options influence race-specific enrollments in locally zoned public elementary schools from 2000 to 2010. we find that the presence of more school-choice options generates racial imbalances between public elementary schools and their surrounding neighborhoods, but this association differs by type of choice-based alternative. private schools, on average, reduce the presence of non-hispanic white students in locally zoned schools, whereas charter schools may reduce the presence of nonwhite students in locally zoned schools. increases in neighborhood-school racial imbalances from 2000 to 2010 were concentrated in neighborhoods undergoing increases in socioeconomic status, suggesting that parents' residential and school decisions are dynamic and sensitive to changing neighborhood conditions. selective opting out has implications for racial integration in schools and the distribution of familial resources across educational contexts. in cities across the united states, working-class communities of color find themselves struggling against inequities deepened by state disinvestment. students at the center-a writing initiative based in several public high schools in new orleans over the last decade-has been a part of this struggle and embraces a pedagogy rooted in the voices, cultures, and histories of traditionally marginalized youth, their families, schools, and neighborhoods. through collections of student writing and digital media, young neo-griots have produced counterstories that call into question dominant narratives about race, schooling, and neoliberal policy. this article draws upon student counterstories, teacher interviews, and classroom and community observations as the means for critically analyzing the implementation of racially-inspired neoliberal reforms, such as decentralization, charter schools, market-based educational choice, and targeted disinvestment in pubic infrastructure, in new orleans-the experimental front for such policies in the united states. while more accelerated and extensive due to the vacuum created by displacement and destruction after hurricane katrina, the reforms are not wholly distinct from those elsewhere. thus students' counterstories shed light on the 'legitimacy' of such policies nationally and globally and reveal the necessity of building solidarities between the south within the north and the global south. more immediately, students and teachers challenge the aspirations of neoliberal elites in new orleans who seek to elide their history, close their school, and reinvent their neighborhood. studentu is a comprehensive program that provides education, nutrition, and social support services to disadvantaged middle and high school students outside of the regular school day. in this paper i investigate the effects of this multiyear program on the early high school outcomes of participating students by exploiting data from oversubscribed admissions lotteries. i find that the subgroup of lottery winners who entered the comprehensive program with low baseline achievement earned more course credits (0.82 credits), achieved higher grade point averages (0.37 grade points), and were less likely to be suspended (17.1 percentage points) during ninth grade than their lottery loser counterparts. investigation of intervening variables indicates that on-time grade progress and decreases in course failure and disciplinary infractions are potential mediating channels. using an index of early high school outcomes, i predict that lottery winners are around 4 percentage points more likely to graduate from high school than lottery losers (5 percent effect). these results suggest that comprehensive services delivered outside of the regular school day have the potential to improve the educational outcomes of disadvantaged students. p>shortly after hurricane katrina's landfall in august 2005 and the reports of rampant looting of businesses in the city, we became curious about the extent of katrina looting as compared to that after other major storms that hit new orleans in 1947 and in 1965. using burglary as a proxy variable for looting, we discovered that the burglary rates in the month before and the month after katrina were significantly higher than those before and after the other two hurricanes. we then investigated the socioeconomic conditions in the city in an effort to explain these numbers. population loss and high unemployment rates, coupled with a decline in high-paying manufacturing jobs and an increase in low-wage food and hotel service jobs generated severe economic inequality in the city that exacerbated the situation created by katrina. our current analysis of the impact of public school desegregation and the oil bust suggests that both events contributed to population loss and the increase in low-wage jobs prior to the storm. we believe that this type of research can assist in the recovery of new orleans by providing an understanding of the city's pre-katrina social and economic conditions and make clearer which post-katrina changes are desirable. charter management organizations (cmos) have increasingly had to respond to questions surrounding their organizations-particularly in the context of the broader social awakening around systemic injustices and evidence of their racially inequitable practices. this study investigated how cmos counteracted criticisms and managed perception by characterizing their organizations as socially and racially conscious. it compared social media content for one cmo population during two time periods that surround the 2016 election: 2014 to 2016 and 2017 to 2019. findings suggest that the cmos have increasingly characterized themselves as socially conscious, but their attentiveness to issues of race and racism remained temporally and topically bounded. the article concludes with a discussion of how cmos' evolving discourse may influence public perception and considers how cmos perpetuate a form of neoliberal multiculturalism that normalizes market reform under the discursive cover of a bounded articulation of equity and racial justice. how have charter schools in wisconsin performed relative to traditional public schools? two analyses provide an answer: first, a comparison of achievement test scores for students in milwaukee charter and traditional schools from 1998 to 2002 for grades 3 through 10 finds a relative advantage for charter school students using fixed effects and first difference specifications. second, a methodological approach new to the debate over performance in choice schools assesses school-level standardized tests in the fourth and eighth grades for 2000-01 and 2001-02. the results for fourth grade are generally favorable for charter schools; those for eighth grade are mixed. overall, the results from these two analyses suggest that charter schools in wisconsin are performing somewhat better than the traditional public schools from which they draw students. (c) 2007 by the association for public policy analysis and management. we employ a panel of individual student data on math and reading test performance for five cohorts of students in texas to study the impact of charter school attendance. we control for school mobility effects and distinguish movement to a charter school from movement within and between traditional public school districts. we find students experience poor test score growth in their initial year in a charter school, but that this is followed by recovery in the subsequent years. failure to account for this pattern may lead to potentially misleading estimates of the impact of charter attendance on student achievement. students who remain in charters largely recover from the initial disruption within approximately 3 years, and there is weak evidence that there may be overall gains from charter attendance within this period. furthermore, students who return to traditional public schools after just 1 or 2 years in a charter do not appear to suffer a lasting negative impact despite their poor average performance in their first year of charter attendance. (c) 2006 elsevier b.v. all rights reserved. city preparatory academy (cpa) is a charter school in a midwestern city that intentionally serves a racially and socioeconomically diverse student population. this exploratory research began as an attempt to document growing concerns and disaffection shared by four staff members at cpa. these four women increasingly convened to discuss workplace hostility and issues of justice and equity, hoping to challenge some of the school's policies and practices. as they sought to promote changes, they faced oppressive dynamics that they attributed to the perspectives, dispositions, and practices of school leadership. this paper describes how particular institutional logics and interpersonal dynamics-shaped by neoliberalism, managerialism, class, and race-gave rise to a kind of non-generative politics that obstructed their efforts and ultimately disaffected them from the school. while the study is primarily an exploration of the context of this particular school, it highlights the need for a critical institutional perspective that situates schools within their sociopolitical context and connects organizational structures, routines, and culture with the beliefs and behaviors of school leaders. organizational scholars employing the theory of representative bureaucracy in their research have found that when public school teacher demographics mirror those of their students, teachers positively affect student performance. little is known, however, about how organizational socialization affects positive representational effects on student outcomes. teachers, however, are socialized differently into the organizational structure, largely through organizational social norms based on various professional aspects. this article analyzes the impact of professional socialization on representativeness by teachers' credentials, employment status, and education levels. using los angeles unified school district (lausd) elementary school data during the 2012-2014 school years, results show that representational effects differ depending on dimensions of student outcomes, and socialization moderating effects vary on the relationship between teacher representation and performance outcomes. socialization positively moderates the teacher's representational effect on student outcomes in terms of teachers with advanced degrees, full credentials, and tenure, which depend on the type of school. charter schools exhibit the positive socialization effect of tenure status, whereas traditional schools show the positive effect of advanced degrees and full credentials. this research enhances our knowledge of the different socialization aspects and how they differ between charter and traditional schools as well as its impact on representation in highly diverse urban elementary schools, contributing to both theory and practice. contributions to the 'school choice' debate have exploded in the last ten years. most of the recent contributions have come from the us on the back of the american revolution in market-led school choice experiments. however, the central idea has a long pedigree and understanding recent contributions like the new book edited by caroline hoxby requires some background. the first thing to understand is that in this book the phrase 'school choice' is used synonymously with the idea of a voucher system. unlike in other countries, the context of the,school choice' debate in the us refers to the extent to which market principles can and should be used in education and the details of the type of voucher (or charter school) scheme and its possible effects. this article explains where the school choice idea came from and briefly summarises the state of the debate. of necessity, we review what is happening in the us in school choice reform, before examining what is new in the hoxby volume. we then reflect on what is missing so far in this debate exploring the idea that educational outputs are not unidimensional and that this can induce incentive problems. we also suggest that the key concept of accountability has been given insufficient attention in this debate. because charter school principals are granted more autonomy and discretion than principals of traditional public schools, it is imperative to search for the attributes of principals that may improve charter school performance. this study examines the relationship between principals' collective bargaining and charter school effectiveness. using propensity score matching based on the school and staffing survey, i find that principals' unionization is positively and significantly associated with charter school performance. i also identify potential mechanisms through which principals' unionization influences charter schools: higher pay and better working conditions for principals, more formal principal evaluation, and more informal teacher evaluation. background/context: nationally, almost a quarter of charter school students attend a school managed by a for-profit education management organization (emo). emos have full executive authority over the operation and management of schools, including curriculum and instruction decisions. because charter schools are funded with public dollars, critics argue that the profit motive may divert funds away from academics and have a negative impact on student achievement. purpose/objective/research question/focus of study: this study compares the academic achievement of emo-managed charter schools with other charter schools and traditional public schools in arizona. whereas prior emo research has focused on total scores in mathematics and reading as the academic achievement variables, this study delves further by analyzing subtest scores that distinguish between basic and complex thinking skills. we use more sensitive test data in an effort to examine the differential impact of the educational practices of emo-managed charter schools on academic achievement. research design: student-level longitudinal test data are used for arizona students who were enrolled in grades 2-6 in 2001 and who remained in the same sector (emo, non-emo charter, or traditional public school) for the next 3 years. the test data include total scores for reading and mathematics, as well as subtest scores divided into basic and complex thinking skills. the analyses are based on a model that estimates the level of academic achievement in year 3 using the sector of attendance as predictors and a twice-lagged achievement variable along with the other student-level covariates. findings/results: for students who remained in the same sector for 3 consecutive years, attendance in non-emo-managed charter schools had a positive effect on achievement results in total mathematics. the outcome was driven by higher scores in mathematics procedures, the basic skills subtest. for students who remained in the same sector and same school for 3 consecutive years, emo-managed charter schools exhibited a positive effect in reading vocabulary, a basic skills subtest, and a negative effect in reading comprehension, the complex thinking subtest. conclusions/recommendations: previous research has illuminated many common teaching and learning characteristics of emo-managed charter schools, such as drill and practice and standardized curricula that can be delivered by less experienced teaching staffs. our results are the first empirical indication that the academic environments of emo-managed charter schools may be associated with higher levels of academic achievement in basic skills at the expense of achievement in complex thinking skills, at least in reading. in all, the results are modest, but they deepen the available evidence about the academic impact of emo-managed charter schools. this activist research story describes the use of research by an urban multi-racial, multi-ses, citywide grassroots coalition in indianapolis. this coalition was formed when a small group of local education activists, black ministers, and community folks met in 2015 to resist the neoliberal takeover of the indianapolis public schools (ips), a coalition which came to be named the ips community coalition. for this activist story, we present a brief review of neoliberalism in general and in education, the emergence of neoliberalism in education in indianapolis, and a brief history of the ips community coalition. next, we describe how the research presented here originated from this coalition, how it was conducted by a local university professor who was one of those who started the coalition and who was working with doctoral students doing a research project, and what the methodology was. we then discuss how social media was used as the main local venue for publicizing the research results, how the use of social media changed the ways we understand research and the ways we present research results, and how social media was used for research dissemination. next, we analyzed quantitative data on race and ses demographics of students and teachers, years teaching experience, math and english language arts academic measures by race and ses, discipline rates by race and ses, expenditures, and staff/student ratios, all publicly available through the indiana department of education. examples of how the results were presented on social media are included. finally, we discuss the implications of this research for research theory and methodology, for activist use of research and research methodologies, and for the use of social media for local activist research dissemination. charter schools elevate choice and competition to foster educational innovations. indeed, these market-style mechanisms are intended to challenge standardized practices associated with district administration of schools. however, a comprehensive review of practices in charter schools indicates that, although some organizational innovations are evident, classroom strategies tend toward the familiar. drawing on organizational and economic theory, this article considers the forces shaping educational innovation in market-oriented reforms. although reformers assume that competition and choice necessary lead to innovations within schools, a more complex examination of competitive institutional environments suggests that mechanisms employed by reformers may actually undercut their intended purposes. the discussion highlights the potential for choice and competition to constrain opportunities for educational innovation and to impose pedagogical and curricular conformity. a number of districts are moving toward a portfolio management model, in which central offices act as "portfolio managers" (pms) that oversee-but may not actively manage-publicly funded schools. using principal-agent theory, with its focus on goal alignment and the use of incentives, we explore how pms operated in ways distinct from traditional district offices in denver, new orleans, and los angeles. we consider how pms identify the goals of multiple principals, incentivize and monitor agents around principals' goals, and select and develop agents who can meet principals' goals. drawing on 76 system-level interviews, we find that pms in each city confronted similar tensions around pm responsibilities but addressed them differently. specifically, we observed distinct pm approaches to managing competing goals of stakeholders in the context of school closure and to balancing school-based autonomy with more prescriptive measures for building school capacity and ensuring the equitable treatment of students. this article explores implementation science with a focus on the strategies leaders use to address organizational challenges. part of a larger study, we employed a qualitative multiple case study design of 20 charter schools to contribute to an evidence base about how leadership at the charter school and charter management organization levels can influence their school communities regarding commitment to students with disabilities. from our exploratory research, key themes emerged that align with effective leadership strategies for implementation demonstrating the positive influence of leaders who prioritize students with disabilities by maintaining a clear vision and strong sense of purpose, creating a safe environment where diversity of perspectives is encouraged, and making sure all voices are heard and valued. public schools across the nation can leverage lessons learned from the charter sector, as leaders work to ensure that their school practices and policies support success for students with disabilities. by ensuring that school leaders are trained and supported to use effective leadership strategies, policymakers, and schools of higher education can influence the adoption and advancement of innovative and effective practices. charter schools have grown in popularity, as both citizens and government officials search for ways to improve public education in america. much of the research on charter schools focuses on academic performance comparisons between charter schools and traditional public schools. far less attention has been devoted to whether the presence of charter schools creates marketlike environments that bring about systemic improvements in public education. this study examines the extent to which charter schools stimulate performance gains in traditional public schools. the results show that charter schools contribute to modest overall performance improvements for students enrolled in traditional public schools. charter schools help bring about stronger performance gains for low-income students enrolled in traditional public schools. the presence of charter schools also affects how financial and programmatic resources are allocated in traditional public schools. what is the relationship between changes in interest group resources and the proposal and adoption of state policy? using a dataset of proposed and enacted teacher policies across five legislative cycles in all 50 states and measures of interest group relative and absolute resource strength, i estimate a series of within-state fixed effects models that gain identification from changes in interest group resources and teacher policy over time. i find that legislatures propose more unfavorable and fewer favorable policies toward teachers' unions in states where teachers' union opposition interest groups are expending more election (but not lobbying) resources over time. further, i find that more unfavorable and fewer favorable policies are adopted in states where teachers' union opposition groups are growing in election resource strength. expanding on prior empirical work, this study suggests that interest group resources matter for policy change and highlights the importance of capturing interest group resource dynamics over time. the state takeover of schools in predominantly black communities has not disrupted the racial subjugation of black girls. using proportional analyses and detroit, memphis, and new orleans as research sites, we find that the takeover of school districts does not produce statistically weaker associations with the use of harsh disciplinary practices against black girls. this finding is important in the context of education reform, as researchers begin to question the motives and outcomes of education reforms. moreover, this study is important to literature that considers the civil rights that black communities must forego for the promise of better schools. finally, this finding is relevant to extant conversations in urban education, especially as those conversations consider the school-to-prison pipeline and disparate disciplinary outcomes for black girls. the meteoric rise in charter schools has several implications for traditional public schools and their students. one understudied implication is the geographic competition for students. given traditional public school boundaries are often fixed while charter school boundaries are more flexible, charter schools can draw students away from existing traditional public schools, and we have very little information about how distance matters in the competition for students. because of this, traditional public schools and school districts have little ability to plan for enrollment changes in the face of charter school growth. our paper uses data on enrollments and demographics in all charter and traditional public schools in los angeles from 2000 to 2013 to better understand these dynamics. we find that traditional public school enrollments clearly decline with competition from nearby charter schools. however, we also observe that charter schools tend to locate where traditional public school enrollments are on the decline. competition is more relevant for elementary schools at short distances-within about 1 mi appears to be where the associations between charter school enrollments and tps enrollment declines are the strongest. for middle and high schools, those connections are apparent within 2 to 6 mi in some models. there is broad consensus that strong educator-student relationships are important in improving outcomes for children coping with trauma and toxic levels of stress, and emerging evidence that positive relationships can help buffer against the compassion fatigue and burnout that is associated with working in high-needs schools. through a case study and semi-structured interviews with 21 educators spanning a range of roles, in one k-12 charter school, in a large midwestern city, we examine the relationship-building strategies utilized, perceived barriers to relationship building, and perceptions of emotional labor and stress. results show that although all staff members prioritize relationship building, few were knowledgeable of strategies that were effective for building relationships with emotionally and behaviorally dysregulated students. the gap between their desire to build relationships and perceived low quality of relationships with students was both caused by and resulted in a high level of compassion fatigue and burnout. implications for building educators' knowledge of relationship-building strategies are discussed. how can restorative justice, an increasingly common alternative to zero tolerance discipline, serve as an opportunity to both dose the racial discipline gap and promote more critical awareness of structural inequality? using knight and wadhwa's (2014) concept of critical restorative justice, i analyzed interviews with youth leaders and staff at one urban charter high school who strove to implement school-wide restorative justice practices with an explicit lens toward resisting structural oppression and the schools to prison pipeline. despite evidence of this explicit commitment, participants still tended to favor exclusionary discipline, particularly to maintain order. it may benefit leaders to anticipate the countervailing pressures they will encounter as they try to enact restorative justice practices within districts and communities that are accustomed to punishment and order as markers of 'good' leadership. there also needs to be a greater emphasis on the words and deeds that contribute to 'critical restorative justice,' since restorative justice is so often discussed as a means for reducing the schools to prison pipeline without detailed attention to how it will disrupt traditional patterns of power and discipline in school. the purpose of this meta-analysis is to analyze the difference of student achievement between charter schools and other public schools using standardized mean-change measures. although many researchers have studied the effects of charter schools on student achievement, the results of those studies are mixed and unclear. according to this research synthesis of 395 mean-change effect sizes of 13 studies, charter school students' test scores over time are slightly higher than those of other public schools by 0.06 standard deviations. furthermore, the results of fixed-effects regression analysis by duration reveal that the coefficient is positive. although it is a small difference, this indicates that students' learning gains in charter schools are higher than other public schools. despite a vast literature on school vouchers, less is known about their long-term competitive effects on public schools. the current paper examines the competitive effect of the indiana choice scholarship program, the largest single voucher program in the us, on math and ela proficiency rates in public schools in the last eight years. exploiting school vouchers' market share as the primary measure of competition, i use two-way fixed effects regression and event study framework to examine the competitive effect. results indicate that, although competition has a positive effect in the earlier years, it is detrimental in the long term, suggesting that the program created a "voucher shock" that led to an improvement in the short term. however, in the long term, the proficiency rates in public schools that faced higher competition fell and never increased again. the trend of voucher recipients who have prior publicschool attendance revealed that the worsening proficiency rates in the public schools that face higher competition were driven by the departure of relatively high achieving students, suggesting that school vouchers inspire sorting. the results are robust to alternative specifications that use the variation in the interaction between the market share of vouchers and geospatial measures of private school density. this article applies theoretical and empirical insights on diffusion to a contemporary, important, and striking case in point: the groundswell of state legislation on and implementation of charter schools over the past decade. drawing from several data sources and using event-history analyses, competing risks, and random-effects negative binomial regression, the analyses examine how interstate dynamics and intrastate attributes affect the adoption of legislation on and the creation of charter schools within states. the findings reveal a strong mimetic tendency among adjacent states to adopt charter school legislation and regional similarities in the creation of charter schools. internal attributes of states, such as competition between the private and public school sectors, the relative strength of teachers' unions, the presence of racial competition, urbanization, and political party dominance likewise play a role, depending on whether the analytic focus is on the adoption of legislation or the implementation of policy. the authors conclude by discussing the implications of the results for understanding the forces underlying innovation and change in educational policy. to explore whether schools' causal impacts on test scores measure their overall impact on students, we exploit plausibly exogenous school assignments and data from trinidad and tobago to estimate the causal impacts of individual schools on several outcomes. schools' impacts on high-stakes tests are weakly related to impacts on important outcomes such as arrests, dropout, teen motherhood, and formal labour market participation. to examine if parents' school preferences are related to these causal impacts, we link them to parents' ranked lists of schools and employ discrete-choice models to infer preferences for schools. parents choose schools that improve high-stakes tests even conditional on peer quality and average outcomes. parents also choose schools that reduce criminality and teen motherhood and increase labour market participation. school choices among parents of low-achieving students are relatively more strongly related to schools' impacts on non-test-score outcomes, while the opposite is true for parents of high-achieving students. these results suggest that evaluations based solely on test scores may be misleading about the benefits of school choice (particularly for low-achieving students), and education interventions more broadly. purpose studies demonstrate the central role of principals in developing and sustaining teacher commitment to their school. teachers' commitment to their school impacts teaching, learning, innovation and school climate and manifests job satisfaction. commitment strongly relates to teacher attrition. attrition is important in the study of school success and failure given its strong predictive link to student learning. design/methodology/approach this study thus identifies relational practices of principals who successfully develop and maintain high levels of commitment among their teaching staff compared to those principals who fail to maintain high commitment or fail to raise low commitment among their teachers during the school year. to investigate this process, this study uses longitudinal, within-year school network and climate data for teachers and principals in 15 american charter schools. with these data and theories offered by social-psychology and organizational studies, the interpersonal leadership and school climate conditions set forth by the principal link to the fluctuating levels of commitment among teachers. findings despite the consistently established link between employee commitment and organizational success and failure, this operationalization of changing levels of staff commitment is a novel contribution to the discussion of organizational principal leadership failure. this study clearly tests the questions: which emotional responses prove volatile to teachers' repeated exchanges with their principals? how do principals' relational practices impact teachers' commitment to teaching? among the strongest findings is the key practice of principals to maintain trust-interpersonal and schoolwide-to improve commitment among teachers and avoid loss of commitment by the end of the school year. practical implications relational practices of principals can promote quality relationships that uphold trust and sustain environments conducive to maintaining high organizational commitment. when leaders fail to establish and maintain quality relationships, challenges experienced during a school year become more difficult to overcome. originality/value the opportunity arises to test the time-varying aspect of interpersonal relations in organizations and the subsequent idea about how organizational leaders maintain strong relationships, strengthen poor ones or repair injured relationships. these results evidence teacher commitment is prone to decline at the end of the school year yet the chance and magnitude of the fluctuation directly responds to changes in principals' relational practices. with relational practices, principals can induce affective responses from teachers at the interpersonal and organizational level that improve commitment among teachers and reduce drops in commitment. heterogeneity is fundamental to learning and when leveraged in instruction, can benefit racially minoritized children. however, finding ways to leverage heterogeneity toward disciplinary teaching is a formidable challenge and teachers can benefit from targeted support to recognize heterogeneity in stem, and its relationship to race and racism in disciplinary teaching. these data draw from a nine-day professional development seminar for secondary teachers to promote heterogeneity in stem learning (n = 12). drawing on analyses of lesson plans developed by teachers during the seminar, and subsequent video analyses of small group discussions, we present a case of four teachers debating heterogeneity in science. the exchange is significant because it draws into relief the ideological and emotional terrain of disturbing the racial hierarchy in which western modern science (wms) is steeped, and its implications for the education of racially minoritized youth. in the focus interaction, a dynamic emerged where three teachers exalted wms, while the fourth grappled with how cultural heterogeneity has or could matter to her science teaching. drawing on the constructs of racial-ideological micro-contestation and racial microaggressions, this analysis illustrates three important dimensions to the design of professional learning for stem teachers that center race: (1) how discipline-specific discussions can uniquely surface the latent racial and ideological meanings teachers associate with stem; (2) the centrality of teachers' storied knowledge in grappling with heterogeneity; and (3) the interplay of micro-contestation and microaggressions in understanding and anticipating the experiences of minoritized teachers when debating issues of race, disciplinarity, and teaching. because various aspects of the school organization matter, this study was designed to determine to what degree principals in both charter and traditional public schools experience autonomy. this quantitative study draws on the 1999-2000 school and staffing survey, and the analyses suggest that there are variations in the degree and amount of principal autonomy experienced across charter and traditional public schools. principals, although clearly autonomous, are constrained by state influence but supported by district influence. charter school principals enjoy greater degrees of autonomy across various internal school activities, and this contributes to the conceptual understanding of organizational autonomy. although policies aiming to increase school-based autonomy are commonplace, we know little about how school actors use autonomy to improve organizational performance in varied contexts. this paper surfaces perspectives from school leaders and teachers on the effectiveness of autonomy and describes how these perspectives vary across schools. we use contingency theory to guide our analysis of case study data from eight schools in the denver public schools (dps) district which vary in school governance, performance, and demographics. we interviewed school principals, teachers, teacher leaders and other charter and district administrators in the 2016-17 school year, totaling 53 participants. school cases consistently reported high levels of accountability pressure from the district central office to improve student test scores that, in turn, informed their mission and goal setting. schools also reported different levels of autonomy that varied according to school governance model and consistently described these levels as optimal for achieving school goals. several internal and external contingencies shaped these perceptions albeit in different ways depending on autonomy level. relevant contingencies included task uncertainty in each school's mission, teacher organizational fit, school leadership, support from intermediate entities, and procedures to coordinate decision-making across school actors or organizational sub-units. the current study critically analyzes the dress code and uniform policies of 89 new orleans public charter schools using content analysis. dress code and uniform policies across the united states are deeply rooted in racism, sexism, and classism and, through their implementation, further contribute to these same oppressions. in this study, the dress code and uniform policies, including the justifications for policy, specific policy rules, and possible consequences for noncompliance, are the primary units of analysis. drawing on intersectionality and the concept of misogynoir, this study attempts to dissect what school policies communicate about race, class, and gender. the racist, classist, and sexist language deployed within the policies is exposed while specifically centering the disproportionate regulation of young black female bodies in dress code policies. school social workers are uniquely positioned to advocate for more equitable dress code and uniform policies. this study contributes to the larger body of literature for its inclusion of data from an entire city as well as its intersectional approach. we analyze a natural experiment in which policymakers in pennsylvania first implemented, and later removed, reimbursements to districts for students exiting to brick and mortar and cyber charter schools. generalized difference-in-difference models show that larger shares of students enrolling in charter schools predict decrements in spending, financial health, and achievement in sending districts; however, these relationships attenuate in years when districts receive reimbursements. after receiving reimbursements, districts with increased competition spent more on instruction and instructional support services, but not on facilities or non-instructional operations. perhaps due to higher instructional expenditures, the relationship between competition and student achievement in reimbursement years is significantly less negative, and at times even positive, compared to non-reimbursement years. cyber charter schools induce fewer instructional expenditures in districts than brick and mortar charter schools. the findings show clear policy choices can support traditional public systems experiencing competition. in comparison with other forms of public-private partnerships (ppp) in education of more recent emergence such as voucher programs or charter schools inspired by the postulates of the theory of public choice, supply-side subsidies for private schools usually respond to less explicit theories of change. indeed, most of these policies are addressed by specialized literature as unique and highly idiosyncratic arrangements, rather than examples of a particular variety of ppp. the frequent absence of a theory of change that explicitly presents the assumptions, objectives and mechanisms of this type of policy, makes it necessary to reconstruct it from a perspective of policy sociology based on the analysis of the behavior of agents and economic, political, institutional and cultural drivers that lie behind their adoption in each particular context. based on a review of the literature and the analysis of the legislative debates of the 1947-2006 period, this article seeks to examine the process of adoption of the regulatory framework defined by the policy of supply-side subsidies for private schools in argentina from an evolutionary perspective of political and cultural economy. the article distinguishes three periods for analytical purposes among which an evolutionary logic of nonlinear continuity prevails, subject to the contextual vagaries and driven by different actors in the field of ideas and political practice. many public services in the united states are administered through non-state actors, many of which are nonprofits with broad social missions. some scholars show that contracting these organizations can compromise their broader goals and political activities, while others find that such arrangements empower the organizations to engage in advocacy and influence policy. we argue that not only can contracting strengthen nonprofits' capacities to engage in politics and advance their missions, but it can mobilize political activity among those working for and engaging with the nonprofits. we use the case of teach for america (tfa) and an instrumental variable approach that leverages plausibly exogenous variation in the timing of tfa's arrival in states to show that contracting tfa is related with the arrival of new education reform advocacy groups spearheaded by tfa alumni. this, in addition to tfa's direct efforts, leads to the passage of reform policies-especially charter school laws. before 2005, when hurricane katrina destroyed most new orleans public schools, youth voice was rarely heard in the superintendent's office. in this chapter, we tell the story of a youth organization that grabbed the historical moment to rethink one of the lowest-performing school systems in the united states. "the rethinkers," as they called themselves, advocated for policy change at well-attended, youth-led news conferences, coaxed agreements from officials in front of tv cameras, and held their civic leaders' feet to the fire. eventually, the rethinkers earned a seat at the school reform table in new orleans. we describe the first generation of rethinkers as they gradually deepen their dedication to one another and their cause. we highlight the critical role adult partnerships played in the success of the re thinkers. these adults deeply respected youth voice and shared skills such as critical thinking, architectural design, and public speaking. finally, we describe how the rethinkers have built victories from a strong set of beliefs that include mutual respect and honest relationships with outsiders based on common goals. "we have a vision: a great education for every kid in new orleans, no matter what neighborhood they stay in, no matter how much money their parents make, no matter the color of their skin." isaiah simms, rethinker, age 11, at a 2006 news conference charter schools are a growing and evolving component of the public education sector. these schools may be exempt from state or local regulations, but they are part of the public system and subject to federal laws and many regulations. research has documented policy tensions and basic challenges associated with developing special education programs in charter schools. a key source of these issues is ambiguity in individual state charter laws regarding roles and responsibilities related to special education. this article presents findings from a review of 41 charter statutes. the review reveals variability and lack of specificity among states in the legislative structures they maintain for charter schools and how responsibility for special education is assigned. these findings highlight the importance of federal, state, and district policy leaders developing a nuanced understanding of statutes shaping the parameters of responsibility for special education in the charter sector. charter schools because of their entanglements with privatization remain one of the most publicly contested and controversial educational reform initiatives. charter schools, in theory, are to balance autonomy and accountability in order to provide students with innovative learning environments and increased achievement on traditional academic measures. the governance of charter schools and the vision espoused in the charter application are central in determining the organization and operation of charter schools. as such, connected to charter schools are the actors that envision them and the processes and policies that enable them. utilizing the case of post-katrina new orleans, i examine the charter authorization process, an understudied aspect of charter school policy. understood as an objective, colorblind process in mainstream policy articulations, the authorization process regulates entry into educational markets. this paper applies a critical race theory analysis to the authorization process. i argue the charter school authorization process is a foundational gatekeeping mechanism that structures charter markets. in so doing, the charter school authorization process is embedded within and constitutive of on-going processes of racial formation and racialized power solidification. moreover, i argue mainstream policy articulations situate the charter school authorization process as an accountability mechanism that is neutral, benign, and objective; such articulations distort and distract from the racial antagonisms upon which neoliberal reform projects are built. as the hawaiian political and cultural movement continues to grow, issues of representation, power, and control are being critiqued-now by hawaiian minds. in this essay i look at the fundamentals of hawaiian epistemology and begin to link them with the educational reform now underway in hawai'i. with the guidance of twenty mentors, i outline seven epistemological categories that begin to solidify a distinct way in which to view teaching, learning, intellect, and rigor. these categories, now struggling to be useful in the hawaiian charter school movement, will inevitably also serve as a way to critique the current colonial system in hawaiian language immersion, spotlight the oppression embedded in well-meant content and performance standards, and highlight the hidden curriculum of assimilation and the acultural assumptions in pedagogy that exist in hawai'i's colonial schools. this outline of a hawaiian philosophy of knowledge expands, invigorates, and redefines ideas of empiricism, intellectual rigor, and knowledge priorities-all through hawaiian ontological lenses. like any definition of culture put forth by indigenous practitioners and scholars, it pushes the envelope of what it means to think, exist, and struggle as a nonmainstream "other," and as it details the liberation found in identity, it must also, inevitably, outline the systems that deter its full blossoming. previous literature establishes a contingency-based framework of external conditions, internal organizational characteristics, and board attributes and composition that impact board effectiveness and calls for more industry-specific nonprofit studies to build the field's knowledge of the factors that lead to nonprofit board effectiveness. in this manuscript, we use a national study of nonprofit charter school boards to answer this call. controlling for internal organizational characteristics and external conditions, we examine how board member selection criteria is related to levels of board boundary spanning in inward, upward, and outward accountability environments. selecting board members because of their knowledge of the organization, have membership in the group being served and for their willingness to give time is all associated with higher levels of inward, upward, and outward accountability activities. alternatively, selecting board members because they are friends/acquaintances of current board members is associated with lower levels of activities across all three accountability environments. our findings suggest that charter school boards may be recruiting board members who can relate to multiple stakeholder groups across accountability environments rather than selecting for members who operate in distinct accountability environments. whereas increased scholarly attention is focusing on contemporary school closings, noticeably absent is the placement of this scholarship within the historical context of black people's social experiences. this paradigm shift would reveal a much longer history that has had devastating consequences for black people. in this article, we identify five waves of black school closings and provide contemporary case studies that reveal an ongoing pattern resulting in the destabilization of black communities across time and space. despite persistent attacks on these institutions, our analyses capture black people's resistance and agency in maintaining their communities and schools. in addition to providing policy implications, we further suggest the term black community-killing as a theoretical way of thinking about the consequences of school closings. given the physical, social, cultural, and financial devastation of new orleans, all aspects of life after katrina irrevocably changed, as did the institutions that once served the legendary crescent city. yet scant reports provide an ethnographic-like view that documents the effects of katrina on historically black colleges and universities (hbcus) and the populations they serve, including preservice and veteran teachers in teacher education programs, specifically in hardest hit new orleans. the primary purpose of this study is to examine the impact of hurricane katrina on hbcu teacher education programs in post-katrina new orleans, their recovery, and their response to the emerging educational landscape that includes the new orleans public school district and the state takeover, schools in the recovery school district. the authors use a qualitative, ethnographic-like approach to analyze each hbcu's intersection of legacy and tradition with public schools, its community, and its students. this paper estimates the effect of charter schools on both students attending them and students at neighboring public schools. using school-level data from michigan's standardized testing program, i compare changes in test scores between charter and public school students. i find that test scores of charter school students do not improve, and may actually decline, relative to those of public school students. the paper also exploits exogenous variation created by michigan's charter law to identify the effects of charter schools on public schools. the results suggest that charter schools have had no significant effect on test scores in neighboring public schools. (c) 2004 elsevier ltd. all rights reserved. baumgartner and jones (1993) showed how radically new policies emerge on government agendas as a consequence of exogenous shocks to policy subsystems displacing privileged interests. but how do these policies evolve post-punctuation? in this paper, we present three different models of policy change. policies may revert to the old status quo if displaced interests re-assert themselves, or they may be "locked-in" by new interests now reaping the benefits. alternatively, they may incrementally change as lawmakers "learn" how to better meet target population needs, particularly by witnessing how other jurisdictions address similar problems. we test these models with data on change in state charter schools laws over time. we find that whether old status quos are overthrow, and the fate of charter policies when they are enacted, is influenced more by competing political interests, especially interest groups, than elite and public perceptions of broad systemic crises. yet, we also find that changing demands on the state and learning from the successes and failures of neighboring states also play significant roles. most studies of no-excuses charter schools are distributive in nature. they answer a question of distributive justice: do these schools adequately close the academic achievement gap that exists in america between white and black or hispanic students? when discussion of no-excuses schools is limited to their distributive worth, critics of no-excuses schools are trapped. are they really against high academic achievement, supporters of no-excuses schools might say. this analysis seeks to escape this trap by proposing and doing an analysis of no-excuses schools using relational justice. a turn to relational justice recognizes other educational goods schools might deliver to their students. by focusing on relational justice, the author moves the debate over no-excuses schools into a register in which both their supporters and their opponents can work toward common aims. the author uses anthony laden's relational justice to analyze no-excuses discourse and practice and then offers recommendations to both no-excuses schools and education theorists. this policy study examined the differences in student achievement scores in reading and mathematics in selected public middle schools of choice and in traditional public middle schools with similar demographics and socioeconomic characteristics in a southeastern school district in north carolina during the 1997-1998, 1998-1999, and 1999-2000 school years. the purpose was to determine whether there were significant differences in academic achievement between students in selected public middle schools of choice and students in traditional public middle schools as measured by the end-of-grade test scores in reading and mathematics. the result from the one-way anova showed that there were significant differences in academic achievement between students in selected public middle schools of choice and students in traditional public middle schools as measured by the end-of-grade tests in reading and mathematics. the louisiana scholarship program (lsp) offers publicly funded vouchers to moderateand low-income students in low-performing public schools to enroll in participating private schools. established in 2008 as a pilot program in new orleans, the lsp expanded statewide in 2012. drawing upon the random lotteries that placed students in lsp schools, we estimate the causal impact of using an lsp voucher to enroll in a private school on student achievement on the state accountability assessments in math, english language arts, and science over a four-year period, as well as on the likelihood of enrolling in college. the results from our primary analytic sample indicate substantial negative achievement impacts, especially in math, that diminish after the first year but persist after four years. in contrast, when considering the likelihood of students entering college, we observe no statistically significant difference between scholarship users and their control counterparts. in theory, the charter school concept is based on a trade-off or exchange: greater autonomy for increased accountability. although charter schools have been operating for more than 10 years, little is known about charter school autonomy in practice. this mixed-methods study used survey and case study data to examine the degree of autonomy of charter schools across the country and the factors limiting school autonomy. the findings indicate that many charter schools do not have high levels of autonomy, with schools least likely to have control over budgetary decisions. in addition, school autonomy is influenced by state laws, relationships with authorizers, and partnerships with educational management organizations and community-based organizations. finally, the levels of autonomy in some schools were dynamic, with schools experiencing less autonomy over time. we study how demand responds to the rebranding of existing state schools as autonomous 'academies' in the context of a radical and large-scale reform to the english education system. the academy programme encouraged schools to opt out of local state control and funding, but provided parents and students with limited information on the expected benefits. we use administrative data on school applications for three cohorts of students to estimate whether this rebranding changes schools' relative popularity. we find that families particularly higher income, white british are more likely to rank converted schools above non-converted schools on their applications. we also find that it is mainly schools that are high-performing, popular and proximate to families' homes that attract extra demand after conversion. overall, the patterns we document suggest that families read academy conversion as a signal of future quality gains although this signal is in part misleading as we find limited evidence that conversion causes improved performance. this qualitative study reports on principals' perceptions regarding the teacher characteristics deemed most important for hiring effective teachers. data for the study come from semi-structured interviews with principals working in urban public, catholic, and jewish schools. results reveal a tendency among principals in all three sectors to focus on both professional skills and personal characteristics as critical components in teacher hiring. however, the analysis reveals that sector affiliation may play an important role in explaining many cross sector variations. more informed hiring practices by principals could potentially affect teacher quality, a critical area for student-learning outcomes. through four years of ethnographic participant observation, and in-depth interviews, this article examines how militarism and masculinity are bound together in the social space of a military-style charter school in southern california. drawing on the concept of hegemonic masculinity by connell, and the discussion by higate and hopton on the reciprocal relationship between militarism and masculinity, this article examines the construction of a military hegemonic masculinity at the school. it also examines the nuances and effects of this particular form of hegemonic masculinity for both boys and girls and argues it is exemplified at the school through the acceptance and condonement of violence and the warrior hero archetype. while not all cadets at the school have access to, or can capitalize upon the advantages of this particular hegemonic masculinity, specifically black boys and girls, it is a powerful force that shapes social interactions, social patterns, and social identities for boys and girls. the systemic changes in the education policy landscape in england under the academies reform movement have nurtured a growing prevalence of educational organisations such as multi-academy trusts (mats) operating as meso-level institutional actors that shape the implementation of policies and mediate between social structures and individual contexts and environments. this paper presents findings from an analysis of instructional improvement efforts in two mats drawing on data from interviews with 13 executives and school leaders. insights from neo-institutional theory provide an important lens for examining the ways in which logics of state, market and community influence executive leaders' decisions and practices towards system-wide instructional reform. findings demonstrate the different ways in which executive leaders perceived these logics influencing their actions and how school leaders experienced the expectations from the executive leaders in the wake of multiple accountability demands. the contextual analysis of institutional logics provides new knowledge on the perceived impact of the macro level policy development and implementation at the mesoand micro-level structures, beliefs and practices revealing the complexity of instructional reform. school choice may lead to improvements in school productivity if parents' choices reward effective schools and punish ineffective ones. this mechanism requires parents to choose schools based on causal effectiveness rather than peer characteristics. we study relationships among parent preferences, peer quality, and causal effects on outcomes for applicants to new york city's centralized high school assignment mechanism. we use applicants' rank-ordered choice lists to measure preferences and to construct selection-corrected estimates of treatment effects on test scores, high school graduation, college attendance, and college quality. parents prefer schools that enroll high-achieving peers, and these schools generate larger improvements in shortand long-run student outcomes. preferences are unrelated to school effectiveness and academic match quality after controlling for peer quality. the authors examine how personnel managers in the educational public sector might employ variants of privatization to achieve public goals. privatization supporters see it as a magic bullet to improve failing public schools, whereas opponents view it as a threat to public education. the authors argue for a more complex understanding of privatization in public education. analysts typically overlook the potential for privatization to change traditional personnel practices and the incentives of public servants. accordingly, the authors define privatization as including the incentives employed within organizations. by this definition, many public bureaucracies may currently serve private interests. the authors then discuss various means of privatization in public education, including vouchers, public charter schools, subcontracting public school management to private providers, and merit pay for teachers. after describing the extant literature and case studies of various forms of privatization, the authors conclude that privatization, broadly defined, can align the private interests of employees with public values. attacks on. the legitimacy of affirmative action pose new challenges for public universities committed to creating a diverse student population without considering race or ethnicity, as factors in admissions. on the basis of a case study of the controversy surrounding the building of a charter school at the university of california, san diego, in response to the elimination of affirmative action in university of california admissions, the authors describe the meaning-making process by which that campus established new procedures for promoting educational equality and constructed new meanings to justify those policies and to resolve conflicts about their legitimacy. the charter school was created after a contentious public debate, in which the concept for the school and tacit definitions of. equality, of social responsibility, and of the university itself became objects of contestation. the analysis reveals (a) the constitutive social processes by which particular meanings of equality and social responsibility-are constructed and institutionalized, and (b) the role of higher education policy in reconstituting meanings of equality: in the wake of. affirmative action's political retreat. school improvement in chronically under-performing schools remains a formidable challenge for school leaders. recent policies in the u.s. have created incentives for school leaders to attempt new strategies to improve outcomes, and increasingly, school leaders of charter management organizations and other multi-school organizations (msos) are taking on this work. research suggests that the most successful school leaders of msos have established robust systems of instruction and professional development. this article is based on a longitudinal qualitative case study of a school leadership team at a new mso and uses the framework of epistemic communities to consider how leaders can generate, manage, and transfer knowledge within and across school boundaries while operating within an accountability-focused school turnaround context. given the diverse professional backgrounds of u.s. educators, creating the capacity for school leaders and teachers to develop a common theory of action and leverage common tools may both be necessary for improvement in student outcomes but also complex and resource-intensive work. developing highly capable msos is an iterative process that requires significant time and resources in school leadership positions to build a shared curriculum, align on instructional design, and develop leadership capacity to support teaching and learning within and across schools. this study uses data mining analytics techniques including trained multiple regression models to identify the predictors of ap pass rates in ca public high schools using publicly available data from the state of california's department of education website. the independent variables included in the analysis explored the relationship of elementary and middle school characteristics such as math and english language arts (ela) test scores, as well as the degree of poverty at a school represented by the percentage of students qualifying for free and reduced-price meals (frpm). other variables considered were the percentage of english language learners (ell's), the size of the school, special curricular programs (ib program, dual language), whether the school was a charter or traditional public school, as well as the age of the school. the multiple regression model and exploratory correlational analysis, highlighted interaction effects of two key variables, frpm and ell's. our final results indicated that, higher 3rd grade math scores offered some mediating effects protecting against the negative effect of high levels of frpm and ell students at a school. 3rd grade math scores were the best predictor of high school ap pass rates. unfortunately, the effect of 3rd grade mean math scores was not high enough to completely cancel out the effects of high rates of poverty or being an english language learner. recent years have seen a revival of debates about the role of business and the sources of business power in postindustrial political economies. scholarly accounts commonly distinguish between structural sources of business power, connected to its privileged position in capitalist economies, and instrumental sources, related to direct forms of lobbying by business actors. the authors argue that this distinction overlooks an important third source of business power, which they conceptualize as institutional business power. institutional business power results when state actors delegate public functions to private business actors. over time, through policy feedback and lock-in effects, institutional business power contributes to an asymmetrical dependence of the state on the continued commitment of private business actors. this article elaborates the theoretical argument behind this claim, providing empirical examples of growing institutional business power in education in germany, sweden, and the united states. today, the us public educational landscape features both well-funded and richly resourced segregated white schools and underfunded, poorly resourced majority black, latino, native american, and poor schools. efforts to remedy these problems are ongoing and varied. some parents and educators have turned away from traditional public schools and have advocated community-controlled schools as a means of remedying a wide range of issues, including educational inequality. charter schools are now a particularly popular alternative form of public education. in this article, we draw on findings from a larger case study of a conversion charter school in california in order to examine issues of equity from two perspectives: access and quality. here, we focus attention on internal dynamics, raising critical questions about the policies and practices enacted within the school and about the long-term effects of everyday interactions between teachers and students. our analysis helps reveal the extent to which educational outcomes are socially constructed, and it shows how structural arrangements within the school sustain rather than lessen educational inequity. in this article we re-examine the dualist theory of public and private sector providers of public services. while this theory holds that private sector providers exhibit a behavior substantively different from those of the public sector, i.e., they, respond to external pressures with market-oriented behavior instead of political behavior, we argue that these actors actually can and often do respond in a political manner. furthermore, we argue that a political response is as likely to be exhibited by for-profit providers, who should be the most free-market oriented, as nonprofit organizations. we provide evidence for our proposition drawn from our study of the behavior of charter schools, market-based providers of public education, and charter school advocates in the district of columbia and find that when faced with numerous challenges, charters responded by lobbying government for assistance instead of competing in the market place. we conclude that the line of demarcation between the behavior of public, and private sector providers is actually quite blurred and when faced with similar problems in the delivery of public services, both forms of providers will respond in a similar manner. school finance drives policy and practice in public education, yet most citizens and some practitioners know very little about how their schools are funded. the purpose of this article is to address the financial issues related to urban schools and the challenge of balancing expectations of higher levels of education with the values of equity, efficiency, and economic growth. section i discusses the social context of school finance in the united states, including urban education issues. this section will discuss equity issues in the context of the history of school finance litigation in the united states. section i will also show how the school funds are spent. section 2 will discuss traditional funding structures and state funding policies. section 3 will discuss decentralization and site-based budgeting, including the use of charters, vouchers, and contracts. the conclusion will explore how restructuring school budgeting can improve instruction and student performance. teacher professional identity, or what it means to be a teacher, informs the types of schools teachers seek for work. with the marketization of schools in the us and abroad, teachers' professional identities are changing. however, we know little about how teachers negotiate-and renegotiate-their professional identities during the job search in contexts with school choice, such as charter schools. this study uses qualitative interview data from 46 teachers in san antonio, texas, where over 25% of students attend charter schools. our findings illuminate the job search as a critical juncture where teachers evaluate their professional identity as they make choices about the sector-charter or traditional public school-and/or school organization they prefer. in particular, the choice context legitimated flexibility and fluidity in teachers' professional identity as teachers moved between sectors to find jobs, even if the school did not align with their personal or professional values. we also found that employability and teachers' perception of the j ob market played an important role in how teachers strategically presented their professional identity on the job search. findings offer implications for teacher education and teacher workforce policies. charter school legislation permits new actors to compete for public funds to provide education to k-12 students across the united states. proponents of market-oriented policies predict that privatization cuts costs and improves service quality, by removing bureaucracy and boosting creativity. these schools were predicted to become laboratories of innovation that would use their flexibility from state and local requirements to improve public education. this study suggests that the less regulated service systems may have also propagated an environment susceptible to managerial and accountability inadequacies, if not outright integrity violations and corruption. using systematic document review and the existing literature on corruption in education, a typology of integrity violations and corruption in the charter school sector is developed in this paper. a better understanding of the characteristics of the institutional environment that enable corrupt behavior is necessary to develop effective strategies to prevent corruption, protect children, and manage public funds effectively. school closings displace thousands of teachers in the united states every year. this paper explores how elementary school teachers in north carolina respond to this labor market shock. after documenting in our study that declining enrollment is a key driver of school closings, we find that whereas most displaced teachers move to new schools in the same district, a considerable number leave public education altogether. we find that the increase in the propensity to leave teaching is largest for experienced teachers. it is also marginally larger for the highest and lowest value-added teachers compared with teachers in the middle of the value-added distribution, and, strikingly, twice as large for black teachers than white teachers even from the same closing school. moving schools after a school closing has no impact on teacher effectiveness as measured by value added. although the primary goal of school closings is typically to move students out of declining or failing schools, school closings also affect the overall distributions of important teacher characteristics, such as experience, race, and effectiveness in raising test scores. since the establishment of the first charter school in 1991, over 7,000 charter schools have opened across the united states. charter schools are publicly funded schools that are exempt from some of the local or state regulation and serve as alternatives to the more traditional public and private schools for many children and families. as charter schools proliferate across the united states, so does the number of school social workers employed by them. even though school social work practice can vary widely across location, type of school setting, state educational policies, and contractual mandates, there is minimal research and limited information about school social work practices in charter schools. this article examines social work practice in the context of charter schools to provide charter school social workers with insight and information tailored to their unique school settings. the article will also review the history of the charter school movement and the impact of current charter school policies on social worker roles and interventions. suggestions for future research are also discussed. top trading cycles (ttc) is pareto efficient and strategy-proof in priority-based matching, but so are other mechanisms including serial dictatorship. we show that ttc minimizes justified envy among all pareto-efficient and strategy-proof mechanisms in one-to-one matching. in many-to-one matching, ttc admits less justified envy than serial dictatorship in an average sense. empirical evidence from new orleans oneapp and boston public schools shows that ttc has significantly less justified envy than serial dictatorship. background: instructional coaching has gained popularity as a reform instrument, yet it varies widely across contexts. this variability plays a role in weak implementation or even rejection of coaching within schools. further, there are gaps in our understanding of how coaching is adopted and accepted in different educational systems. purpose: this article uses concepts from organizational institutionalism to gauge the legitimacy and taken-forgrantedness of coaching in two charter-management organizations and one public school district. it surfaces the processes as well as the outcomes of the institutionalization of coaching. research design: i collected qualitative data for this study in three systems to draw out comparisons in the structures, practices, and norms regarding coaching: this included 38 interviews, over 20 observations, and over 30 documents. i coded and analyzed the interview, observation, and document data to answer questions about how and why coaching was institutionalized in each system. findings: my findings reveal that coaching was more highly institutionalized in the two charter-management organizations than in the public school district. in particular, coaching was deemed appropriate and desirable by most educators in the charter systems. additionally, coaching was embedded in system-level policies and school-level routines in the charter systems. my findings also indicate that organizational structures, actors' role definitions, and artifacts were associated with the institutionalization of coaching. conclusions: this study sheds light on how and why coaching, as a counternormative lever for instructional reform, is institutionalized in various educational systems. it points to the importance of system and school leaders' routines for increasing the legitimacy and taken-forgrantedness of coaching. district expenditures and efficiency can be influenced by the entry of charter schools. loss of economies due to reduced enrollments and a rising share of high-cost students are some of the key mechanisms that could potentially increase the costs of providing education in district schools. the competitive pressure from charter schools could also lead to efficiency gains by reducing the per pupil amount districts spend to achieve a given level of outcome. utilizing data for utah's school districts over the period of 2014-2018, i estimate unobserved effects models to assess the expenditure and efficiency effects of charter schools on traditional public schools. i find significant increases in per-pupil expenditures associated with charter-induced enrollment losses and rising percentages of high need students. i also find evidence of efficiency losses in school districts stemming from the initial charter entry, but most adverse externalities appear to recede over time. the research underscores the policy significance of understanding how fiscally-constrained schools respond to competition. purpose: this study examines how district governance and different school contexts in denver's portfolio management model affect shared leadership for learning. we define this as shared influence on instructional leadership and school-wide decision making, which research suggests have strong ties to student achievement and teacher commitment. method: we analyze interview data from 53 administrators, teacher leaders, and teachers in eight case study schools and teacher surveys in 48 schools. in both data sets, we purposively sampled based on variance in school performance ratings and by school type (e.g., traditional public, standalone charter, charter management organization [cmo], and innovation schools). findings: we find that perceptions of shared instructional leadership were generally high across the school contexts, though cmo and innovation schools had the highest perceptions in both the survey and case study data. schools varied substantially in shared decision making, but innovation schools had higher average scores than other school models. centralized policies and supports, alongside organizational visions spanning networks of schools, helped explain the enactment of shared leadership for learning. for example, schools within denver's "innovation" network shared a common vision of teacher empowerment, while cmos that had more prescribed policies and practices across their schools had lower reported levels of shared decision making. school choice reforms have been proposed as ways to enhance efficiency, equity, and effectiveness in education. this study examines the consequences of participating in public high school choice in chicago, a city with a wide variety of choice programs, including career academies, charter schools, magnet schools, and selective test-based college prep high schools. the analysis uses population level administrative and survey data on all public school eighth graders enrolled in chicago to estimate the effect of school choice participation on on-time graduation propensity (i.e., in 4 years). techniques employed to estimate this effect include propensity score, catchment area fixed effects, and multilevel analysis. results suggest that there is a modest positive graduation benefit from exercising school choice. there are no racial/ethnic differences in the choice benefit, but low-achieving students benefit less from high school choice than high-achieving students. in addition, students in high-poverty neighborhoods gain less from exercising choice than do students in low-poverty neighborhoods. these findings call into question the extent to which school choice enhances equity for low-achieving students and students in high-poverty neighborhoods. purpose the authors examine whether reports of internal control weaknesses (icws) under federal single audit (fsa) guidelines are a useful tool for evaluating non-profit (np) management, using a unique nationwide sample of np charter schools. while prior research focuses on external stakeholder reactions to reported icws, little if any research addresses the utility of these reports for internal users. the authors fill this gap in the literature, finding evidence suggesting that np charter school decision-makers use internal control (ic) reports when setting executive compensation awarding lower pay increases when deficiencies are reported. design/methodology/approach the authors regress executive compensation changes on reported icws and likely determinants of np compensation, including organization size, growth, liquidity and management performance, using a sample of 173 school/year observations representing 113 unique schools for the years 2012-2015. findings the authors find a negative relationship with executive pay increases subsequent to reports of initial and repeated ic deficiencies, indicating that lower than average pay increases are awarded subsequent to reports of icws. research limitations/implications interpretation of the authors' results is subject to several limitations, including the possibility of omitted variable bias and the authors' sample, though it comprises all available data for the sample period, and is relatively small and may be considered exploratory in nature. further, charter schools represent a unique public/private partnership in the educational sector, and the results may not be generalizable to other nps. future research could explore the relationship between reported ic deficiencies and governance in other, broader np sectors. practical implications the authors' findings are useful to np organization boards of directors as they consider what factors to evaluate in their chief executive officer (ceo) compensation decisions. in addition to other criteria, inclusion of ic effectiveness in the ceo reward system is prudent, especially in today's environment of increasingly important information security and ic matters. the results suggest such information is being included. this previously undocumented use is also of particular value to regulators when weighing the costs and benefits of mandating single audits for smaller nps, who are otherwise unlikely to obtain information on the organization's ic environment. social implications these findings may help inform the debate regarding np charter schools, a fast-growing, economically significant and highly controversial sector in public education. charters are predominantly funded by state and local taxes. as such, the quality of governance in np charter schools is of interest to a wide range of stakeholders including parents, regulators and the public at large. originality/value while prior research on icws and nps focuses on external stakeholder reactions to reported icws, little if any research addresses the utility of these reports for internal users, especially in relatively smaller organizations. the research leverages the existence of charter schools, which are independent but present nationwide, providing a suitable sample of like organizations. further, no extant research to the authors' knowledge examines the relationship of np executive compensation and reported icws a topic previously addressed in the for-profit (fp) literature. we use the case of education interest groups to examine how and when policy changes lead interest groups to polarize in their support for political parties. using over 145,000 campaign contributions from all 50 states from 2000 to 2017, we test whether the passage of private school choice, charter laws, and labor retrenchment policies led to the polarization of education interest groups over time. in 2000, teachers unions were the dominant group and mostly aligned with democrats. meanwhile, republicans lacked support from any education groups. this pattern was consistent across states. over time, coalitions in some states became polarized, meaning unions grew even more aligned with democrats and reform groups with republicans, while other states did not experience such polarization. we show that private school choice programs, but not labor retrenchment or charter laws, contributed to this changing partisan alignment. our findings demonstrate that policy feedback can shape both the electoral mobilization and party alignments of interest groups. in this article, mark r. warren argues that if urban school reform in the united states is to be successful, it must be linked to the revitalization of the communities around our schools. warren identifies a growing field of collaboration between public schools and community-based organizations, developing a typology that identifies three different approaches: the service approach (community schools); the development approach (community sponsorship of new charter schools); and the organizing approach (school-community organizing). the author elaborates a conceptual framework using theories of social capital and relational power, presenting case studies to illustrate each type. he also discusses a fourth case to demonstrate the possibilities for linking individual school change to political strategies that address structures of poverty. warren identifies shared lessons across these approaches, and compares and contrasts the particular strengths and weaknesses of each. warren concludes with a call for a new approach to urban education reform that links it theoretically and practically to social change in america's cities. background: after the turn of the 21 st century in new york city, mayor michael bloomberg launched major initiatives to open new small schools and new charter schools as a central piece of a strategy to transform schooling and produce dramatically better results. although more than 550 new public schools and charter schools were established in new york city between 2003 and 2015, with some increases in graduation rates, the focus on new schools has subsided, many aspects of schooling remain the same, and significant inequities in performance persist. purpose/objective: this article explores the confluence of factors that help co explain how some new practices emerge even as many aspects of what tyack and cuban called the "grammar of schooling" endure. design/analysis: to achieve this objective, this article undertakes a historical analysis that highlights the intersection among the goals, capacity demands, and values in the new school initiatives, and the needs, existing capabilities, and values of four intermediaries involved in creating new small schools or new charter schools. this analysis looks particularly at the different choices these organizations made about when to connect to and distance themselves from these initiatives (when to "bridge" and "buffer") and the role those choices played in the extent and nature of their own growth and the evolution of the new schools initiatives. findings/conclusion: even with political support and initiatives that were supposed to provide some freedom to innovate outside conventional constraints, these intermediaries had to find ways to fit within the needs, demands, and values of the school system at that time. at the same time, the intersections in the evolution of these organizations and the wider system also help to explain how they were able to influence the evolution of the policy environment, sustain themselves, and create some new practices, products, and services even as the focus on new school creation subsided. background/context: jean anyon's work provides a powerful intervention in the study of education with her attention to political economy and the social contexts of education. mainstream neoliberal charter reform arguments often counter anyon's work by suggesting a "no excuse" ideology, which often ignores structural realities facing youth. over the decades, charter schools have garnered bipartisan interest and expanded significantly. following hurricane katrina, new orleans was one such site where the expansion and experimentation with charter schools has taken place. utilizing the restructuring of new orleans after katrina as a site for examination, this article builds from a larger yearlong qualitative critical race case study on the reproduction of white dominance via the charter school authorization and application process. purpose/objective/research question/focus of study: utilizing the educational restructuring of new orleans post-katrina, this article aims to illustrate the interconnectedness of political economy and race. extending anyon's analysis of political economy, the article focuses on the neoliberal restructuring of new orleans education after hurricane katrina to illustrate how the notions of abjection and zones of nonbeing form a guiding constellation for the accumulation and solidification of white power and capital. research design/data collection and analysis: this article builds off a larger yearlong qualitative critical race case study on the reproduction of white racial educational dominance in post-katrina new orleans. interviews and student artifacts are the central data. conclusion/recommendations: the author recommends the grounding of youth voice in educational policy analysis, conceptualization, and implementation; the consideration of how race impacts education; and continued research on the inter-imbrication of race and political economy. educational innovations such as 'no-excuses' charter schools have emerged as a discipline-focused approach to schooling as they are predicated on communicating high-expectations and personal responsibility. as 'no-excuses' charters are replicated across the united states as part of a neoliberal education reform policy, there continues to be prevailing stereotypes about the black and latinx populations in these spaces by teachers, the majority of whom are white. yet not every white teacher within this context espouses the academic and behavioural socialisation associated with 'no-excuses' contexts. the findings of this phenomenological study suggest that white educators can become allies of black and latinx students but fail to create consistent affirming spaces due to an unrelenting implicit organisational pressure that we identify as 'no-excuses pressure,' that works against educators becoming full resistors and works against black and latinx students' full humanity. the paper concludes with implications on how to build critical resistance for all teachers, especially those within a 'no-excuses' context. effective schooling requires teachers to have professional discretion; yet in the twentieth century, bureaucratization enhanced administrative control of teaching. teacher unionization offered one response to bureaucratization, intended in part to protect teacher professional discretion. more recently, the charter school movement offered a second means to protect teacher professionalism, though some scholars argue that charters fail to empower teachers since few charter teachers have union representation. we describe the conceptual links between unionization, charter schooling, and teacher professionalism. we then use the nationally-representative 2011-2012 school and staffing survey data to empirically examine the extent to which unionization and charter schooling influences teacher professionalism, measured as teachers' perceptions of control over school policies and aspects of teaching and learning. ols regressions indicate that unionized teachers report lower levels of control, while charter teachers report somewhat greater levels of control over school policies and curricula than other public school teachers. most research focuses on principal mobility generally, but little assesses charter leadership specifically. this exploratory study examines how leaders in stand-alone and charter management affiliated schools in new york and new jersey made their decisions to lead, stay, and transition to different roles. leaders cited excitement about autonomy and the mission of their schools as reasons for entering the role. in part because of their connection to the mission and students, many former teachers took on a leadership role or transitioned within their organization through a sense of obligation, knowing there were few, if any, potential successors. the toll of working hours, specifically when compounded by repeated interpersonal and internal conflict, was most salient to leaders' decisions to leave leadership. by contrast, positive relationships were cited as the most important reasons to stay. finally, leaders discussed consulting, turnaround, central office, or educator training opportunities largely within the charter sector as potentially pulling them out of their current roles. philanthropists have long funded a wide range of educational research, practice, and policy initiatives, primarily through namesake foundations. some observers have criticized these efforts as doing little to change the status quo in education and have called for more aggressive action on the part of this sector. out of this critique has emerged a new philanthropic form, often termed venture philanthropy. perhaps nowhere is venture philanthropy more prevalent than in the charter school and policy and advocacy terrain. drawing from document analysis and a review of historical literature, this article provides a sociopolitical, descriptive discussion of this "new" form of philanthropy in supporting the charter school reform network. it also examines the funding strategies of venture philanthropies and the areas of policy intersection in program initiatives. the article concludes with a discussion of some political and philosophical tensions that venture philanthropy raises and also provides suggestions for further research. in this secondary research study, we investigate the text/identity/curriculum work enacted in a primary university-school project with third-grade children in quebec who were engaged in inquiry into children's rights through bilingual text production. drawing on sociocultural perspectives of language and identity as well as translanguaging, we examined both the product and the process of identity text production. analysing classroom interactions and children's bilingual production using discourse analysis, the findings show how teachers' cross-curricular efforts in creating translanguaging spaces and shifts with students' emerging bilingualism and critical understanding of children's rights issues provided spaces for identity and knowledge re/construction, effectuating new curricular opportunities, inquiries, and language/literacy learning. this process-oriented view of identity text production points to the mutually constitutive nature of identity/text/curriculum work, inviting a dynamic, non-linear understanding of text production, and calling for reflexive attention to power relations in classroom interactions for greater possibilities for meaningful identity and knowledge making. theories of market-based school reform suggest that teacher labor markets may be inefficient because schools lack autonomy to incentivize performance in hiring, retention, and compensation. we test this empirically by comparing teacher exits in the deregulated market of new orleans with neighboring traditional school districts. we find that the relationship between teacher performance and retention is stronger in the deregulated market. we also find positive associations between salary and performance, but only when teachers transfer from one charter school to another. while teacher retention is more closely tied to performance in new orleans, this did not yield a net gain in teacher quality, because new teachers in new orleans were of lower average quality than their peers in neighboring districts. studies of the charter sector typically compare charters and traditional public schools at a point in time. these comparisons are potentially misleading, because many charter-related reforms require time to generate results. we study quality dynamics among charter schools in the state of texas from 2001 to 2011. school quality in the charter sector was initially highly variable and on average lower than in traditional public schools. however, exits, improvement of existing charter schools, and higher quality of new entrants increased charter effectiveness relative to traditional public schools despite an acceleration in the rate of sector expansion in the latter half of the decade. we present evidence that reduced student mobility and an increased share of charters adhering to no-excuses-style curricula contribute to these improvements. although selection into charter schools becomes more favourable over time in terms of prior achievement and behaviour, such compositional improvements appear to contribute little to the charter sector gains. moreover, accounting for composition in terms of prior achievement and behaviour has only a small effect on estimates of the higher average quality of no excuses schools. the 1990s witnessed growing attention to the adoption of choice-based school reforms, particularly charter schooling and school vouchers. although researchers have approached the school choice debate from theoretical, normative, and empirical directions, little attention has been paid to examining how teachers view school choice or what factors shape their attitudes. this oversight is significant because teachers can impact the success of school choice experiments in many ways, such as through their willingness to launch and staff schools of choice, adopt new practices developed in schools of choice, and support choice-based reform efforts in their unions and communities. using a survey of arizona and nevada teachers, we find that white, experienced, unionized, democratic educators and those working in a "positive" school environment are less supportive of school choice. arizona teachers, who live in close approximation of a free market for education, are particularly hostile to choice, but teachers who have had personal contact with a charter school are more supportive. the results indicate that the success of school choice will likely be influenced by the characteristics of the teacher workforce and teachers' familiarity with competition. in the united states, charter school proliferation remains a top priority for neoliberal education reformers and their private sector allies. such schools are owned and run by private operators yet receive public funding, resulting in large transfers of public assets into private hands. co-location facilitates this process by providing charters rent-free space within existing public school buildings. the author argues that new york's 2014 co-location reform, which guarantees co-location or rental assistance for the city's charter schools, produces school space in ways that create new circuits for the accumulation of capital by the private sector, while at the same time putting into circulation hegemonic imaginations of the relationship of race to school space. co-location reform enlists school space within neoliberalism's color-blind and meritocratic racial ideology: reformers like new york governor andrew cuomo "don't care who you are" because achievement is seen as the result of hard work and good choices made in free markets, and co-location will extend educational markets to families of color who have heretofore been excluded. using the co-location of success academy charter schools as a case, the author argues that co-location reform, animated by a "white spatial imaginary," both obscures and exploits the racialized process of organized abandonment that underwrites neoliberal capitalism. charter schools have become a very popular instrument for reforming public schools, because they expand choices, facilitate local innovation, and provide incentives for the regular public schools while remaining under public control. despite their conceptual appeal, analysis has been hindered by the selective nature of their student populations. this paper investigates the quality of charter schools in texas in terms of mathematics and reading achievement and finds that average school quality in the charter sector is not significantly different from that in regular public schools after an initial start-up period but that there is considerable heterogeneity. perhaps more important for policy, however, is the finding that the parental decision to exit a charter school is significantly related to school quality. the magnitude of this relationship is substantially larger than the relationship between the probability of exit and quality in the regular public school sector and consistent with the notion that the introduction of charter schools substantially reduces the transactions costs of switching schools. (c) 2006 elsevier b.v. all rights reserved. districts are relying on school autonomy to help schools differentiate educational programming for students and improve low-performing schools, yet we know little about how schools use autonomy in practice. drawing on school case study and principal survey data from the los angeles unified school district, we find variation in perceived school leader autonomy stemming from each school model's governance design, district-provided capacity building, and other organizational conditions. principal perceptions of autonomy are positively associated with perceived implementation ease of school plans which, in turn, is positively related to reports of teacher collegiality and responsive school practices. this article synthesizes past research findings on the work of charter schoolteachers and juxtaposes this research kith case studies of forty charter school teachers in six urban charter elementary schools, charter schools, a with increased autonomy over personnel and budget, are given the freedom to make many decisions related to hiring, salary, and working conditions. in general, charter school teachers work longer hours and receive less job security than colleagues in traditional public schools. in some states, charter school teachers earn significantly less than other public school colleagues. the evidence also suggests, however, that teachers generally enjoy their professional lives in charter schools-their colleagues and the school's education program. the authors argue that in order to continue to attract and retain teachers, charier schools may need to extend their use of autonomy to improve the working conditions of teachers and ultimately, to extend the life of the school. recent studies of charter school effectiveness have questioned whether charter school networks can produce a lasting impact on students' long-term outcomes. our study is the first to examine this issue at the network of knowledge is power program (kipp) schools, which primarily serve disadvantaged students of color and constitute the nation's largest charter school network. using admission lotteries as a random assignment instrument, we estimate the impacts of 13 kipp middle schools on college enrollment and persistence in college over the first two postsecondary years. building on prior studies of kipp that show kipp middle schools have strong positive effects on middle school achievement, we find that kipp middle schools also positively affect rates of enrollment in 4-year college programs. the magnitude of the estimated impact of a middle school admission offer (6.9%) and enrollment at a kipp school (12.9%) is substantial relative to nationwide disparities in college enrollment across racial groups. since their introduction in the early 1990s, charter schools, which provide a hybrid educational form that combines public funding with many of the educational policy freedoms that attend private schools, have experienced growing popularity across the country. as their numbers continue to increase, funding for charter schools has become more of a concern. statistics indicate that charter school funding, which derives from federal, state, and local sources, has not kept pace with the funding accorded traditional public school systems. this disparity has led some charter school constituents to consider equal protection challenges against these allegedly discriminatory funding regimes. the supreme court's 1973 decision in san antonio independent school district v. rodriguez, however, has led many to conclude that the doors to the federal courthouse remain closed to equal protection litigants protesting inequities in school funding. the author begins by presenting background information on federal equal protection jurisprudence, the charter school concept, and the purported discrepancies in charter school funding. after discussing the continued viability of education as a fundamental right, he then considers the court's rodriguez decision in light of its subsequent rulings in papasan v. allain and plyler v. doe. following an examination of charter school characteristics relevant to charter school equal protection challenges, the author contends that papasan and, to a lesser extent, plyler, present alternative avenues that would allow charter school plaintiffs to circumvent the rodriguez barriers. he concludes that, ironically, charter school plaintiffs have the strongest chance to raise a successful federal equal protection claim by confronting the government's lowest hurdle: rational basis review. under what he terms the "papasan exception," rubio contends that rodriguez explicitly made itself inapplicable to a state's decision to divide resources unequally among its school districts and that, therefore, federal equal protection challenges remain available to charter school litigants who have inexplicably been denied access to entire categories of state funds. over the past fifteen years, public charter schools have emerged as an influential, if controversial, school choice model. charter schools seek to reform america's underperforming public education system by stimulating curricular innovation, increasing parental and community involvement in education, and competing with traditional public schools. however, charter schools experience intense levels of segregation and racial isolation that exceed the already troubling levels in traditional public schools. in response to this trend, eleven states have enacted racial balancing statutes that require charter schools to use race and racial classifications to achieve racially diverse student bodies. this note appraises the constitutionality of charter school racial balancing laws in light of the supreme court's holding in grutter v. bollinger that diversity is a compelling interest in higher education. careful examination of charter school racial balancing provisions reveals that, on the basis of their characteristics, these laws are either "strong" or "weak." although all eleven states that mandate racial balancing in charter schools possess a constitutionally compelling interest in diversity as articulated in grutter, only the "weak" provisions of nine states are sufficiently narrowly tailored to survive strict scrutiny equal protection analysis. consequently, the "strong",racial balancing provisions of nevada and south carolina should be rejected as unconstitutional, and the "weak" racial balancing provisions of the remaining nine states should be affirmed as constitutional under grutter and the fourteenth amendment. background/context:in new orleans, louisiana, in the years following hurricane katrina, predominantly white education reformers have used entrepreneurial support to dismantle the predominantly black city's public education system. using racial domination without community approval, these education reformers have educationally disenfranchised the black community by implementing no excuses (ne) charter school management organizations (cmo). the rise in these organizations has also led to the mass firing of the city's majority black educator base and the hiring of majority white educators. scholarship on ne cmos notes their use of dehumanizing behavioral practices meant to control their student populations. accounts, however, are limited from those who have witnessed, experienced, or resisted these dehumanizing behavioral practices. purpose/objective/focus of study:through the critical race theory (crt) lens of racial realism, this paper provides a critical race personal counternarrative (crpcn) that characterizes the racist and racialized disciplinary and surveillance practices used to control black students' bodies. it examines my experiences as a teacher within an ne cmo, the knowledge is power program (kipp) school in new orleans. furthermore, this paper underscores my own black fugitive pedagogic acts alongside my black students, acts that allowed us to create fleeting moments of freedom inside and outside our classroom. research design:i relied on critical race methodology to construct a crpcn against kipp, which prides itself on positive behavior practices and social justice. the evidence i drew on included free-written notes, conversations with former students and teachers, media (e.g., photos and videos), and scholarly literature. to analyze data, i drew on crt concepts of racial realism and the permanence of racism in u.s. society to underscore black fugitivity, anti-black surveillance, and discipline. conclusion/recommendations:racial realism provides a lens for identifying the evolution of racialized surveillance technologies on black bodies within the united states. although critics characterize racial realism as overly pessimistic, this paper notes one way that scholars, educators, students, and parents can draw on this tool of racial resistance to accept the current racial reality, uncover racially oppressive schooling practices, and highlight strategies of survival through fugitive acts. how do youth view spanish in our changing multiethnic urban schools and communities? in this article i explore this question by analyzing the perspectives and social interactions of students in an urban charter high school located in a community undergoing dramatic demographic shift from a predominantly african american city to a predominantly latino/a city with a significant pacific islander population. working from ethnographic and social language data collected over a school year with 8 focus students and their peer groups, i show how spanish was understood as a tool of solidarity and exclusion, reinforcing ethnic division is positive and painful ways. i also show how african american and pacific islander youth desired access to spanish and used words and phrases in important ways with their latino/a peers. i conclude by discussing how education could utilize these findings to foster language learning and interethnic relationship in our shifting communities and schools. this article evaluates the competitive effect of charter schools on hosting school districts, using data envelopment analysis and a regression model. the empirical work is based on michigan, using district-level school finance and michigan educational assessment program score data. the results of our analysis show that charter hosting districts improved their efficiency score, as measured by dea, more than other school districts. however, this difference in efficiency score is not statistically significant. further analysis using first-differencing regression also confirms that the change in efficiency noted in charter-hosting districts is not affected to a statistically significant degree by the share of local charter school enrollment. this implies that the existence of charter schools does not in and of itself automatically improve the efficiency of traditional public schools. supporters of public education fear attempts to privatize schools, while the private sector has always struggled against the monopolistic power of the public schools that educates almost 90% of all k-12 students. this trepidation has recently been intensified by the creafion of a "third sector" that includes charter schools, voucher programs, and the increased diversity of private education. this article looks at the dynamics of fear as shaped by increased competition among public, private, and privatized schools. in fact, both public schools and their private school counterparts, fear privatization of education because it draws students and resources away from traditional schools. and recently, the opening of new "religious charter schools" has crossed the lines between church and state, and between private and public education. thus, the politics of education have become somewhat more confused and unnerving as the distinctions between public and private education are virtually disappearing. governments increasingly rely on private entities to institute educational reforms. this article examines the effects of the most significant of these market-based reforms: charter schools. as of the 2004-2005 school year, the united states boasted over three thousand charter schools, with state governments facing continued pressure to expand that number. some critics, however, fear that charter schools pose a threat to the traditional public school system. their central concern, generally referred to as "cream-skimming," is that the educational choice system created by charter schools privileges those students and parents whose race, class, or educational background afford them a better position to navigate the market for schools. this article will contend that the threat of cream-skimming currently appears unsubstantiated. additionally, it will posit that charter schools may actually become allies with district schools, potentially aiding in efforts to increase educational funding. however, because the reforms are so new and the educational landscape is changing in so many ways, additional research is necessary to fully ascertain charter schools' impact on the traditional public school system. this paper uses data on ohio school districts to estimate the short and long term impact of different types of school expenditures on student outcomes. our identification strategy employs a dynamic regression discontinuity design that relies upon the exogenous variation in public school funding created by marginally approved or failed local referenda to fund ohio schools. we find that additional school expenditures on operating, minor capital, and major capital expenditure categories do not have a statistically significant effect on the student test scores of the average public school. importantly, however, operating expenditures have a large and statistically significant impact on student performance in higher poverty school districts. we also examine possible channels (e.g., class size, attendance, discipline, and teachers' compensation) through which each type of expenditure may affect outcomes, and we find that teachers' compensation is the only channel that is affected by additional operating and minor capital expenditures. we examine how teachers from two alternative preparation programs-teach for america (tfa) and kansas city teacher residency (kctr)-contribute to the teacher labor market in and around kansas city, missouri. tfa and kctr teachers are more likely than other teachers to work in charter schools and, more broadly, in schools with more low-income, low-performing, and underrepresented minority (black and hispanic) students. teachers from both programs are more racially/ethnically diverse than the larger local-area teaching workforce, but only kctr teachers are more diverse than other teachers in the same districts where they work. we estimate value added to achievement for teachers in both programs compared with nonprogram teachers, with the caveat that our kctr sample for this analysis is small. in math, we find large positive impacts of tfa and kctr teachers on test score growth; in english language arts also, we estimate positive impacts, but they are smaller. school discipline has been a site of contention and reform. in this study, we draw from 17 interviews with traditional and charter school principals in one mid-sized urban school district to examine how principals use discipline as a tool to both maintain control and demonstrate care. our study calls attention to different strategies principals use to establish this balance, including reducing suspensions, moderating "no-excuses" systems, and building positive student-teacher relationships. we also make a theoretical contribution by showing how schools and school leaders respond to competing institutional logics in developing practices and policies. virtually every definition of charter schools asserts that they are a form of public schooling. this article poses the question: in what way ? charter school advocates, observers, and opponents all note that the schools are publicly funded, are open to all, and are chartered by public entities. this analysis pursues the question by comparing the rhetoric regarding the definition of public education employed by charter school reformers in one state, michigan, with that of the common school reformers of the 19th century, particularly horace mann. the analysis finds conflicting definitions of what constitutes public schooling. although both reforms support tax-funded schools and open access, the common school reformers emphasized political-democratic forms of control. charter school advocates actively challenge such control, and elevate market mechanisms of consumer choice and competition between providers as the primary means of authority. to advance such a program, proponents of charter schools explicitly seek to "redefine" popular conceptions of what constitutes public and private education. in doing so, they frame education principally as a consumer good, and, this article theorizes, effect a privatization of the purpose of public education that contrasts with the common school reformers' stated concern for democracy and the public good. this article analyzes the case of school choice in the united states and its implications for the brazilian context. this discussion is important to brazil, given the fact that key actors are starting to advocate in favor of introducing charter schools and vouchers in the country. evidence from countries that introduced this model can help shed some light on this debate. in this article, we will analyze the overall performance of school choice in the united states, especially charter schools, focusing on its implications on educational equity. the brazilian educational system is highly unequal. thus, if charter schools are not helping to enhance the overall quality and equity in the united states, it may not be a policy to be pursued in brazil. in this scenario, focusing on the idea that school choice is the answer may divert the attention from systemic policies that can contribute to improve education such as high-quality early childhood education, increased education funding, after-school programs, and teacher professional development. since their introduction in the 1990s, charter schools have grown from a small-scale experiment to a ubiquitous feature of the public education landscape. the current study uses the legislative removal of a cap on the maximum number of charters in north carolina as a natural experiment to assess the impacts of charter school growth on teacher quality and student composition in traditional public schools (tps) at different levels of local market penetration. using an instrumental variable difference-in-differences approach to account for endogenous charter demand, we find that intensive local charter entry reduces the inflow of new teachers at nearby tps, leading to a more experienced and credentialed teaching workforce on average. however, we find that the entry of charters serving predominantly white students leads to reductions in average teacher experience, effectiveness, and credentials at nearby tps. overall these findings suggest that the composition of the teacher workforce in tps will continue to change as charter schools further expand, and that the spillover effects of future charter expansion will vary by the types of students served by charters. recent expansions in privatization of government programs mean that the constitutional paradigm of a sharp separation between public and private is increasingly at odds with the blurred public-private character of modern governance. while substantial scholarship exists addressing the administrative and policy impact of expanded privatization, heretofore little effort has been made to address this disconnect between constitutional law and new administrative reality. this article seeks to remedy that deficiency. it argues that current state action doctrine is fundamentally inadequate to address the constitutional challenge presented by privatization. current doctrine is insufficiently keyed to the ways that privatization involves delegation of government power, and simultaneously fails to allow governments sufficient flexibility in structuring public-private relationships. this article proposes instead a new constitutional analysis of privatization that reformulates state action in private delegation terms. under the proposed analysis, the critical question is whether delegations of authority to private entities are adequately structured to enforce constitutional constraints on government power. central to this approach is the recognition that mechanisms other than directly subjecting private entities to constitutional scrutiny can satisfy the demands of constitutional accountability, and can do so without intruding unduly on government regulatory prerogatives. where such mechanisms are lacking, however, grants of government authority to private entities represent unconstitutional delegations. to implement this approach, the article advocates a two-step inquiry that first singles out private delegations creating agency relationships between private entities and the government for special scrutiny, and then asks whether adequate alternative accountability mechanisms exist. mission schools in africa in the first half of the twentieth century were in many ways microcosms of the great educational debates of the times. the objectives of policies regarding access, governance and curriculum were part of a historical evolution of mission education but they were also increasingly a reflection of significant new trends that were to reshape the theory and practice of colonial education. new forms of educational research and professional expertise were to play an ever-increasing role in shaping the forms and content of the education provided. the brief of the mission churches was to meet with the increasing demand for schooling. church and state gradually expanded their cooperation in the field as the costs of education outstripped the resources of the missions and the demand for mass education came to be linked to nationalist demands for political and economic rights. this paper is concerned to map the background to those international influences that shaped the policy and practices of mission education and the increasing engagement of colonial governments with the field of education. it addresses the question of the worldwide protestant mission church's response to the changing political, social and economic environment of the first half of the twentieth century. in particular it seeks to explore how mission initiatives shaped thinking about education in asia, africa, oceania and latin america by the 1930s. it also attempts to situate those issues within a wider educational framework by linking them to the emergent debate concerning pragmatism and utilitarianism in regard to progressive education in the usa and the quest for social democratic education in the united kingdom and europe as part of a response to socialism, nationalism and totalitarianism. in short, the paper explores the influence of the christian mission churches with regard to social policy, in general, and the provision of education, in particular, during the interwar years, with special reference to areas influenced by the work of the international missionary council. at a time when there was a crisis of support for 'foreign missions' how did the debates between fundamentalist-evangelicals and supporters of a 'social gospel' transform themselves into debates regarding the role of missions in non-western societies? and how did these essentially ecclesiastical/theological issues come to influence public policy, specifically educational policy, in the long term? the conclusions are that mission churches had a very significant influence on the shaping of educational thinking in the colonial and imperial context at a time when state influence in the sector was still often quite weak. the origins of the conference and research culture that has informed educational policy since the establishment of the united nations organization had its roots in the broad context of the charter of the league of nations, with a meeting of religious and secular goals, prior to the outbreak of the second world war. between 1910 and 1939 there was a significant history of educational reform and community development that has only been partially documented in relation to its global significance. this is an attempt to build a framework for understanding the nature of those changes and what was achieved. the investigation is conducted through an exploration of the three great world mission conferences of the international missionary council (imc) held at edinburgh (1910), jerusalem (1928) and tambaram, india (1938). the attempts of christian churches to engage with dramaticsocial changes associated with industrialisation, urbanisation, poverty, cultural change and the rise of anti-colonialism, with specific regard to the field of educational policy, are documented and analysed. since charter schools first appeared in 1991, state legislatures have used them to spur education reform. with charter schools' rapid growth, to almost 2700 charter schools serving 684,000 students, a variety of legal issues have emerged. this article examines several of these issues and describes the approaches used by different state legislatures and courts to resolve them. the issues implicated in these charter school laws often concern seminal features that have traditionally marked a distinction between private and public education. part i examines issues affecting the establishment of charter schools, including the sponsorship of charter schools; the conversion of private schools to charter schools; the provisions for home schools and cyber schools; the involvement of for-profit charter school management companies; and the finality of decisions made by charter-granting authorities. part ii explores questions related to charter schools' operations, focusing on tuition; the application of health and safety standards; and the standards guiding revocation, charter renewal or non-renewal decisions, and contract enforcement. in this article, we build on the existing literatures on small group dynamics and public and nonprofit governance by exploring the link between small group dynamics, governance, and nonprofit performance. the results provide evidence that nonprofit governing boards can improve organizational performance by improving their governance behaviors. specifically, we link survey data from minnesota nonprofit charter school board members to hard measures of organizational performance in a path analysis predicting school-level math and reading proficiency levels. we find that boards exhibiting better group dynamics are more active in key governance areas, and that active governance is linked to increased organizational outcomes. our findings advance scholarly understanding of nonprofit governance by identifying a pathway between nonprofit board governing dynamics and sustainable organizational performance gains. we conclude with practical advice on how nonprofit boards can increase their organizational performance through improved small group dynamics. charter schools are one form of decentralizing public education by shifting power into the hands of school stakeholders by providing them with more "voice" in day-to-day decisions. however, the increasing involvement of educational management organizations (emos) as managers of charter schools raises new questions about the influence of school stakeholders. this exploratory study examines the experiences of three very different emos and two schools operated by each company. specifically, the author describes the role of each company in the development of the educational programs in the schools it manages. the three companies varied in the extent to which they limited school stakeholder "voice." the analysis builds toward a greater understanding of the impact of emos on decentralization, including an exploration of the power of charter schools in the emo-school relationship that examines how "exit" from the emo-school relationship may provide power in a way that "voice" does not. charter schools place competitive pressure on school districts to retain students and public funding. many districts also have moved to decentralize control of budgets and teacher hiring down to school principals, independent of competitive pressures. but almost no evaluation evidence gauges the effectiveness of charter-like schools, relative to traditional public schools. we find that autonomous pilot schools in los angeles enroll more low-income and spanish-speaking students, compared with traditional schools. pilot pupils are significantly less likely to exit the school district. but pilot pupils displayed lower test scores in mathematics and fell slightly below traditional students in english-language arts, taking into account prior performance and their propensity to enter pilot schools. we tracked 6,732 students entering pilot high schools between 2008 and 2012, statistically matched in multiple ways with traditional peers from identical sending middle schools. we discuss the advantages of our evaluation strategy and the implications of our findings for education leaders and policy makers. much research documents the systems of racism that undergird the rise of school choice policies and charter schools, racialized organizations that reproduce racial logics. while school choice policy gets enacted at the structural level to enable the formation of charter schools, policy also interacts with a localized neighborhood context where space must be allocated to the charter school. as race scholars show, space is itself racialized. how does this localized allocation of racial space shape intra-group dynamics in a predominantly latinx neighborhood? evidence for this study comes from two years of ethnographic participant-observation and informal conversations with parents in a traditional public school and a charter school in a large northeastern city. findings show how threats to the material boundaries of school space activate symbolic boundaries between parents from each school, drawing from racialized organizational identities of traditional public schools as representing neighborhood loyalty and anti-gentrification resistance positioned against charter schools as representing dominant whiteness, superiority, and social mobility. i conclude with a discussion of implications for broader studies of racialized space and organizations, culture, and collective action. purpose currently, in the education data use literature, there is a lack of research and examples that consider the early steps of filtering, organizing and visualizing data to inform decision-making. the purpose of this study is to describe how school leaders and researchers visualized and jointly made sense of data from a common learning management system (lms) used by students across multiple schools and grades in a charter management organization operating in the usa. to make sense of lms data, researchers and practitioners formed a partnership to organize complex data sets, create data visualizations and engage in joint sensemaking around data visualizations to begin to launch continuous improvement cycles. design/methodology/approach the authors analyzed lms data for n = 476 students in algebra i using hierarchical cluster analysis heatmaps. the authors also engaged in a qualitative case study that examined the ways in which school leaders made sense of the data visualization to inform improvement efforts. findings the outcome of this study is a framework for informing evidence-based improvement cycles using large, complex data sets. central to moving through the various steps in the proposed framework are collaborations between researchers and practitioners who each bring expertise that is necessary for organizing, filtering and visualizing data from digital learning environments and administrative data systems. originality/value the authors propose an integrated cycle of data use in schools that builds on collaborations between researchers and school leaders to inform evidence-based improvement cycles. centering the research process on buiding, rebuilding, and maintaining relationships, this multi-vocal article highlights the need to revisit practice. we consider research conducted in a city where all public schools are charter schools and discuss tensions between the implementation of our research approach and the university as we trouble the notion of 'authorship,' collaboration, and 're-presentation.' bringing our unique positionalities to the forefront, this article focuses on voice (oral story) and how voice functions in (written) text for researcher and participants in dissertation research. we argue that dissertation research is a collaborative and relational process that involves: the participants, the author, the advisor, the bodies of knowledge, and the ethical and moral principles that frame the process. long-term, reciprocal relationships constructed a foundation for this study's knowledge production and may be needed in all research studies, especially those that include those who are 'marginalized' and whose voices are often silenced. in u.s. law, the term "public private partnership" is a term that began to be used in the late 1990s and early 2000s in two distinct but related senses. in both cases, the term is used to denote government contracts in which the private contractor takes on more responsibility than has been customary in the past for the delivery of the services contracted for. with respect to transportation infrastructure, such as highways and bridges, the term refers to a family of relatively new contract types, actively promoted by the federal government for use by state governments, such as operations and maintenance or design-build-finance-operate-maintain, by which the government is able to shift much of the financing, maintenance, and/or operating cost for public infrastructure to private contractors, who may then be allowed to recoup their costs through tolls or other user payments, thus enabling the government to use the market to accomplish its purposes and to relieve public budgets of the financial burden associated with infrastructure upgrading and maintenance. by extension, the term has been applied broadly to all types of contracting out of important government services, including such things as schools and prisons, provision of health care, and even the administration of state welfare programs and financial rescue of the economy. in neither case are the contract types in question really new. there is an extensive history of such use of government contracting, both with respect to transportation infrastructure and more broadly. but the use of the term "public private partnerships" appears to symbolize a new enthusiasm for privatizing governmental functions. in both cases, this extensive use of contracting out raises important public law questions, both with respect to the ways in which the enthusiasm for contracting out has led to efforts to weaken existing legal protections for the public interest and with respect to the ways in which existing law fails to ensure that public values and interests are protected in such contracting out. this article uses theories of public governance to explain the performance of wisconsin's virtual charter school sector. specifically, longitudinal student-level data from wisconsin is used to determine the characteristics and performance of students transferring into and out of virtual charter schools. the results show that students with lower test scores are more likely to transfer school sectors. regression modeling indicates that students suffer immediate-term academic losses when they transfer into virtual charter schools, and immediate-term academic gains when they return to traditional public schools. the results highlight the explanatory power of modern theories of public governance, but call into question the assumption that market-based governance reforms will produce performance gains. the results also speak to the performance of virtual charter schools generally, and to the possible impacts and lessons of the covid-19 related shift to virtual education in the u.s. despite research indicating significant challenges of market-based schooling, charter schools remain a growing trend in the united states. in this article, we examine an emerging market model: a k-12 system of charter schools under one charter board meant to serve as a city's school district. to assess the fit of the market model, we employed a qualitative case study design, using interviews with school board members and the superintendent, and document analysis of school governance documents including the district's bylaws, organizational charts, and state law. we analyzed our findings against a theory of school governance and found that despite the intent of local actors to create a school district that served all students, the market approach to whole-district schooling created gaps in service. this article raises important insights into the use of market models and the underlying philosophy of governance in shaping educational offerings for students, families, and communities. urban south grassroots research collective for public education (usgrc) is a new orleans-based coalition melding research and grassroots organizing for racial-economic equity. buras examines her involvement as a scholar activist working in solidarity with community groups to document the effects of the charter school takeover on black public schools and neighborhoods and push back. through narrative accounts, buras illustrates and analyzes usgrc's collective efforts as an instantiation of critical race praxis. unlike mainstream approaches to scholarship, which treat people and places as data points to be leveraged for academic purposes, usgrc's approach prioritizes the meanings and consequences of research for communities. "making it matter," buras argues, requires insurgent scholarship grounded in history, counter-storytelling, place-based knowledge, democratic collaboration, long-term commitment to community, and anti-racist action. ultimately, she situates usgrc's work in a lineage of freedom fighting and reveals how solidarity and historical knowledge sustain scholars and community members engaged in struggle. this article seeks to document and critique concepts of social and material inequalities embedded in institutional policies and practices in neoliberal education, utilizing autoethnography to explore the obstacles and experiences of a black female charter school leader using an africentric approach to educating black children. a conceptual framework that blends african-centered pedagogy, african womanism, and transformational leadership was used to guide the qualitative autoethnographic study that anchors this article. use of the autoethnographic method provides an opportunity to examine the relational dynamics of the experiences of this black female charter school leader in the cultural context of the black community and neoliberal education. data analysis was captured from autobiographical storytelling within three key time periods or epochs of the researcher's 17-year experience starting, operating, and closing a charter school. the article highlights findings that indicate how attempts to implement an african-centered approach to educating black children, in a dc charter school, in the u.s. eurocentric education model, in the neoliberal era, was compromised by neoliberal policies; and illustrates how reported findings support the need to continue to examine how children of color can be educated, not just schooled, in a manner that places them at the center of their learning, builds agency, and develops them into creative and critical thinkers and future builders. a premise of charter school initiatives has been that these schools have direct benefits for the students attending them and indirect benefits for other students by creating competition for traditional public schools to improve their performance. this study uses a two-pronged approach to assess whether california charter schools are having indirect effects on students in traditional public schools. first, we examine how traditional public school principals react to the introduction of charter schools. second, we assess whether competition from nearby charters is affecting student achievement outcomes for students that remain in traditional public schools. the survey results show that traditional public school principals felt little competitive pressure from charters. similarly, the student achievement analysis shows that charter competition was not improving the performance of traditional public schools. these results suggest that california charter schools are having little effect on the climate of traditional public schools. policies are assumed to rarely change after enactment. punctuated equilibrium theory argues this is because law makers shift attention away from policies after enactment, letting them run on autopilot. i argue that the periods between punctuations deserves study, and that what law makers do is design institutions to make policies path dependent so they can only change within limited parameters-if at all. it may also be that interest groups opposing new policies are still able to shape the way they evolve, pushing against intended paths. in this article i test the influence of path dependence versus group opposition in state charter school policies. i find some evidence of path dependence, but i also find that, to some extent, opposing interests can still change these laws after enactment. furthermore, i find these policies became increasingly similar over time, partially because of path dependence, but also because of the influence of opposing interests. charter schools, and other market-based reforms such as school vouchers and the student tutoring provision of the no child left behind act of 2001, are steeped in politics largely because they challenge the legitimacy of traditional power and funding arrangements in public education. the charter school reform is a significant public-private hybrid on the education landscape. two advocacy coalitions engaged in charter school politics advance opposing perspectives on market-based education policy. this article begins with a framework for examining privatization in education and charter school politics. following this, several key subjects of charter school politics are examined: financing and state caps on the number of charter schools permitted, parental choice, teachers unions and education management companies, and research on charter schools. despite heated battles over student achievement data, the future of charter school politics is likely to be shaped more by the respective values and mobilization power of the two advocacy coalitions than by data on student performance. background/context: embedded in "common sense" and state-mandated reforms to close "the achievement gap," the urban school, especially those sites with a no-excuses orientation to learning, can produce and reproduce the carceral state in students' lives. the seemingly innocuous policies and processes limit access to educational opportunities and create disproportionate out-of-class time, which can emerge as the connective tissue for criminalization and the school-to-prison nexus that disproportionately affects black males in the united states. purpose/objective/research question/focus of study: the objective of the study was to illuminate the more unspoken mechanisms of disproportionality in school while concurrently raising awareness of how everyday practices, like school-imposed mis/labeling, contribute to the symbolic violence and dehumanization of black and latinx boys in school. research design: the article includes purposeful observations and semi-structured interview data with school personnel and students drawn from a 14-month ethnographic study. findings/results: the findings from this study revealed that the mechanisms of disproportionality ranged from explicit anti-black policies to more tacit systems and processes, but all reflected how the no-excuses environment contributes to the connective tissue of criminalization and the school-to-prison nexus for boys of color. the finding centers on three systems and policies that are influenced by carceral logic and the enforcement of student alienation. conclusion/recommendations: the findings from the study reveal the need for a radical transformation of no-excuses public charter schools, one that is community-based and rooted in an afrocentric education. if educators and other school personnel are working in tandem with community members, they can reassess their negative misperceptions of minoritized communities that begin to shape infractions rooted in anti-blackness. a community-based approach can begin to dismantle the school-to-prison nexus. furthermore, an afrocentric education approach requires school personnel to understand the history and culture of people of african descent and to see students' full humanity. here, students' lived experiences would be centered within the diaspora, while sociocultural norms that may have been criminalized in the past would be valued and accepted. research in sociology demonstrates the way social connections shape access to information about job opportunities. in education, we understand less about how social networks impact the job process for marginalized teachers and teachers in nontraditional labor markets. this study examines how teachers in new orleans and detroit, cities with high concentrations of charter schools, use their networks to search for jobs, and how their experiences vary by race and gender. we find that in choice-rich environments, there was an extensive reliance on social networks in the hiring process, and teachers had different access to key social networks that can help to land jobs. hiring decisions and unequal access to job opportunities among teacher candidates, in part due to the reliance on networks, created conditions where teachers who cultivated stronger networks, or with access to the "right" networks, had greater opportunity, with implications for racial and gender equity and diversity. in this article, i examine the interplay of artist identity, creative agency, and the urgency of action through research with a teen arts internship at a contemporary arts center in post-katrina new orleans. the central research questions for the study focused on investigation of the contexts, narratives, activities, and consequences of artist identity formation. first, i offer a brief literature review of art education for social justice, activism, and creative agency. then, i describe the use of social practice theory of identity and agency to interpret activist artist identity development within the research. next, i delineate the use of portraiture as methodology to construct narrative portraits of the young artists of the study. finally, i present data and analysis of the findings of the study of the contexts, narratives, activities, and consequences of activist artist identity work. over the past 10 years increasing numbers of charter schools have been considered a viable option for many students seeking to obtain a quality education. public charter schools and their administrators and teachers are obligated to follow the principles enshrined in federal mandates, such as the individuals with disabilities education improvement act of 2004, section 504 of the rehabilitation act of 1973, and title ii of the americans with disabilities act. this study examines the capacity of charter school operators to create environments and service delivery models that effectively address the needs of students eligible for special education services via a survey of wisconsin charter school operators and a content analysis of the applications of independent charter schools. the results indicate that charter operators, particularly those presiding over schools considered their own local education agency, experienced significant challenges with addressing special education in the planning and implementation of their charter schools. policy implications for the role of charter authorizers are explored. fully online virtual schools have consistently underperformed academically compared to brick and mortar schools. scholars debate the extent to which these differences are due school quality or the type of student that attends virtual schools. the large number of students who enrolled in virtual schools during the covid-19 pandemic provides a unique opportunity to revisit this debate, as the phenomenon plausibly attenuates negative selection into virtual schools. previous research concluded that a virtual school covid cohort resembled prior groups demographically but reported greater success at their prior in-person schools and in cyber schools, however, it offered only limited insight into their academic performance at their virtual school. we use data from a large cyber charter network ("countrywide cyber") to assess whether students who enrolled in full time virtual schools due to covid-related concerns performed better on entry diagnostic assessments. results indicate that students who enrolled due to covid-19 were stronger academically, corroborating recent descriptive research. the implications of these results for practice and policy are discussed. objective the effects of competition from public charter schools on district school budget decisions are theoretically ambiguous. competitive pressures could increase desired budget autonomy since they give district school leaders more flexibility; however, competition could decrease desired budget autonomy if district school leaders are generally riskaverse or if they believe that central office staff are in better positions to make school-level budget decisions. competitive pressures could also increase or decrease changes in school-level spending depending on school leaders' beliefs about how to efficiently allocate resources. methods we randomly assign surveys to district school leaders in texas in the 2019-2020 school year to determine the effects of anticipated competition from public charter schools on reported desire for budget autonomy and expectations about future school-level spending decisions. results we find the first experimental evidence to suggest that anticipated charter school competition has large negative effects on school leaders' reported spending on certain categories of support staff, and reduces, or has no effect on, the reported desire for more school-level budget autonomy. the negative effects on spending for support staff tend to be larger for school leaders with more experience. conclusion although more research is needed, these results suggest that competition from public charter schools could lead to reductions in spending for certain categories in district-run public schools if school leaders have the autonomy to make budget decisions. this is the second of three articles on "sources of authority in education". all use the work of amy gutmann as a heuristic device to describe and explain the prevalence of market-based models of education reform in the united states as part of what pasi sahlberg terms the global education reform movement (germ). this movement is based on neoliberal tenets and encourages the enterance of private business and the adoption of business practices and challenges long standing notions of democratic education. the first article is "negating amy gutmann: deliberative democracy, education and business influence" (to be published in democracy and education) and the third is "the odd malaise of democratic education and the inordinate influence of business" (to be published in policy futures in education). my intent is to include them, along with a fourth article, "profit, innovation and the cult of the entrepreneur: civics and economic citizenship," as chapters of a proposed volume, democratic education and markets: segmentation, privatization and sources of authority in education reform. the "negating amy" article looks primarily at deliberative democracy. the present article considers the promise of egalitarian democracy and how figures such as horace mann, john dewey, and gutmann have argued it is based largely on the promise of public education. "the odd malaise" article begins by offering some historical background, from the origins of the common school in the 1600s to market emulation models, no child left behind and how this is reflected in a "21st century schools" discourse; it ends by considering and underlying theme: what happens to the philosophy of education when democracy and capitalism are at odds. the "profit, innovation" article then looks at how ideological forces are popularized, considering ayn rand's influence, the concept of merit, schumpeter's concept of 'creative destruction,' and the ideal of the entrepreneur as related sources in a changing common sense, pointing out that the commonplace of identifying the innovator and the entrepreneur is misplaced. the present article accordingly begins to question business influence and suggest show we may outline its major features using amy gutmann's work as a heuristic device to interpret business-influenced movements to reform public education. originally the title was turning amy gutmann on her head. consequently it returns to gutmann's democratic education and its three sources of authority, suggesting that the business community is a fourth source. as such, it is in a contest to supplant the systems of deliberative democracy for which gutmann advocates. it continues with a consideration of what might be called a partial historical materialist analysis the growth of inequality in the united states (and other countries) since the 1970s; this correlates with much of the basis for changes in the justifications and substance of education reform. after casting this question in principal-agent terms, it then looks at both those who sought to create a public will for public education and recent reform movements that have sought to redirect public support from a unified education system and instead advocate a patchwork of charters, vouchers for private schools, on-line education, home schooling, virtual schools and public schools based on market emulation models. drawing from other theories of education, especially plato (and the spartan model), locke, and john stuart mill, it also suggests that it might be instructive to compare gutmann's three sources of authority to abraham kuyper's concept of sphere sovereignty. it concludes that ultimate authority for education is -or should be-, somewhat paradoxically, vested in the adult the child will become, creating practical problems regarding the education of the sovereign that are never fully resolved and which may, in fact, be unresolvable based on rational deliberation. finally, it looks at one instrument of business, market segmentation, and its importance as a motivating factor for education reform. in this article, kristen l. buras examines educational policy formation in new orleans and the racial, economic, and spatial dynamics shaping the city's reconstruction since 2005. more specifically, buras draws on the critical theories of whiteness as property, accumulation by dispossession, and urban space economy to describe the strategic assault on black communities by education entrepreneurs. based on data collected from an array of stakeholders on the ground, she argues that policy actors at the federal, state, and local levels have contributed to a process of privatization and an inequitable racial-spatial redistribution of resources while acting under the banner of "conscious capitalism." she challenges the market-based reforms currently offered as a panacea for education in new orleans, particularly charter schools, and instead offers principles of educational reform rooted in a more democratic and critically conscious tradition. in this paper, we draw upon in-depth interviews with teachers and administrators in 18 unionized charter schools around the country to investigate teachers' motivations for unionization. our results suggest that while mismanagement and distrust are often the proximate cause of charter unionization efforts, both material and purposive goals-greater job security and pay as well as increased voice in school decision-making-power organization drives and contract negotiations. our evidence suggests unionization and collective bargaining agreements can create more transparency around pay and development, which teachers desired. but, sometimes unionization carried unanticipated risks for administrators-salaries increased faster than revenues and teacher development became constrained by newly formed collective bargaining agreements. the current study critically analyzes the dress code and uniform policies of 89 new orleans public charter schools using content analysis. dress code and uniform policies across the united states are deeply rooted in racism, sexism, and classism and, through their implementation, further contribute to these same oppressions. in this study, the dress code and uniform policies, including the justifications for policy, specific policy rules, and possible consequences for noncompliance, are the primary units of analysis. drawing on intersectionality and the concept of misogynoir, this study attempts to dissect what school policies communicate about race, class, and gender. the racist, classist, and sexist language deployed within the policies is exposed while specifically centering the disproportionate regulation of young black female bodies in dress code policies. school social workers are uniquely positioned to advocate for more equitable dress code and uniform policies. this study contributes to the larger body of literature for its inclusion of data from an entire city as well as its intersectional approach. background/context: the lack of court-ordered support for race-based policies that maintain and create integrated schools has forced communities of color to seek other avenues to obtain equitable education, such as school choice. individual states and the federal government, as seen in grant provisions through the american reinvestment and recovery act, are encouraging the expansion of choice at the very time that options for increasing student diversity, particularly racial diversity, are being narrowed by the courts. purpose/objective/research question/focus of study: the article uses critical race theory to examine the outcomes of specific school reforms, based on market theory models of school choice, that were designed to alleviate schooling inequities in urban districts. setting: the context of milwaukee, wisconsin, serves as a microcosm of urban districts that have embraced school choice to create more equitable schooling options. milwaukee, like most metropolitan areas, has a history of court-ordered desegregation that served as a temporary solution to racially segregated schools. given the federal and district court turn from supporting race-based desegregation policies in schools, milwaukee and other metropolitan districts are looking for new models to serve students of color in their districts and cities. research design: this article is a conceptual paper that incorporates data from a variety of sources to support the authors' conclusions. data collection and analysis: data for this project were taken from the u.s. census bureau, documents from newly created small high schools, such as web sites and curriculum designs; current newspaper articles discussing issues of small high schools; archival newspaper articles documenting the creation of the 1990 choice and charter programs; professional experiences as a member of the bill and melinda gates institutional selection and small-school team support system; and an empirical study that documents teachers' attempts to provide curriculum and instruction in newly created small schools. conclusions/recommendations: in combination, these data sources tell the story of market theory reforms that will continue to struggle to meet reformists' goals to serve all milwaukee populations so long as policy makers and the courts continue to deny the irrefutable power that race and class exercise in parental choice in u.s. urban schools. urban south grassroots research collective for public education (usgrc) is a new orleans-based coalition melding research and grassroots organizing for racial-economic equity. buras examines her involvement as a scholar activist working in solidarity with community groups to document the effects of the charter school takeover on black public schools and neighborhoods and push back. through narrative accounts, buras illustrates and analyzes usgrc's collective efforts as an instantiation of critical race praxis. unlike mainstream approaches to scholarship, which treat people and places as data points to be leveraged for academic purposes, usgrc's approach prioritizes the meanings and consequences of research for communities. "making it matter," buras argues, requires insurgent scholarship grounded in history, counter-storytelling, place-based knowledge, democratic collaboration, long-term commitment to community, and anti-racist action. ultimately, she situates usgrc's work in a lineage of freedom fighting and reveals how solidarity and historical knowledge sustain scholars and community members engaged in struggle. in many cities, charter schools make up an increasing proportion of public schools, substantially altering education governance. in new orleans, nearly every public school student attends a charter school. each charter school or network has its own private governing board responsible for obtaining and maintaining the school’s charter, school finances, and hiring school leadership. we know relatively little about the composition, priorities, or effectiveness of these boards. in this article, we find that new orleans’s charter boards are unrepresentative, are focused on fiduciary responsibilities rather than academics, and routinely fail to comply with state transparency laws. as more schools and other public services in urban areas move to private governance, it is important to examine the people who compose the boards, their decision-making processes, and the extent of public involvement. new orleans provides a cautionary tale of how this governance system could operate in other cities with growing charter sectors. teacher labor markets are evolving across the united states. the rise of charter schools, alternative teacher certification, and portfolio districts are transforming teachers’ access to employment, changing the way they search for and apply for jobs, and may also change the role that social networks play in the job search. however, we know little about how teachers use their networks to find jobs, particularly in increasingly fragmented local labor markets. we draw on interviews with 127 teachers in three districts chosen to reflect an increasing presence of charter schools: new orleans, detroit, and san antonio. we find that the extent of fragmentation in a city’s labor market drives the use of networks, with important implications for job access and equity. under new school-choice policies, schools feel increasing pressure to market their schools to parents and students. i examine how school leaders in new orleans used different marketing strategies based on their positions in the market hierarchy and the ways in which they used formal and informal processes to recruit students. this study relied on qualitative interviews, observations of board meetings, and board-meeting minutes from a random sample of 30 schools in new orleans. findings indicate that marketing was a very common strategy. yet even though choice policies were meant to give parents, not schools, power in selecting where their children attend school, some schools found ways to avoid enrolling disadvantaged students, often by not marketing. faced with the pressure of accountability and charter renewal, these schools traded greater funding for potentially greater averages in student achievement. at the same time, some schools that were oversubscribed invested in marketing and recruitment anyway to draw less affluent parents to the school, who might not be aware of the open application and enrollment process. i discuss the implications of these marketing strategies. new orleans has become the blueprint for urban education reform in the united states, with federal, state, and local policymakers advocating its development as the nation's first all-charter school district. the destruction of the lower 9th ward following hurricane katrina provided education entrepreneurs and state allies with an 'unprecedented opportunity' to rewrite the geography of new orleans. targeted state disinvestment in black communities prepared the ground for white entrepreneurs to capitalize on public schools and create an urban space economy that serves their accumulative interests through dispossession of working-class communities of color. based on oral history interviews with veteran teachers, administrators, and community members affiliated with martin luther king elementary school in the lower 9th ward, this case study traverses time and space, documenting the community's history of racial resistance and more recent struggles for educational equity. i examine these struggles in the context of neoliberal attempts to undermine the reconstruction of long-standing schools and neighborhoods and instead secure space for privately managed charter schools. notably, efforts to rebuild king elementary in this reformed landscape reveal a distinct commitment to equity, culture, and a shared sense of place the antithesis of the vacuous market-based policies that have guided reform in new orleans. i argue that such commitments have enabled and energized grassroots educational resistance to dispossession despite the power of venture capital and exclusionary master plans. in this article huriya jabbar examines how the regulatory environment in post–hurricane katrina new orleans has influenced choice, incentives, and competition among schools. while previous research has highlighted the mechanisms of competition and individual choice—the “invisible hand”—and the creation of markets in education, jabbar focuses here on how markets, especially those in education, are also governed by the “visible” hand of the government, which, through regulations and policies, influences how they operate and the outcomes they generate. she compares two governing agencies to examine how the different policy environments in new orleans shaped school leaders' perceptions of competition and their behavioral responses to it. her findings indicate that governing agencies constrain or enable school leaders' ability to respond to market pressures, sometimes mitigating and other times exacerbating inequities in the marketplace. these findings can inform other school districts across the united states as they adopt market-based reforms, providing directions for ensuring that such policies are equitable. education in south africa from 1961 to 2011: between two paradigms and elusive ideals this article forms part of the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the tydskrif vir geesteswetenskappe. it presents an overview of events and debates in education provision in south africa during the period under review. the article argues that education between 1961 and 2011 needs to be understood against the backdrop of what happened in the country even before 1961. it therefore lists and briefly discusses a number of pre-1961 historical events pertinent to education. before 1994, and from 1961 onward in particular education in south africa was dominated by the separate but equal paradigm, also espousing the principle of differentiated education to accommodate the learning needs of learners and the needs of the country. the south africa act of 1909 set the tone for the exclusion of the so-called non-whites from political and other processes. it allocated higher education to the union government and all other education to the four provincial governments. this period was characterised among others by the creation of advisory councils for non-white education and various levels of education institutions for non-whites. various investigations to explore possibilities regarding the provision of education for non-whites like the eiselen commission were commissioned. in 1948 the national party assumed power and adopted the apartheid policy (separate development). the bantu education act was promulgated soon after and it came to epitomise all that was objectionable about the separate but equal policy: unequal spending on children of different races and a curriculum designed to educate black children for second class citizen status. it unleashed opposition to apartheid education that was not to stop before 1994. separate educational laws for the education of indians and coloureds were introduced in the 1960s and the education and training act was promulgated in the 1970s to regulate the education of all black people inside "south africa" and outside it in the self-governing territories that had been formed by that time. in 1994 the anc took over political power and immediately gave expression to the freedom charter notion that the doors of learning shall be opened to all. the anc espoused what can be called a human rights (transformative or freedom) education paradigm built on the pillars of equality, access, redress, non-racialism, non-sexism and quality. it transformed the education system and created only one national education department with nine provincial departments and only two types of schools public and independent schools. the anc introduced sweeping legislative and policy changes and changed the organisation, funding and governance of schools. compulsory school attendance for all children was introduced and only one national school-end examination was put in place. the article argues that neither the separate but equal nor the human rights paradigm achieved their ideals. this conclusion is reached by analysing the performance of the system, the training of teachers, the curriculum, the cultural and religious aspects of schooling, the role that unions play in education and the funding of education. it further concludes that too many schools remain dysfunctional and that many children do not yet have access to quality education despite the fact that participation in education has improved dramatically. the unique role of unions in south african governance and schooling is examined and their alleged disruptive rule regarding the management and governance of education is explored. the main claim of the article is that participation in education has increased but that the performance of the system has not improved significantly. previous gaps and inequalities seem to have remained and may even have widened. the ideals pursued by the two paradigms in question remain elusive. there are, however a number of keys that can be used to unlock the potential of the education system so that it may contribute its share to the wellbeing of the citizens of the country and to the welfare and development of the country as a whole. a number of districts are moving toward a portfolio management model, in which central offices act as “portfolio managers” (pms) that oversee—but may not actively manage—publicly funded schools. using principal-agent theory, with its focus on goal alignment and the use of incentives, we explore how pms operated in ways distinct from traditional district offices in denver, new orleans, and los angeles. we consider how pms identify the goals of multiple principals, incentivize and monitor agents around principals’ goals, and select and develop agents who can meet principals’ goals. drawing on 76 system-level interviews, we find that pms in each city confronted similar tensions around pm responsibilities but addressed them differently. specifically, we observed distinct pm approaches to managing competing goals of stakeholders in the context of school closure and to balancing school-based autonomy with more prescriptive measures for building school capacity and ensuring the equitable treatment of students. informed by recent struggles over schooling, this article proceeds from the premise that education is a deeply geographic and urgently political problem increasingly engaged by a wide range of scholars and activists. we argue that the current political moment demands increasing geographic attention to the confluence of social processes that shape schooling arrangements. we contend that this attention also must address how people involved in collective action understand and enact alternatives and how these mobilizations may articulate with other social movements. although existing geographers of education have studied schooling in relation to other processes such as gentrification and citizenship, we argue that centering schooling as an object of study can enliven important disciplinary conversations. in light of these arguments, we call on geographers to advance geographic scholarship on education by creating a cohesive critical geographies of education subfield. drawing from intensified interest in the geographies of education, this subfield can contribute to broader geographic debates by centering schooling in theory generation, rather than only studying education as a site of test cases for existing geographic theories. given this call, this review highlights how the existing literature on schooling signals the potential of geographic work on education and marks considerations for the development of future research. this article explores the dynamic discursive interactions between two keenly related concepts, globalization and neoliberalism. though largely synonymous in the social imaginary, in fact, these ideas are different and analytically distinct. they need unpacking. the notion that both globalization and neoliberalism are empirically verified social realities must be advanced. what's more as they affect the global-local social relation, varying manifestations such as gentrification, the global emergence of schools of choice (charter schools), and the economic and geographic dislocations of subordinate populations become evident. relying on empirical studies and everyday lived cultural experience in the rebuilding of the city of new orleans post-hurricane katrina, i finally examine the implications for a global latino education and pedagogy. theories of market-based school reform suggest that teacher labor markets may be inefficient because schools lack autonomy to incentivize performance in hiring, retention, and compensation. we test this empirically by comparing teacher exits in the deregulated market of new orleans with neighboring traditional school districts. we find that the relationship between teacher performance and retention is stronger in the deregulated market. we also find positive associations between salary and performance, but only when teachers transfer from one charter school to another. while teacher retention is more closely tied to performance in new orleans, this did not yield a net gain in teacher quality, because new teachers in new orleans were of lower average quality than their peers in neighboring districts. despite research indicating significant challenges of market-based schooling, charter schools remain a growing trend in the united states. in this article, we examine an emerging market model: a k-12 system of charter schools under one charter board meant to serve as a city’s school district. to assess the fit of the market model, we employed a qualitative case study design, using interviews with school board members and the superintendent, and document analysis of school governance documents including the district’s bylaws, organizational charts, and state law. we analyzed our findings against a theory of school governance and found that despite the intent of local actors to create a school district that served all students, the market approach to whole-district schooling created gaps in service. this article raises important insights into the use of market models and the underlying philosophy of governance in shaping educational offerings for students, families, and communities. building on an interpretive case study of a public school at a prison in new orleans, this paper examines the punitive culture of public education and points to its role in extending both the minority achievement gap and mass minority incarceration. the work documents how racial minorities, and african american males in particular, are criminalized by school disciplinary policies and shows how these policies foreshorten educational careers and increase risk for incarceration. the paper concludes by turning to a school site in post-hurricane katrina new orleans where a grassroots student organization has resisted the correctional school disciplinary model and has advocated for more positive educational investments. •school choice and centralized enrollment are intended to expand access.•many students in a school choice system are not assigned to their first-choice school.•assignments below first choice result in substantially lower school quality.•some school quality is regained with multiple rounds of assignment.•schools can maintain enrollment even if they are not frequent first choices. centralized school enrollment is designed to improve the allocation of seats in choice-based systems. we study the quality of k-12 public school placements relative to revealed family preferences using data from new orleans, where a market-based school system allocates most seats through a centralized enrollment lottery. we propose a theory of family utility maximization under school choice systems with and without guaranteed placements. using an instrumental variables strategy, we estimate the causal effect of losing a school placement lottery on the school quality a student receives. we find a significant gap between preferred and actual school quality for students who do not win a first-choice assignment, some of which is regained when multiple rounds of assignment are offered. from the supply side, this allows schools of choice to operate with weak demand by enrolling students who fail to win assignment to oversubscribed schools of greater quality and higher preference ranking. this article examines black male students' perceptions of the role of race and racism in perpetuating the school-to-prison pipeline. through a phenomenological investigation of ten black male students in the new orleans area, this article finds that black male students perceive racism in society, racism in schools, and poor teacher expectations to aid in the perpetuation of the school-to-prison pipeline. furthermore, the participants of this study revealed that schools may use other black males who have successfully navigated the educational system to better reach black male students who are placed at risk of the school-to-prison pipeline. this article considers the responses of theses black male students to the role of race and racism in the context of critical race theory. given the physical, social, cultural, and financial devastation of new orleans, all aspects of life after katrina irrevocably changed, as did the institutions that once served the legendary crescent city. yet scant reports provide an ethnographic-like view that documents the effects of katrina on historically black colleges and universities (hbcus) and the populations they serve, including preservice and veteran teachers in teacher education programs, specifically in hardest hit new orleans. the primary purpose of this study is to examine the impact of hurricane katrina on hbcu teacher education programs in post-katrina new orleans, their recovery, and their response to the emerging educational landscape that includes the new orleans public school district and the state takeover schools in the recovery school district. the authors use a qualitative, ethnographic-like approach to analyze each hbcu's intersection of legacy and tradition with public schools, its community, and its students. in cities across the united states, working-class communities of color find themselves struggling against inequities deepened by state disinvestment. students at the center-a writing initiative based in several public high schools in new orleans over the last decade-has been a part of this struggle and embraces a pedagogy rooted in the voices, cultures, and histories of traditionally marginalized youth, their families, schools, and neighborhoods. through collections of student writing and digital media, young neo-griots have produced counterstories that call into question dominant narratives about race, schooling, and neoliberal policy. this article draws upon student counterstories, teacher interviews, and classroom and community observations as the means for critically analyzing the implementation of racially-inspired neoliberal reforms, such as decentralization, charter schools, market-based educational choice, and targeted disinvestment in pubic infrastructure, in new orleans-the experimental front for such policies in the united states. while more accelerated and extensive due to the vacuum created by displacement and destruction after hurricane katrina, the reforms are not wholly distinct from those elsewhere. thus students' counterstories shed light on the 'legitimacy' of such policies nationally and globally and reveal the necessity of building solidarities between the south within the north and the global south. more immediately, students and teachers challenge the aspirations of neoliberal elites in new orleans who seek to elide their history, close their school, and reinvent their neighborhood. police officers and metal detectors have become fixtures in american public schools. in this tough-on-crime, security-oriented era, the new gold standard for school discipline has become the criminal justice system. while harsh school punishment has reshaped schools and communities across the socioeconomic divide, nowhere is the overlap between classroom and prison more striking than at the orleans parish prison, the site of a new orleans public school enrolling primarily poor african american boys expelled under zero-tolerance policies for minor infractions such as tardiness, but not actual criminal behavior. the prison school examines how and why public schools take a punitive approach to education and analyzes how this criminalizing mode influences a student's approach toward correctional custody. how did schools and prisons--two very different kinds of public institutions--become so intertwined, and what does this combination mean for students, communities, and, ultimately, a democratic society? how do we begin to unravel the ties that bind the racialized realities of mass school failure and mass incarceration? and what does this mean to segments of the population--in particular, african american males--who have been systematically removed from their schools and their society?--provided by publisher. educational access was central in the racial inscription of class identities in the late nineteenth century. in atlanta and new orleans, white newspapers, politicians and ordinary citizens launched vigorous campaigns against integrated schools, which resulted in limited access to elite public schooling for upwardly mobile blacks. jewell's study analyses these cases to explore social reproduction as a link between race and class as social structures. whites in both cities used the concept of miscegenation, or racial mixing, to define blacks' access to elite cultural knowledge and social networks as a violation of the colour line. jewell argues that analyses of racial formation should give attention to discursive links between race and class in struggles over social reproduction because maintaining racial hierarchies in periods of social change requires constructing new cultural narratives that reproduce economic dominance over racial minorities. in this article, buras chronicles the struggle against closing frederick douglass high school in new orleans. amid mass charter school development and the school facilities master plan aimed at reconstructing the city's education landscape, douglass remained one of the only open access public high schools in the historic upper 9th ward. the community's spirited effort to honor the school's african american legacy and acquire greater resources from the state-run recovery school district, in opposition to support for privately managed charter schools, provides a striking case study of resistance to current reforms and their costs. it also highlights the danger of school closures in the absence of historical context, which explains the challenges of all-black public schools through a critical analysis of white supremacy and racially targeted state disinvestment. we're really going to have to take a look at what neighborhoods are rebuilt and what jobs are available for people before we even talk about rebuilding schools, torin sanders] said. this is like urban planning 101. definitely there will be a rebuilding of schools but it won't be done in isolation. if jobs are here and houses are here, schools will be here.as of oct. 11, only 2,700 students or 5 percent of the 55,000 students enrolled in nops pre-katrina confirmed a return to the district. about 3,000, or about 43 percent, of the district's 7,000 pre-katrina staff said they will return. orleans parish school board president torin sanders said a majority of the schools were destroyed. the district is still completing applications to fema and documenting damage, he said.once those dollar amounts come in then we can see what we're entitled to and what we can rebuild with, sanders said. sanders said they can't plan to rebuild schools until they know how many students and teachers will return. as of oct. 11, only 2,700 students or 5 percent of the 55,000 students enrolled in nops pre-katrina confirmed a return to the district. about 3,000, or about 43 percent, of the district's 7,000 pre-katrina staff said they will return.the washington, d.c.-based national education association estimates it costs an average of $11 million to rebuild an elementary school, $15 million to rebuild a middle school and $31 million to rebuild a high school. new orleans students increasingly uncomfortable with what they describe as the prison-like atmosphere at many of their public schools will present alternative security solutions to recovery school district superintendent paul vallas at 10 a.m. thursday at john dibert elementary school, 4217 orleans ave. the rethinkers, a four-year-old organization of students and adult advisers, have come up with a four-point plan they believe will create "safety through dignity" and establish a positive foundation of problem-solving as they progress through the school system. artspot trains local youth and incarcerated women in these methods via their educational programs in the new orleans public schools and in a louisiana women's prison (michna 544). since 2005, artspot has broadened its communityengagement methods to produce performance projects that help transform the racial divide in new orleans and heal local individuals and communities from the material, psychic, and spiritual damage that the 2005 "federal flood" inflicted. according to mwase in an interview, artspot's research into local baptist congregations revealed to them the extent to which churches in new orleans both reinforce the city's racial divide and "ground" local communities. according to becker, when he stepped inside and perceived its total destruction, the tears he had been holding in since the day of the storm suddenly poured forth. in this scene, mwase and randels reenacted the colonizing encounter from the point of view of two children in zimbabwe engaging in a role-playing game about their nation's history. since mwase's character was the only one who had access to collective memories of what actually happened when the whites first arrived, she took on the "role" of colonizer and diamond-company owner, cecil john rhodes.6 randels's character, in turn, took on the role of a tribal chief. ...] part v explores the political lessons other school districts and states can learn from the new orleans experience, particularly as it relates to state takeover, charter schools, and school choice plans. the orleans parish school board (opsb), the entity in control of new orleans public schools prior to the storm, was plagued by corruption and financial mismanagement.12 prior to the hurricane the district was officially bankrupt, with over $265 million in debt.13 corruption had become so rampant that the fbi set up a task force housed in the district headquarters which led to dozens of criminal indictments.14 the opsb was racially polarized and appeared more concerned about who controlled supplier contracts and the union contract than the well-being of children.'5 there was also a leadership void, as the opsb ran through eight superintendents between 1998 and 2005. ' the high turnover rate was due, in part, to the high level of friction between the superintendents and the highly active and controlling opsb, infamous for its micromanagement of the system.17 based on this dismal record of academic performance and entrenched financial mismanagement and graft, the public and state legislators lost confidence in the opsb 's ability to run the schools. since hurricane katrina struck the gulf coast region nearly three months ago, it seems everyone has an opinion about the future of new orleans public schools, including state, educational and community leaders.but educational experts say the opinion of only one governing body counts.the final authority rests with the state and that's the bottom line, said dave griffith, spokesman for the national association of state board's of education. the state has the definitive say but everyone from community leaders to city officials is weighing in on the subject anyway.i think what's going on right now is a little bit confusing, said tulane university president scott cowen, who chairs mayor c. ray nagin's bring back new orleans education committee. people are confused about the responsibility of the school board, the state and the legislature. they're confused about who is in control. i'm confused, too. it's changing every day.since the hurricane, in addition to nagin's bring back new orleans committee to discuss the long-term future of the schools, gov. kathleen babineaux blanco proposed a bill to take over all 68 failing schools in the district.state rep. steve scalise, rmetairie, also filed a bill pushing the takeover one step further by asking the state to control all 117 district schools. lourdes moran, orleans parish school board vice president, spearheaded the algiers charter school association of which she is also a member to turn 13 west bank schools into charter schools, which were originally scheduled to reopen last monday... the orleans parish school board reopened four of nine schools under its control, including mcmain]. the rest are either chartered or controlled by the state.the district has the authority to reopen five more schools, including warren easton high school on canal street, which may reopen next, said school board president phyllis landrieu.i'm pleased with where we're at right now, landrieu said. we've accomplished a lot and, as far as i can tell, we're accommodating most of the children. anytime anyone wants to come into school, we try to accommodate them.not all school officials are happy with opsb's performance.brenda mitchell, president of the united teachers of new orleans, doesn't think enough schools are open in orleans parish. state education officials say all students who want to return to new orleans schools will have a spot, but mitchell said students are being turned away.i'm not satisfied if there's one child who needs placement, mitchell said. we're obligated to provide children with education no matter where they come from. i'm very disappointed in the district. i don't believe they've taken in to consideration the impact of what they've done. this is an opportunity to hear the voices of the citizens from every community, said councilwoman cynthia hedge-morrell, chairwoman of the council's education and budget committees. "our goal is to gain a united and inclusive view of what we need to do to provide every child in new orleans with a solid education." "a citywide assessment of the new orleans public schools is the right starting point to refocus attention on student achievement and long-term improvement," said newly appointed state education superintendent paul pastorek. "we urge parents and others who are interested in expressing their views to attend one of these meetings. everyone's voice is important." "this is the opportune time to assess the new orleans public schools," said robert d. reily, co-chairman of the foundation. "this is the initial step in an ongoing community engagement process focused on public education. with the continued support of the community and local leaders, we can help inform policy decisions and make lasting positive change for our children. " i think they've done a good job, said school board member jimmy fahrenholtz. the reason some want them out is strictly politics. they're outsiders. as much good as they've done, now is not the time to get rid of them. we're in crisis mode.the a&m employees are aware of the politically charged environment but they avoid being into it when possible. they spend between 14 and 18 hours per day fixing the payroll system, opening schools in algiers and elsewhere in the city and working with the federal emergency management agency to repair damaged buildings.we're business professionals, said doug lambert, an a&m director who is working as the school district's chief financial officer. we're not politicians, we don't choose sides. we try to present the facts. we don't deal in emotions and politics, that's not our game. alvarez & marsal representatives had to defend their firm's work at an april 19 school board meeting. it wasn't the first challenge to their presence in new orleans. this is a fixed-fee contract, lambert said. we're not billed out per hour. if i work 45 hours, i make the same as if i work 60 hours. i'm making half of what i would normally bill out at.lambert estimates the 36 alvarez & marsal employees working for the school district would bill out between $200 to $600 per hour in the private sector.the a&m contract changed in december last year when more employees were added in the real estate and insurance departments. the contract increased to $18.6 million with $2.6 million reimbursable through fema, leaving the district to pay about $16 million.a&m defense we're pleased at what we've accomplished, lambert said. i don't think there's one person here who isn't putting their heart and soul into this. the fact that the city, rsd and opsb are going to be working together with the community to develop a long-term plan for the public school system should send a strong signal about our joint determination to create a better future for our children, opsb president phyllis landrieu said. currently, the rsd operates 20 direct-run schools and 17 charter schools and serves more than 17,000 students. the opsb operates 5 direct-run schools and 12 charter schools and serves more than 9,000 students. the short-term facility plans for the rsd for the 2007-08 school year include the completion of 15 building restoration projects at existing rsd and opsb school facilities and the addition of 12-15 modular campuses at rsd and opsb school sites, adding about 16,000 student seats to orleans parish. the report captures both the concerns and the hope expressed by citizens throughout new orleans, said councilwoman cynthia hedgemorrell, chairwoman of the city council education and budget committees. "now we must come together as a united community and support the plan of action that will improve education for all public school students regardless of race or socioeconomic background. this is our opportunity to transform public schools in new orleans from obstacles into assets for economic growth." "we believe that the recommendations presented in this report will provide a solid foundation for on-going community support efforts to improve our schools," said bob reily, chairman of the greater new orleans education foundation. "transforming public education in new orleans will not happen overnight. it requires thoughtful planning and relentless execution." "this report is an informative assessment by the community with a thoughtful set of recommendations that will inform rsd priorities as we go forward," said paul pastorek, louisiana superintendent of education. "transforming the new system of schools in new orleans will require this kind of community involvement if we are to be successful. i am grateful for the leadership of the sponsoring agencies who initiated and brought this assessment to fruition." isidore newman school and academy of the sacred heart's campuses also have wireless capability, and about 80 percent of metairie park country day's campus is wireless. country day implemented a program where all freshmen students will have a gateway m-280 convertible tablet computer. at chapelle, computers are used on a regular basis in grade levels eight through 12. "we don't have a one-to-one student to laptop ratio, but we use them in portable labs in almost every subject," said jane ann frosch]. "we're trying to teach our students that technology is a part of our everyday lives." mandeville high school has 700 computers, with 95 percent connected to the internet and 100 wireless laptop computers that can be moved from classroom to classroom. each teacher has a desktop computer and classrooms typically have three to five computers for students to use. there are 20 "model classrooms," defined by the state as a classroom with a minimal 5-to-1 ratio of student to internet-connected pcs. with new orleans public schools, "most schools have some laptops," said peggy abadie]. typically, a lab at one of these schools consist of 30 to 32 computers, and many of the laptops are brand new, having just replaced ones lost during hurricane katrina, said abadie. the nearly 3,000 new orleans public school students may be more confused than the school board when they return to school in november.school board president torin sanders and interim superintendent ora watson said tuesday four schools on the west bank will reopen: o. perry walker high school, dwight d. the recovery school district plans to hire the best teachers for 33 new orleans public schools it will reopen in the fall. but teacher testing and pay scales could become sticking points.the preliminary rsd plan calls for a nationwide search, competitive salaries and the need to recruit the best of the best, according to robin jarvis, acting rsd superintendent.jarvis said recruiting is under way throughout louisiana and in other states where displaced education employees may be living, such as houston, dallas, san antonio, austin, texas and atlanta.we are running ads in the major daily newspapers in those areas in addition to using databases of emails we have gathered since the storms, she said. additionally, we are meeting with national organizations such as teach for america to determine how we might use their human resources skills in finding the best of the best.if i could characterize the plan it's a transition plan, said paul pastorek, rsd advisory committee chairman. planning also continues on teacher pay. according to 200506 state department of education data, orleans parish paid $42,262 in average teacher salaries, jefferson parish paid $42,563 and st. tammany paid $43,962. the state average was $42,454. in 2004, companies are budgeting more for corporate contributions. officials with chevrontexaco, entergy, hibernia and cox communications inc. said they plan to increase corporate contributions this year. entergy, which has seen a 45 percent increase in requests for donations since 2002, will give more this year, patty riddlebarger] said. exactly how much is hard to nail down before autumn because entergy also matches employee united way contributions. in addition, entergy, which operates in seven states, recently gave $1 million to the new orleans d-day museum, she said. the tulane university shakespeare festival's shakespeare alive program provides live shakespeare performances for students and workshops and resources for teachers. entergy and hibernia are providing funds for 17 orleans parish public schools to participate in the program. for residential property, the u.s. department of housing and urban development recommends inspection of paint every year for signs of deterioration such as flaking and peeling. hud also suggests performing dust wipes after maintenance jobs that disturb old paint. dust wipes, performed by trained or certified professionals, should be conducted every two years with results kept on file. whenever renovation is done and paint is disturbed at one of jefferson parish's 83 schools, we have things tested and we address the renovation or whatever we're doing accordingly, david taylor] said. some tests on some exteriors have come back where there is lead paint but it has been encapsulated with other paint. we follow whatever guidelines need to be followed. in st. charles parish, about half of the parish's 19 public schools were built before lead-based paint was banned, said larry sesser, executive director of physical plant services. carver elementary school, built in the 1950s, sealed its lead paint in the 1990s, he said. not all surfaces in all buildings have been tested, he said, but he is not aware of peeling or deteriorating paint. the tax increment financing diverts public funds that are already dedicated and badly needed by our public schools and our economic and transportation infrastructure, dupepe said. and it's been voted on by the citizens to be distributed that way. the citizens weren't consulted when this tif was created. its purpose is simply unfair and it doesn't serve the public interest. the nomcvb, orleans parish public schools, the convention center, new orleans tourism marketing corp., the louisiana stadium and exposition district and the rta will forego an estimated $202 million in hotel occupancy taxes over 30 years, according to the new orleans-based bgr. if there's no hotel, there's no tax, boissiere said. they're not losing anything because they wouldn't get it anyway. justin bates, aaron phipps, 2003 graduates, and 2000 graduates curtis colly and nelson lemieux earned microsoft certifications while at the center. the four now attend louisiana colleges. the center for science & math on delgado community college's campus at 980 navarre ave. was founded in 1993. it offers high school students a half-day, hands-on science and math program, kris pottharst] said. students can earn microsoft and comptia certifications as well as take oracle database classes. theatre of the oppressed was conceived by brazilian theatre director and theorist augusto boal as a 'rehearsal for revolution'; it hinges on participants' power to select material for inquiry and frame, shape, script, and perform stories of problems/oppressions in their own lives and communities. in a 12-week-long study i co-facilitated in the drama classroom of an urban charter school in the autumn of 2007, six girls and two boys framed problems from their lives and communities, scripted and staged anti-model scenes, and performed a wide range of forum interventions. as a facilitator, i struggled with the tension between my own desire to intervene in discourses in embedded assumptions i found problematic and my fears that by doing so, i would be colonising the workshop with my own privileged agenda. this article is about that struggle, and about the problem that popular positions and ideas are not necessarily progressive, and while theatre of the oppressed is usually utilised in support of politically progressive agendas, the work participants initiate and the choices they make do not automatically orient towards social justice. charter schools have seen dramatic growth over the last decade. however, we know little about how they affect traditional public schools. i look at how charters affect student outcomes in public schools using data from a large urban school district in the southwest. unlike prior work that relies on school fixed effects, i address the endogenous location of charter schools using an instrumental variables strategy that relies on plausibly exogenous variation in local building supply. results show that charters induce modest but statistically significant drops in math and language test scores, particularly for elementary students. however, results for middle and high school students show improvements in discipline. (c) 2011 elsevier b.v. all rights reserved. in new orleans, two men hold the key to whether this region will take part in the impending national economic upsurge: mayor c. ray nagin and orleans parish schools superintendent anthony amato. amato must get a grip on the out-of-control finances in the orleans parish public school system while attending to the pressing intellectual needs of students in his charge. and the school board, which has been woefully inefficient in helping amato sift through the financial wreckage that involves at least $20 million in missing funds, needs to become his ally instead of his greatest challenge. state and local school officials estimate there will need to be enough classroom space for 28,500 new orleans public school students by august.mike thompson, forensic accountant for alvarez and marsal, reported to the bring new orleans back education committee at the sheraton in new orleans monday night.in order to ready the schools, the district must complete emergency repairs by june 30 for the federal emergency management agency to reimburse the district... located on the campus of the university of new orleans, on the shore of lake pontchartrain, the benjamin franklin high school (bfhs) has three notable distinctions: it’s the highest-achieving public high school in all of louisiana. it’s a strong contender for, and likely winner of, the title of “most integrated public high school in new orleans.” (there’s really only one rival.) and it’s one of the country’s very few academically selectivecharterschools. but it wasn’t always a charter. before hurricane katrina hit the crescent city in 2005, ben franklin was a selective academic magnet within the orleans parish school when all eyes turned to new orleans ten years ago, i thought, finally, people will see the poverty, people will see the income inequality, and things will change. ...]the majority of people who work on the sets-not counting the extras like mardi gras indians and jazz musicians, when they need an authentic new orleans scene-are producers, writers, set designers, even caterers from outside of the city. many young people in our communities, even before the storm, had trauma disorders. because of the storm, that number has increased. seeking to grasp what she called a "golden opportunity for rebirth" out of the wreckage of hurricane katrina, gov kathleen babineaux blanco asked the louisiana legislature last week to embrace a plan that would give the state control of most new orleans public schools. the plan was to be taken up in a 17-day special legislative session that was called to deal with a range of matters linked to devastation from hurricane katrina and rita. babineaux's move came days after the new orleans school board decided to convert 20 of the district's school to charter status. the city was then seven years into the post-katrina education revolution that wrested control of the public schools from the seven-member orleans parish school board. two orleans parish school board members went to prison, five years apart, on federal conspiracy charges. ...]10 years after katrina, the school board hired henderson lewis jr. as superintendent and fell in line behind him. ...]he chartered out the district’s final traditional schools. charter schools have become the hegemonic “solution” for urban educational reform initiatives aimed at curtailing longstanding race-based educational inequities. the “common sense” of neoliberal charter schools as the cure to persistent inequality is best illustrated in the post-katrina new orleans educational reforms. this article will focus on a lesser explored aspect of charter schools: the charter school authorization and application process in post-katrina new orleans. we center on the perspectives of african american educational actors. using data from separate but complementary studies, we argue the charter authorization and application process is a racialized site that reproduces white dominance. many previous studies have examined the level of state grants to local k-12 school districts. however, these studies have not considered the role of citizen "trust" in state versus local governments as a factor. we hypothesize that the role of the state in funding education reflects citizen "trust" in the relative capabilities of governments. we measure "trust" directly via public opinion polls that capture citizen attitudes about the appropriate responsibilities of state versus local governments; we also measure "trust" indirectly, by the role of state government as revealed by its relative importance in overall service provision (net of k-12 spending). we find that the state share of k-12 education spending tends to be higher when there is greater citizen trust in state versus local governments. using a critical race theory lens, the authors propose a way of writing race research using composite counterstories. drawing on data from a yearlong study of school rebuilding in the time period immediately after hurricane katrina devastated the city of new orleans, the authors examine the experiences of african-american educators in the school rebuilding efforts. cook and dixson look specifically at how composite counterstories speak back to racialized constructions of black educators that justified their post-katrina displacement and usher in an era of school reform in which new orleans is described as "ground zero" for the expansion of charter schools, the disempowerment of teachers' unions, and the re-organization of teacher preparation. given the context of the research, the authors argue that researchers should consider how composite counterstories facilitate racial research and ensure the protection of research participants. this article presents a study of state-imposed neoliberal education reform and resistance in post-katrina new orleans. in hurricane katrina’s aftermath, the city’s school system was dramatically reformed with most of its public schools replaced by privately administered “charter schools.” the article examines the social contradictions created by this reform and characterizes how the city’s education activists articulate their resistance to education privatization. situating the reform within new orleans’s post-katrina neoliberal reconfiguration, it analyzes how simultaneous processes of education privatization and racial dispossession have made the reform lack popular legitimacy. the article concludes by considering how the neoliberal policies implemented after the storm were conditioned by race, arguing that racial politics should be considered fundamental, rather than adjacent, to the study of neoliberalization in us cities. despite the growing media attention paid to charter-school unions, comparatively little empirical research exists. drawing on interview data from two cities (detroit, mi, and new orleans, la), our exploratory study examined charter-school teachers’ motivations for organizing, the political and power dimensions, and the framing of unions by both teachers and administrations. we found that improving teacher retention, and thus school stability, was a central motivation for teacher organizers, whereas, simultaneously, high teacher turnover stymied union drives. we also found that charter administrators reacted with severity to nascent unionization drives, harnessing school-as-family metaphors and at-will contracts to prevent union formation. as the charter sector continues to grow, understanding why teachers want unions and how those unions differ from traditional public school unions is crucial to analyzing the long-term viability of these schools and the career trajectories of the teachers who work in them. purpose: the purpose of this study is to examine school leaders’ preferences and practices in an environment of widespread decentralization, privatization, and school choice. in new orleans, such reforms have been enacted citywide since hurricane katrina, making it an ideal site to examine what happens when policy makers lift restrictions for school leaders—and remove protections for teachers—related to teacher hiring on a large scale. research methods/approach: in this exploratory study, i analyze qualitative data to examine school leaders’ preferences and practices when recruiting teachers in new orleans. the data for the study come from 94 interviews with principals, district leaders, and charter network leaders. findings: school leaders had different conceptions of “talent” and “fit,” and used a variety of strategies to recruit teachers. school districts and charter networks both supported and constrained school leaders’ autonomy and recruitment practices by screening applicants or setting guidelines and criteria. other intermediary organizations also played a role in shaping the teacher labor market. school choice also posed unique challenges for teacher recruitment. implications: overall, expansive choice policies in new orleans appear to foster flexibility and variation in teacher hiring strategies (although not in salary), as expected in a decentralized system. however, these policies and strategies appear also to have other consequences, including greater instability or “churn,” unpredictability, and a bifurcated teaching force. working paper no. 23265 in 2012, new orleans recovery school district (rsd) became the first u.s. district to unify charter and traditional public school admissions in a single-offer assignment mechanism known as oneapp. the rsd also became the first district to use a mechanism based on top trading cycles (ttc) in a real-life allocation problem. since ttc was originally devised for settings in which agents have endowments, there is no formal rationale for ttc in school choice. in particular, ttc is a pareto efficient and strategy-proof mechanism, but so are other mechanisms. we show that ttc is constrained-optimal in the following sense: ttc minimizes justified envy among all pareto efficient and strategy-proof mechanisms when each school has one seat. when schools have more than one seat, there are multiple possible implementations of ttc. data from new orleans and boston indicate that there is little difference across these versions of ttc, but significantly less justified envy compared to a serial dictatorship. charter school advocates see the infusion of market competition into the educational sector as a means to achieving greater efficiency, effectiveness, and equity. within this framework, consumer demand is understood to regulate the charter sector. this article challenges the adequacy of this premise, arguing that the structure of the financing of charter schools plays a decisive, if not determining, role in directing growth. drawing on an analysis of the financing that enabled the dramatic growth of the uno charter school network (ucsn) in chicago during the 2000s, the article explores the implications of speculative borrowing and spiraling debt burdens on charter schools and on the functioning of the charter sector more broadly. the analysis reveals that (1) new debt was increasingly used to retire existing debt, (2) the structure of new financing assumed continued growth, and (3) schools within the network were yoked together as revenue from existing—and anticipated—schools was pledged to repay new debt. this article presents a study of state-imposed neoliberal education reform and resistance in post-katrina new orleans. in hurricane katrina’s aftermath, the city’s school system was dramatically reformed with most of its public schools replaced by privately administered “charter schools.” the article examines the social contradictions created by this reform and characterizes how the city’s education activists articulate their resistance to education privatization. situating the reform within new orleans’s post-katrina neoliberal reconfiguration, it analyzes how simultaneous processes of education privatization and racial dispossession have made the reform lack popular legitimacy. the article concludes by considering how the neoliberal policies implemented after the storm were conditioned by race, arguing that racial politics should be considered fundamental, rather than adjacent, to the study of neoliberalization in us cities. before landfall leveled the system completely, the louisiana state superintendent of schools hired alvarez & marsal, a corporate firm from new york city specializing in what it calls "turnaround management and corporate advisory services," to run new orleans public schools, giving them a mandate to recommend changes directly to the state superintendent.2 late last year, as state officials took over 107 of 128 new orleans public schools3, the state board of education had already devised what one board member calls a "state school accountability model" and began to rank schools internally. meanwhile, the language of academic standards, statewide test scores, discipline, individual initiative, and mental ownership has been inserted into the political discourse on public education at every level, as has the promise of private management as a panacea for public rot. using new orleans as a site of analysis, this article provides a critical race theory reading of a little studied policy mechanism, the charter school application and authorization process. embedded and competing narratives within charter school applications are analyzed. the authorization process is the central gatekeeping mechanism in the reproduction of charter schools. the authorization process determines who gets to govern schools, including the freedom to set curriculum, discipline policies, personnel, utilization of funds, and their relationship to and role in the communities in which they are located. this article unpacks the community based and "no excuses" discourses within charter applications. it finds patterns of confluence between those narratives and the applicants' racial and educational identities, suggesting that the authorization process worked as a site for the repro duction of racialized neoliberal dominance in post-katrina new orleans, disenfranchising local teachers and communities. before the catastrophe of hurricane katrina and its flooding, concentrated poverty in new orleans was eroding and undermining the economic, social and educational infrastructure of the city and its neighborhood schools. fixing the school system which suffered years of corruption, bad management and abysmal academic performance, remains one of the highest priorities in the rebirth of the city. profound hope lay in the small cluster of charter schools, and selective admission schools or city-wide access schools, the latter of which had a long history of producing success in new orleans. post-flooding, the creation of the algiers association meant that schools would enroll anyone if space allowed. so, the dynamics of high educational expectations in new orleans poses a self-fulfilling prophecy of de facto segregated education in orleans parish pubic educational reform. the paper examines whose interests and what interests are served by the new charter system and how these interests support educational access and opportunity. this paper examines the competitive effects of a unique school choice program implemented in the late 1990s, wisconsin's open enrollment program, which allows families to send their children to schools outside their home district. in contrast to other school choice programs, districts not only face negative consequences from losing students and state funding, but they also stand to gain in the event of student emigration from other districts. the identification approach exploits differences in the number of schools in bordering districts, which affects inter-district ease-of-transfer. estimates produce three main conclusions. first, districts that experience student out-migration produce higher standardized test scores in the subsequent year. second, these effects are most evident among districts for which out-migration, expressed as a percentage of enrollment, falls in the upper quartile of all districts under consideration. third, districts do not appear to respond to in-migration, indicating that districts place more emphasis on (and have more control over) preventing out-migration, as opposed to encouraging in-migration. these findings provide evidence that schools respond to competitive forces by improving quality. (c) 2011 elsevier ltd. all rights reserved. background/context: in new orleans, louisiana, in the years following hurricane katrina, predominantly white education reformers have used entrepreneurial support to dismantle the predominantly black city’s public education system. using racial domination without community approval, these education reformers have educationally disenfranchised the black community by implementing no excuses (ne) charter school management organizations (cmo). the rise in these organizations has also led to the mass firing of the city’s majority black educator base and the hiring of majority white educators. scholarship on ne cmos notes their use of dehumanizing behavioral practices meant to control their student populations. accounts, however, are limited from those who have witnessed, experienced, or resisted these dehumanizing behavioral practices. purpose/objective/focus of study: through the critical race theory (crt) lens of racial realism, this paper provides a critical race personal counternarrative (crpcn) that characterizes the racist and racialized disciplinary and surveillance practices used to control black students’ bodies. it examines my experiences as a teacher within an ne cmo, the knowledge is power program (kipp) school in new orleans. furthermore, this paper underscores my own black fugitive pedagogic acts alongside my black students, acts that allowed us to create fleeting moments of freedom inside and outside our classroom. research design: i relied on critical race methodology to construct a crpcn against kipp, which prides itself on positive behavior practices and social justice. the evidence i drew on included free-written notes, conversations with former students and teachers, media (e.g., photos and videos), and scholarly literature. to analyze data, i drew on crt concepts of racial realism and the permanence of racism in u.s. society to underscore black fugitivity, anti-black surveillance, and discipline. conclusion/recommendations: racial realism provides a lens for identifying the evolution of racialized surveillance technologies on black bodies within the united states. although critics characterize racial realism as overly pessimistic, this paper notes one way that scholars, educators, students, and parents can draw on this tool of racial resistance to accept the current racial reality, uncover racially oppressive schooling practices, and highlight strategies of survival through fugitive acts. when the new orleans school board appointed e. j. edmunds, a light-skinned afro-creole man, the mathematics teacher for the city's best high school in 1875, the senior students walked out rather than have a “negro” as a teacher of “white youths.” edmunds's appointment was a final, bold act by the city's mixed-race intellectual elite in exercising the political power they held under radical reconstruction to strip racial designations from public schools. white supremacist redeemers responded with a vicious propaganda campaign to define, differentiate, and diminish the “negro race.” edmunds navigated the shifting landscape of race in the new orleans public schools first as a student and then as a teacher, and the details of his life show the impact on ordinary afro-creoles as the city's warring politicians used the public schools both to undermine and reinforce the racial order. this article draws from a qualitative case study of 22 teachers of african american males who participated in a screening event of the documentary beyond the bricks as part of a community engagement project in three cities: new orleans, new york, and oakland through the lenses of critical race theory and the matrix achievement paradigms typology, this article highlights three major themes connected to teaching black male students: (a) recognizing and removing the blind spot, (b) resisting the normalization of failure, and (c) fulfilling the need for (practicing) culturally responsive educators. this article seeks to contribute to the scholarly discussion on the use of film in urban teacher education, and puts forth beyond the bricks as a critical, solutions-oriented discussion tool that offers concrete ideas about what black males need to achieve social and academic success in america's schools. before 2005, when hurricane katrina destroyed most new orleans public schools, youth voice was rarely heard in the superintendent's office. in this chapter, we tell the story of a youth organization that grabbed the historical moment to rethink one of the lowest-performing school systems in the united states. “the rethinkers,” as they called themselves, advocated for policy change at well-attended, youth-led news conferences, coaxed agreements from officials in front of tv cameras, and held their civic leaders’ feet to the fire. eventually, the rethinkers earned a seat at the school reform table in new orleans. we describe the first generation of rethinkers as they gradually deepen their dedication to one another and their cause. we highlight the critical role adult partnerships played in the success of the re-thinkers. these adults deeply respected youth voice and shared skills such as critical thinking, architectural design, and public speaking. finally, we describe how the rethinkers have built victories from a strong set of beliefs that include mutual respect and honest relationships with outsiders based on common goals. “we have a vision: a great education for every kid in new orleans, no matter what neighborhood they stay in, no matter how much money their parents make, no matter the color of their skin.” – isaiah simms, rethink-er, age 11, at a 2006 news conference school choice has the potential to be a tool for desegregation, but research suggests that choice more often exacerbates segregation than remedies it. in the past several years, hundreds of ‘intentionally diverse’ charter schools have opened across the country, potentially countering the link between charter schools and segregation. yet, these schools raise important questions about choice, segregation, and equity. for instance: how do leaders of diverse charter schools prioritize diversity in decisions about location, marketing, and recruitment? what are the implications of these diversity efforts for equity, especially within competitive and marketized educational contexts? we explore the concrete recruiting and marketing strategies schools used to build and retain their diverse communities, drawing on qualitative data from new orleans, la, and minneapolis-st. paul, mn. we identify key strategies used by school leaders, but also note that many strategies were ad-hoc and experimental. furthermore, we noted that school goals around “how much” diversity was sufficient were often unarticulated, making schools susceptible to external pressures that might refocus attention away from equity and diversity, or allow groups with more power to shape agendas within the school. finally, we find that contexts of gentrification and widening economic inequities threatened schools’ efforts to recruit and maintain a diverse student body. we discuss implications for leaders of diverse charter schools and other leaders seeking to diversify their student bodies, as well as policymakers and charter authorizers. the times-picayune, the new orleans daily that is the mouthpiece of big business interests, ran a front page article in the september 5,2009 edition headlined,"delgado is forced to reject students."the sub-headline was "impasse with fema over repairs leaves campus short on space." staff writer john pope began, "for the first time in delgado community college's 88-year history, the area's most populous institution of higher education has turned away 1 ,500 applicants because it ran out of building space." recent revelations by top u.s. military officers offer a damning indictment of state officials. "(t)hen-gov. kathleen blanco] said the publicly run charity hospital would not reopen even though the military had scrubbed the building to medical-ready standards...," wrote cain burdeau in a july 14, 2009 associated press article. he continued, "...lt. gen. rüssel honore said blanco told him in late september 2005 the 20-story building that served the region's poor residents would not reopen. 'ma'am, we got the hospital clean, my people report... if you want to use it,' honore recalled telling blanco. 'her reply to me: well general, we're not going to open it, we're working on a different plan.'" the depth of this legacy explains why a march 2006 demonstration by a couple hundred people led by the doctors and nurses of charity who had helped clean the hospital resulted in the new orleans city council unanimously passing a resolution the following month "...urging the state to... repair and reopen charity hospital," and why the following month in may, the louisiana senate and house also unanimously passed a resolution to "hereby urge and request the governor... to develop and implement a plan to use a portion of the medical center of new orleans (big charity hospital) to provide medical services to the new orleans community and region on an interim basis..." the new orleans public schools superintendent search committee hopes to have a search firm in place by sept. 26 and a superintendent hired by the end of january 2006. in may, the orleans parish school board allocated $5,000 to fund the superintendent search. the opsb recently approved $50,000 for the search. the opsb recently hired ora watson as interim superintendent but she has not said whether she will apply for the full-time position, phyllis landrieu] said. and haynes middle school in metairie. the first thing they ask is 'what is the condition of the public schools?' and people say the public schools are bad. but there's franklin and franklin and franklin, st julien said, referring to ben franklin senior high school, one of the 22 magnet or citywide access schools in orleans parish. there is a high demand for magnet schools in orleans and jefferson parishes where schools are not rated as highly as those in tangipahoa, st. charles and st. tammany parishes, which have no magnet schools. stan smith] will shadow doug lambert] until alvarez & marsal's contract expires in december. after that, he will be on his own to oversee every department that's not academics, which includes purchasing, human resources, information technology, facilities and all members of the financial group. the recovery school district took control of 112 schools last november, leaving the orleans parish school board to oversee 16. six of those schools will reopen tuesday to nearly 3,000 students. smith will oversee the district's $19.6 million budget and the distribution of that money. it's a task that doesn't come easy. the district is infamous for its muddled finances, missing money and corruption, but lambert said smith is aware of that. sixty-one facilities have been repaired and reopened, 10 by the nops and 51 by the rsd, at a cost of $87 million, according to the february rsd restoration funding status report presented to the state senate education committee. another $47.8 million has been spent to restock the buildings $10 million by the nops and $37.8 million by the rsd. more rebuilding projects are in store to allow more schools to open. the rsd and nops will work together on a master plan for new orleans public schools, according to the senate committee report. new orleans citybusiness has chosen 50 honorees for its eighth annual women of the year awards luncheon to take place nov. 10 at the sheraton hotel. honorees were selected based on successes in business and contributions to the new orleans community. the 2006 women of the year special publication will run in the nov. 13 edition of new orleans citybusiness. * p.k. scheerle, president/ceo, p.k. scheerle, rn & associates the biloxi public school district put cameras in every classroom of the district's 11 schools for the beginning of the 2003-04 school year. lester walker, supervisor of machine repair, said nearly 800 cameras have been installed inside and outside the schools. biloxi's cameras generated national attention. sue durbin, spokeswoman for biloxi public school district, said biloxi is the first school district in the united states to put cameras in every classroom. charlotte matthew, principal of avery alexander elementary school in gentilly, said she would have to have more research before deciding how she feels about cameras in schools. she said she would also have to refer to her staff to gauge their feelings. her gut reaction is she doesn't want cameras in classrooms but hallways or outside would be fine. dr. robin jarvis] served this state and the new orleans community with courage and tenacity, said paul pastorek]. "her leadership, her willingness to take risks and make difficult decisions demonstrated her unique and remarkable leadership skills." "when i took this leadership role in new orleans, i did so with the understanding that it would be an interim position," jarvis said. "we have faced many challenges, and i am proud to have been a part of a new beginning for the public schools in new orleans. as the end of our first full school year approaches, it's time for me to move on, to spend more time with my family and begin a new chapter in my life. i want to commend the teachers, principals and support staff that work tirelessly day in and day out to build a better school system." robin morris is one of 24 new orleans principals accepted into this year's school leadership center of greater new orleans, which means she's agreed to spend part of her summer vacation learning how to improve her school. since then, educators from the center have trained 150 principals from orleans, jefferson, plaquemines, st. tammany and st. bernard parishes. a grant from baptist community ministries funds most of the center's annual $1.2 million budget, including salaries for seven staff members, research grants and the summer institute june 19-24, which costs about $60,000 annually. of the 150 principals slc has trained since 1998, an estimated 35 are no longer in the program because of retirement or a move out of the principal position, brian riedlinger] said. the biggest turnover is in new orleans public schools, he said. the jefferson parish department of juvenile services reports the rate of drug offenses has increased 33 percent since the storm while violent crimes remain flat. realistically, drug and violent crimes are up significantly more than that after taking into account the reduced student population. school officials say they feel almost helpless to stop the mayhem. ray st. pierre, jefferson parish school board representative for district 3, said students will always find a way to bring a weapon into school. alandrus lesene, an 18-year-old senior at st. mary's academy in new orleans, said students at public schools bribe security guards to sneak weapons inside. any security guard found guilty of such action should be jailed for endangering the lives of everyone in the school building. students attended from orleans parish public schools, which included ben franklin elementary, mary mcleod bethune, and charter schools from orleans parish and algiers charter school association and parochial schools such as st. michael's special school. students cheered a cooking demonstration of jivin' jambalaya with wynton marsalis] on trumpet with his septet including don vappie on banjo. capital one will also donate $1 million in grants to the following 20 organizations in greater new orleans: catholic charities, city park, city year, community development capital, delgado community college, dryades ymca, habitat for humanity, friends of the jefferson parish library system, jefferson parish public schools, kingsley house, lighthouse for the blind, louisiana philharmonic orchestra, new orleans musician's clinic, neighborhood housing services, new orleans neighborhood development collaborative, new orleans public library foundation, new schools for new orleans, nunez community college, st... n/a opened: dec. 20 project: amber street drainage improvements, st. tammany parish owner: st. tammany parish department of finance firm: stranco, inc., 70459 hwy. 59, abita springs bid amount: $43,546 opened: jan. 5 project: raymond street road & drainage improvements, st. tammany parish owner: st. tammany parish department of finance firm: davis materials, llc, p.o. box 399, pearl river bid amount: $18,890 opened: jan. 4 project: del oaks drive culvert replacement, st. tammany parish owner: st. tammany parish department of finance firm: stranco, inc., 70459 hwy. 59, abita springs bid amount: $50,000 opened: jan. 4 project: jefferson parish public works warehouse, bridge city owner: jefferson parish council firm: f. h. myers construction, co., 520 commerce point, harahan bid amount: $3,943,000 opened: nov. 29 project: roof repairs at the waggaman playground, waggaman owner: jefferson parish council firm: all bids rejected opened: nov. 17 project: two year contract maintain dredge intake basin at the east bank wastewater treatment plant, jefferson parish owner: jefferson parish council firm: all bids rejected opened: nov. 15 project: demolish and re-construct the column structure for jefferson parish fire station no. 13, metairie owner: jefferson parish council firm: r. seibert construction, 208 st. bernard parkway, st. bernard bid amount: social mothering—women's carework in the public sphere—played an important role in whites' responses to racial minorities' claims to middle-class mobility and identity in the late nineteenth century. in new orleans and san francisco, two cities where racial minorities used public education to achieve and reproduce middle-class position, white women principals were central figures in struggles over schooling that contributed to the de jure segregation of black and asian children. i analyze two historical cases to show how racialized constructions of social mothering helped to maintain links between race and class. in both incidents, public opinion held white professional women responsible for ensuring the racial purity of white children's public spaces and social identities. i argue that analyses of the race-class intersection should more carefully consider how the economic domination of racial minorities is maintained through various gendered forms of reproductive labor. my concern that is other than lake forest montessori in the (francis) gaudet (school) building, i don't see anything else happening in the eastern new orleans area, said alice midkiff, who proposed einstein charter school with her husband, ron midkiff, three months before katrina. that has me concerned because there are other families out there. mike thompson, forensic accountant for the school district and a senior director with alvarez & marsal, the new york firm hired before katrina to turn around the district, said he is aware of the high need in eastern new orleans. cyndi nguyen, president of the einstein charter school board and a parent of three girls, including 13-year-old serina, whom she wants to attend einstein in the fall, wants to know when the village de l'est elementary school building will be ready. after hearing from the parish school board that the canal street high school would not reopen, the foundation board for easton petitioned the school system for a local charter to operate easton independently, according to a spokesperson for the foundation. the warren easton hall of fame was established by the foundation to recognize distinguished graduates and since 1991 more than 150 members have been inducted. pete fountain, louisiana attorney general charles foti and o. perry walker head the list of inductees. the question that comes to mind is how to differentiate the good work and the good will that will happen at easton from the good work that's being done at all the new charter schools. they all need as much help as they can get from local businesses, volunteers and the louisiana board of elementary and secondary education. charter schools have been promoted as an equitable and innovative solution to the problems plaguing urban schools. advocates claim that charter schools benefit working-class students of color by offering them access to a "portfolio" of school choices. in charter schools, race, and urban space , kristen buras presents a very different account. her case study of new orleans—where veteran teachers were fired en masse and the nation's first all-charter school district was developed—shows that such reform is less about the needs of racially oppressed communities and more about the production of an urban space economy in which white entrepreneurs capitalize on black children and neighborhoods. in this revealing book, buras draws on critical theories of race, political economy, and space, as well as a decade of research on the ground to expose the criminal dispossession of black teachers and students who have contributed to new orleans' culture and history. mapping federal, state, and local policy networks, she shows how the city's landscape has been reshaped by a strategic venture to privatize public education. she likewise chronicles grassroots efforts to defend historic schools and neighborhoods against this assault, revealing a commitment to equity and place and articulating a vision of change that is sure to inspire heated debate among communities nationwide. chapter 1 black education in the south: critical race reflections on the historic policy landscape chapter 2 the assault on black children by education entrepreneurs: charter schools, whiteness, and accumulation by dispossession chapter 3 keeping king elementary school on the map: racial resistance and the politics of place in the lower 9th ward chapter 4 the closing of douglass high school: counterstories on the master's plan for reconstruction chapter 5 the culture of the education market: teach for america, union busting, and the displacement of black veteran teachers chapter 6 new orleans—a guide for cities or a warning for communities? lessons learned from the bottom-up (with urban south grassroots research collective) “buras does an excellent job of explaining the realities of the privatization of public schools in new orleans. her recounting of the history of public education in new orleans connects the dots on today's corporate reforms, which have made the disenfranchisement of poor and minority children ‘politically correct’ in the 21st century.”—raynard sanders, educational consultant and radio host of the new orleans imperative “as buras shows in this decade-long tour de force of theoretically grounded investigative research, rather than a national reform model advancing new democratic possibilities, the new orleans market-based charter school experiment threatens to exacerbate racial and economic injustice. what is happening in new orleans is nothing short of an unconscionable colonial project that we cannot ignore, and it will affect black education nationally for decades to come.”— joyce e. king, benjamin e. mays endowed chair for urban teaching, learning & leadership, georgia state university, usa and president-elect, the american educational research association “buras provides an essential look at how communities are engaging in, resisting, and making sense of a slate of educational reforms they had little say in designing. with incisive analysis, buras helps to direct much-needed attention to the experiences of students, parents, and community members as local public schools are reformed into quasi-private entities. by examining the elite networks shaping schooling in new orleans and cities around the country, this book calls us to consider the relationship between educational privatization and the ongoing racial and social inequalities that continue to characterize schooling in the united states.”—janelle scott, graduate school of education & african american studies, university of california at berkeley kristen buras is an associate professor in the department of educational policy studies at georgia state university. she is the author of rightist multiculturalism and coeditor of the subaltern speak . she is also cofounder and director of urban south grassroots research collective for public education. in the main office of dwight d. eisenhower elementary school in lower algiers, principal cynthia bernard chats with teachers while writing in large black letters across the back of a white banner: dwight d. eisenhower charter school. it's different now, said bernard. that's why we changed the name. the banner that used to say eisenhower elementary will read eisenhower charter as it hangs on the front of the school wednesday morning, symbolic of the changes within new orleans public schools since hurricane katrina hit in august. nearly 1,600 students will return to five west bank schools in new orleans this week eisenhower, martin behrman elementary, alice m. harte elementary, o. perry walker senior high and edna karr senior high. eight more schools are scheduled to reopen as student enrollment increases.the schools, formerly under the orleans parish school board's control, will be run by the algiers charter school association, a separate board.i never studied charter schools before. i never had to, bernard said. but you're allowed flexibility with a charter. you either have enough rope to swing from a tree or hang from a tree.while the schools look the same, the teachers and principals are different. teachers are working with colleagues they've never met and students are sitting next to new classmates.we could have kids from two entirely different cultures here, said bernard, former principal at paul b. habans elementary school in algiers. but what we want to do is develop a new culture. since hurricane katrina, things have to change. our perspective has to broaden.the schools will open half-days through dec. 22. during the anne rice] benefit, place heard about st. michael's special school in new orleans, a non-graded school for mild or moderately handicapped people between the ages of 6 and 21. she said tommy] did well there, but now that he's reached high-school age, there are new social and external pressures. the staff at st. michael's doubts it has the resources to help him make the transition, place said. there are very few schools, if any, equipped to handle the older autistic children, which leaves parents looking for an alternative program, said jane silva, st. michael's principal. most autistic children with severe requirements end up in the public school system. the tuition at st. michael's is $3,200 per year. a new program for autistic children at st. louise de marillac school in arabi will cost $8,000. at the chartwell center in new orleans, a therapy and research center for autistic children, tuition runs $14,000. newly appointed new orleans public school superintendent anthony amato says his profession is just an extension of the kind of person he has always been. clearly, the educational system has not met the demands of our students. and that's not to say there aren't bright spots in the educational system or that there aren't great teachers or great principals. but on the whole, it's very clear to everyone in the city that the educational system has not done exactly what our students need. as a result of that ... we're in a very challenged position. and unless we ramp up, in terms of increasing time on tasks ... and increasing the intensity and focus of our curriculum, our students are not going to be prepared for the world of tomorrow. i was very specific. i said we are going to have the greatest gains on the (louisiana educational assessment program) exam of any parish in the state. (if that doesn't happen), i don't deserve to be the superintendent, meaning that i would ask my school board to take a hard look at me. i honestly feel that any superintendent worth his or her word in america today should be able to make some substantial change in a year and then to continue to make that change over the coming years. i want to show this city and all of our students that the superintendent is willing to put his reputation on the line for our kids. new orleans public schools officials estimate it will take three to five years and approximately $800 million to repair the damage caused by hurricane katrina.all of the system's 124 schools sustained damaged to varying degrees in the storm, said martin mcfarland, managing director for alvarez and marsal, the new yorkbased management firm in charge of the school system.about $25 million in contracts have been awarded to repair the first wave of schools with initial projects focusing on schools that can be quickly brought back into service.construction work on 24 schools has already been put out to bid and selected. the schools with more damage will be bid on individual timetables, said mcfarland.about a quarter of the schools, 32 buildings, sustained minimal damage such as blown out windows and mold growth.a lot of them were damaged only because power was off and mold started to grow due to the moisture, mcfarland said.approximately 20 orleans parish schools have reopened. studies of teacher satisfaction suggest that satisfaction is related to both the racial composition and the organizational structure of the schools in which teachers work. in this article, the authors draw from theories of race and organizations to examine simultaneously the effects of school type (traditional public vs. charter) and racial mismatch on teacher satisfaction and subsequent turnover. in doing so, they examine the organizational differences between traditional public and charter schools that contribute to systematic differences in satisfaction and turnover across these school types. using 1999-2000 schools and staffing survey data, the authors find that charter school teachers are more satisfied than are public school teachers because of greater autonomy. charter school teachers, however, are more likely to leave teaching than are traditional teachers. the authors also show that teaching in racially mismatched schools results in lower levels of satisfaction for white teachers and that being in a charter school reduces this negative effect. that is, they are guaranteed seats. we use this fact to construct instrumental variables estimates of the effects of passive charter attendance: the grandfathering instrument compares students at schools designated for takeover with students who appear similar at baseline and who were attending similar schools not yet closed, while adjusting for possible violations of the exclusion restriction in such comparisons. estimates for a large sample of takeover schools in the new orleans recovery school district show substantial gains from takeover enrollment. in boston, where we can compare grandfathering and lottery estimates for a middle school, grandfathered students see achievement gains at least as large as the gains for students assigned seats in lotteries. larger reading gains for grandfathering compliers are explained by a worse non-charter fallback. school choice policies are often based on the idea that competition will generate better outcomes for all students. yet there is limited empirical research about how school leaders actually perceive competition and whom they view as rivals. drawing on concepts from economic sociology, i study principals' competitive networks and the sets of schools they view as rivals, and i use network and statistical analysis to explore factors that explain the existence of a competitive tie between two schools. most school leaders perceived some competition, but the extent to which they competed with other schools varied significantly. factors that predicted a competitive relationship between two schools included geography, student transfers, school performance, principal characteristics, and charter network. two more new orleans public elementary schools will reopen in february.the schools will reopen through the state's recovery district, which means they are part of the 102 schools the state took over in november.an elementary school will reopen at mcdonogh 7 elementary school and mary bethune school will reopen on the campus of arthur ashe school until final repairs are completed on bethune's existing building.as of the week of jan. 23, about 9,600 students were registered and about 8,700 students were in classes, school officials said.we are pleased to see so many students returning to new orleans and we want to assure their parents that they will have a public school to attend, said... the new orleans teachers' union and a lawyer for several local families have sued to force the opening of more public schools in the storm-ravaged city, but state education officials contend that enough space is available at the schools already operating. ...] asta levene, whose 10-year-old son angelo attended mcdonough #15 elementary school in the french quarter before the storm, said she tried, and failed, to enroll him in any of the reopened public elementary schools. the rigidity of teachers unions has been given as a primary reason for their lack of representation among america's rapidly growing, although still relatively small, charter school sector. in the case of post-hurricane katrina new orleans, the city rapidly converted from a union-backed teacher workforce to a largely nonunionized charter school workforce in the years following state takeover and charter conversion. this makes the recent emergence of two single-school unions in charter schools there worthy of study. as the teachers attempt to organize single-school unions in a nearly all charter school system, what are their motivations? this case study of one of new orleans' emerging charter school unions found that pay inequities, job insecurity, a lack of teacher voice in school-level decisions, and a culture of compliance, all motivated teachers to seek unionization. teachers hoped to promote equity and teacher involvement with their union, but the organizing effort did strain some relationships, particularly those involving middle management. tipitina's foundation announced the fifth annual instruments a comin' benefit concert and auction to be held may 1 at tipitina's uptown.concert proceeds from the cover charge and silent auction will help buy musical instruments for new orleans public school band programs. since its inception, instruments a comin' has provided more than $500,000 worth of donated instruments to young musicians.popeye's chicken is sponsoring this year's event, which organizers say is more crucial than ever after hurricane katrina damaged the music culture of new orleans is at risk. morales] isn't the only professional in town who chose an unfulfilling career. more than 1,000 professionals in the new orleans metropolitan area are looking into trading in their briefcases for book bags this year. people with degrees in law, business and medicine are ready to take on the challenges of teaching high-risk middle school students, for instance, for salaries as low as $26,000 their first year. the applicants are vying for 100 slots in the teach greater new orleans program at the university of new orleans, a project that takes people from other professions, gives them a crash summer school course and feeds them into the area public school systems this fall. the university is partnering with the new teacher project, a national nonprofit organization that works with schools in recruiting and training new teachers. the new teacher project is partnering with the state board of regents in recruiting for the practitioner teacher program at uno, nicholls state and the university of louisiana at monroe. each university program has its own name such as teach greater new orleans at uno. jim meza, dean of the uno college of education, said nationwide, about 50% of teachers in urban areas leave the profession in the first three years. teach greater new orleans not only requires a three-year commitment, but they match the teachers with mentor teachers and university cohort leaders for support, meza said. informal and institutional barriers may limit teacher movement between charter schools and traditional public schools (tpss). however, we know little about how teachers choose schools in areas with a robust charter school sector. this study uses qualitative data from 123 teachers to examine teachers’ job decisions in three cities with varying charter densities: san antonio, detroit, and new orleans. our findings illuminate different types of segmentation and factors that facilitate and limit mobility between sectors. we find that structural policies within each sector can create barriers to mobility across charter schools and tpss and that teachers’ ideological beliefs and values serve as informal, personal barriers that reinforce divides between sectors. this study offers implications for policy in districts with school choice. neoliberal education reforms in schools serving sizeable black populations throughout the united states have proliferated and are being transported to black educational contexts abroad. building on a framework of coloniality, antiblackness and a review of black colonial education this relational analysis argues that contemporary neoliberal education reforms not only resemble the early 20th century movement to spread black industrial education from the american south to regions of the global southincluding regions of west, south and east africa but also reproduce logics of antiblack coloniality. this framework is applied to two cases: the chartering of schools in new orleans louisiana following hurricane katrina in 2005, and the 2016 decision to privatize the entire school system in liberia. far from 'unlikely' this article argues that the application of market-based reforms to schools in the black souths (the 'urban' ghettos of the united states as well as the 'underdeveloped' global south) is a continuation of 20 th century colonial education interventions and the persistent claim of blackness as always in crisis. and others, have published meaningful book-length challenges to post-katrina education in new orleans. orleans parish school board officials, along with alvarez & marsal public sector services, their hired guns, were complicit in the takeover by summarily firing forty-three hundred veteran teachers, costing new orleans an average fifteen years of teaching experience per person. in 1961, a plumber without classroom or administrative educational experience was given “complete authority to act on all school matters” (p. 66) in the ninth ward cooperative school, an all-white alternative to integrated public schools in new orleans. in 1999, the appointment of a temporary superintendent and a full-time superintendent, both without louisiana teaching credentials, reflected “a community sentiment that had percolated for some time: that the school district needed outsiders, people with no k-12 educational experience, to address the vast problems in the city's public schools” (p. 162). students at the university of new orleans (uno) unfurled banners saying "chop from the top" and "save uno." in baton rouge, la, students conducted a funeral march for public education. what made actions on october 7th a step forward from march 4th was the growing connection between students and workers in their schools and communities, along with the desire to continue to grow towards a national movement. people also were encouraged by solidarity actions that took place internationally as part of what's being called the "global wave of actions for education" to continue through november. while march 4th was the culmination of months and years of organizing, october 7th is a stepping off point for another year of actions. we couldn't have asked for better results. we have continued to introduce an alternative narrative on public education, despite recent media promotion of so-called "education reform" and "race to the top," particularly supporting charter schools. school choice is expected to place pressure on schools to improve to attract and retain students. however, little research has examined how competition for students actually operates in socially embedded education markets. economic approaches tend to emphasize individual actors’ choices and agency, an undersocialized perspective, whereas sociological approaches emphasize social structures such as race, class, and institutions over agency, an oversocialized view. in this study, i examine the interplay between structure and agency in education markets to (a) examine how a school’s position in the market hierarchy influences how it is represented and viewed as a rival by network competitors and to (b) explore how a school’s position in the network of competitors influences the possible and actual strategic actions that schools adopt in response to market pressures. using case studies from new orleans, i find that school leaders’ positions in the socially constructed market hierarchy and in a social network of competitors influence their actions, which further determine their market positions. research in sociology demonstrates the way social connections shape access to information about job opportunities. in education, we understand less about how social networks impact the job process for marginalized teachers and teachers in nontraditional labor markets. this study examines how teachers in new orleans and detroit, cities with high concentrations of charter schools, use their networks to search for jobs, and how their experiences vary by race and gender. we find that in choice-rich environments, there was an extensive reliance on social networks in the hiring process, and teachers had different access to key social networks that can help to land jobs. hiring decisions and unequal access to job opportunities among teacher candidates, in part due to the reliance on networks, created conditions where teachers who cultivated stronger networks, or with access to the “right” networks, had greater opportunity, with implications for racial and gender equity and diversity. nearly ten years after katrina and the implementation of a host of new and radical education reforms in new orleans, there remains little evidence about whether the changes have improved school performance. despite this lack of evidence, the new orleans model is held up as a reform success, and is being adopted by other cities. in this article the authors ask how policymakers in new orleans and at the state level define, access and interpret research or evidence on the reforms, and how, if at all, such evidence informs their decision-making. they interviewed key district and state policymakers, as well as representatives from dozens of intermediary organizations in the area, who, they argue, are also shapers of policy. on the demand side, they found that policymakers primarily used personal anecdotes to justify their position and explain the success of reforms, and they relied on blogs or non-peer-reviewed sources for background information. peer-reviewed research was seldom used, typically passed to policymakers via an echo chamber of intermediary organizations, personal contacts or key partners. connecting supply to demand, the authors find that intermediary organizations broker research and evidence to advance their policy agendas, and that they serve as de facto policymakers in new orleans. we use student assignment lotteries to estimate the effect of charter school attendance on student achievement in boston. we also evaluate a related alternative, boston's pilot schools. pilot schools have some of the independence of charter schools but are in the boston public school district and are covered by some collective bargaining provisions. lottery estimates show large and significant score gains for charter students in middle and high school. in contrast, lottery estimates for pilot school students are mostly small and insignificant, with some significant negative effects. charter schools with binding assignment lotteries appear to generate larger gains than other charters. in a careful and precise analysis of the workings of these markets, adams shows how they failed, again and again, to help the people most in need to come even close to rebuilding their homes or renting affordable housing, while they proved remarkably successful as profit-making ventures for the corporations and agencies that used public money for generating private profit. icf, which made a mess of the road home program, resurfaces as a major investor in faith-based programs, offering its services (for pay) to help such groups organize themselves according to successful market strategies. not the u.s. government, as we all now know, but as adams shows, contract workers of the likes of those employed by blackwater—the private-sector paramilitary group that now goes under(cover) by the name xe services, and whose quick arrival in the post-katrina city resulted from our national investment in private firms that now perform the paid labor of disaster relief. adams’s sharp analysis of the workings of the sba loan program makes it crystal clear who was reaping profits from these eager lenders, and who was paying back the debt, at interest. ...]in some conspicuous ways, new orleans has already occupied a place in those stories—in naomi klein’s the shock doctrine (2007), for example, the charter school system in new orleans serves as an example of what happens when private enterprise rushes in to replace ailing public school systems. there were two mentions of student achievement on the lae site. more louisiana students are taking college entrance exams. more than half of last year's high school seniors took the sat exam, the highest total ever. lae did not mention average scores or any significant test data. where is the louisiana attorney general? where is the louisiana department of education? i checked their web site, too. i looked at the department's press releases dating back to 1999 and found no mention of the missing money in orleans parish. leslie jacobs, an at-large member of the louisiana board of elementary and secondary education, says there is outrage but it's just not shared by the right people. jacobs has been fighting for education reform for years. she points to systems with similar demographics to orleans parish that have overcome big problems and are now achieving success. she points to the monroe school system as an example for orleans to follow. in this article, kristen l. buras examines educational policy formation in new orleans and the racial, economic, and spatial dynamics shaping the city's reconstruction since 2005. more specifically, buras draws on the critical theories of whiteness as property, accumulation by dispossession, and urban space economy to describe the strategic assault on black communities by education entrepreneurs. based on data collected from an array of stakeholders on the ground, she argues that policy actors at the federal, state, and local levels have contributed to a process of privatization and an inequitable racial-spatial redistribution of resources while acting under the banner of "conscious capitalism." she challenges the market-based reforms currently offered as a panacea for education in new orleans, particularly charter schools, and instead offers principles of educational reform rooted in a more democratic and critically conscious tradition. i write to honor young terrence & many other public school students like him in the two cities i have known -manila & new orleans. the brutal facts of poverty, violence & frustration can be found in the 55 (out of 117) new orleans public schools deemed "academically unacceptable" by high-stakes test administrators pre-katrina]. the label & the facts, though intended only for the schools, stick deeper into the children's souls, & function like deranged emperors who delight in burning their dreams & futures. the collision of terrence's & his killer's "deferred dreams" connect in profound ways to similar collisions i had seen working as a community organizer in the slums of manila. yet every time i am with them, a resilient sort of power rises -inspiring & fueling me as a teacher & an activist -as they all say to me in the words of the poet rubin alves: "hope is the hunch that the overwhelming brutality of the facts that oppress & repress us is not the last word.". references. adapted from the source document. one of the primary aims of choice policies is to introduce competition between schools. when parents can choose where to send their children, there is pressure on schools to improve to attract and retain students. however, do school leaders recognize market pressures? what strategies do they use in response? this study examines how choice creates school-level actions using qualitative data from 30 schools in new orleans. findings suggest that school leaders did experience market pressures, yet their responses to such pressures varied, depending in part on their perceptions of competition and their status in the market hierarchy. some took steps toward school improvement, by making academic and operational changes, whereas others engaged in marketing or cream skimming. free schools are new state-funded but privately-run schools set up under the academies legislation. free schools represent the most overtly market-oriented policy within the conservative-led coalition government's school reform programme in england and have provoked intense controversy, centring on issues of pupil attainment, social equality, democracy and privatisation. this paper evaluates the evidence for the performance of the models on which the policy is based: charter schools in the us, free schools in sweden, and labour's academies. the potential impact on local schools is assessed. issues of democratic accountability are discussed, in terms of the application process, the governance of free schools, and their impact on local authorities. factors affecting the future trajectory of the free school initiative are discussed, including the opportunities for private companies to set up and run free schools for profit. the paper concludes by considering the challenge which free schools represent to their critics. dr. brenda mitchell is president of the united teachers of new orleans. she was raised in the city of new orleans and has called new orleans her home for over fifty years. she is a graduate of the new orleans public schools. dr. mitchell received her undergraduate degree from southern university of new orleans, her masters +30 from the university of new orleans, and doctorate degree in developmental education with a specialization in instructional systems from grambling state university. dr. mitchell began her teaching career in 1968. she has served in many capacities in the new orleans public schools elementary school teacher, title i staff developer, and a title i math and reading teacher. she was the founding director of both the new orleans teacher center and the united teachers of new orleans center for professional growth and development. in 1999, she was elected president of the united teachers of new orleans. she brings to this position a commitment to teachers' professional development and highlights the necessary role that teachers must play in the reform of city schools dr. linda stelly works as the associate director for educational issues for the american federation of teachers (aft) in washington, d.c. her role includes coordination of the aft's redesigning schools to raise achievement project. stelly has facilitated leadership and results-based reform solutions, designing communications strategies for administrators and decision makers in local and national institutions. she has coordinated research initiatives in the areas of local and national policy development and strategic planning. she has developed proven practice leadership strategies for accountability and effective teaching behaviors from a multicultural perspective. a graduate of dillard and plight of the education system interview loyola universities, she is a resident of the new orleans community and serves on the mayor's advisory committee for education. (by publisher). after hurricane katrina, all 124 new orleans public schools remained closed for at least two months. some still haven't reopened. at around 9 p.m., the electricity and phone went out. florence jumonville] went to bed at 11 p.m. and slept through the hurricane in the same room where she slept through hurricane katrina 40 years later. the deterioration of school buildings played a part in the aftermath of hurricane katrina. while flooding wrecked schools in the lower ninth ward, lakeview, gentilly and eastern new orleans, much of the damage was the result of deferred maintenance, said pat reilly, the district's director of facilities and construction and head of alvarez & marsal real estate advisory group. it's very odd and it's very sad that that has to happen, said sajan george, managing director for alvarez & marsal and chief operating officer for the school district. i understand why they're doing it but the reality is that principals shouldn't have to fundraise for basic supplies, whether they're cleaning supplies or anything else. i'm not blaming the principals, they're trying to get schools ready and not waiting for the system, but it saddens me that they have to do that. a total of $15 million is budgeted annually for cleaning supplies and custodial workers for the 120 schools in the district, according to george. when asked if that was enough, george said he's assessing that right now. everything is being reviewed and analyzed. george said an outside vendor, a minority entity services inc. of norco, is responsible for supplying cleaning supplies and floor wax to the schools. n/a opened: jan. 11 project: elementary school lighting fixture replacement at various locations, st. charles parish owner: st. charles parish school board firm: frickey brothers construction, paradis bid amount: $747,000 opened: jan. 6 project: repair and rehabilitation of effluent pumps and motors no. 2 and 3 at the harahan wastewater treatment plant owner: city of harahan firm: precision p.s.i. inc., kenner bid amount: $23,974 opened: jan. 12 -since hurricane katrina struck the gulf coast region nearly three months ago, it seems everyone has an opinion about the future of new orleans public schools, including state, educational and community leaders.but educational experts say the opinion of only one governing body counts.the final authority rests with the state and that's the bottom line, said dave griffith, spokesman for the national association of state board's of education.the state has the definitive say but everyone from community leaders to city officials is weighing in on the subject anyway.i think what's going on right now is a little bit confusing, said tulane university president scott cowen, who chairs mayor c. ray nagin's bring back new orleans education committee. people are confused about the responsibility of the school board, the state and the legislature. they're confused about who is in control. i'm confused, too. it's changing every day.since the hurricane, in addition to nagin's bring back new orleans committee to discuss the long-term future of the schools, gov. kathleen babineaux blanco proposed a bill to take over all 68 failing schools in the district.state rep. you do what you have to do to keep things going, said the 38year-old husband and father. in order to get things going, you have to get people back here.craig stewart owns creative motivational services, a new orleans-based firm specializing in career planning, peer pressure, social issues and self-improvement. stewart, a native new orleanian and a new orleans public schools graduate, had plenty of work in dallas and houston and after the storm and contemplated staying in texas. but something told him to return to new orleans.i could have left years ago but i'm connected to the city, stewart said. not by choice but by purpose. but is the city willing to take me back? what will be the new new orleans? who will have a hand in it? by law, bese can only appoint a state superintendent of education to serve through its term, which ends january 2008. at that time, pastorek will have the opportunity to serve on a month-by-month basis until the newly elected board makes its own selection. as an advocate for quality public education, pastorek served as chairman for the recovery school district advisory committee, a 23member committee comprised of state-level and community leaders who advised cecil picard] on current rsd school activities and the long-term plans for the rebuilding of public schools in orleans parish posthurricane. "under cecil's leadership and this board's guidance for the last 11 years, the administrators and teachers in this state have made significant improvements in public education and in the lives of children," pastorek said. "but we know that there is still much to do. we must work harder and smarter to close the achievement gaps. we must work harder and smarter to raise overall academic achievement." charters represent an expansion of public school choice, offering free, publicly funded educational alternatives to traditional public schools. one relatively unexplored research question concerning charter schools asks whether charter schools are more efficient suppliers of educational services than are traditional public schools. the potential relative efficiency advantage of charters vis-a-vis traditional publics is one of the mechanisms that supports the hypotheses that charters could improve performance for their students while using the same or fewer resources, and that the systemic effect of charters could lead to improved outcomes for traditional public students without requiring an increase in education sector resources. in this paper, we provide evidence as to the cost efficiency of charter schools relative to traditional public schools, and explore the extent to which those differences are attributable to differences in hiring and compensation practices, or to differences in the length of time a campus has been operating. we generate estimates of efficiency using a stochastic cost frontier approach. we estimate a translog stochastic cost frontier model using panel data for charter campuses and traditional public campuses in texas over the five-year period 2005-2009. our main findings suggest that charter schools are able to produce educational outcomes at lower cost than traditional public schools probably because they face fewer regulations but are not systematically more efficient relative to their frontier than are traditional public schools. (c) 2011 elsevier ltd. all rights reserved. public schools across the nation have turned to the criminal justice system as a gold standard of discipline. as public schools and offices of justice have become collaborators in punishment, rates of african american suspension and expulsion have soared, dropout rates have accelerated, and prison populations have exploded. nowhere, perhaps, has the war on crime been more influential in broadening racialized academic and socioeconomic disparity than in new orleans, louisiana, where in 2002 the criminal sheriff opened his own public school at the orleans parish prison. "the prison school," as locals called it, enrolled low-income african american boys who had been removed from regular public schools because of nonviolent disciplinary offenses, such as tardiness and insubordination. by examining this school in the local and national context, lizbet simmons shows how young black males are in the liminal state of losing educational affiliation while being caught in the net of correctional control. inthe prison school, she asks how schools and prisons became so intertwined. what does this mean for students, communities, and a democratic society? and how do we unravel the ties that bind the racialized realities of school failure and mass incarceration? an excerpt from reinventing america's schools: creating a 21st century education system discusses the reinvention of the new orleans public education system after hurricane katrina in 2005. after katrina, louisiana handed all but seventeen of the city's public schools to the state's recovery school district (rsd), created two years earlier to turn around failing schools. over the next nine years, the rsd gradually turned them all into charter schools--a new form of public school that has emerged over the past quarter century. charters are public schools operated by independent, mostly nonprofit organizations, free of most state and district rules but held accountable for performance by written charters, which function like performance contracts. most, but not all, are schools of choice. in 2019, new orleans' last traditional schools converted to charter status, and 100 percent of its public school students now attend charters. the orleans parish school board is concerned anthony amato] eventually will be made a job offer he can't refuse. amato has been offered jobs in miami-dade county, fla., houston and seattle, but he promised not to entertain those offerings, said district 3 board member jimmy fahrenholtz. the new opsb, which officially took office earlier this month, is far more supportive of amato than the opsb he worked with over the past two years. four members from the ousted board tried to fire the superintendent last summer. those four have been replaced with members who promised in their campaigns to work with amato. amato has been through a lot, fahrenholtz said, adding that the past board never gave amato the 10 percent annual bonuses his contract allows. it provided a window to see them more clearly. but the aftermath of katrina has aggravated these inequalities. over three thousand public housing apartments occupied before katrina plus another thousand under renovation were bulldozed after katrina. new orleans is now the charter capital of the us most of the public schools in new orleans have become charters since katrina. the main public healthcare provider, charity hospital, which saw 350,000 patient visits a year, remains closed. but, people can observe that new orleans is now whiter, more male and more prosperous. although jarring, these statistics can only be shocking to those who have willingly ignored systematic evidence of what michael harrington fifty years ago called the "the other america". centering the research process on building, rebuilding, and maintaining relationships, this multi-vocal article highlights the need to revisit practice. we consider research conducted in a city where all public schools are charter schools and discuss tensions between the implementation of our research approach and the university as we trouble the notion of 'authorship,' collaboration, and 're-presentation.' bringing our unique positionalities to the forefront, this article focuses on voice (oral story) and how voice functions in (written) text for researcher and participants in dissertation research. we argue that dissertation research is a collaborative and relational process that involves: the participants, the author, the advisor, the bodies of knowledge, and the ethical and moral principles that frame the process. long-term, reciprocal relationships constructed a foundation for this study's knowledge production and may be needed in all research studies, especially those that include those who are 'marginalized' and whose voices are often silenced. students themselves have often been the most eloquent critics of the rsd system. "it's a prison," says jerenise walker of the fiya youth squad, who attends john mcdonogh high school in the treme neighborhood of new orleans. "i counted thirteen metal detectors and not one book," jerenise reported after her first day of school in september. books in many classes had still not arrived in october, putting children at a critical disadvantage in state-mandated leap tests. "if we fail this they are going to say we're dumb," complained jerenise. working conditions have become much worse for teachers as well. last fall's state takeover effectively broke the teacher's union in new orleans, united teachers of new orleans. utno was the largest union in the state of louisiana, a so-called "right to work" state, and teaching was a source of stable, moderately well paying work for large numbers of african-american women. shortly after hurricane katrina's landfall in august 2005 and the reports of rampant looting of businesses in the city, we became curious about the extent of katrina looting as compared to that after other major storms that hit new orleans in 1947 and in 1965. using burglary as a proxy variable for looting, we discovered that the burglary rates in the month before and the month after katrina were significantly higher than those before and after the other two hurricanes. we then investigated the socioeconomic conditions in the city in an effort to explain these numbers. population loss and high unemployment rates, coupled with a decline in high-paying manufacturing jobs and an increase in low-wage food and hotel service jobs generated severe economic inequality in the city that exacerbated the situation created by katrina. our current analysis of the impact of public school desegregation and the oil bust suggests that both events contributed to population loss and the increase in low-wage jobs prior to the storm. we believe that this type of research can assist in the recovery of new orleans by providing an understanding of the city's pre-katrina social and economic conditions and make clearer which post-katrina changes are desirable. in 2005, when natural disaster hit new orleans, louisiana, in the form of hurricane katrina, life came to a standstill. no aspect of city life was left untouched by the hurricane. it destroyed not only neighborhoods but also the city’s infrastructure. in addition, it completely uprooted the public education system of orleans parish. the public schools in orleans parish before the hurricane were far from delivering an adequate education to their students. thus, this chapter is a story about constructing an entirely new and better system of public education to meet the needs of families in new orleans, and, in education experts say the perfect time for new orleans public school officials to search for a new leader is now as the school year winds down and superintendents finish out contracts in districts across the country.it is the end of the school year and one of the most active times for searches, said terri schwartzbeck, policy analyst for the arlington, va.-based american association of school administrators. nops interim superintendent ora watson resigned in march. her contract expires july 20.it's the eighth time in 11 years the orleans parish school board has had to search for a new superintendent.but unlike last year's search to replace superintendent anthony amato, hurricane katrina brought a whole new challenge finding someone to help rebuild a district.the awareness about new orleans is very high, said schwartzbeck. it's not like there's a situation that the school board would need to educate someone about. it's been abundantly written about, maybe even too abundantly. if anything (the district) is up against a lot of negative media. regrouping after the loss of his business, john lee] went to work in new orleans as a consulting engineer and met john alvendia, an electrical engineer with chevron who would become jrl's executive vice president. the study of the i can learn pilot program in jefferson parish public schools led to jrl's distinction from the wwc in its 30month review of more than 800 studies of math programs. only 11 studies met wwc standards and four were of the i can learn program. the orleans parish school board voted in december to place i can learn labs in 38 schools. the $2.2 million contract was endorsed after the louisiana board of ethics determined it was not a violation for nops teachers to work with jrl as consultants. charter schools in new orleans have been hailed as the silver lining to hurricane katrina. the state of louisiana used the hurricane as an opportunity to rebuild the entire new orleans public school system, which had been considered among the worst in the nation. they also launched the nation’s most extensive charter school experiment. the reorganization of the city’s schools has created an incredibly complex system of school authorities. the new system steers a minority of students, including virtually all of the city’s white students, into a set of selective, higher—performing schools and steers another group, including most of the city’s students of color, into a group of lower—performing schools. in order to guarantee equal educational opportunities to all of the city’s students, the school system must both look inward (limiting the selectivity system that favors a few schools and renewing its commitment to the city’s traditional public schools), and outward (taking a more balanced, regional approach to school choice by enhancing options for its students in the form of regional magnet schools and new interdistrict programs, which do not yet exist). that being said, i have to admit that it is time to consider alternatives for children attending new orleans public schools. in the just finished legislative session, a bill to allow vouchers for children to opt out of public schools and enter the local parochial system was defeated. this was a striking blow against these children. it turns out there might be some folly in that logic, too. the orleans parish school system spent $6,446 per pupil in the 20012002 school year. the national average for per-pupil expenditures was $7,692. washington, d.c., schools spent the most, more than $12,000 per student, and utah spent the least, just under $5,000. the louisiana average was $6,567, about $120 per child more than orleans parish. another crisis will occur when students from the schools taken over by outside educators have to re-enter the orleans public system. imagine the trauma capdau middle school students will undergo when they return to classrooms controlled by our local school board. they will go from an expectation of learning to an exercise in survival. the thelonious monk institute of jazz, a nonprofit education organization, will introduce its jazz in america: the national jazz curriculum to public school students in new orleans and along the gulf coast feb. 20-24. jazz in america is the institute's internetbased jazz curriculum that is available to all fifth-, eighthand 11th-grade public school students as a regular part of social studies or american history classes. education reform in new orleans is often cited as one of the brighter spots in the city’s uneven post– hurricane katrina recovery. new orleans is an interesting case because of the speed and scope of the changes in its public education system, including the following: —state takeover of low-performing schools.in other district takeovers, states typically take control of the entire school district apparatus, including the central office. in new orleans, the state of louisiana took over individual schools based on their performance while leaving the local school board and its central office intact, albeit with far fewer schools it's a couple of broken limbs." "we're not going to go away, so it (the number of convictions) is going to keep going up," he said. "this particular facet of the case, the one involving ms. ellenese brooks-simms], is by no means over. this investigation that involves that kickback and bribery scheme is very much alive, very viable and well under way. certainly this case could very well yield additional charges against other individuals." "we are in the best shape we've been in since even before the storm in terms of administration, student performance, finances and being able to have a very responsive and accountable administration and school system," she said. "i don't want to say we are thankful for katrina], but i am very thankful for the opportunity we have to rebuild our system." summerbridge, which operates at the newman campus, is one of a handful of local efforts to open the doors of the college admission process to public school students in orleans parish. school officials do not know how many new orleans public school graduates have enrolled in college but recent board of regents figures show most are ineligible for the state's most accessible free tuition program. summerbridge, which started in 1989, intercedes with students at the middle school level in hopes of improving their ability to perform well in the tops core classes. director anna zorrilla said a strong performance in middle school can channel students to a high school that will prepare them for post-secondary education, either one of the public magnet schools or a parochial or private school where possible. students continue working with summerbridge through graduation. summerbridge offers after-school, saturday and summer sessions aimed at boosting scholastic abilities. zorrilla estimated it costs $2,000 per student per year to run summerbridge, which does not charge tuition. funding comes from charitable donations ranging from the corporate level to individuals, she said. over the next few weeks, dozens of schools will open across new orleans for the second full academic year since hurricane katrina. as many as 33,000 children are expected to report to one of the campuses in the city's patchwork of charter and traditional public schools. since the hurricane struck two years ago this month, new orleans has become a laboratory for innovation. by the end of the 2006-2007 school year, nearly 60 percent of the city's 26,000 schoolchildren were attending 31 charter schools, the largest share in any city in the nation. nine new charters, in fact, are slated to open in the new school year. still, the state-run recovery school district, or rsd, is expected to operate more than 30 schools this year and will remain central to rebuilding public education in the city. federal courts have consistently rejected plaintiffs' arguments that the government is liable when citizens suffer injuries at the hands of private third parties. in the context of education, there are few cases where federal courts have held that schools are liable for the injuries that students incur at the hands of private third parties. this article puts forth a theoretical argument for schools, specifically schools operating under the governance of a state takeover district in a predominately black school district with a predominately black-elected school board, to be held liable for participating in disciplinary practices that are linked to the school-to-prison pipeline. the article first traces the roots of the state-created danger doctrine and then discusses the role of education reform policies in enabling the school-to-prison pipeline. next, the article provides a statistical analysis of three case studies in state takeover districts (detroit, memphis, and new orleans). my research found no instances where the state takeover district disrupted the school-to-prison pipeline, but i discovered multiple instances where state takeover districts have exacerbated the school-to-prison pipeline. in this article i argue that there is hope in the sixth circuit (detroit and memphis) for the use of the state-created danger doctrine, which grows out of the fourteenth amendment's due process clause, to mitigate the school-to-prison pipeline. however, the fifth circuit (new orleans) appears to have foreclosed legal causes of action based on the state-created danger doctrine. finally, this article provides a critical race critique of the school-to-prison pipeline and the few tools that black people have to combat this form of racial subjugation in light of education reform policies. our original contract was written to come in, fix the financial situation, hire the appropriate people and leave, said a&m managing director bill roberti. "obviously, that charge changed dramatically. we went into crisis management mode for quite a period of time. we were part of the fabric of recovery for the better part of six months." some major posts have been filled, roberti said, pointing to the recent hiring of acting superintendent darryl kilbert and chief financial officer stan smith. until the financial positions are filled with qualified candidates, a&m staff members will remain on the job, even if it means staying on next year, roberti said, an idea ok'd by state superintendent of education cecil j. picard. if ava lee] and other teachers at lafayette elementary do not find ways to improve leap scores and remove the school from the academically unacceptable list this year, the school will be eligible for takeover by the state. schools that fail academically four years in a row can have control transferred from the local school board to the board of elementary and secondary education. lafayette elementary is on oak-tree-lined south carrollton avenue, which is dotted in some sections with stately, pricey, whitecolumned homes. despite the nearby opulence, lafayette elementary's students come from neighborhoods where families have little money and, in some cases, lots of problems, lee said. public school teachers with a bachelor's degree in st. charles parish earn about $3,314 more than their orleans parish colleagues. st. tammany parish starts teachers out at about $3,753 more than orleans. scores of teenagers streamed out of john mcdonogh senior high school in this city's storied treme neighborhood on a recent afternoon as a dozen security guards and city police officers stood watch along the sidewalk. the three-story brick school sits on esplanade avenue in treme, the neighborhood just north of the french quarter that is famous for producing some of the city's most talented musicians and brass bands. in january, a shipment of new trumpets, saxophones, and other instruments made it possible for mcdonogh to reassemble a 130member marching band in time to rehearse and polish a routine for last month's mardi gras parades. plans to turn several new orleans public schools into charter institutions could create some confusion when the district's nearly 3,000 students return to class in november.school board president torin sanders and interim superintendent ora watson have decided four schools on the west bank o. perry walker high school, dwight d. eisenhower elementary school, martin behrman elementary school and alice m. harte elementary school will reopen nov. 14 as new orleans public schools, not charter schools.that announcement contradicts an oct. 7 school board decision to turn all 13 west bank schools into charter schools and open eight schools in november. however, a week after that meeting, an orleans parish civil court judge issued a restraining order against the opsb to halt the charter school plan. the order was filed on behalf of rev. arthur wardsworth, an algiers pastor who said the opsb violated an openmeeting law.because the judge granted that restraining order, the school board vote was rendered null and void, said sanders, who voted against the charter school plan. and dr. watson is not sitting here and twiddling her thumbs waiting for a decision to be made. she's ready to open schools.despite endless snipping among school board members and outrage among parents and community leaders, no one has publicly opposed the charter schools idea. sanders said his biggest problem was a lack of communication. he said school board vice president lourdes moran didn't notify the public, himself or fellow board members cynthia cade and phyllis landrieu of the charter school plan before it came up for a vote oct. 7. this article investigates how michigan's charter school policy influences the composition of students by race and socioeconomic status in urban traditional public schools. using 2 years of student-level data in michigan's urban elementary and middle schools, the dynamic student transfers between charter schools and tpss are analyzed through a series of hierarchical generalized linear models. the two-way transfer analysis shows that the student sorting under the charter school program tends to intensify the isolation of disadvantaged students in less effective urban schools serving a high concentration of similarly disadvantaged students. the findings imply that a challenge for the state policy makers is to help disadvantaged students who are left behind in the most disadvantaged schools, without significantly reducing the benefits to students who take advantage of school choice. the jan. 5 session offered a stark contrast to the pre-katrina rowdiness that usually accompanied monthly orleans parish school board planning meetings.instead of sitting side by side at the front of the room in the administration building in algiers, five of seven school board members faced each other while sitting around a table at the new orleans metropolitan convention and visitors bureau on st. charles avenue.michael casserly, executive director of the council of the great city schools, sat at the head of the table flanked by opsb members una anderson, lourdes moran, heidi lovett daniels, cynthia cade, phyllis landrieu, acting superintendent ora watson, chief reconstructing officer bill roberti and attorney regina bartholomew. board members torin sanders and jimmy fahrenholtz did not attend.there were no public outcries, no banging gavels, no whispering. their purpose was clear.i want to see if we can get the board to come to some agreement about where you're going, said casserly. you're going to have to put your personal and political issues aside. if this board cannot pull together, the chance of success is very poor.the washington, d.c.-based council of the great city schools is a coalition of 66 of the nation's largest urban public school systems. state superintendent of education cecil picard had demanded that the opsb hire new york professional services firm alvarez and marsal to come in to organize the district's finances. he threatened to withhold millions in federal money for the school district if opsb did not. the orleans parish school board voted 4-to-3 may 23 to allow alvarez] and marsal] to manage the district's finances. but torin sanders] refused to sign the agreement, saying it gave opsb no control and saddled it with unlimited liability. sanders appealed to the state board of ethics for help. meanwhile, the same four opsb members who voted for the agreement voted to sue sanders to force him to sign it. but parents from the school district filed a restraining order prohibiting sanders from signing the agreement, which created an impasse. educational access was central in the racial inscription of class identities in the late nineteenth century. in atlanta and new orleans, white newspapers, politicians and ordinary citizens launched vigorous campaigns against integrated schools, which resulted in limited access to elite public schooling for upwardly mobile blacks. jewell's study analyses these cases to explore social reproduction as a link between race and class as social structures. whites in both cities used the concept of miscegenation, or racial mixing, to define blacks' access to elite cultural knowledge and social networks as a violation of the colour line. jewell argues that analyses of racial formation should give attention to discursive links between race and class in struggles over social reproduction because maintaining racial hierarchies in periods of social change requires constructing new cultural narratives that reproduce economic dominance over racial minorities. purpose: this article presents findings from a study of six schools in the together initiative (ti), which facilitates increased school autonomy from districts and expands teacher decision-making authority. this study aims to understand how ti's theory of action changed structures, cultures, and agency as the concepts of site-based management and expanded teacher decision making were interpreted and implemented by district and school leaders and teachers. research design: data were collected over the first 2 years of the initiative using a concurrent mixed-methods design. field notes from more than 200 hours of observations and transcripts of 231 semistructured interviews with stakeholders were coded using the constant-comparative method. findings from qualitative data were triangulated with annual teacher survey findings. findings: implementation of ti varied across the six schools and depended greatly on school staffs' existing relationships the district, principal support for decision-making structures, and the extent to which school cultures reflected trust and teachers were able to enact greater agency. only two schools experienced moderate increases in site-based management and expanded teacher decision making; those that did not were missing at least one of these structural or cultural supports. conclusions: at a time when charter schools are touted as an effective reform model, this article informs policy and practice on the original charter conceptautonomous, innovative district schools. our findings suggest that creating contexts where site-based management can flourish is far more complicated than changing structures or establishing supportive school cultures. draws on personal involvement in the new orleans (la) school district to examine the origins & development of the recovery school district (rsd), wherein the state took responsibility for running the new orleans schools tagged as failing at the end of the last testing period before hurricane katrina. background to the crisis of new orleans public education is provided, & the us government's katrina response is compared to certain of its actions in iraq, highlighting problems engendered by the ideological conviction that the private sector outperforms the public sector. how a market-based approach was applied to the new orleans public education crisis is explained, identifying the problem with market-driven education as chiefly one of unequal market access. the arrival of the rsd in the wake of katrina & the struggling market-based charter school experiment is then discussed, highlighting problems stemming from the lack of administrative leadership. the current state of the new orleans education system is described, giving attention to the arrival of paul vallas from the philadelphia, pa, school system to take over rsd. d. edelman katrina destroyed so many lives and homes," said adams, a 25-year veteran teacher and member of the united teachers of new orleans (utno), "but we cannot allow post-katrina policies to destroy the hope and opportunity that public schools represent. adams and other educators and students who testified at the hearing urged the lawmakers to get more federal money to new orleans to help rebuild and reopen schools, buy new equipment, rehire staff and cover healthcare costs for laid-off employees. we utilize state data of nearly 1.7 million students in ohio to study a specific sector of online education: k-12 schools that deliver most, if not all, education online, lack a brick-and-mortar presence, and enroll students full-time. first, we explore e-school enrollment patterns and how these patterns vary by student subgroups and geography. second, we evaluate the impact of e-schools on students' learning, comparing student outcomes in e-schools to outcomes in two other schooling types, traditional charter schools and traditional public schools. our results show that students and families appear to selfsegregate in stark ways where low-income, lower achieving white students are more likely to choose e-schools while lowincome, lower achieving minority students are more likely to opt into the traditional charter school sector. our results also show that students in e-schools are performing worse on standardized assessments than their peers in traditional charter and traditional public schools. we close with policy recommendations and areas for future research. doris voitier]'s story was in the women of the year special section in the nov. 13 edition of citybusiness. if you missed it, please take the time to go back and read up on her and the other 49 winners as well. trust me, you will be impressed. voitier, superintendent of st. bernard parish public schools, set herself apart by going forth and achieving one simple goal ensuring the children of st. bernard parish would have access to education after hurricane katrina. and they would have teachers in spite of the devastation in their parish, a necessary byproduct of her main goal. under voitier's leadership and in spite of government obstacles, the schools in st. bernard opened before christmas last year. at first for a few hundred children, then for 1,500 and now they are teaching and nurturing 3,000 students. those st. bernard students have clean classrooms with textbooks, certified teachers and bathrooms that work. this research note presents preliminary research into the relationship between the racial composition of public schools in school districts and the percentages of white students in nonpublic schools in those districts. specifically we ask two questions: is the enrollment of whites in non-public schools associated with minority predominance in public schools? is there an association between the enrollment of whites outside of the public school system and the academic performance of students in the public school system? using twoand three-level hierarchical linear models, we find that school districts that have more whites in nonpublic schools tend to contain public schools with larger percentages of minority students. further, at both the school and individual levels, achievement test scores tend to be lower in districts in which white students tend to be enrolled outside of the public school system. in addition, the achievement gap between white and minority students tends to be greater in districts with relatively more students in nonpublic schools. these findings are consistent with the argument that the withdrawal of white students from the public school system is negatively related to academic achievement because it tends to concentrate minority students in public schools. the louisiana department of education's recovery school district will open three more public schools in orleans parish tuesday. officials expect as many as 900 students to begin attending those schools through the end of semester in june.i am encouraged that students and their families continue to return to new orleans, said state superintendent of education cecil picard. i welcome all of the students back to school and hope that they find their campuses a place of familiarity, security and learning.as of last week, 445 students registered at joseph a. this article offers an analysis of the origins, evolution, and impact of the obama administration's race to the top (rttt) competitive grant program and places it in the broader context of the debate over president obama's aggressive use of executive power. faced with divided control and partisan gridlock in congress which has been unable to reauthorize esea, the largest federal education program the obama administration has opted to make education policy from the executive branch. while many observers have questioned the expansive interpretation of statutory and regulatory authority that undergirds rttt and the nclb waiver process there is little doubt that the efforts have had a significant impact on the national political discourse around education and pushed many states to propose or enact important policy changes, particularly around charter schools, common core standards, and teacher evaluation processes. along with health care, education reform is likely to be remembered as the most significant policy legacy of the obama administration. however, while the affordable care act was drafted by congress and secured through the "normal" legislative process, the obama education agenda has largely been designed and enacted through unilateral executive branch authority. as a result, these actions may well set significant precedents for the separation of powers as well as for education policy. the existing models of mixed public–private school systems usually capture only the decreasing average cost faced by public schools, whereas empirical studies find evidence of it for private schools as well. motivated by this, an equilibrium model of a mixed public–private school system is studied in this paper, whereby private schools also face decreasing average cost over enrollment. in the model, households, heterogeneous with respect to exogenously specified income and child’s ability, choose among a public and a private school. private school charges tuition whereas public school is free. public school spending is financed by income tax revenue collected from all households and the tax rate is determined via majority voting. achievement of a child depends on its ability and education spending. under the assumptions on the parameters of the model, a joint lognormal distribution of income and ability, and a cobb–douglas utility, majority voting equilibrium is numerically shown to exist. the model is calibrated to match certain statistics from the 2013 turkish data. using the calibrated model, we compare the benchmark for a mixed public–private school system with a pure public school system to understand the impact of shutting down some of the private schools in turkey following the july 15 coup attempt. we find that mean achievement and variance of achievement after high school is 0.039 % higher and 0.013 % lower respectively in a pure public school system. this article offers an analysis of the origins, evolution, and impact of the obama administration's race to the top (rttt) competitive grant program and places it in the broader context of the debate over the no child left behind act and the shifting intergovernmental relations around education. rttt is fundamentally about two things: creating political cover for state education reformers to innovate and helping states construct the administrative capacity to implement these innovations effectively. the program has had a significant impact on the national political discourse around education and pushed many states to propose or enact important policy changes, particularly around charter schools and teacher-evaluation processes. however, we should remain realistic in our expectations about what rttt can accomplish; although the program's approach may be different from that of earlier federal education programs, many of the political and institutional obstacles to sustaining meaningful reform at the federal and state levels remain largely the same. rttt will struggle to surmount these obstacles in the short term, even as it hopes to transform them over the longer term. education is both an ideological and political enterprise where dominant expressions of racial, gendered, classed, and generational forms are borne out in the classroom on a daily basis in avariety of ways. these ways of thinking, knowing, and being have become not just commonplace, but normal. anything existing outside these so-called normal standards and practices is marginalized, ostracized, and in some cases criminalized in the public school classroom leaving many of our students under-represented and under-served. therefore critical and democratic educators must seek to disrupt these notions of “common sense” that serve to reproduce oppressive societal norms in education. to this end critically minded educators must ask several questions: 1. how are relationships between curriculum and culture created and maintained? 2. who is “invisible” in our schools and classrooms? why are they so? 3. what counts as intellectual work and who says that this is so? 4. how do educators begin to make arguments that contradict “common sense”? 5. what and where are the possibilities for the formation of strategic alliances? 6. what are the implications, intended and otherwise? i wish to examine each of these questions so that students and educators can begin to buildcounter-narratives around how public education in the united states “should work” and what can be done to “fix it.” in particular, i wish to look at the ways that hip-hop culture can be employed as meaningful strategy for educators and students to explore their collective vision of what it means to be human. how does the intersection of education and hip-hop culture allow students to create a shared understanding of identity, agency for themselves, and change in their communities. the nation's largest charter management organization is the knowledge is power program (kipp). kipp schools are emblematic of the no excuses approach to public education, a highly standardized and widely replicated charter model that features a long school day, an extended school year, selective teacher hiring, strict behavior norms, and emphasizes traditional reading and math skills. no excuses charter schools are sometimes said to target relatively motivated high achievers at the expense of students who are more difficult to teach, including limited english proficiency (lep) and special education (sped) students, as well as students with low baseline achievement levels. we use applicant lotteries to evaluate the impact of kipp academy lynn, a kipp school in lynn, massachusetts that typifies the kipp approach. our analysis focuses on special needs students that may be underserved. the results show average achievement gains of 0.36 standard deviations in math and 0.12 standard deviations in reading for each year spent at kipp lynn, with the largest gains coming from the lep, sped, and low-achievement groups. average reading gains are driven almost entirely by sped and lep students, whose reading scores rise by roughly 0.35 standard deviations for each year spent at kipp lynn. since 2007, hebrew language charter schools publicly-financed k-8 schools teaching modern hebrew to religiously, linguistically, and culturally diverse students have emerged in cities across the united states. this article analyzes the contested notion of language ownership by exploring a set of discussions in over 75 articles in the american jewish press about hebrew charters. this article demonstrates how anxieties about communal production and reproduction are traceable through the circulated discourses about hebrew learning. analysis reveals how hebrew charters are perceived as both a threating practice and an opportunity for communal renewal and growth. hebrew charters illuminate how language ownership is negotiated through printed media and how one community grapples with the challenges and possibilities that language diffusion presents. (c) 2015 elsevier ltd. all rights reserved. purpose: as state and federal accountability systems have increased demands for evidence of student achievement, the use of data to inform practice has become more prevalent. more research is needed to understand not only what organizational factors shape data-use efforts but also how these factors enable or constrain educators' use of data for instructional improvement. this article addresses this gap by examining how two types of education systemsschool districts and charter management organizations (cmos)use data and allocate their organizational resources to this end. methods: data were collected from six secondary schools in two districts and two cmos during the 2010-2011 school year. over 70 interviews were conducted with teachers and school and system leaders. patterns from within and across school systems are presented. findings: key contextual differences had a strong influence on data-use efforts: accountability pressures shaped the patterns in data use, whereas other organizational conditionsstructure and decision-making rights, size and growth trajectory, financial resources, and degree of regulationrestricted or facilitated the systems' mobilization of resources for these efforts. implications: this study suggests that the school systems as a whole play a critical role in supporting schools and educators in using data, regardless of whether that system is district or charter. as this article is one of the first to offer a comparative look at data use between school districts and cmos, it lays the groundwork for diffusion of promising practices across these systems for school and system leaders. the state has experimented with a range of decentralized school organizations over the past half century, in part aiming to lift poor children. this movement stems from not only neoliberal ideology but also from the earlier "third way" of advancing public projects-severing local organizing from the state's bureaucratic rules, while stopping short of atomized market remedies. this article first examines the economic and institutional forces that drive civic activists to advance decentralizing remedies, especially the spread of non-government organizations (ngos) and client choice in the education sector. we then detail the uneven empirical benefits of three decentralizing segments of the education sector: preschools, parental vouchers, and charter schools. finally we move beneath surface-level governance changes to highlight how particular social relations found inside decentralized organizations at times do yield discernible, even sizable, benefits. comparative cases reveal a second generation of decentralists, who build from the lessons of their policy ancestors. second-wave decentralists are keenly focused on a social architecture that motivates poor children and educators. in this article huriya jabbar examines how the regulatory environment in post hurricane katrina new orleans has influenced choice, incentives, and competition among schools. while previous research has highlighted the mechanisms of competition and individual choice-the "invisible hand"-and the creation of markets in education, jabbar focuses here on how markets, especially those in education, are also governed by the "visible" hand of the government, which, through regulations and policies, influences how they operate and the outcomes they generate. she compares two governing agencies to examine how the different policy environments in new orleans shaped school leaders' perceptions of competition and their behavioral responses to it. her findings indicate that governing agencies constrain or enable school leaders' ability to respond to market pressures, sometimes mitigating and other times exacerbating inequities in the marketplace. these findings can inform other school districts across the united states as they adopt market-based reforms, providing directions for ensuring that such policies are equitable. in this article, buras chronicles the struggle against closing frederick douglass high school in new orleans. amid mass charter school development and the school facilities master plan aimed at reconstructing the city's education landscape, douglass remained one of the only open access public high schools in the historic upper 9th ward. the community's spirited effort to honor the school's african american legacy and acquire greater resources from the state-run recovery school district, in opposition to support for privately managed charter schools, provides a striking case study of resistance to current reforms and their costs. it also highlights the danger of school closures in the absence of historical context, which explains the challenges of all-black public schools through a critical analysis of white supremacy and racially targeted state disinvestment. background: competitive foods remain prevalent in schools even though the majority of states' laws have addressed this for several years. whereas updated federal standards take effect during school year 2014-2015, aspects of competitive food regulation will remain relegated to the states and districts and concerns exist about compliance with the federal standards. this study examined compliance provisions codified into state law that focused on incentives, monetary penalties, or contracts which could provide examples for other jurisdictions. methods: codified statutory and administrative laws effective as of january 2013 for all 50 states and the district of columbia were compiled using boolean searches in lexis-nexis and westlaw. all laws were analyzed by 2 study authors to determine the presence and components of relevant provisions. results: eighteen states' laws contained compliance mechanisms including financial and/or programmatic incentives (5 states), contract provisions (11 states), and monetary penalties for noncompliance (7 states). five states' laws contained a combination of approaches. conclusions: compliance measures help to strengthen competitive food laws by providing state agencies with an enforcement mechanism. enforcing such provisions will help to create healthier school environments. this study will provide useful insight for governments at all levels as they implement competitive food laws. we take a closer look at what can be learned about charter schools by pooling data from lottery-based impact estimates of the effect of charter school attendance at 113 schools. on average, each year enrolled at one of these schools increases math scores by 0.08 standard deviations and english/language arts scores by 0.04 standard deviations relative to attending a counterfactual public school. there is wide variation in impact estimates. to glean what drives this variation, we link these effects to school practices, inputs, and characteristics of fallback schools. in line with the earlier literature, we find that schools that adopt an intensive "no excuses" attitude towards students are correlated with large positive effects on academic performance, with traditional inputs like class size playing no role in explaining charter school effects. however, we highlight that no excuses schools are also located among the most disadvantaged neighborhoods in the country. after accounting for performance levels at fallback schools, the relationship between the remaining variation in school performance and the entire no excuses package of practices weakens. no excuses schools are effective at raising performance in neighborhoods with very poor performing schools, but the available data have less to say on whether the no excuses approach could help in nonurban settings or whether other practices would similarly raise achievement in areas with low-performing schools. we find that intensive tutoring is the only no excuses characteristic that remains significant (even for nonurban schools) once the performance levels of fallback schools are taken into account. research over the last 50 years have been remarkably consistent when it comes to addressing education inequality: background factors like family and socioeconomics matter to school success. yet policies remain narrowly focused on school-based reforms like testing, standards, and charter schools due in large part to the american public's limited understanding of education and inequality. i argue that scholars, as the experts, are ultimately responsible for changing how policymakers and the public think about these issuesa duty they have yet to embrace. in this connection, the use of framing can help education researchers broaden attitudes and stimulate political will. drawing mainly from disciplines outside education, this article explores the potential of framing as a communication tool for education scholars. specifically, i examine how it has been used in science, political, and marketing communication to broaden public opinion. i also offer ways to frame the issue of education inequality to help the public, including decision makers and influencers, conceive of solutions and opportunities beyond the status quo. the rise in the influence of and spending by educational philanthropists and foundations over the past two decades, especially in the area of market-based reforms, such as charter schools, vouchers, and merit pay, is evident across the united states. largely due to philanthropic investments, relatively new educational intermediary organizations (ios) have also been growing in size, scope, and influence. these new ios have sought to implement market-based reforms in key urban school districts, frequently based on ideological stances and/or evidence of their efficacy. as yet, researchers have not conceptualized the unique position of foundations in the landscape of intermediary organizations, market-based reforms, and evidence production and utilization. drawing from a 3-year (2011-2014) study of ios, research utilization, and policymaking in the case of "incentivist" reforms, we find that foundations are uniquely situated in the reform landscape as a central actor, at the "hub" of intermediary activity as a funder of ios, but also as a "spoke" in the wheel that helps to mobilize and, in many ways, direct the activities of the ios. we discuss the implications of the role of foundations in research production, promotion, and utilization for research and policymaking. purpose: this article highlights the complexity of accountability issues associated with one charter school from the charter application process, operation, and functioning of the external mechanism and the internal mechanism to hold the charter school accountable, closure of the school, and consequences of the charter school's closure on its constituents. research design: utilizing retrospective case study design, 11 interviews from 6 participants, school documents, school district data, court proceedings, and newspaper accounts reconstruct the narrative of one charter school from its inception to closure and its community's lived experience. findings: in this case study, a charter school board's quality of governance played a significant role in a charter school's success or failure. charter school board, charter school leadership, and local school authorizer played important roles in the school's closing. charter school authorizers, charter school boards, and charter school leaders are accountable and responsible actors in a charter school's functioning, and negligence in fulfilling these roles can lead to a school's closing. teachers' complaints are signals of a school in distress. according to teachers and parents, the school's closure had a devastating impact on the students, teachers, and parents. conclusions: the dual governance mechanism of charter schools can work if the charter school board, charter school leaders, and authorizers fulfill their governance roles. however, the theory does not account for human behavior in policy implementation. charter school governing boards are well positioned to ensure accountability for individual charter schools. charter school authorizers need to establish clear guidelines on board selection and membership. over the past two decades, the landscape of elementary and secondary education in the united states has shifted dramatically, due to the emergence and expansion of privately provided, but publicly funded, schooling options (including both charter schools and private school choice devices like vouchers, tax credits, and educational savings accounts). this transformation in the delivery of k12 education is the result of a confluence of factors-discussed in detail below-that increasingly lead education reformers to support efforts to increase the number of high quality schools serving disadvantaged students across all three educational sectors, instead of focusing exclusively on reforming urban public schools. as a result, millions of american children now attend privately operated, publicly funded schools. this rise in a "sector agnostic" education policy has profound implications for the state and federal constitutional law of education because it blurs the distinction between charter and private schools. this article explores three of the most significant of these implications. in this article we compare the governance behaviors and preferences of nonprofit charter school board members with traditional elected public school board members in michigan, minnesota, and wisconsin. using originally collected survey data, we find that nonprofit charter school board members are less likely to place emphasis on relations with the public, engage in conflict, be ideologically diverse, and perceive the executive as responsible for key governance tasks than traditionally elected public school board members. the findings provide new information for policymakers weighing the potential benefits of education privatization through the use of nonprofit charter schools against the potential loss of democratic board accountability. using a discourse analytic framework that draws on theories of language ideologies, this paper analyzes the semiotics of a heritage language as it moves from the context of parochial education to the realm of public schooling. specifically, it examines how hebrew undergoes resemioticization when a hebrew language charter school in the district of columbia is established. i examine what hebrew signifies through an analysis of two public texts: the sela public charter school application and a community online forum. i identify how this new educational initiative redefines hebrew teaching as a novel form of bilingual education that eschews discourses of identity, rights, and heritage. next i show that the online forum participants attach diverse and contradictory meanings to hebrew. this analysis examines the semiotic processes at work when a heritage language is untethered from its traditional communal context and transformed into a public language, and the ways in which bilingualism and bilingual education are reframed and contested in the process. this study examines the impact on student achievement of implementing a bundle of best practices from high-performing charter schools into low-performing, traditional public schools in houston, texas, using a school-level randomized field experiment and quasi-experimental comparisons. the five practices in the bundle are increased instructional time, more effective teachers and administrators, high-dosage tutoring, data-driven instruction, and a culture of high expectations. the findings show that injecting best practices from charter schools into traditional houston public schools significantly increases student math achievement in treated elementary and secondary schools-by 0.15 to 0.18 standard deviations a year-and has little effect on reading achievement. similar bundles of practices are found to significantly raise math achievement in analyses for public schools in a field experiment in denver and program in chicago. using us data from the los angeles unified school district (lausd) i analyse student outcomes from advanced placement tests and smarter balanced summative assessments to determine whether charter school students display higher levels of college readiness. using panel data from 2011-12 through 2014-15 for the advanced placement tests, i find a gain of between 10.8 and 21.0 percentage points for charter students on average over students attending traditional public schools. for the smarter balanced assessment using school years 2014-15 and 2015-16, i again find that charter students outperform traditional public students on average with gains in all categories for both the english and the mathematics portions of the exam. the results of this study seem to offer some support for the view that offering choice in schooling tends to improve performance. publicly funded private schools, also known as charter schools in some countries, are an increasingly popular tool among ministries of education for improving school effectiveness; however, little is known about their efficiency. this study evaluates the efficiency of charter schools in massachusetts by assessing their proficiency scores and per student spending as compared with traditional public schools. i find that charter schools outperform traditional public schools in both reading and math and that the difference is more salient in urban communities. furthermore, urban charter schools spend significantly less per pupil than their traditional public school counterparts. not only are charter schools outperforming traditional public schools academically, but they are doing so at a lower cost particularly in urban communities. by introducing an efficiency component to the wider body of literature, this research explores what conditions are best suited for charter schools, taking into consideration the limited financial capabilities of underserved school districts and low-income countries. (c) 2014 elsevier ltd. all rights reserved. purpose data use cultures in schools determine data use practices. such cultures can be muted by powerful macro accountability and organizational learning cultures. further, strong equity-oriented data use cultures are challenging to establish. the purpose of this paper is to engage these cultural tensions. design/methodology/approach the data discourse and decisions of four grade-level teams in two elementary schools in one district were studied through observation of 62 grade-level meetings over the course of a year. the observations focused on "data talk," defined as the structure and content of team conversations about interim student performance data. findings distinct macro cultures of accountability and organizational learning existed in the two schools. the teams' own data use cultures partly explained the absence of a focus on equity, and none of the teams used student performance data to make instructional decisions in support of the district's equity aims. leadership missed opportunities to cultivate an equity-focused data use culture. practical implications school leaders who advocate that equity importantly guides data use routines, and can anticipate how cultures of accountability or organizational learning "show up" in data use conversations, will be better prepared to redirect teachers' interpretations of data and clarify expectations of equity reform initiatives. originality/value this study is novel in its concept of " data talk," which provided a holistic but nuanced account of data use practices in grade-level meetings. as the number of online k-12 educational offerings continues to grow it is important to better understand key indicators of success for students enrolled in these classes. one of those indicators is student dropout rates. this is particularly important for hispanic or latino students who traditionally have high dropout rates. the purpose of this study was to better understand dropout rates for k-12 hispanic or latino students enrolled in online schools in arizona. this was accomplished by examining the effects that the independent variables of time, school type (charter vs non-charter) and delivery type (blended vs fully online) have on dropout rates. a quantitative analysis of data from 32 online schools was performed. the results of this study show that dropout rates are indeed declining for the period of 2013-2015. this decline is mirrored by national dropout rates for all students and specifically for hispanic or latino students. while the declines are positive news, the dropout rates for hispanic or latino students are still among the highest measured. the dropout rate gap between other demographic groups and hispanics or latinos is still substantial and worth continued research along with efforts to reduce these dropout rates and foster increased student success. this article documents evidence of nonrandom gender sorting across k-12 schools in the united states. the sorting exists among coed schools and at all grade levels, and it is highest in the secondary school grades. we observe some gender sorting across school sectors and types: for instance, males are slightly underrepresented in private schools and charter schools and are substantially overrepresented in irregular public schools, a large share of which educates students with special needs and juvenile justice involvement. gender sorting within sectors and types is also quite prevalent and appears to be highest within the private schools (where single-sex schools are more common) and irregular public schools. we find that gender sorting is higher in counties that have higher shares of enrollment in private and nonregular public schools. this sorting occurs even though parents have similar stated preferences for school attributes for their sons and daughters. we examine whether working conditions in charter schools and traditional public schools lead to different levels of job satisfaction among teachers. we distinguish among charter schools managed by for-profit education management organizations (emos) and non-profit charter management organizations (cmos) and stand-alone charter schools. we investigate our research question using data from the school and staffing survey. we find that teachers in charter schools are less satisfied with their jobs than teachers in traditional public schools. we also find that teachers in emo-managed schools appear less satisfied than those in stand-alone charter schools. our analyses suggest that lower salaries and limited union memberships help drive these lower levels of satisfaction, particularly among stand-alone charter schools and charter schools managed by emos. background/context: charter school policy has evolved into a major component of the current education reform movement in the united states. as of 2012, all but nine u. s. states allowed charter schools, and in one of those nine, washington state, charter school legislation was passed by popular vote in november 2012. there is a substantial, if contested, research base focusing on charter school effectiveness, particularly related to test score achievement, as well as an equally contested literature base on charter school enrollment selectivity, student expulsions, and increased segregation in charter school populations. purpose: the purpose of this study is to analyze the network of relations of policy actors surrounding the statewide campaign to pass the charter school initiative 1240 in washington state in order to better understand how wealthy individuals and their associated philanthropic organizations influence educational policy. research design: making use of available tax records, public election information, individual and organizational websites, and institutional and foundation databases, this study uses simple directed graphing techniques from social network analysis to analyze the complex relationships and affiliations of policy actors relative to the campaign to pass charter school initiative 1240 in the state of washington. conclusions/recommendations: this study concludes that, compared to the average voter in washington, an elite group of wealthy individuals, either directly through individual donations or indirectly through their affiliated philanthropic organizations, wielded disproportionate influence over the outcome of the charter school initiative in the state, thereby raising serious concerns about the democratic underpinnings of an education policy that impacts all of the children in washington state. this study also concludes that elite individuals make use of local nonprofit organizations as a mechanism to advance their education policy agenda by funding those nonprofits through the philanthropic organizations affiliated with those same wealthy elites. in light of these conclusions, the authors recommend that a mechanism for more democratic accountability be developed relative to education policy campaigns, initiatives, and legislation. neoliberal public school reform has revitalized efforts to open unique all-male schools for black boys. existing research stresses how these black male academies nurture resilience but has failed to examine what makes these schools distinctive. drawing on one year of ethnographic research, this article demonstrates how northside academy, an all-male charter high school, built a respectable brotherhood. modeled after elite all-male institutions, northside's classics curriculum and professional uniform marked its young men as having disciplined minds and bodies, destined for college and a middle-class future. yet to maintain legitimacy within a competitive environment, the school community drew moral boundaries between its exceptional young men and those delinquent boys most in crisis. this engaged a respectability politics where upwardly mobile black men reject their more marginalized peers for failing to reform their character. this study's findings extend knowledge of single-sex public schools and of the impact of increased competition under neoliberalism. a widely cited report by the federal government accountability office found that charter schools enroll a significantly smaller percentage of students with disabilities than do traditional public schools. however, thus far no hard evidence exists to definitively explain or quantify the disparity between special education enrollment rates in charter and traditional public schools. this article uses student-level data from denver, colorado, to map the creation and growth of the special education gap in elementary and middle school grades. the gap begins because students with disabilities are less likely to apply to charter schools in gateway grades than are nondisabled students. however, the special education gap in denver elementary schools more than doubles as students progress between kindergarten and the fifth grade. about half of the growth in the gap in elementary grades (46%) occurs because of classification differences across sectors. the remaining 54% of the growth in the gap in elementary grades is due to differences in student mobility across sectors. however, the gap does not primarily growand in fact tends to shrinkdue to the movement of students with disabilities across sectors and out of the city's school system. rather, the impact of student mobility on the gap is driven primarily by nondisabled students: regular enrollment students are more likely to enter into charter schools, thus disproportionately reducing the percentage of students with disabilities within the charter sector. in many urban districts, the public education landscape is being transformed as private-sector providers such as educational management organizations, charter management organizations, and partner support organizations partner with or run district schools. while some private-sector providers'' visions for school reform have remained static over time, others'' have changed due to factors like the evolving policy environment, changes in local contexts, or new direction in the providers'' own agendas. this article creates a framework that places these private-sector players on a continuum of control. such a continuum captures the variety of providers in the field examining different attributes that can contribute to the likely success or failure of a partnership. particularly for practitioners, it captures the varying degrees of support and loss of control that collaboration with an outside provider might entail. background/context: the concept of scale has gained purchase across social sectors in recent years as organizational leaders and funders seek to maximize the impact of promising social innovations. purpose/objective: we apply insights from recent scholarship on ideas as mechanisms for change to explain how the idea of "getting to scale" intersected with political opportunities and human and financial resources in the early diffusion of the charter management organization (cmo). research design: as the birthplace and a political locus of the cmo form, california is an ideal vantage point from which to understand the early years of the form's diffusion. we conducted interviews with california cmo and non-cmo leaders, principals, and funders. our interviews were designed to understand when and why cmo leaders thought about growth, the challenges and opportunities associated with growth, organizational goals and strategic priorities, and whether and how funders shaped cmo development and plans. in addition, we constructed a school-level panel dataset for the 1991-92 to 2006-07 school years using data from the national center for education statistics common core of data and the california department of education. we included charter organizational form, enrollment, and school founding and closure years. we also joined multiple foundation center datasets to create a grant-level dataset for the years 1999 to 2006 that includes grant amount, grant type, recipient, and funder. finally, we conducted participant and nonparticipant observations at cmo board meetings, foundation staff meetings and presentations, and charter school conferences and meetings. findings/results: understood and framed as the vehicle for getting to scale, the cmo form drew a disproportionate share of private philanthropy dollars, appealed to a new class of professionals from outside of education, and was successfully distinguished from alternative charter forms, all of which contributed to its early diffusion. conclusions/recommendations: we develop a fuller understanding of the charter school movement, describing how the diffusion of the cmo form displaced ideas about school-level autonomy and decentralization in favor of ideas about getting to scale and tipping the system. the study also offers insight to scholars analyzing current and past efforts at educational reform by emphasizing the roles played by ideas, opportunities, and resources. the seed schools, which combine a no excuses charter model with a 5-day-a-week boarding program, are america''s only urban public boarding schools for the poor. we provide the first causal estimate of the impact of attending seed schools on academic achievement, with the goal of understanding whether changing a student''s environment is an effective strategy to increase achievement among the poor. using admission lotteries, we show that attending a seed school increases achievement by 0.211 standard deviation in reading and 0.229 standard deviation in math per year. however, subgroup analyses show that the effects may be driven by female students. for some reason, grass clippings in late summer smell differently than newly mown grass clippings in early spring. late summer grass clippings smell like football season. it's a great time of the year. there weren't a lot of robots in my hometown. hardly anyone i knew had one. i don't recall any robots hanging around main street before or after i finished playing high school football. but there were robots on television every week. they acted as butlers, maids, friends why not football players? lately, i've been thinking about those irrational fears as i try to figure out how our public schools deteriorated so badly. since there aren't any rational or logical explanations for the way the public schools in orleans parish have been allowed to decline, there must be some crazy ones. today, the new orleans public school system has only 21 schools in its jurisdiction. most of them are in older buildings that were on high ground and survived the storm. katrina caused $800 million worth of destruction to the schools, but it also provided an opportunity for a new beginning. the staff was determined to succeed when schools reopened after a year. planners seized the opportunity for change. a dedicated tech team knew that technology could make a critical difference in students future success. they chose qwizdom student response systems as linchpins of a model classroom project that included interactive whiteboards and laptops. the goal for technology, according to peggy abadie, executive director of information technology, is for technology to help transform instruction in such a way that ownership of instruction is transferred to the learner. they chose qwizdom's q4 student response system as the pivotal technology because they improve teachers' ability to know immediately how students are performing and engage and sustain students in learning at the same time. today the district has 3800 qwizdom clickers in classrooms, starting with high school math and science so that 98% of those classes have the response systems. direct subsidy scheme (dss) schools are a product of hong kong's market-oriented educational reform, mirroring global reform that champions parental choice and school marketization. such schools have greater autonomy in matters of curricula, staffing, and student admission. although advocates of the dss credit it with increasing educational diversity and competition, little empirical is available to back up such claim. in this study, we use data from the program for international student assessment to compare student achievements in dss schools with those in traditional public schools. we find that while dss students' test scores in math, reading, and science have improved significantly over time, though the variation is much greater. changes in mean performance have been anchored by a substantial change in student composition. dss schools have a higher proportion of students with high socioeconomic status than with medium and low socioeconomic status. dss schools also amplify the effects that family background have on student achievement. these findings raise concerns that the dss approach favors a small minority of students. provincetown, massachusetts is a popular multigendered tourist destination where openness to diversity is part of the school and wider community ethos. youth encounter their hometown as a place whose cultural ethos they do not always embrace. based on participant-observation fieldwork from 1995 to 2002, this article explores how students have developed a "culture of resistance" to dominant discourses of tolerance and acceptance. by deconstructing how schools are sites of intergroup conflicts over gender tolerance and public school ownership, student-resistance conduct is shown to be a response to perceived alienation from mainstream social norms and discourses. background/context: with a growing body of evidence to support the assertion that teacher quality is vital to producing better student outcomes, policymakers continue to seek solutions to attract and retain the best educators. performance-based pay is a reform that has become popular in k-12 education over the last decade. this strategy potentially produces positive impacts on student achievement in two ways: better alignment of financial incentives with desired outcomes and improved the composition of the teacher workforce. while evaluations have primarily focused on the former result, there is little research on whether the longer-term implementation of these polices can attract more effective teachers. purpose: in this study we aim to provide evidence for potential long-term impacts that performance-based pay can have on the composition of the teacher workforce by addressing two questions: does performance-based pay attract fundamentally different individuals, as measured by their risk preferences, to the teaching profession? are stated preferences for a particular pay format correlated to measures of teacher quality? research design: we apply methods from experimental economics and conduct surveys with 120 teachers from two school districts who have experienced performance pay. we compare the risk preferences of teachers hired under the two pay formats to test the hypothesis that performance-based pay attracts individuals with different characteristics to the profession. we also analyze teachers' survey responses on their preferences for performance-based pay to determine their relationships to two measures of teacher quality: student test-score gains and principal evaluations. conclusions/recommendations: we find mixed results regarding the ability of performance-based pay to alter the composition of the teacher workforce. teachers hired with performance-based pay in place are no different from their colleagues. however, teachers claiming to seek employment in districts with performance-based pay in place appear significantly less risk averse. surprisingly, additional analyses indicate that teachers' value-added scores and performance evaluations do not predict a positive disposition towards merit pay. thus, while these results indicate the possibility for performance-based pay to attract different individuals to teaching, they do not provide evidence that such change would necessarily improve the composition of the workforce. policymakers should take this potential tradeoff into consideration when considering the expansion of performance pay policies. objective. we examine how the working conditions in charter schools managed by management organizations (mos) compare to those that teachers experience in stand-alone charter schools. we consider differences in the degree of autonomy within the schools, professional development, levels of administrative support, support from teachers and parents, and teachers' work hours and levels of compensation. methods. our data come from the 2011-2012 schools and staffing survey (sass). we estimate multilevel models using the hierarchical linear modeling software, while controlling for the composition of the teachers and school context. results. we find that teachers in charter schools managed by education mos have lower levels of autonomy than teachers in other charter schools. they also receive lower levels of compensation than other charter school teachers. conclusion. for-profit mos appear to constrain the charter schools that they manage, limiting the ability of teachers to determine how students are taught within their classrooms. this week is important for the future of new orleans.as our state legislators consider the issues gov. kathleen babineaux blanco has laid before them in the special session, one in particular promises to determine our fate. it looks like the governor finally understands.the governor has asked for the state of louisiana to formally take over most of the new orleans public schools. she should amend her request to let the state take over the entire system. anything less is folly. no part of the orleans parish school system is worth saving.the system has been broken for years. any level of scrutiny reveals inadequacy ranging to criminal neglect of a school system's only purpose to provide a safe and nurturing environment for children to learn how to read and write.the present system has failed on every level. the children have no expectation of achievement or safety. the children have no expectation that anyone from the school board on down gives a damn about them.that can and should change in one fell swoop. hurricane katrina has given us the opportunity to fix past sins. this paper draws on data and experiences observing and analyzing school lotteries from the national evaluation of charter school impacts (gleason et al., 2010) to describe the challenges associated with lottery-based research. in that study, covering 36 charter middle schools in 15 states, we found that charter schools did not affect student achievement or behavior on average, although there was substantial variation across schools. in this paper, we discuss the prevalence of oversubscribed charter schools at the time the study was conducted (the 2005-2006 and 2006-2007 school years), which was lower than commonly reported. we then describe how the sample of schools that participated in the study compared to all other charter middle schools nationwide, to provide some insight into the generalizabilty of findings from lottery-based studies. in general, oversubscribed charter schools were more likely to be located in urban areas and serve a higher-achieving population of students than those without excess demand. we also describe common features of school lotteries and waitlists, and examine implications of these features for a school's ability to support a lottery-based study. finally, we summarize lessons learned for conducting lottery-based research on charter schools, drawing on our observations of the schools' lotteries and analysis of the data from these lotteries. (c) 2011 elsevier ltd. all rights reserved. purpose this study aims to use the original data collected from school board members representing nonprofit charter schools in the state of minnesota to examine the relationship between the distribution of board-executive governance responsibilities and the performance of organizations operating as part of a new public management style macro-governance reform. design/methodology/approach a combination of survey data collected from minnesota charter school board members and hard performance data were utilized in two ols regression models to predict the link between organizational governance and school performance. findings the authors find that boards can improve hard measures of organizational performance by shifting responsibility of day-to-day operations closer to the executive, and public advocacy duties closer to the board. the results build on the existing literatures on school board governance and board-executive relations. overall, the findings suggest the existence of an ideal balance between board-executive governance responsibilities in key functional areas on charter school boards. originality/value though a healthy literature exists regarding the value of charter schools, very few studies have actually explored the way in which these organizations are governed. this study is the first to link charter board governance responsibilities to performance. school choice researchers are often limited to comparing one type of choice with another (e.g., charter schools vs. traditional public schools). one area researchers have not examined is the effects of different school types within the same urban region. we fill this gap by analyzing longitudinal data for students (grades 3-8) in indianapolis, using student fixed effects models to estimate the impacts of students switching from a traditional public school to a charter, magnet, catholic, or other private school. we find that students experience no differences in their achievement gains after transferring from a traditional public school to a charter school. however, students switching to magnet schools experience modest annual losses of -0.09 standard deviation (sd) in mathematics and -0.11 sd in english language arts. students switching to catholic schools also experience annual losses of -0.18 sd in mathematics. these findings are robust to a series of alternative model specifications. additionally, we find some variability in the mean school type impacts by students' race/ethnicity, english language learner status, and number of years enrolled in a choice school. we discuss our results in the context of the variability of choice school effects across an entire urban area, something future research needs to examine. charter schools emerged in the 1990s as an alternative to the u.s. public schools with the hope that charter schools would not be exposed to the same problems of the traditional public schools that are due to high levels of bureaucracy, less autonomy and no competition for students, hence for financial resources. this came about following the success of "magnet schools" that emerged as a product of the previous generation in the 1970s. likewise, charter school movement had bipartisan support from many levels and today, although still only about 1 percent of students is enrolled in charter schools they emerged as a successful model to traditional public schools and even to the private schools in many areas. u.s. has the most diverse group of students in its history and all the basic trends indicate the diversity will become even greater. among the school age population after only one generation the entire country will become a minority non-white or non-european in origin. diversity is growing rapidly in the nation's suburban rings, which have become the center of american life and politics. yet schools remain largely segregated and are becoming more so although americans still believe that their children benefit from integrated education and there is substantial evidence that those beliefs are correct. segregated schools are still highly unequal. segregation by race related to segregation by poverty and to many forms of educational inequality for african american and latino students; few whites experience impoverished schools. efforts to overcome the effects of segregation through special programs have had some success, but there is no evidence that they have equalized systems of segregated schools. segregated schools particularly those in big cities have stunningly high levels of high school dropouts and very poor records of preparing students for higher education. segregation has not been a successful educational or social policy. yet u.s. school system is experiencing a continuing expansion of segregation for both blacks and latinos and serious backward movement in the south. specifically in this study, effect of charter school movement on the issue of ethnic, racial, religious, socio-economic segregation has been analyzed and it has been concluded that in fact there is a relation between the segregation issue and the charter school movement and that this relationship is mostly a negative one unlike magnet schools, which substantially improved the segregation problem in the 1970s; however it was not clear whether it is the charter school movement that is the cause or it is the other way around. in this paper, survey data collected from nonprofit charter school board and elected public school board members in minnesota is used to test three hypotheses relating to theories of new public management, democratic governance, and small group dynamics. we find that nonprofit charter school board members perceive lower levels of conflict, place less priority on the general public, and perceive a higher degree of governance responsibly in the area of financial management, than elected board members. we conclude that the increased use of nonprofit charter schools has potentially substantial implications on accountability and effectiveness in the delivery of public education. school districts increasingly push school leaders to utilize multiple measures of teacher effectiveness, such as observation ratings or value-added scores, in making talent management decisions, including teacher hiring, assignment, support, and retention, but we know little about the local conditions that promote or impede these processes. we investigate the barriers to principals' use of teacher effectiveness measures in eight urban districts and charter management organizations that are investing in new systems for collecting such measures and making them available to school leaders and the supports central offices are building to help principals overcome those barriers. interviews with more than 175 central and school leaders identify barriers in three main areas related to accessing measures, analyzing them, and taking action based on their analysis. supports fall into four categories: professional development, connecting principals to sources of expertise, creating new structures or tools, and building a data use culture. survey analysis suggests that indeed principals in high support systems perceive lower barriers to data use and report greater incorporation of teacher effectiveness measures into their talent management decisions. after-school community-based spaces are often recognized in political and educational discourse as institutions that "save'' and "rescue'' black youth. such rhetoric perpetuates an ethos of pathology that diminishes the agency of youth and their communities. through ethnographic research with 20 youth workers at a college completion and youth development after-school program in the urban northeast, findings indicate that tensions arise as youth workers strive to reimagine black youth in humanizing ways despite pressures to frame them as broken and in need of fixing to compete for funding with charter schools. data also reveal deep tensions in youth workers' experiences as they critique neoliberal reforms that shape their work; yet, at the same time, they are forced to hold students to markers of success defined by neoliberal ideals. these tensions result in youth workers downplaying the social, cultural, and emotional dimensions of their work. scholars who document neoliberal trends in education argue that privatization and corporatization in schools is dehumanizing and discourages democratic participation. these scholars assert that neoliberal education policies heighten social inequity by emphasizing individualism, marketability and colorblindness without interrogating social structures of power. can qualitative documentation of the effects of neoliberal policy in education talk back to these trends? can ethnographically mapping the complex effects of neoliberal trends on teaching and learning serve to heighten teachers' sense of agency and resistance? this paper documents the ways that teachers construct their identities in reaction to reading the author's critical ethnography of their school. data were gathered for this paper in teacher interviews following two years of collaborative ethnographic fieldwork at the college preparatory academy, a small public high school in brooklyn, new york that created its own in-house nonprofit organization in order to solicit funds from private donors. using derrick bell's interest convergence theory, i critique competitive models of philanthropy in education and explore whether collaborative and critically engaged ethnography can serve to expose the tension between public and private interests in education, and can encourage teachers to challenge and critique these borders. objective. most public organizations use both materialistic and idealistic appeals to attract valued employees, with the latter being particularly important for difficult jobs. teaching in high poverty communities is one such job, though none have studied whether successful high poverty schools such as the knowledge is power program (kipp) schools make relatively greater use of public service appeals in teacher recruitment. in education, we identify these materialistic and idealistic appeals as teacher-centered and student-centered incentives. teacher-centered incentives are those that appeal to a teacher’s desire for higher compensation or advancement opportunities, whereas student-centered appeals attempt to attract teachers with a public service mission. method. we compare the use of teacher-centered and student-centered appeals in teacher recruitment by the universe of kipp networks (n = 33) and neighboring traditional public school districts (n = 34), each serving disadvantaged populations. coders record personnel website use of four teacher-centered appeals (including salary and benefits) and four student-centered appeals. results. chi-square tests show that kipp schools make less use of teacher-centered appeals, especially monetary compensation, and more use of student-centered appeals in teacher recruitment. conclusion. supplemented by fieldwork, findings suggest that appeals to mission may work better than merit pay in recruiting effective teachers for high poverty schools. knowledge is power program delta college preparatory school (kipp dcps), an open-enrollment charter school,(1) opened in 2002 in helena, arkansas. kipp dcps students have consistently outperformed their peers from neighboring districts on year-end student achievement scores, and kipp's national reputation led arkansas lawmakers to exempt kipp from the state's charter school cap. yet, skeptics of kipp in particular, and charter schools in general, voiced a concern that the apparent kipp advantage in student achievement may have been due to the prior academic ability of the students who selected into kipp rather than to the kipp school itself. furthermore, some kipp critics have argued that student attrition at kipp schools accounts for the apparent kipp advantage. until now, no prior study has rigorously compared performance of kipp students with traditional public school peers on matched observable academic and demographic variables or carefully considered student attrition rates at kipp dcps. here, we begin by summarizing prior evaluations of kipp schools nationally. next, we carefully examine student attrition from 2005 through 2011, and we find that kipp dcps attrition resembles that found in nearby traditional public schools. finally, using regression models that control demographic and prior academic indicators, we find that kipp dcps students gain significantly more each year on standardized assessments than do their matched peers. these results are important as nearly all prior empirical work on kipp schools has been conducted in urban settings. despite the fact that many rural students struggle academically or attend struggling schools, we know relatively little about the potential benefits of no excuses charter schools in rural areas, such as kipp dcps. various reform strategies that deregulate schooling grant different degrees of autonomy to individual school sites, lit an effort to understand how these policies affect the teacher's workplace, we studied the experiences of teachers in six deregulated: schools-two state-sponsored charter schools, two in-district charter schools, and two public school-based management schools-all located in boston and serving similar groups of students. based on intensive interviews with teachers and principals supplemented by document analysis and informal observations, we concluded that the most autonomous schools-charter schools-are not necessarily the schools that enterprising teachers favor. all respondents agree that the most important feature of charter schools is their power to recruit and retain like-minded staff who commit themselves to a common mission. working with others who share values and practices leads to considerable satisfaction among teachers. however; teachers in these schools also voiced concern about several important features of their workplace-the scope and definition of their responsibilities, their role in school design and governance, their right to raise complaints and resolve problems, and assurances of job security and predictable pay. we concluded that, of the three policy models, the in-district charters best combined the features that provide school autonomy while meeting the basic concerns of teachers. these findings lead to recommendations for both policy and practice. few school choice evaluations consider students who leave such programs, and fewer still consider the effects of leaving these programs as policy-relevant outcomes. using a representative sample of students from the citywide voucher program in milwaukee, wisconsin, we analyze more than 1,000 students who leave the program during a 4-year period. we show that low-performing voucher students tend to move from the voucher sector into lower performing and less effective public schools than the typical public school student attends, whereas high-performing students transfer to better public schools. in general, transferring students realize substantial achievement gains after moving to the public sector; these results are robust to multiple analytical approaches. this evidence has important implications for school choice policy and research. we use admissions lotteries to estimate effects of attendance at boston's charter high schools on college preparation and enrollment. charter schools increase pass rates on massachusetts' high-stakes exit exam, with large effects on the likelihood of qualifying for a state-sponsored scholarship. charter attendance also boosts sat scores sharply and increases the likelihood of taking an advanced placement (ap) exam, the number of ap exams taken, and ap scores. charters induce a substantial shift from 2to 4-year institutions, though the effect on overall college enrollment is modest. charter effects on college-related outcomes are strongly correlated with charter effects on earlier tests. power in k-12 education is rapidly moving from local school boards and government to extraordinarily wealthy private philanthropists. building networks among nonprofits, government agencies, school districts, and others, private foundations such as the gates, broad, and walton family foundations are fundamentally restructuring american k-12 education. the common core state standards, teacher evaluation, and charter schools are a few of the initiatives these funders are backing. the massive influx of private money into education policy and its influence over public education raises questions around the proper role of philanthropy in a democracy. in a society with increasing wealth inequality, should the economic elite be able to gain further power to shape social institutions through giving? are there or should there be any limits to this power? examining specific trends and events in education philanthropy over the last 10 years, this article identifies key players in philanthropic education reform and argues that philanthropy in education is now playing a policy-making rolewithout checks and balancesthat is qualitatively and quantitatively different than before. i conclude with a cautionary note on the dangers of letting education policy become the domain of the economic elite. this study leverages event history analysis to help explain the expansion of public charter school legislation between 1991-2006. this study expands previous work in two important ways. first, while critical distinctions separate public charter school and school voucher programs, both fall comfortably within the broader rubric of "school choice." as such, it is difficult to understand the development of state legislation for one school choice variant independent of the other. thus, this analysis includes the presence of publiclyor privately-funded voucher programs in a state as a possible factor influencing the adoption of charter school legislation in a state. second, a methodological contribution emerges by comparing results generated by a complementary log-log model with results generated by a rare event logistic regression model. that school voucher programs' influence on the emergence of state charter schools laws is robust across both models underscores school voucher programs' salience to the emergence of charter school legislation. understanding the emergence of charter school legislation as a defensive political move to deflect school voucher progress or a political compromise finds support in these results. either interpretation of the emergence of charter schools' ascendance, however, needs to account for the school voucher programs' influence as well as important suburban political and economic interests. this article presents findings from a lottery-based study of the impacts of a broad set of 33 charter middle schools across 13 states on student achievement. to estimate charter school impacts, we compare test score outcomes of students admitted to these schools through the randomized admissions lotteries with outcomes of applicants who were not admitted. we find that impacts varied considerably across schools and students, with more positive impacts for more disadvantaged schools and students and more negative impacts for the more advantaged. on average across the schools in the study, the impacts of charter middle schools on student achievement were negative but not statistically significant, regardless of whether we examined the impact of the offer of admission or actual attendance at these schools. this article explores the dynamic discursive interactions between two keenly related concepts, globalization and neoliberalism. though largely synonymous in the social imaginary, in fact, these ideas are different and analytically distinct. they need unpacking. the notion that both globalization and neoliberalism are empirically verified social realities must be advanced. what's more as they affect the global-local social relation, varying manifestations such as gentrification, the global emergence of schools of choice (charter schools), and the economic and geographic dislocations of subordinate populations become evident. relying on empirical studies and everyday lived cultural experience in the rebuilding of the city of new orleans post-hurricane katrina, i finally examine the implications for a global latino education and pedagogy. new orleans has become the blueprint for urban education reform in the united states, with federal, state, and local policymakers advocating its development as the nation's first all-charter school district. the destruction of the lower 9th ward following hurricane katrina provided education entrepreneurs and state allies with an 'unprecedented opportunity' to rewrite the geography of new orleans. targeted state disinvestment in black communities prepared the ground for white entrepreneurs to capitalize on public schools and create an urban space economy that serves their accumulative interests through dispossession of working-class communities of color. based on oral history interviews with veteran teachers, administrators, and community members affiliated with martin luther king elementary school in the lower 9th ward, this case study traverses time and space, documenting the community's history of racial resistance and more recent struggles for educational equity. i examine these struggles in the context of neoliberal attempts to undermine the reconstruction of long-standing schools and neighborhoods and instead secure space for privately managed charter schools. notably, efforts to rebuild king elementary in this reformed landscape reveal a distinct commitment to equity, culture, and a shared sense of place the antithesis of the vacuous market-based policies that have guided reform in new orleans. i argue that such commitments have enabled and energized grassroots educational resistance to dispossession despite the power of venture capital and exclusionary master plans. we develop the concept of a policy bubble to capture the notion of long-term overinvestment in a policy. in sketching the relation of policy bubbles to economic bubbles, we describe how these two concepts have similar origins but different trajectories because they are filtered by different institutions. we examine in some detail three likely instances of ongoing policy bubbles: crime policy, school reform (charter schools and private education vouchers), and the contracting and privatization of public services. we show how these cases differ from the housing bubble of 1997-2007, how they differ from each other, and the extent to which they can be considered policy bubbles. last, we suggest this concept can help unify the policy process literature with the practice of policy evaluation and outline testable hypotheses for future research. school choice is expected to place pressure on schools to improve to attract and retain students. however, little research has examined how competition for students actually operates in socially embedded education markets. economic approaches tend to emphasize individual actors' choices and agency, an undersocialized perspective, whereas sociological approaches emphasize social structures such as race, class, and institutions over agency, an oversocialized view. in this study, i examine the interplay between structure and agency in education markets to (a) examine how a school's position in the market hierarchy influences how it is represented and viewed as a rival by network competitors and to (b) explore how a school's position in the network of competitors influences the possible and actual strategic actions that schools adopt in response to market pressures. using case studies from new orleans, i find that school leaders' positions in the socially constructed market hierarchy and in a social network of competitors influence their actions, which further determine their market positions. purpose: the purpose of this study is to examine school leaders' preferences and practices in an environment of widespread decentralization, privatization, and school choice. in new orleans, such reforms have been enacted citywide since hurricane katrina, making it an ideal site to examine what happens when policy makers lift restrictions for school leadersand remove protections for teachersrelated to teacher hiring on a large scale. research methods/approach: in this exploratory study, i analyze qualitative data to examine school leaders' preferences and practices when recruiting teachers in new orleans. the data for the study come from 94 interviews with principals, district leaders, and charter network leaders. findings: school leaders had different conceptions of talent and fit, and used a variety of strategies to recruit teachers. school districts and charter networks both supported and constrained school leaders' autonomy and recruitment practices by screening applicants or setting guidelines and criteria. other intermediary organizations also played a role in shaping the teacher labor market. school choice also posed unique challenges for teacher recruitment. implications: overall, expansive choice policies in new orleans appear to foster flexibility and variation in teacher hiring strategies (although not in salary), as expected in a decentralized system. however, these policies and strategies appear also to have other consequences, including greater instability or churn, unpredictability, and a bifurcated teaching force. the question of how school choice programs affect the racial stratification of schools is highly salient in the field of education policy. we use a student-level panel data set to analyze the impacts of the louisiana scholarship program (lsp) on racial stratification in public and private schools. this targeted school voucher program provides funding for low-income, mostly minority students in the lowest-graded public schools to enroll in participating private schools. our analysis indicates that the vast majority (82%) of lsp transfers have reduced racial stratification in the voucher students' former public schools. lsp transfers have marginally increased stratification in the participating private schools, however, where just 45% of transfers reduce racial stratification. in those school districts under federal desegregation orders, voucher transfers result in a large reduction in traditional public schools' racial stratification levels and have no discernible impact on private schools. the results of this analysis provide reliable empirical evidence on whether or not parental choice harms desegregation efforts in louisiana. the meaning, measurement, and implications of 'public opinion' have long been a source of debate. in this paper, we examine the extent to which the educational priorities of elites in the us reflect the educational priorities of the american public. to do so, we focus on one particular segment of the education policy-making elite education poll creators. through a content analysis of questions asked between 1969 and 2013 in the phi delta kappa/gallup poll of the public's attitudes toward the public schools, we examine the salience of key educational issues over time. we compare these trends to the proportion of poll respondents who label those issues the 'biggest problem' facing schools, thereby approximating two different conceptions of public opinion regarding education. we find that the issues that receive the most coverage by pollsters do not typically match the issues that respondents claim to be the biggest problems in schools. in light of the important role that opinion polls may play in shaping discussion and debate over educational issues, we argue that further study of the construction of public opinion is warranted. purpose the purpose of this paper is to determine the differing ways in which nonprofit charter and traditional public school board members define the concept of accountability in the school or schools they oversee. the findings speak to the governing consequences of shifting oversight of public education from democratically elected bodies to unelected nonprofit governing boards. design/methodology/approach the authors use originally collected survey data from democratically elected school board members and nonprofit charter school board members in minnesota to test for differences in how these two populations view accountability. open-ended survey questions are coded according to a previously used accountability typology. findings the authors find that charter school board members are more likely than traditional public school board members to define accountability through high stakes testing as opposed to staff professionalization and bureaucratic systems. originality/value the results speak to the link between board governance structure and accountability in the public education sector, providing new understanding on the way in which non-elected charter school board members view their accountability function. to have a strong public education system, it is imperative to recruit and maintain high-caliber public school teachers and ensure that school administrators can terminate underperformers. teachers unions have contributed to this effort by increasing professionalism in teaching and giving teachers a role in school management, but they have also detracted from it by making it too difficult to terminate incompetent teachers. nonunionized charter schools that employ teachers at will, on the other hand, may leave teachers vulnerable to arbitrary or malicious terminations. unionized charter schools, a relatively recent phenomenon, produce teacher contracts that, as the result of labor negotiations between two prominent players in education, could provide valuable lessons for reform to the american public education system. this note's analysis of contracts from the unionized charter schools in new york city reveals that they provide teachers with more job protection than employment at will but far less than provided in the public school union contract. traditional public schools and unions should reform their collective bargaining agreements to provide a level of job security similar to that in the unionized charter school contracts. this may create the right balance between allowing principals to terminate incompetent teachers and protecting teachers from arbitrary or malicious terminations. recent reforms in england's education system have been justified on the grounds that other countries have pursued similar approaches to education reform. many such policies that by-pass or otherwise diminish meso-level institutions demonstrate a commitment to the idea of devolving authority to local actors. the current reforms in england and elsewhere reconfigure governance structures to diminish intermediate-level institutions on the grounds that these reforms lead to more effective and equitable educational systems. but in lieu of compelling evidence of such an impact, it appears that such policies are often instead simply a political attack on meso-level authorities, and may in fact represent an opportunity for new policy players to occupy the space left by receding meso-level institutions. this article surveys some of the specific policies that have emerged from recent policy trends, particularly those that have undercut established intermediate-level institutions in the usa and new zealand. reviewing the empirical record from these cases, i argue that, rather than simply devolving power away from intermediate authorities to local actors in order to produce more effective or equitable outcomes, many of these reforms have been more successful instead in creating the conditions in which new, non-state actors are able to accrue policy power for themselves. a defining characteristic of charter schools is that they introduce a strong market element into public education. in this paper, we examine through the lens of a market model the evolution of the charter school sector in north carolina between 1999 and 2012. we examine trends in the mix of students enrolled in charter schools, the racial imbalance of charter schools, patterns in student match quality by schools' racial composition, and the distributions of test score performance gains compared to those in traditional public schools. in addition, we use student fixed effects models to examine plausibly causal measures of charter school effectiveness. our findings indicate that charter schools in north carolina are increasingly serving the interests of relatively able white students in racially imbalanced schools and that despite improvements in the charter school sector over time, charter schools are still no more effective on average than traditional public schools. studies examining the role of philanthropic foundations in advancing social change have primarily focused on the impact of foundations' financial resources. few scholars have analyzed how foundations also leverage social mechanisms to advance and legitimate desired change. we conceptualize philanthropic foundations as agents of change known as institutional entrepreneurs to illuminate the social mechanisms they employ in pursuit of institutional change. we study the case of charter schools within the field of u.s. public education, where foundations elevated a new organizational formthe charter management organizationby engaging in three social mechanisms: recombining cultural elements to establish the form, enforcing evaluative frameworks to assess the form, and sponsoring new professionals to populate the form with preferred expertise. we argue that foundations are distinctive due to their ability to simultaneously pursue social mechanisms that are often considered to be the realms of different types of institutional entrepreneurs. this article brings two black intellectual traditions to bear on the question of charter schools: black marxism and black nationalism. the authors examine the theoretical and rhetorical devices used to talk about charters schools by focusing on how notions of 'black liberation' are deployed by the charter movement, and to what end. the authors first use a black marxism lens to illustrate the character of the racial and economic relationships facilitated by charter schools. next, the authors use historical methods to contextualize the liberation discourse of school choice proponents within a black nationalist history of school reform. the authors conclude that 'choice' rhetoric makes claim to the black freedom struggle without addressing its most enduring commitments to social justice and self-determination, ultimately perpetuating dependency by oppressed people upon their oppressors. the study identifies the limitations of contemporary critical theory to excavate several dimensions of racism in educational policy and highlight the need for scholars to draw on black intellectual traditions to evaluate the theoretical and historical significance of contemporary educational reform. this paper explores the possibilities for critical policy analysis afforded by lacanian discourse theory, with its emphasis on the unconscious and the agency of the letter, and considers its significance for critical policy analysis in education, in ways that complement and supplement the insights of post-structuralist discourse theory. to explore these possibilities, the paper examines the fantasies residing in neoliberal education policy's vision of the knowledge economy, before focusing on a lacanian analysis of the ideologies of knowledge and power manifested in the us kipp (knowledge is power) charter school network, in order to think about how neoliberalism's obsession with knowledge as control and mastery might be unsettled by what lacan called 'the sublimity of stupidity' by engagement with a psychoanalytic epistemology that recognizes how conscious knowledge may be interrupted by the unknowing of the unconscious and that places neoliberal regimes of knowledge in a dialectical relationship with non-knowledge, ignorance, stupidity and desire. in its 2015 opinion in washington league of women voters v. state, the washington state supreme court invalidated initiative 1240 which authorized the creation of charter schools. the court considered two issues on appeal: (1) that the charter schools unconstitutionally diverted common school funds to non-common schools; and (2) that the charter schools violated article ix, section 2 requiring the legislature to establish a "general and uniform system of common schools." the court resolved the case on the common school fund issue and did not reach the "general and uniform" challenge. in its slip opinion, the court had included a footnote explaining that the charter schools under initiative 1240 also violated the uniformity of the common school system. after denying the state's petition for reconsideration, the court issued an amended opinion omitting the footnote. thus, the import of the article ix uniformity mandate on charter schools remains unsettled. in response to the court's opinion in league of women voters invalidating initiative 1240, the washington state legislature passed the charter public school act (the cpsa). the cpsa establishes a system of charter schools outside the common school system. because the washington state supreme court has not yet considered a challenge to charter schools under the article ix "general and uniform mandate," it is unclear whether charter schools which are relatively free from regulation and focused on providing alternative and varied learning experiences can fit within a general and uniform system of public schools. this comment argues that the uniformity requirement in article ix, section 2 of the washington state constitution requires the legislature to establish a uniform system of laws by which the public schools are administered. although cases interpreting the article ix uniformity mandate emphasize the substantive uniformity of the schools themselves, the text of the constitution, the structure of the public school system, and interpretations advanced in other contexts support a procedure-based interpretation. because a procedurally uniform system does not necessarily require identical schools, this comment argues that the charter school system established under the cpsa fits within the general and uniform system of public schools. background/context: parent trigger policies have become a popular option in the education reform toolbox, giving parents the potential ability to induce substantial structural changes at their local public school. this reform approach emerged in california during the great recession, and has since proliferated to a number of states, spurred on by policy advocates, philanthropic funders, and associated reform organizations. these state-level policies allow a majority of parents at low-performing schools to petition to force school transformation through conversion to charter school status, replacement of school leadership and/or staff, or other corrective actions expected to improve outcomes at the school. purpose: this analysis considers the emergence, evidentiary basis, and potential of parent trigger policies. in particular, we focus on the policy, political and social circumstances in which parent trigger legislation emerged in california, the efficacy of the school improvement levers on which it draws, and the underlying assumptions about democratic engagement that inform the approach. research design: this policy analysis draws on multiple forms of evidence to examine the efficacy of the parent trigger approach for school improvement and community engagement. the initial examination of the emergence of parent trigger considers public policy positions, media statements, and press accounts to trace the nuances of this policy landscape. then, in lieu of useful research evidence on parent trigger itself, we turn to the research literature on the remedies that parent trigger tends to adopt, including studies in school choice, charter schools, and various school improvement strategies, as well as the implications for parental empowerment. findings: reviews of extant evidence on policy remedies implicit and explicit in parent trigger indicate that, although parent trigger may have emerged from a deep-seated desire to improve educational opportunities for disadvantaged children, it is unlikely to actually improve the educational quality of schools, given that the overall effects of these policy interventions are mixed, at best, and parent trigger adds another element of instability to already unstable school communities in disadvantaged areas. conclusions/recommendations: our analysis suggests that parent trigger tends to assume an aggregative model of democratic action drawn from a market-style economic premise. unless policy makers promote a more deliberative model of community engagement, empowerment, and school governance, it is likely that parent trigger could contribute to continual corruption of democratic institutions and avenues for school governance. this article explores the potential impact of increased school choice, specifically of proposed charter (partnership) schools, on educational inequality in new zealand. an initial review of the educational marketplace literature proves inconclusive as to whether privatised schooling is capable of reducing disparity in academic outcomes and broader social contexts, and even suggests it might further increase segregation. subsequently, the article presents a case study of educational inequality in chile (1990-2010) to set up a comparison of an education system that has become increasingly market based and unequal. the 20-year time frame was selected to cover the shift to decentralised education under pinochet until the large-scale breakout of student protests against systemic inequality, known as the chilean winter'. in conclusion, the article suggests that a successful strategy to counter educational disparity needs to create viable alternatives to a free-market approach and, as such, it appears that there are important lessons that new zealand can learn from the chilean winter lessons that go beyond the implementation of charter schools to fundamental social structures. this article develops a framework for investigating research use, using an "advocacy coalition framework" and the concepts of a "supply side" (mainly organizations) and "demand side" (policymakers). drawing on interview data and documents from new orleans about the charter school reforms that have developed there since 2005, the authors examine (a) the role of intermediaries in producing information and research syntheses for local, state, and/or federal policymakers; (b) the extent of policymakers' demand for such research and information; and (c) the extent to which local and national coalitions of organizations appear to be influential in research use. the article concludes that there are two coalitions in new orleans that differ in their interpretations of charter school performance, equity, and access; that there is overall very low research capacity within the intermediary sector; and that there is little evidence of demand from state policymakers for research findings. there was agreement across both coalitions that there is a lack of a credible and non-partisan research group studying the reforms, that is, one that produces data analyses that are not merely descriptive. the authors map preliminary findings about how intermediary organizations are connected to national groups, as well as how research is shared within coalitions. neoliberalism is routinely criticized for its moral indifference, especially concerning the social application of moral objectives. yet it also presupposes a particular moral code, where acting on the assumption of individual autonomy becomes the basis of a shared moral-political praxis. using a discourse theoretical approach, this article explores different articulations of morality in neoliberal discourse. we focus on the case of campbell brown, the former cnn anchor who reinvented herself from 2012 to 2016 as a prominent charter school advocate and antagonist of teachers unions. we examine the ideological significance of a campaigning strategy that coheres around an image of the moral superiority of corporatized schooling against an antithetical representation of the moral degeneracy of america's public schools system. in particular, we highlight how brown attempts to incorporate the fragments of different progressive discourses into a neoliberalized vision of educational justice. the black kitchen table has long served as a meeting place for black families to discuss, debate, and critique issues related to the black struggle. in particular, it was common for black kitchen table conversations to talk about the nuances of navigating systems of legalized segregation and oppression, as well and more recently navigating the landscape of contemporary education reform. however since the creation of social media, the traditionally private kitchen table conversations, have become an open-source for all to read. black families have persistently lived a process of rewriting the prewritten narrative of their own lives and the lives of their children. moreover, black parents who now find themselves fighting for their children's educational opportunity in a land of market reform, now have to navigate the binary of competing black ideologies on charter schools in plain view of outsiders. in this short manuscript, i discuss the two prevailing perspectives of education reform in the black community, the contemporary and historical roots of free-market, neoliberal, education reform, and conclude with arguing for the need to have a more defined and exclusive place for our kitchen table conversations. the american experiment with charter schools advanced on dual impulses of increasing opportunities for disadvantaged students and unleashing market competition. while critics see these independently managed schools as a form of privatisation, proponents contend that they are public schools because of funding and accountability arrangements and potential benefits, and believe that the economic logic around these schools will produce equitable educational opportunities. this analysis considers how charters are or are not instances of privatisation in education, showing that the marketised environment they are intended to nurture serves as a route for profit-seeking strategies. in reviewing the research on charter school organisational behaviour and outcomes in marketised environments, i find evidence of de facto privatisation in function if not in form. as charter schools often act like profit-seeking entities, but fail to achieve expected academic and equity outcomes, the concluding discussion considers how these schools are placed between conflicting goals, and serve as entry points for private organisations seeking to penetrate the publicly funded education sector. i conclude that perhaps their most important role is in serving as a vehicle for privatising public policydiminishing the public while enhancing the position and influence of private interests and organisations in education policymaking. we examine illinois educational data from standardized exams and analyze primary factors affecting the achievement of public school students. we focus on the simplest possible models: representation of data through visualizations and regressions on single variables. exam scores are shown to depend on school type, location, and poverty concentration. for most schools in illinois, student test scores decline linearly with poverty concentration. however, chicago must be treated separately. selective schools in chicago, as well as some traditional and charter schools, deviate from this pattern based on poverty. for any poverty level, chicago schools perform better than those in the rest of illinois. selective programs for gifted students show high performance at each grade level, most notably at the high school level, when compared to other illinois school types. the case of chicago charter schools is more complex. up to 2008, chicago charter and neighborhood schools had similar performance scores. in the last few years, charter students' scores overtook those of students in traditional schools as the number of charter school locations increased. for the past, let's say 100 years, the expectation for educational achievement for children coming through the local public school system has been slight. if you doubt my opinion, please tell me why the school buildings look so bad and the system won't even provide enough textbooks to teach fundamental science and math. as you read the editorial opinion offered this week in citybusiness, it's easy to see we think the evidence is overwhelming. we've asked anyone on the school board who has failed to back anthony amato as superintendent to step down. the business community, including mayor c. ray nagin, gov. kathleen babineaux blanco, the state legislature and the board of elementary and secondary education all smell a rat. tony amato, superintendent in orleans, and diane rousseau, jefferson superintendent, have difficult jobs. the school systems they manage are large, poor, neglected and under appreciated. their students are too often also poor, neglected and under appreciated. the jefferson parish figures include $4.2 million in tuition opportunity program for students or tops awards. the tops program is a state-funded tuition abatement program that has been praised and copied by several states and, as you can see, it accounts for about one-third of the scholarships earned by local students. the jefferson public schools should delight in telling us all about the $6.1 million earned in academic scholarships, $1.4 million for athletics, $520,000 in military and $296,000 in rotc. i'm sure jefferson students wind up in prestigious schools all across the nation, too. the knowledge is power program (kipp) is an influential and rapidly growing nationwide network of charter schools serving primarily disadvantaged minority students. prominent elements of kipp's educational model include high expectations for student achievement and behavior, and a substantial increase in time in school. kipp is being watched closely by policy makers and educators as a possible model for urban education, but existing studies of kipp's effects on students have been subject to methodological limitations, making them less than conclusive. we measure the achievement impacts of forty-one kipp middle schools across the country, using propensity-score matching to identify traditional public school students with similar characteristics and prior-achievement histories as students who enter kipp. we find consistently positive and statistically significant impacts of kipp on student achievement, with larger impacts in math than reading. these impacts persist over four years following admission, and are not driven by attrition of low performers from kipp schools. (c) 2014 association for education finance and policy scholars who document neoliberal trends in education argue that privatization and corporatization in schools is dehumanizing and discourages democratic participation. these scholars assert that neoliberal education policies heighten social inequity by emphasizing individualism, marketability and colorblindness without interrogating social structures of power. can qualitative documentation of the effects of neoliberal policy in education “talk back” to these trends? can ethnographically mapping the complex effects of neoliberal trends on teaching and learning serve to heighten teachers' sense of agency and resistance? this paper documents the ways that teachers construct their identities in reaction to reading the author's critical ethnography of their school. data were gathered for this paper in teacher interviews following two years of collaborative ethnographic fieldwork at the college preparatory academy, a small public high school in brooklyn, new york that created its own in-house nonprofit organization in order to solicit funds from private donors. using derrick bell's interest convergence theory, i critique competitive models of philanthropy in education and explore whether collaborative and critically engaged ethnography can serve to expose the tension between public and private interests in education, and can encourage teachers to challenge and critique these borders. this article discusses findings from a three-year ethnographic study of an ethnic studies course called native american literature, which began during the passing of legislation that banned the teaching of ethnic studies in arizona's public and charter schools. the data analyzed here explore the ways students use silence as a form of critical literacy-or critical silent literacies-in response to racial microaggressions enacted by their peers, their teachers, or a combination of both. this framing of silence questions common assumptions that native american students are silent because of their biological, inherent, and/or cultural "traits." challenging such assumptions, native american students in this study reveal that as they attempt to voice their ideas, they are repeatedly silenced because their knowledges counter the dominant settler knowledges taught in public schools. as a result, they discuss how their silence has been used over time as a resistance strategy to shield themselves, their identities, and their family and community knowledges from dominant, monocultural knowledges with which they did not agree. background: scholars widely acknowledge that politics help explain why policies are adopted and how they play out in states, districts, and schools. to date, political analyses of education reform tend to isolate a particular policy and examine the politics of its adoption or implementation, but pay less attention to the effects of the politics of surrounding reforms and broader issues. purpose: in this article, i use the instrumental case of the los angeles public school choice initiative (psci) to demonstrate the ways in which the political dynamics of other policy issues in the same local environment greatly affect the form and fate of a reform. the article examines what led to the adoption of psci and what explains its implementation and adaptation over time. research design: the study employed an embedded case study design and gathered 3 years of data from leader interviews, observations, interviews, and focus groups in nine case study schools, media articles, and documents. i drew on an ecological-political framework to analyze these data and to understand the evolution of psci. findings: i find that psci provided a vehicle to advance the goals of six education reform "subgames"-decentralization, charter expansion, accountability, union reform, academic rigor, and community empowerment-as well as goals of two broader local "games" of electoral politics and bridging, and that each was consequential to at least one or more phase of psci. at times in its evolution, players seeking success in one area of reform aligned with, used, or were used by players seeking success in other areas of reform. it is the interactions of these players in relation to the environment and to others working to advance complementary and conflicting reform issues and goals that explains how a reform touted to improve accountability and learning for low-performing schools and to empower the community became a broader referendum on school governance and reform writ large. conclusions: consistent with recent scholarship, this research demonstrates that an increasingly broad set of actors are engaging in decisions around public schooling and changing the nature of educational governance. the study also illustrates the value of examining local policy with an ecological-political lens and poses several hypotheses that could be explored in future studies. finally, it suggests that prior to adoption, policymakers consider the extent to which a new policy advances or competes with the goals of surrounding reforms and investigate ways to bolster bridging games. background/context: memphis has, in many ways, become "ground zero" for neoliberal-or corporate-reform efforts, including a statewide turnaround school district, proliferation of charter schools, and value-added teacher evaluation measures. along with these reforms come models of schooling that undermine the concept of the "community school," leading to different conceptions of schools, teachers, and students. in this reform context, it is challenging to implement culturally relevant pedagogy (crp) in a way that is true to its three pillars: academic achievement, cultural competence, and sociopolitical consciousness. the challenges that those who desire to implement crp face can be categorized as either conceptual-representing a lack of understanding of crp's conceptual underpinnings-or systemic-representing institutional barriers that impede the integration of crp. purpose/objective: the purpose of this analytic essay is to outline particular challenges to crp in a hyper-reform context and to propose a framework describing changes that must take place in the process of implementing crp. setting: the authors use memphis as a model of hyper-reform and the backdrop for discussions of how crp can be implemented in such a setting. research design: this paper is an analytic essay. conclusions/recommendations: we propose that effectively implementing crp in a reform context is a process that requires a shift from a methodology of individualism to a methodology of collectivism. we align corporate reform with an individualist approach, while crp, we argue, takes a more collectivist stance. the shift from individualism to collectivism also signals a shift in our conceptions of students, from trainees to successful citizens; teachers, from engineers to artists and activists; and schools, from corporations to community. a quick tour of the school reveals nothing out of the ordinary: classrooms, desks, cafeteria tables, bulletin boards, posters with announcements, etc. but a closer look exposes several clues to the influence of local and national trends in educational reform. first, it is a charter school, a fact attested to by the student uniforms(3/4) plaid skirts and button-down shirts for girls, and khaki pants with shirt and tie for boys. also, an observer would notice that each teacher's door is decorated with the name and paraphernalia of her or his college alma mater. the local public university is heavily represented on these doors, along with a small number of other local or regional universities. however, sprinkled throughout the school are decorations reflecting the universities of the teach for america corps members who are part of the school's faculty: syracuse, valparaiso, florida, washington university, etc. in addition, a quick look inside each classroom reveals "data walls," places to track student achievement over the course of the semester and school year. similarly, an announcement on the television screen in the cafeteria announces the school's distinction as a "reward school," meaning that the school's gains on the standardized achievement tests were among the highest in the state. in the same cafeteria is a bulletin board featuring examples of " nonverbal classroom cues," "snapping," and "tracking with your eyes." the title of the bulletin board is, "what's the word on culture?" background: the charter school movement relies on teachers as critical components. teacher commitment is an important aspect of teachers' lives, because it is an internal force for teachers to grow as professionals. it is also considered one of the crucial factors in influencing various educational outcomes, including teacher effectiveness, teacher retention, and student learning. however, no empirical studies have examined teacher commitment in charter schools. purpose: to address this knowledge gap, this study compares organizational and professional commitment of teachers in charter schools and traditional public schools (tpss) and explores how these differences are associated with teachers' characteristics, school contextual factors, and working conditions in the two types of schools. research design: this study utilizes quantitative analyses of national data from the 2007-2008 school and staffing survey. hierarchical linear models were developed to examine whether teacher commitment differs between charter schools and tpss; how teacher characteristics, school contextual factors, and teachers' perceptions of working conditions contribute to the difference; and finally, whether these variables differentially influence teacher commitment in charter schools and tpss. conclusions: on average, teachers in charter schools experienced lower levels of organizational commitment than teachers in tpss, but similar levels of professional commitment. teacher working conditions explained a large amount of the variance in between-school teacher commitment, suggesting that improving principal leadership, increasing opportunities for professional development, and alleviating teachers' workload would be effective ways to promote teacher commitment in charter schools. purpose: knowledge about principals' leadership roles in charter schools' success has become more important as the number of charter schools increases and as we have learned more about the influence of principal leadership on school effectiveness. to contribute to the limited empirical literature on the principal labor market, this study explores the reasons for the disparity of turnover rates between charter school principals and their counterparts in traditional public schools (tpss). it focuses on the differential distributions of observable factors, including principal characteristics, principal leadership practices, school contexts, and working conditions. it also examines how the associations between these observables and the likelihood of principal turnover differ between these two types of schools. research methods/approach: this study uses data on a nationally representative sample of principals from the schools and staffing survey in the 2007-2008 school year and its following-year principal follow-up survey. the main analytic strategies include logit models and the fairlie nonlinear decomposition technique. findings: a statistically significant difference in charter-tps principal turnover rates was confirmed. the explanatory variables collectively explained about 49% of the charter-tps turnover gap: principal characteristics explained 3%, principal leadership quality explained 4%, school contexts explained 2%, and working conditions explained 28%. moreover, relative to tps peers, three factors have stronger associations with the likelihood of charter school principal turnover: principal leadership quality, barriers to the dismissal of poor-performing or incompetent teachers, and salary. implications for research and practice: this is one of first few studies that empirically explore the charter school principal workforce and labor market movements. findings are practically informative for retaining principals in charter schools. background with the expansion of charter school networks, population losses in urban district schools and stretched budgets have encouraged struggling districts to adopt closure-as-reform. school closings have received considerable attention in the media as a controversial reform, reconfiguring the educational landscapes of over 70 post-industrial cities like chicago, detroit, and new orleans. however, in the last decade, few scholars have considered the project of examining closures—their process and their effects—empirically. purpose in this article, we examine the rollout of 30 school closures in philadelphia in 2012 and 2013 to explain how school closures have become yet another policy technology of black community and school devaluation in the united states. moving beyond educational studies that have focused on the outcomes of mass school closures like student achievement and cost savings, we argue that a thorough theorization of how race, violence, and community values relate to school closure as process could help to explain the ways in which contemporary educational policy reforms are creating new modes of communal disposability in cities’ poorest zip codes. setting/participants data collection occurred in two comprehensive high schools in philadelphia slated for closure in 2012 and 2013: johnson high and franklin high. participants at both schools included students, teachers, parents, community members, and district officials. research design the authors spent several years in their respective schools recording observations of instructional practice, community meetings, and district events and interviewing key informants such as students, teachers, administrators, and district officials. the first author spent three years at johnson high school, from september 2011 to june 2013. the second author spent five years at franklin high school, from september 2008 to june 2013. she also spent hundreds of hours at the high school examining archival materials and interviewing students, teachers, and alumni about their experiences in the school and community. in addition to their individual case studies, the authors jointly transcribed and coded over two dozen community and district meetings’ video recordings during the 2012 and 2013 closures. in the aftermath of the school closures process, we used a comparative ethnographic method to compare and contrast the events that occurred at these two schools. findings suturing anthropologies of violence and education to frame the analysis, we explore moments of collision between policy discourses deployed by state and local officials that crafted closures as inevitable and threatened school communities’ articulations of the racialized implications of the closures. we further localize our analysis to demonstrate how two school communities—one majority asian and another majority black—with similar performances and characteristics met dramatically different fates. given the lack of transparency in how decisions were made around which schools to close, the ways in which these communities read and responded to the closure threat offer a window into the ways in which race informed the valuation process across schools. conclusions/recommendations we conclude with a plea to state and federal policymakers to consider the long-term ramifications of school choice expansion and state disinvestment for the health and stability of traditional public schools. we encourage policymakers to move in a more reparative direction, prioritizing the needs of those “unchosen” by choice and imagining a system that might serve all students more equitably. public charter schools (pcs) are thought to succeed because they have greater autonomy and are held more accountable than traditional public schools (tps). though teachers are central to this expectation, there is little evidence about whether teachers in pcs enjoy more autonomy and are held more accountable than teachers in tps. also, it is unclear what the franchising of the pcs sectorthe growth of schools run by educational management organizations (emos)means for teacher autonomy and accountability. using nationally representative survey data, this article compares teachers' perceptions of autonomy and accountability in pcs and tps and in emo-run and non-emo-run pcs. it shows that teachers in pcs reported greater autonomy than teachers in tps; similarly, teachers in non-emo-run schools indicated greater autonomy than teachers in emo-run schools. however, there were no differences in perceptions of accountability across these different school types. this article explores the discourse practices of an indigenous, community-based charter school and its efforts to create space for indigenous both/and identities across rural-urban divides. the ethnographic portrait of urban native middle school (unms) analyzes the discourse of making a space for you', which brings together rural and urban youth to braid binary constructs such as indigenous and western knowledge, into a discourse of indigenous persistence constraining contexts of schooling. we use the concept of reterritorialization' to discuss the significance of unms's community effort to create a transformative space and place of educational opportunity with youth. the local efforts of this small community to reterritorialize schooling were ultimately weakened under the one-size-fits-all accountability metrics of no child left behind policy. this ethnographic analysis talks back' to static definitions of identity, space and learning outcomes which fail to recognize the dynamic and diverse interests of indigenous communities across rural urban landscapes. a relatively small state, utah presents an interesting case to study charter schools given its friendly policy environment and its significant growth in charter school enrollment. based on longitudinal student-level data from 2004 to 2009, this paper utilizes two approaches to evaluate the utah charter school effectiveness: (a) hierarchical linear growth models with matched sample, and (b) general methods of moments with student-fixed effects regressions. both methods yield consistent results that charter schools on average perform slightly worse as compared to traditional public schools, a result that is primarily affected by the low effectiveness and high student mobility of newly opened charter schools. interestingly, when charter schools gain more experience they become as effective as traditional public schools, and in some cases more effective than traditional public schools. this research has implications for local and state charter school policies, particularly policies that avoid "start-up" costs associated with new charter schools. (c) 2012 elsevier ltd. all rights reserved. we examine the characteristics of schools preferred by parents in new orleans, louisiana, where a "portfolio" of school choices is available. this tests the conditions under which school choice induces healthy competition between public and private schools through the threat of student exit. using unique data from parent applications to as many as eight different schools (including traditional public, charter, and private schools), we find that many parents include a mix of public and private schools among their preferences, often ranking public schools alongside or even above private schools on a unified application. parents who list both public and private schools show a preference for the private sector, all else equal, and are willing to accept lower school performance scores for private schools than otherwise equivalent public options. these parents reveal a stronger preference for academic outcomes than other parents and place less value on other school characteristics such as sports, arts, or extended hours. public schools are more likely to be ranked with private schools and to be ranked higher as their academic performance scores increase. in this essay, the authors explore trends in intergovernmental relations (igr) by analyzing recent education policies-no child left behind act, common core state standards, and local empowerment policies. identifying a resurgent role for local actors in education policy, the authors argue that recent federal efforts to exert more control have in many ways strengthened the influence of local actors by providing avenues for school districts and other local "non-system" players to challenge traditional governance arrangements. in a similar vein, because the federal government's ability to achieve its goals rests primarily on actions of local players, federal policies have in the course of implementation strengthened the hand of many local actors. based on their analyses, the authors stress that igr is not a zero-sum game. as one level gains power in certain domains, other levels may simultaneously acquire power in the same or different domains. the authors further argue that relations among federal, state, and local governments are bidirectional. federal policy often requires states and districts to alter local policies, and conversely, decisions made by states and districts can also influence federal decisions. the authors begin the essay with an overview of the intergovernmental landscape, followed by an analysis of current education policies to illustrate the ways in which local actors have retained and asserted significant control over schooling, despite the expanded federal role in education policy. the essay concludes with questions for future research and practice. the louisiana scholarship program (lsp) offers publicly funded vouchers to moderateand low-income students in low-performing public schools to enroll in participating private schools. established in 2008 as a pilot program in new orleans, the lsp expanded statewide in 2012. drawing upon the random lotteries that placed students in lsp schools, we estimate the causal impact of using an lsp voucher to enroll in a private school on student achievement on the state accountability assessments in math, english language arts, and science over a four-year period, as well as on the likelihood of enrolling in college. the results from our primary analytic sample indicate substantial negative achievement impacts, especially in math, that diminish after the first year but persist after four years. in contrast, when considering the likelihood of students entering college, we observe no statistically significant difference between scholarship users and their control counterparts. one of the primary aims of choice policies is to introduce competition between schools. when parents can choose where to send their children, there is pressure on schools to improve to attract and retain students. however, do school leaders recognize market pressures? what strategies do they use in response? this study examines how choice creates school-level actions using qualitative data from 30 schools in new orleans. findings suggest that school leaders did experience market pressures, yet their responses to such pressures varied, depending in part on their perceptions of competition and their status in the market hierarchy. some took steps toward school improvement, by making academic and operational changes, whereas others engaged in marketing or cream skimming. school choice policies are often based on the idea that competition will generate better outcomes for all students. yet there is limited empirical research about how school leaders actually perceive competition and whom they view as rivals. drawing on concepts from economic sociology, i study principals' competitive networks and the sets of schools they view as rivals, and i use network and statistical analysis to explore factors that explain the existence of a competitive tie between two schools. most school leaders perceived some competition, but the extent to which they competed with other schools varied significantly. factors that predicted a competitive relationship between two schools included geography, student transfers, school performance, principal characteristics, and charter network. over the past two decades, most states have adopted laws enabling charter schools, as charter advocates successfully presented charters as the solution to core problems in urban public education. yet some states with large urban centers, notably washington and kentucky, resisted this seemingly inexorable trend for years. what explains their resistance? furthermore, why did washington-a state with a strong teachers' union and long-standing democratic political control (resources for charter resistance identified in prior research)-ultimately adopt charters in 2012 while kentucky has not? i use comparative-historical narrative analysis to trace differences in charter battles in the urban centers of the two states. i find that supporters framed charters as the solution in both cases but varied in their ability to name public schools as the problem in the first place. i identify the source of the discursive resources used by opponents of charter schools in state-level "educational ecosystems'': the cultural and institutional legacies of a range of state educational policies. skeptics of the kipp (knowledge is power program) charter school network argue that these schools rely on selective admission, attrition, and replacement of students to produce positive achievement results. we investigate this using data covering 19 kipp middle schools. on average, kipp schools admit students disadvantaged in ways similar to other local students, and attrition patterns are typically no different at kipp than at nearby schools. unlike district schools, however, kipp schools tend to replace students who exit with higher achieving students, and fewer students are replaced in the later years of middle school. overall, kipp's positive achievement impacts do not appear to be explained by advantages in the prior achievement of kipp students, even when attrition and replacement patterns are taken into account. the closure of low-performing schools is an essential feature of the charter school model. our regression discontinuity analysis uses an exogenous source of variation in school closure an ohio law that requires charter schools to close if they fail to meet a specific performance standard to estimate the causal effect of closure on student achievement. the results indicate that closing low-performing charter schools eventually yields achievement gains of around 0.2-0.3 standard deviations in reading and math for students attending these schools at the time they were identified for closure. the study also employs mandatory closure as an instrument for estimating the impact of exiting low-quality charter schools, thus providing plausible lower-bound estimates of charter school effectiveness. these results complement the more common lottery-based estimates of charter school effects, which likely serve as upper-bound estimates due to their focus on oversubscribed schools often located in cities with high-performing charter sectors. we discuss the implications for research and policy. (c) 2016 elsevier inc. all rights reserved. post hurricane katrina, the city of new orleans embarked upon an unprecedented experiment/innovation in urban public education. following a state takeover of most of its public schools-107 of 128 and its dismantling of collective bargaining and subsequent summarily dismissal of unionized teachers education policymakers launched a rapid-fire (miron, 2008) reform movement to convert most of its public schools to privately managed charter schools. charter schools now hold a 70% market share. this is the largest in the us. despite the fact that the state was the prime driver in the near wholesale move to convert existing schools to charter schools in particular former state superintendent (now deceased) cecil picard (miron, 2008), the local school district, the orleans parish school board (opsb) actually implemented the reform. specifically it provided authorization to the algiers charter association to start-up five schools as a cluster of charter schools in the historic algiers neighborhood located on the west bank, across the river from downtown new orleans. this neighborhood was located on "high ground" land, that is, in one of the areas that did not flood. we utilize state data of nearly 1.7 million students in ohio to study a specific sector of online education: k-12 schools that deliver most, if not all, education online, lack a brick-and-mortar presence, and enroll students full-time. first, we explore e-school enrollment patterns and how these patterns vary by student subgroups and geography. second, we evaluate the impact of e-schools on students' learning, comparing student outcomes in e-schools to outcomes in two other schooling types, traditional charter schools and traditional public schools. our results show that students and families appear to self-segregate in stark ways where low-income, lower achieving white students are more likely to choose e-schools while low-income, lower achieving minority students are more likely to opt into the traditional charter school sector. our results also show that students in e-schools are performing worse on standardized assessments than their peers in traditional charter and traditional public schools. we close with policy recommendations and areas for future research. the intent of this article is to examine the role of charter schools in educational reform in the alberta context and to argue that the real promise of charter schools resides less in fostering innovation and efficiency in public education, and more in providing schools of choice for parents and in addressing diverse values and goals of education. this article is premised on the concern for the global phenomenon of governments adopting market solutions to address "problems" related to diversity, efficiency, and accountability in the public sector. governments depoliticize education and debates regarding its social purposes "by placing it as much as possible in the province of parental authority" and market forces, and at the same time "deny parents the democratic authority to implement educational policy that requires state support" (gutmann, 1987, p. zi). this approach marks a "paradigm shift in the economics of education policy and social policy in general" (gewirtz, ball, & bowe, 1995, p. 2), with a new emphasis on accountability and efficiency through competition and consumer choice. social scientists have begun to document the stratifying effects of over a decade of unprecedented charter growth in urban districts. an exodus of students from traditional neighborhood schools to charter schools has attended this growth, creating troubling numbers of vacant seats in neighborhood schools as well as concentrating larger percentages of high-need student populations like special education students and english language learners in these schools (buras, 2014; gabor, 2014; knefel, 2014). in cities like philadelphia, the maintenance of two parallel educational systems-one charter, the other district-has also strained budgets and contributed to fiscal crises that have further divested traditional district schools of critical resources (popp, 2014). how are youth, teachers, and staff in neighborhood schools responding to these conditions and the moral associations that the neighborhood school has come to invoke within an expanding educational marketplace? what does it mean to attend and/or work in a traditional neighborhood school in the midst of the dramatic restructuring of urban public education? using frameworks developed in anthropological and sociological studies of social stigma, i explore in this paper how the power of market stratification has come to influence the intensification of institutional stigmas around the traditional neighborhood school (anyon, 1980; goffman, 1963; link and phelan, 2001). drawing on ethnographic data from a neighborhood school in philadelphia, i center youth perspectives on their aspirations and life chances given their status as students in a non-selective neighborhood school in my analysis. i ultimately interrogate how notions of race, educational quality, and [lack of] school choice, impact this neighborhood school community's sense of worth and future as individuals as well as an institution. when passed in 2001, the no child left behind act represented the federal government's most dramatic foray into the elementary and secondary public school policymaking terrain. while critics emphasized the act's overreliance on standardized testing and its reduced school district and state autonomy, proponents lauded the act's goal to close the achievement gap between middleand upper-middle-class students and students historically ill served by their schools. whatever structural changes the no child left behind act achieved, however, were largely undone in 2015 by the every student succeeds act, which repositioned significant federal education policy control in state governments. from a federalism standpoint, the every student succeeds act may have reset education federalism boundaries to favor states, far exceeding their position prior to 2001. while federal elementary and secondary education reform efforts since 2001 may intrigue legal scholars, a focus on educational federalism risks obscuring an even more fundamental development in educational policymaking power: its migration from governments to families, from regulation to markets. amid a multidecade squabble between federal and state lawmakers over education policy authority, efforts to harness individual autonomy and market forces in the service of increasing children's educational opportunity and equity have grown. persistent demands for and increased availability of school voucher programs, charter schools, tax credit programs, and homeschooling demonstrate families' desire for greater agency over decisions about their children's education. parents' calls for greater control over critical decisions concerning their children's education and schooling options may eclipse state and federal lawmakers' legislative squabbles over educational federalism. background/context: teachers affect student performance through their interaction with students in the context of the classrooms and schools where teaching and learning take place. although it is widely assumed that supportive working conditions improve the quality of instruction and teachers' willingness to remain in a school, little is known about whether or how the organizational structure of charter schools influences teacher working conditions. purpose/research question: this article compares teacher working conditions in charter and traditional public schools and among various types of charter schools. in doing so, it seeks to understand whether the different working conditions are influenced by the intrinsic institutional features of charter schools such as autonomy and competition, or by the extraneous factors such as measureable school and teacher characteristics. research design: this study utilized data from the 2003-2004 schools and staffing survey (sass), the nation's most extensive survey of k-12 schools and teachers, both for charter schools and traditional public schools (tpss). this article is a quantitative analysis that involves three main steps. first, based on the responses to the sass teacher questionnaire, confirmatory factor analysis was performed to generate multiple factors corresponding to key dimensions of teacher working conditions. second, propensity score matching was used to pair charter schools with tpss that are similar in terms of school location, educational level, school type, and student demographics. this matching process mitigates the confounding effects of these extraneous factors on teachers' perceptions of working conditions. finally, a series of weighted hierarchical linear models were utilized to compare teachers' perceptions of working conditions between charter and traditional public schools, controlling for teacher and school characteristics. conclusions/recommendations: the results show that charter and traditional public school teachers perceive their working conditions to be similar in many regards, including principal leadership, sense of community and collegiality, classroom autonomy, opportunities for professional development, and adequacy of instructional supplies. however, charter school teachers perceive that they have significantly more influence over school policies, but a heavier workload than traditional school teachers. among charter schools, district-granted charter schools show consistently more supportive working environments than charters granted by other organizations. this implies that state policy can have some indirect influence over charter school working conditions by providing substantial administrative support and oversight to charter schools authorized by independent organizations other than the established structure of school districts. this paper compares for-and non-profit management of charter schools in florida using a unique dataset combining enrollment and student proficiency data with the annual independent financial audits filed by all charter schools. comparisons reveal that independent for-and non-profit charter schools locate in similar markets and serve similar student bodies, whereas for-profits belonging to a network locate in lower income, denser, and more hispanic areas. bearing out the concerns of parents and policymakers, regression estimates indicate that, among independent charters, for-profits spend less per pupil on instruction and achieve lower student proficiency gains. by contrast, among charter schools belonging to a network, for-profits spend approximately 11% less per pupil, but expenses on student instruction are not being cut. the estimates, which control for differences across schools in student composition and other characteristics, imply that an equivalent level of per pupil expenses purchases about 0.03 sigma higher student proficiency at network for-profit charter schools. (c) 2017 elsevier ltd. all rights reserved. since their inception in 1992, the number of charter schools has grown to more than 6,800 nationally, serving nearly three million students. various studies have examined charter schools' impacts on test scores, and a few have begun to examine longer-term outcomes including graduation and college attendance. this paper is the first to estimate charter schools' effects on earnings in adulthood, alongside effects on educational attainment. using data from florida, we first confirm previous research (booker etal., ) that students attending charter high schools are more likely to graduate from high school and enroll in college. we then examine two longer-term outcomes not previously studied in research on charter schoolscollege persistence and earnings. we find that students attending charter high schools are more likely to persist in college, and that in their mid-20s they experience higher earnings. teacher evaluation is at the center of current education policy reform. most evaluation systems rely at least in part on principals' assessments of teachers, and their discretionary judgments carry substantial weight. however, we know relatively little about what they value when determining evaluations and high stakes personnel decisions. using unique data from an independently managed public charter school district, i explore the extent to which autonomous school administrators' formative evaluations of teachers predict a variety of future personnel decisions. i also assess the extent to which their evaluations predict alternative measures of teacher performance, including student and parent evaluations of individual teachers in the same and future school years. i find that formative midyear ratingsshared by administrators with teachersclearly differentiate between teachers and are strongly associated with end-of-year dismissal and promotion decisions. i use an exploratory factor analysis to identify four distinct components of administrators' feedback to teachers and show that different components predict different types of personnel decisions in schools. in addition, different components predict different teacher performance measures. the results suggest the importance of accounting for multiple aspects of teachers' work in evaluation systems that are meant to inform multiple types of personnel decisions. by most media accounts, charter schools are innovative schools. but little empirical work interrogates this idea. we examine the growth and decline of specialist charter school mission statements as one indicator of innovation. in line with theories of resource partitioning, we find that specialist charter school missionsthose asserting innovation with regards to populations served, curricula utilized, and/or educational focushave become increasingly diverse over time. however, simultaneously, we find support for a generalist assimilation hypothesis: charter schools have come to resemble traditional schools through isomorphic tendencies over time. hence, we show that although specialist charter schools are becoming increasingly diverse in their missions, these charter schools are increasingly making up a smaller portion of the population. we also find, counter to charter school advocates' intentions, that states with more permissive charter school laws are those that also tend to have a great proportion of charter schools with generalist missions. our findings contribute to a theoretical understanding of specialist organizations by considering specialization as an example of innovation in the charter school population. furthermore, our findings have implications for the way charter school laws are created and enacted to foster innovation through specialization. while critics offer concerns that cyber charter schools under-enroll special education students, such schools may offer advantages for these students, and some cyber schools have identified this market niche. little is known about such schools. we surveyed parents (n = 232; 48.7% response rate) and students (n = 269; 53.7% response rate) at a cyber charter school that we will call suntech, where special education students account for 26% of the student body. findings indicate that special education students and their parents were more likely than general education peers to mention behavioral issues as influencing their decision to choose suntech. compared to general education counterparts, special education students and parents reported somewhat higher levels of satisfaction in the school and somewhat lower levels of satisfaction in their prior schools. implications are discussed. (c) 2014 elsevier ltd. all rights reserved. a growing body of research has been documenting the pivotal role that philanthropic funding plays in advancing state and local charter school reform. however, there is little understanding of the geographic flow of these funding patterns and the market, policy, and organizational conditions that have concentrated funding in some clusters of states more than others. to address this limitation, we use descriptive cartography and quadratic assignment procedure (qap) regression to analyze longitudinal funding data from 15 philanthropic foundations along with data related to the contexts of the states where grant recipients reside. we find that between 2009 and 2014, foundations were increasingly converging their funding flows to charter school organizations in select clusters of states as they shifted the concentration of funds away from individual charter schools to charter management organizations (cmos) and advocacy organizations. a substantial portion of the variation in this interstate convergent grant funding was associated with previously established funding flows. however, the local market and policy contexts of states and certain forms of evidence of charter school effectiveness were also associated with interstate convergent funding. these findings point to the potential ways public policy and research can shape the flow of private money into public education and yet illuminate substantial geographic inequality in the ways these funds are distributed. the authors situate the emergence and effects of contemporary market-based reforms within a framework of urban political economy that centers on racial inequality. they discuss how and why market-based reforms have evolved alongside racialized political and economic trends that have transformed cities over the past century, and they critically evaluate the research literature in light of such trends. the authors argue that deterioration of the urban core's infrastructure, schools, and housing has created ripe conditions for market-oriented reforms to take root. they also argue that these reforms have exacerbated divides in increasingly unequal and bifurcated cities. the authors conclude that these intersections and interactions between market-based reforms and urban contexts must be addressed by policy and research. a common criticism of charter schools is that they systematically remove or "counsel out" their lowest performing students. however, relatively little is currently known about whether low-performing students are in fact more likely to exit charter schools than surrounding traditional public schools. we use longitudinal student-level data from two large urban school systems that prior research has found to have effective charter school sectors-new york city and denver, colorado-to evaluate whether there is a differential relationship between low-performance on standardized test scores and the probability that students exit their schools by sector attended. we find no evidence of a differential relationship between prior performance and the likelihood of exiting a school by sector. low-performing students in both cities are either equally likely or less likely to exit their schools than are student in traditional public schools. (c) 2016 elsevier ltd. all rights reserved. this article offers an analysis of the legacy of the obama administration's education agenda, focusing on implications for american federalism. faced with partisan gridlock in congress-which was not able to reauthorize the elementary and secondary education act (esea) until the last year in office-the obama administration opted to make education policy through creative, expansive, and controversial uses of executive power that changed the national political discourse around education and pushed states to enact important policy changes regarding charter schools, common core standards and assessments, and teacher evaluation. the administration's aggressive efforts on school reform, however, eventually led to a political backlash against those same reforms and federal involvement in education more generally and resulted in an esea reauthorization (the 2015 every student succeeds act) that rolls back the federal role in k-12 schooling in important ways. one of the enduring legacies of the obama presidency may well be the invigoration and expansion of the state role in education. purpose: informed by literature on labor market and school choice, this study aims to examine the dynamics of principal career movements in charter schools by comparing principal turnover rates and patterns between charter schools and traditional public schools. research methods/approach: this study uses longitudinal data on utah principals and schools from 2004 to 2011. the aalen-johansen estimator and discrete-time competing risk models are used to analyze principal turnover rates and transition patterns in charter schools in relation to those in traditional schools. we also explore the extent to which school contextual and principal background factors contribute to principal turnover. findings: our analyses show that charter schools had a higher principal turnover rate than traditional schools and very different principal transition patterns. when charter principals left, they tended to move to nonprincipal positions or leave the utah public school system altogether, instead of moving to another school as principals. in contrast, when traditional school principals left, they tended to continue to be principals in another school, mostly within the same school district. conclusions and implications: the findings suggest that unlike the traditional school principal position that is often regarded as a stepping stone along an established career path, the charter school principal position is more likely to be a stopping point. this may cause overall principal shortage in charter schools and highlights the need for supportive systems that develop and sustain strong leadership in charter schools. the new orleans tribune (1864-1870), the first black daily newspaper in the united states, was the singular text in the public south at its time to staunchly advocate for public, integrated education, anticipating the ruling of brown v. board of education, and arguing that separate education would always be synonymous with unequal education and would reinforce the mark of inferiority already placed upon blacks by slavery. this article argues that the tribune grounded its argument against segregated education in logos-centred rhetoric that focused specifically on combating the dominant discourse of white supremacy and black inferiority embedded in the emerging ideology of scientific racism. the tribune defended against the divisive rhetoric of the newly forming eugenics movement and instead posed public, integrated education as a necessary prerequisite to rebuilding a nation destroyed by the civil war. purpose: how principals hire, assign, evaluate, and provide growth opportunities to teachers likely have major ramifications for teacher effectiveness and student learning. this article reports on the barriers principals encountered when carrying out these functions and variations in the degree to which they identified obstacles and problem-solved to surmount them. research methods: i conducted semistructured interviews with 30 principals in charter or conventional schools in two adjacent northeastern states. state a has been at the national forefront of efforts to raise teacher effectiveness. state b is a particularly strong union setting. charter school principals constituted 23.3% of the sample; 53% of principals worked in urban schools. after coding interview transcripts, i used thematic summaries, categorical matrices, and analytical memos to identify themes across participant experiences. findings: principals encountered barriers to cultivating teacher effectiveness that were economic, contractual, cultural, and interpersonal. principals with more professional development regarding how to improve teachers' instruction and principals of schools that were elementary, smaller, and in state a reported fewer barriers and more opportunities to developing human capital. implications: implications for policymakers include creating incentives to draw teachers to urban and rural schools and curtailing teacher assignments that prioritize seniority. implications for practitioners include efforts to shift the culture of schools to support principals in providing accurate and frank feedback on instruction. further research should examine whether the patterns identified here hold for a larger, random sample of principals including those in large, urban districts and right-to-work states. investigations of the effects of schools (or teachers) on student achievement focus on either (1) individual school effects, such as value-added analyses, or (2) school-type effects, such as comparisons of charter and public schools. controlling for school composition by including student covariates is critical for valid estimation of either kind of school effect. student covariates often have different effects between schools than within schools. econometricians typically attribute such differences to a form of endogeneity, specifically, level-2 endogeneity, or the confounding of student covariates with unobserved school characteristics, whereas education researchers primarily interpret the differences as contextual effects or the effects of collective peer attributes on individual student achievement. this article considers both and makes connections between the econometric and education research literatures. we show that the hausman and taylor approach from panel data econometrics can be used for valid estimation of individual school or school-type effects when there is only level-2 endogeneity but can lead to bias when there are also contextual or peer effects. in contrast, contextual effects are typically estimated by including school means of student covariates in addition to the student-level covariates (equivalent to the mundlak device), but this leads to biased school comparisons in the presence of level-2 endogeneity. we interpret the estimates from these two competing estimators in terms of the type a and type b school effects defined by raudenbush and willms and show that both estimators are preferable to the common group-mean-centering approach. a growing number of school districts use centralized assignment mechanisms to allocate school seats in a manner that reflects student preferences and school priorities. many of these assignment schemes use lotteries to ration seats when schools are oversubscribed. the resulting random assignment opens the door to credible quasi-experimental research designs for the evaluation of school effectiveness. yet the question of how best to separate the lottery-generated randomization integral to such designs from non-random preferences and priorities remains open. this paper develops easily-implemented empirical strategies that fully exploit the random assignment embedded in a wide class of mechanisms, while also revealing why seats are randomized at one school but not another. we use these methods to evaluate charter schools in denver, one of a growing number of districts that combine charter and traditional public schools in a unified assignment system. the resulting estimates show large achievement gains from charter school attendance. our approach generates efficiency gains over ad hoc methods, such as those that focus on schools ranked first, while also identifying a more representative average causal effect. we also show how to use centralized assignment mechanisms to identify causal effects in models with multiple school sectors. this paper addresses the rise and consequences of an emerging global education industry (gei), which represents new forms of private, for profit involvement in education across the globe. the paper explores the emergence within the gei of new and varied, largely transnational, markets in education by focusing on three examples of the gei at work. the first example addresses the issue of charter schools, what they have come to represent, how they have been implemented, and, especially, the impact they have had on public schooling more broadly. while they have taken different forms in different places, they have succeeded in installing the idea of quasi-markets in education, which has been directly instrumental in opening up opportunities for private investment in education. the second example concerns the ways that the increasingly global standardisation of education policies, provision and practices, presents lucrative opportunities for investment and profit. the forms and consequences of such standardisation are described in the contrasting cases of qatar, mongolia and indonesia. the third example concerns low-fee private schools in the global south. far from such schools being seen as local initiatives, the paper shows how they have become a major opportunity for profitable investment by international corporations. background & purpose: this article focuses on the growing role of venture philanthropy in shaping policy and practice in teacher education in the united states. our goal is to bring a greater level of transparency to private influences on public policy and to promote greater discussion and debate in the public arena about alternative solutions to current problems. in this article, we focus on the role of one of the most influential private groups in the united states that invests in education, the new schools venture fund (nsvf), in promoting deregulation and market-based policies. research design: we examine the changing role of philanthropy in education and the role of the nsvf in developing and promoting a bill in the u.s. congress (the great act) that would create a system throughout the nation of charter teacher and principal preparation programs called academies. in assessing the wisdom of the great act, we examine the warrant for claims that education schools have failed in their mission to educate teachers well and the corresponding narrative that entrepreneurial programs emanating from the private sector are the solution. conclusions: we reject both the position that the status quo in teacher education is acceptable (a position held by what we term "defenders") and the position that the current system needs to be "blown up" and replaced by a market economy ("reformers"). we suggest a third position ("transformers") that we believe will strengthen the u.s. system of public teacher education and provide everyone's children with high-quality teachers. we conclude with a call for more trenchant dialogue about the policy options before us and for greater transparency about the ways that private interests are influencing public policy and practice in teacher education. in the past, sociologists have provided keen insights into the work of teaching, but classic studies by scholars like dan lortie and willard waller are now decades old. with the current emphasis on teacher evaluation and accountability, the field is ripe for new sociological studies of teaching. how do we understand the work of teaching in this new context of control? in this article, i use the case of an urban, no-excuses'' charter school to examine how teachers responded to the school's intensive effort to socialize them into a uniform set of disciplinary practices. drawing from 15 months of fieldwork at a no-excuses school, i found that teachers varied in their responses to school control based on their cultural toolkitstheir preferences and their capacities. based on teachers' adaptation strategies, i introduce four ideal types: conformers, imitators, adaptors, and rejecters. this article makes the following contributions. first, i extend classic theories of teacher self-socialization to a new context of control. second, i offer new ways beyond sensemaking theories to analyze how and why teachers adopt (or fail to adopt) new teaching practices. finally, i provide timely insight into teacher experiences in no-excuses schoolsand into these schools' efforts to redirect teacher education toward a more prescriptive, skills-based approach. reflecting post-bureaucratic organisation theory, education reformers intended charter schools to empower school-level leaders, most typically principals, with autonomy to pursue clear, student-centred missions. yet little research explores whether charter school principals have more power than traditional public school counterparts. we summarise the limited literature addressing the issue. second, we present findings from interviews with nine charter leaders from six us states who have experience in leading both charter and traditional public schools, a unique data set. both prior research and our findings suggest that generally, leaders feel more likely to be held accountable for results in charter schools than in traditional public schools. furthermore, without oversight from school boards and central office administrators, charter leaders report having more power over budget and personnel, and more ability to collaborate with teachers. at the same time, standalone charter leaders report needing business support and training, while those from charter management organizations feel free to focus on academic success. sociopolitical consciousness refers to an individual's ability to critically analyze the political, economic, and social forces shaping society and one's status in it. a growing body of scholarship reports that high levels of sociopolitical consciousness are predictive in marginalized adolescents of a number of key outcomes including resilience and civic engagement. the present study explored the role that urban secondary schools can play in fostering adolescents' sociopolitical consciousness through a longitudinal, mixed methods investigation of more than 400 adolescents attending progressive and no excuses charter high schools. analyses revealed that, on average, students attending progressive high schools demonstrated sizeable shifts in their sociopolitical consciousness of racial inequality, and students attending no excuses high schools demonstrated sizeable shifts in their sociopolitical consciousness of social class inequality. qualitative interviews with participating students offered insight into the curriculum, programming, and practices that these youth perceived as contributing to these differences in their sociopolitical consciousness. informed by recent struggles over schooling, this article proceeds from the premise that education is a deeply geographic and urgently political problem increasingly engaged by a wide range of scholars and activists. we argue that the current political moment demands increasing geographic attention to the confluence of social processes that shape schooling arrangements. we contend that this attention also must address how people involved in collective action understand and enact alternatives and how these mobilizations may articulate with other social movements. although existing geographers of education have studied schooling in relation to other processes such as gentrification and citizenship, we argue that centering schooling as an object of study can enliven important disciplinary conversations. in light of these arguments, we call on geographers to advance geographic scholarship on education by creating a cohesive critical geographies of education subfield. drawing from intensified interest in the geographies of education, this subfield can contribute to broader geographic debates by centering schooling in theory generation, rather than only studying education as a site of test cases for existing geographic theories. given this call, this review highlights how the existing literature on schooling signals the potential of geographic work on education and marks considerations for the development of future research. arizona enrolls a larger share of its students in charter schools than any other state in the country, but no comprehensive examination exists of the impact of those schools on student achievement. using student-level data covering all arizona students from 2006 to 2012, we find that the performance of charter schools in arizona in improving student achievement varies widely, and more so than that of traditional public schools (tps). on average, charter schools at every grade level have been modestly less effective than tps in raising student achievement in some subjects. but charter schools that closed during this period have been lower performing than schools that remained open, a pattern that is not evident in the traditional public sector. purpose federal and state policymakers in the usa have sought to better differentiate the performance of k-12 teachers by enacting more rigorous evaluation policies. the purpose of this paper is to investigate whether these policies are working as intended and explore whether district stressors such as funding, enrollment, and governance are associated with outcomes. design/methodology/approach the authors examined teacher evaluation ratings from 687 districts in michigan to identify the relationship between district stressors and two outcomes of interest to policymakers: frequency of high ratings and variation of ratings within districts. a qualitative index of variation was used to measure variation of the categorical rating variable. findings about 97 percent of teachers in michigan are rated effective or highly effective, and variation measures indicate overwhelming use of only two ratings. charter school districts have fewer teachers rated highly than traditional districts, and districts with higher fund balances have more teachers rated highly. districts with increasing fund balances have higher variation. practical implications the findings suggest that district stressors presumably unrelated to teacher performance may influence teacher evaluation ratings. state teacher evaluation reforms that give districts considerable discretion in designing their teacher evaluation models may not be sufficient for differentiating the performance of teachers. originality/value this research is important as policymakers refine state systems of support for teacher evaluation and provides new evidence that current enactment of teacher evaluation reform may be limiting the value of evaluation ratings for use in personnel decisions. charter schools have become the hegemonic solution for urban educational reform initiatives aimed at curtailing longstanding race-based educational inequities. the common sense of neoliberal charter schools as the cure to persistent inequality is best illustrated in the post-katrina new orleans educational reforms. this article will focus on a lesser explored aspect of charter schools: the charter school authorization and application process in post-katrina new orleans. we center on the perspectives of african american educational actors. using data from separate but complementary studies, we argue the charter authorization and application process is a racialized site that reproduces white dominance. since the passing of the no child left behind act of 2001 (nclb), neoliberal policies, such as standardized curriculum, high-stakes tests, accountability measures, school choice, charter schools, value-added models and school privatization have pushed social justice teaching to the margins. as a result, many educators endure demoralization, teach in a state of fear and are driven out of the classroom. this article examined of how educators sustained and enhanced their ability to teach for social justice through a teacher inquiry group (tig) that was founded by a teacher activist organization in los angeles, california, usa. conducting a qualitative case study methodology and critical inquiry group design, data were collected over the course of an academic year through observations and document analysis with 25 teacher participants and semi-structured interviews with six core teacher participants across the teaching experience spectrum. findings reveal that tig members engaged in a collective and individual social justice process described here as a community of transformative praxis. through a community of transformative praxis, participants pursued pedagogical goals, became students of their praxis and practiced social justice teaching, which led to being validated and inspired to teach for social justice. the article provides implications for research and practice that considers social justice teacher retention, teacher professional development, and re-imaging the purpose and possibilities of public education. major new foundations, such as the gates foundation, broad foundation, and walton family foundation, developed strategies for education philanthropy that drew on lessons from the annenberg challenge in the 1990s. rather than funding locally initiated plans for reform, these new funders share a similar set of strategies, such as charter school expansion and teacher evaluation, and promote these strategies for national replication. foundation dollars have played a role in enabling significant transformations of some urban districts, such as los angeles, newark, new orleans, and washington, d.c. based on analysis of foundation grant distribution to urban districts since 2000 and the political consequences of these grants, i argue that the pendulum of philanthropic strategy may have moved too far in response to the annenberg challenge. where funders saw too much adaptation to local circumstances with annenberg, they have responded with an overemphasis on national models. where funders saw too much geographic dispersion of resources with annenberg, they have responded with significant coordinated investments in certain districts where blacks and latinos find themselves disempowered by outside interests. where funders saw too many attempts to cooperate and collaborate with traditional school districts, they have responded with a strategy that financially weakens some urban districts. in the conclusion, i highlight new lessons for foundations based on weaknesses in the national replication strategy. centralized school enrollment is designed to improve the allocation of seats in choice-based systems. we study the quality of k-12 public school placements relative to revealed family preferences using data from new orleans, where a market-based school system allocates most seats through a centralized enrollment lottery. we propose a theory of family utility maximization under school choice systems with and without guaranteed placements. using an instrumental variables strategy, we estimate the causal effect of losing a school placement lottery on the school quality a student receives. we find a significant gap between preferred and actual school quality for students who do not win a first-choice assignment, some of which is regained when multiple rounds of assignment are offered. from the supply side, this allows schools of choice to operate with weak demand by enrolling students who fail to win assignment to oversubscribed schools of greater quality and higher preference ranking. background: we examine whether working conditions in different types of charter schools lead to different levels of teacher turnover. we consider two types of teacher turnover behaviors. one is teacher migration, which refers to the transfer of teachers from one school to another. the other one is teacher attrition, which describes the phenomenon of teachers leaving the profession entirely. we distinguish among charter schools managed by for-profit education management organizations (emos), those managed by non-profit charter management organizations (cmos), and regular charter schools. method/analysis: our data come from the 2011-12 schools and staffing survey (sass). we estimate multi-level models with hierarchical linear modeling (hlm) software. findings and implications: we find that teachers in charter schools managed by emos and cmos have higher levels of migration and attrition intention than do teachers in regular charter schools. teachers, particularly in emo-managed charter schools, are more likely to consider moving to another school or to leave the teaching profession. our analyses suggest that the increased migration and attrition among teachers in mo-managed charter schools can be partially explained by the differences in working conditions, such as the degree of administrative support in the school, the degrees of classroom control and school-wide influence of teachers, salary, opportunities of professional development, the quality of the student body, and the degree of student misbehavior. (c) 2018 western social science association. published by elsevier inc. all rights reserved. rapidly expanding charter and voucher programs are establishing a new education paradigm in which access to traditional public schools is no longer guaranteed. in some areas, charter and voucher programs are on a trajectory to phase out traditional public schools altogether. this article argues that this trend and its effects violate the constitutional right to public education embedded in all fifty state constitutions. importantly, this article departs from past constitutional arguments against charter and voucher programs. past arguments have attempted to prohibit such programs entirely and have assumed, with little evidentiary support, that they endanger statewide education systems. unsurprisingly, litigation and scholarship based on a flawed premise have thus far failed to slow the growth of charter and voucher programs. without a reframed theory, several recently filed lawsuits are likely to suffer the same fate. this article does not challenge the general constitutionality of choice programs. instead, the article identifies two limitations that state constitutional rights to education place on choice policy. the first limitation is that states cannot preference private choice programs over public education. this conclusion flows from the fact that most state constitutions mandate public education as a first-order right for their citizens. thus, while states may establish choice programs, they cannot systematically advantage choice programs over public education. this article demonstrates that some states have crossed this line. the second limitation that state constitutions place on choice programs is that their practical effect cannot impede educational opportunities in public schools. education clauses in state constitutions obligate the state to provide adequate and equitable public schools. any state policy that deprives students of access to those opportunities is therefore unconstitutional. often-overlooked district level data reveals that choice programs are reducing public education funding, stratifying opportunity, and intensifying segregation in large urban centers. each of these effects represents a distinct constitutional violation. theoretical literature on whether school competition raises public school productivity is ambiguous (e.g. macleod & urquiola, 2015) and empirical evidence is mixed (e.g. hsieh and urquiola, 2006). moreover, competition might itself be an outcome of changes in productivity (e.g. hoxby, 2003). we provide evidence for the negative effect of the threat of competition on students' test scores in elementary public schools in poland. the identification strategy uses the introduction of the amendment facilitating the creation of autonomous schools in poland in 2009 as an external shock to the threat of competition. we focus on the short run in which there is only a limited set of actions available to schools' principals. for the total sample we find no effect, however, for more competitive urban educational markets, we report a drop in test scores in public schools following the increased threat of competition. this negative effect is robust to the existence of autonomous schools prior to the amendment and to the size of public schools. it does not result from a pre-existing or concurrent trend either. we exclude student sorting and adjustments in schools' expenditures as potential channels. background: although we have learned a good deal from lottery-based and quasi-experimental studies of charter schools, much of what goes on inside of charter schools remains a "black box" to be unpacked. grounding our work in neoclassical market theory and institutional theory, we examine differences in the social organization of schools and classrooms to enrich our understanding of school choice, school organizational and instructional conditions, and student learning. purpose/objective/research question/focus of study: our study examines differences in students' mathematics achievement gains between charter and traditional public schools, focusing on the distribution and organization of students into ability groups. in short, we ask: (1) how does the distribution of ability grouping differ between charter and traditional public schools? and (2) what are the relationships between ability group placement and students' mathematics achievement gains in charter and traditional public schools? research design: with a matched sample of charter and traditional public schools in six states (colorado, delaware, indiana, michigan, minnesota, and ohio), we use regression analyses to estimate the relationship between student achievement gains and school sector. we analyze how ability grouping mediates this main effect, controlling for various student, classroom, and school characteristics. findings: we find significant differences in the distribution of students across ability groups, with a more even distribution in charter compared to traditional public schools, which appear to have more selective placements for high groups. consistent with prior research on tracking, we also find low-grouped students to be at a significant disadvantage when compared with high-and mixed-group peers in both sectors. conclusions: although we find some significant differences between ability group placement and student achievement gains in mathematics, these relationships do not differ as much by sector as market theory (with its emphasis on innovation and autonomy) would predict. consistent with institutional theory, both sectors still group students by ability and have similar relationships between gains and grouping. background/context: sociopolitical development (spd) refers to the processes by which an individual acquires the knowledge, skills, emotional faculties, and commitment to recognize and resist oppressive social forces. a growing body of scholarship has found that such sociopolitical capabilities are predictive in marginalized adolescents of a number of key outcomes, including resilience, academic achievement, and civic engagement. many scholars have long argued that schools and educators have a central role to play in fostering the sociopolitical development of marginalized adolescents around issues of race and class inequality. other scholars have investigated school-based practices for highlighting race and class inequality that include youth participatory-action research, critical literacy, and critical service-learning. objective of study: the present study sought to add to the existing scholarship on schools as opportunity structures for sociopolitical development. specifically, this study considered the role of two different schooling models in fostering adolescents' ability to analyze, navigate, and challenge the social forces and institutions contributing to race and class inequality. setting: the six high schools participating in the present study were all urban charter public high schools located in five northeastern cities. all six schools served primarily low-income youth of color and articulated explicit goals around fostering students' sociopolitical development. three of these high schools were guided by progressive pedagogy and principles, and three were guided by no-excuses pedagogy and principles. research design: the present study compared the sociopolitical development of adolescents attending progressive and no-excuses charter high schools through a mixed methods research design involving pre-post surveys, qualitative interviews with participating adolescents and teachers, and ethnographic field notes collected during observations at participating schools. results: on average, adolescents attending progressive high schools demonstrated more significant shifts in their ability to analyze the causes of racial inequality, but adolescents attending no-excuses high schools demonstrated more significant shifts in their sense of efficacy around navigating settings in which race and class inequality are prominent. neither set of adolescents demonstrated significant shifts in their commitment to challenging the social forces or institutions contributing to race and class inequality. conclusions: both progressive and no-excuses schools sought to foster adolescents' commitment to challenging race and class inequality, but focused on different building blocks to do so. further research is necessary to understand the pedagogy and practices that show promise in catalyzing adolescents' analytic and navigational abilities into a powerful commitment to collective social action-the ultimate goal of sociopolitical development. purpose: the study examines why the logic of a performance management system, supported by the federal teacher incentive fund, might be faulty. it does this by exploring the nuances of the interplay between teaching evaluations as formative and summative, the use of procedures, tools, and artifacts obligated by the local teacher incentive fund system, and bonus payments as extrinsic motivators. research methods: the study is a qualitative longitudinal study in three public charter schools that were selected as a presumably conducive environment for incentive-driven performance management. eight rounds of semistructured interviews, 130 interviews, and 65 hours of meeting observations are the data for this study. findings: in the three charter schools, the adoption period was characterized by consonance, the belief that the performance management system served valued purposes. in midlife, dissonance set in. performance contingencies attached to both bonus and external evaluations were perceived as disconfirming the values of the schools. incentives and status competition were largely rebuffed and relegated to the periphery. once the power of incentives became latent, a period of resonance set in. administrators and teachers came to interact with the two main artifacts, videos of lessons and the summative evaluation of teaching observation tool, in ways that afforded new learning. implications for research and practice: the study suggests that research insights can be gained when logics of complex performance management systems are disentangled and competing dynamics deliberately studied. practically speaking, when schools try to maintain a rich collegial culture, incentives may crowd out the use of teaching evaluations for formative learning. the new teachers' roundtable (ntrt) is a democratically run collective of new teachers who have become critical of neoliberal reform with which they have participated. these teachers relocated to new orleans, with organizations including teach for america, as a part of the post-katrina overhaul of public schools. through interviews and observations, this study examines the ways in which members of this collective support each other in attempts to navigate experiences they perceive as dehumanizing to themselves, their students, and their students' communities. by developing relationships amongst themselves and with other stakeholders affected by and resisting privatization, they are able to challenge their own privilege and begin shifting their perspective and pedagogy. this study aims to contribute to our understanding of how teachers who have been affiliated with market-based movements can be galvanized to work in service of movements that are democratic, anti-racist, and accountable to communities. there is a power that can be created out of pent-up indignation, courage, and the inspiration of a common cause, and that if enough people put their minds and bodies into that cause, they can win. it is a phenomenon recorded again and again in the history of popular movements against injustice all over the world. a recent english education policy has been to encourage state primary schools to become academies: state funded, non-selective, and highly autonomous establishments. primary schools have been able to opt-in to academy status since 2010 and academies now account for twenty-one percent of the primary sector. this paper investigates the causal effect of becoming a converter academy on primary school assessment outcomes, and on entry-year intake composition. unlike existing evidence focused on earlier academies formed from failing secondary schools, no evidence is found of a converter academy effect on attainment for the average pupil. although, there is evidence of a slight positive effect on age 11 attainment for pupils eligible for free school meals. there is no evidence that becoming a converter academy affects the composition of the entry-year intake. almost every state has experimented with charter schools to improve education outcomes for high-needs students. charter schools operate with more autonomy and flexibility than traditional public schools, but at the expense of democratic accountability mechanisms. while this model has produced positive results, some charter schools deny access to or underenroll students with disabilities. the individuals with disabilities education act entitles all students with disabilities to a free and appropriate public education and establishes certain procedures by which students and their parents can vindicate this right, but these procedures are imperfect. this note argues that the absence of democratic responsiveness in the charter model amplifies existing shortcomings of special education procedures, frustrating the purposes of both charter school authorization statutes and the individuals with disabilities education act. it concludes by offering suggestions for charter school authorizers and lawmakers to improve access to alternative, less-legalized mechanisms for protecting special education rights in the charter school context. charter schools have been one of the most important dimensions of recent school reform measures in the united states. though there have been numerous studies on the effects of charter schools, these have mostly been confined to analyzing their effects on student achievement, student demographic composition, parental satisfaction, and the competitive effects on traditional public schools. this study departs from the existing literature by investigating the effect of charter schools on enrollment in private schools. to investigate this issue empirically, we focus on the state of michigan where there was a significant spread of charter schools in the nineties. using data on private school enrollment from biennial nces private school surveys, and using a fixed effects as well as an instrumental variables strategy that exploits exogenous variation from michigan charter law, we investigate the effect of charter school penetration on private school enrollment. we do not find any causal evidence that charter schools led to a decline in enrollment in the private schools. further, we do not find evidence that enrollments in catholic or other religious schools were affected differently from those in non-religious private schools. our results are robust to a variety of sensitivity checks. (c) 2015 elsevier inc. all rights reserved. an unsustainable workload is considered the primary cause of teacher turnover at charter management organizations (cmos), yet most reports provide anecdotal evidence to support this claim. this study uses 2010-2011 survey data from one large cmo and finds that teachers' perceptions of workload are significantly associated with decisions to leave across schools and teachers. about 1 out of 3 teachers who rated their workload unmanageable left their school compared with 1 in 10 who did not rate their workload unmanageable. however, controlling for perceptions of leadership and professional growth, workload was no longer associated with turnover. accounting for measures of working conditions across schools and teachers, perceptions of the cmo's student disciplinary systems were the only significant predictor of turnover. purpose in arizona's mature, market-based school system, we know little about how school leaders make meaning of school choice policies and programs on the ground. using ethnographic methods, the author asked: how do school leaders in one arizona district public school and in its surrounding community, which includes a growing number of high-profile and "high-performing" education management organisation (emo) charter schools, make meaning of school choice policies and programs? the paper aims to discuss these issues. design/methodology/approach the author analysed 18 months of qualitative fieldnotes that the author collected during participant observations and six semi-structured school leader interviews from both traditional district public schools in the area (n=4) and leaders from emo charter schools (n=2). findings school leaders' decision-making processes were influenced by competitive pressures. however, perceptions of these pressures and leadership actions varied widely and were complicated by inclusive and exclusive social capital influences from stakeholders. district public school leaders felt pressure to package and sell schools in the marketplace, and charter leaders enjoyed the notion of markets and competition. charter schools enjoy support among republican and democratic lawmakers in states and congress, but little research has examined their support among the electorate. we take advantage of washington's 2012 charter school ballot initiativethe first voter-approved charter initiative in the united statesto shed light on the politics of school choice at the mass level. because in-depth, individual-level voter data are often unavailable in state-level elections, we leverage extensive precinctand district-level data to examine patterns of support and opposition toward the charter school initiative, focusing on how partisanship, ideology, and demographic factors serve to unify or divide voters. our analysis reveals that the coalition of supporters cut across usual partisan and demographic cleavages, producing somewhat strange bedfellows. this finding has important implications for the strategies advocacy groups may consider as they seek to expand or limit school choice programs via ballot initiatives as opposed to the statehouse, and provides suggestive evidence regarding the evolving shapers of voter support for school choice and ballot initiatives more generally. charter school effects remain uncertain. small lottery studies on high-performing charters produce impressive results, but large observational studies on the full range of charter schools are less encouraging. to make matters worse, these observational studies that aim for representativeness are based on only switchers, a small and unrepresentative population, arguably defeating the purpose of this design. in the first study of charter school effects on the full range of charter school students in north carolina, we find that, in general, charter school performance has improved over time, although often it continues to remain lower than traditional public school achievement. however, we find some evidence suggesting that black and economically disadvantaged students experience slightly more achievement growth in charter schools, particularly in reading, than do students who are white and not economically disadvantaged. in madison, wisconsin, a member of a typically marginalized community challenged the status quo with the proposal for a charter school dedicated to black youth. a year of debate ensued in mainstream news organizations and social media. calling on critical race theory, this research compares the legitimation strategies of journalists to school officials, activists, and others writing online. using textual analysis and in-depth interviews, the evidence demonstrated that even as journalists and others worked to reinforce the status quo by drawing from dominant institutions and principal storylines, the digital work of authentication and grassroots organizing of african-americans and other supporters of the charter school forced an alternative discourse to developone centered on experiences of inequities. the article also shows how organizational constraints stymie well-meaning reporters when trying to story-tell about issues of race, and how all of these strategies from both blacks and whites come from a place of identity construction and maintenance. background: over the past decade, courts and administrative agencies increasingly have considered cases that involve clashes between charter school proponents and teacher unions. while these cases have focused on a range of education policy issues, some cases have focused on arguably the most important legal and policy distinction applicable to charter schoolswhether a charter school should be considered public or private. purpose: this study examines the intersection of the public/private distinction in u.s. law and policy, and the shifting political positions of teacher unions and charter school proponents, in courts and agencies. we examine the history of the public/private distinction in u.s. law and policy and specifically in education, in addition to conducting an in-depth analysis of three recent decisions involving charter schools and teacher unions in which courts and agencies determined whether charter schools were public or private organizations. research design: this article is a legal analysis and historical case study. findings: three recent and high-profile education cases in agencies and courts reflect the continuing breakdown of the public/private distinction in law and policy. courts and agencies have hinged their decisions about the applicability of federal and state collective bargaining laws on this distinction and have grounded decisions about the basic constitutionality of state charter school laws in this distinction as well. however, them is little consistency in how the public/private distinction has been applied in legal clashes between teacher unions and charter schools. conclusion: our analysis underscores the limitations of the current debate over the public/private ate nature of charter schools and teacher unions, particularly in the institutional settings of courts and agencies, because this debate is largely untethered from issues of teaching and learning. however, our analysis also suggests that the public or private nature of charter schools still appears "up for grabs " in the legal arena. as such, courts and agencies might offer reformers a useful venue compared to the legislative arena for influencing how the public/ private distinction applies to charter schools. purpose: new teacher effectiveness measures have the potential to influence how principals hire teachers as they provide new and richer information about candidates to a traditionally information-poor process. this article examines how the hiring process is changing as a result of teacher evaluation reforms. research methods: data come from interviews with more than 100 central office personnel and 76 principals in six urban school districts and two charter management organizations. these sites were systematically sampled based on the amount of time and resources devoted to creating data systems and implementing processes that allow principals access to teacher effectiveness data. in addition to the fieldwork, we also surveyed all principals in six of the eight systems. a total of 795 principals responded to the survey, with an overall response rate of 85%. findings: the findings suggest that while teacher effectiveness data can be used to inform hiring decisions there is variation in how and the extent to which principals use these measures in hiring. this variation is explained by central office practices as they mediated how principals approached teacher effectiveness data in the hiring process, as well as individual principal characteristics such as principal knowledge and skills, perceived validity of data, and social capital. implications for research and practice: our results demonstrate ways in which school systems and principals are incorporating teacher effectiveness data into the hiring process. both principal preparation programs and school systems should focus on ensuring that principals have the skills and resources to use data for human capital decisions. studies examining public opinion toward the education system long have reported consensus in favor of increasing school funding, teacher salaries, and school choice. despite this apparent agreement, government reform of the us public school system has proven contentious and challenging for both political parties. new data from a diversity of sources allow us to examine the more contentious aspects of school-funding policy and offer insight as to why education-funding reform has been difficult. we find that from 1998 to 2016, citizens were remarkably consistent in their opinions on general questions of school funding. however, there has been substantial disagreement and change in the public opinion toward national versus local school funding, tying teacher salaries to student performance, and specific methods of increasing school choice. this macro-level stability and consistency and micro-level instability and inconsistency may help explain why implementing reform remains difficult even though the desire for reform is widespread. recent center for research on education outcomes (credo) analyses find that cyber charter schools in seventeen states show consistently low reading and mathematics value-added test scores compared to traditional public schools serving comparable students. this generally accords with prior research. we hypothesize that the relatively poor measured academic value-added of cyber charters reflects artificial testing conditions for students in those schools. accordingly, we have collected testing information from the seventeen credo states. state-level analyses find that cyber student persistence, which likely indicates school quality, correlates moderately and significantly with the cyber student academic value-added as measured by credo. further, we find evidence of lower cyber school value-added in states which permit cybers to use narrow testing windows, perhaps reflecting testing fatigue on the part of test-takers. we discuss implications, and suggest next steps for research exploring whether testing conditions affect measured cyber charter performance. the years during and after the great recession constrained revenue across all levels of government. revenue shortfalls in states decreased intergovernmental transfers, which compounded the plight of local governments already facing large declines in own-source property taxes. among the many casualties of this economic downturn were school districts, which responded by implementing a variety of financial management strategies to continue providing educational service provision to more than 50 million students across the united states. one strategy school districts continue to utilize is countercyclical stabilization of expenditures with fiscal slack, which raises an important-and, to date, largely unanswered-question of how school districts manage to accumulate fiscal slack, given both volatility and decreases in revenues in the years following the great recession. one approach is to use implicit slack from biased forecasts to generate explicit fiscal slack in the unassigned fund balance. this article provides evidence for this strategy by empirically testing it with data from kentucky school districts from school years 2001-2002 to 2013-2014. the findings indicate that school districts are engaged in strategic planning with implicit fiscal slack, which allows them to accumulate explicit fiscal slack, a cornerstone of prudent financial management that can provide budgetary flexibility during financial uncertainty. the relationship between implicit and explicit fiscal slack is heterogeneous over the business cycle, providing further evidence of strategic planning. practitioners can also use the findings of this article to support the strategic use of forecasts to help accumulate unassigned fund balance, particularly in the years after the great recession. although it is well known that certain charter schools dramatically increase students' standardized test scores, there is considerably less evidence that these human capital gains persist into adulthood. to address this matter, we match three years of lottery data from a high-performing charter high school to administrative college enrollment records and estimate the effect of winning an admissions lottery on college matriculation, quality, and persistence. seven to nine years after the lottery, we find that lottery winners are 10.0 percentage points more likely to attend college and 9.5 percentage points more likely to enroll for at least four semesters. unlike previous studies, our estimates are powerful enough to uncover improvements on the extensive margin of college attendance (enrolling in any college), the intensive margin (persistence of attendance), and the quality margin (enrollment at selective, four-year institutions). we conclude by providing nonexperimental evidence that more recent cohorts at other campuses in the network increased enrollment at a similar rate. recent policy emphasis on market mechanisms to drive up the performance of education systems has resulted in rising fees and increased competition in higher education in england, and in the creation of different types of self-governing state-funded schools run independently of municipal authority in compulsory schooling. university sponsorship of charter schools in the us raises issues which this article examines in relation to university sponsorship of academies in england. the article provides a quantitative overview of university sponsorship of academies over the last decade and explores how the policy context has shaped the discursive construction of sponsorship by the institutions concerned. different patterns of sponsorship linked to institutional position and differentiated discourses of 'sponsorship' consistent with 'academic entrepreneurship' are identified. the discursive function of sponsorship is argued to extend to a legitimation of the policy itself reflected in increasing government pressure on universities to sponsor academies. national philanthropies have recently played a prominent role in spending on u.s. urban school board elections, largely seeking to promote candidates who support charter schools. in atlanta in 2017, 30 candidates competed for nine open school board seats. one practice has been to fund intermediary organisations (ios) (e.g. advocacy groups, foundations) that disseminate information and research in an effort to shape public opinion. this paper analyses the role of ios in the 2017 school board race in atlanta. drawing on 12 interviews with policymakers and io representatives, analysis of campaign literature, and media accounts, the authors contrast the ways in which the intermediary and philanthropic sectors attempted to influence leaders' framing of educational policy issues. findings reveal a nascent capacity for ios in atlanta for shaping support for pro-charter board candidates. the paper discusses implications for understanding the role that ios may play in the politics of urban education. new conceptions of public governance across nations have taken hold globally. in this article, we explore the involvement and expansion of a broad range of actors in public services delivery, beyond the remit of traditional government. while there are common features of this trend, variations reflect the significance of context-sensitive policy, which consider national, state/provincial, and local factors, including governance structures. we report findings from our critical comparative policy analysis, which examines civil society actors as funders of public schooling in toronto, canada; melbourne, australia; and new orleans, usa. specifically, we identify the actors contributing financially to schools in these cities, and the policies that encourage and enable them to take on this new funding role. we highlight similarities and variations between practices and policies in the sites and present factors that give rise to them. we discuss implications of these actors' participation as funders and implications for democratic education. descriptions of charter schools as militaristic ?boot camps? continue to animate popular discourses. recently, the upper echelons of the charter school sector, commonly known as charter school management organizations (cmos), have come under intense scrutiny for their controversial ?no excuses? disciplinary practices. these socialization practices are regarded as investments whereby students are expected to become both adept test takers and ?good?, ?disciplined? aspirational citizens. as most ?no excuses? (ne) charter schools operate within segregated, low-income urban communities in the u.s., it can be argued that these schools function as vehicles for behavioral scrutiny and bodily surveillance shaping the lives and subjectivities of economically disadvantaged students of color. a curriculum focused on body control raises significant ethical questions regarding the educative practices for low-income children of color in the united states? divided society. drawing on discourse analysis, this paper focuses on bodily control portrayed in key texts (handbooks, videos, etc) used by some charter schools before drawing on bourdieu?s tool of habitus to show how a codified corporeal curriculum may work in cmos, where bodily control is deemed a prerequisite for academic excellence. education researchers and political scientists have long raised theoretical objections to market-based reforms like school choice on the grounds that these policies may undermine public participation in democratic politics and erode public support for public institutions like schools. little work, however, has empirically tested this claim. drawing on a unique dataset of 191 off-cycle school bond elections in michigan school districts between 2005 and 2017, this paper employs regression modeling to test whether voter turnout and school bond passage rates are lower in districts where school choice exit participation is high. results show that a 1 percentage point increase in a district's school choice participation rate is associated with a 1% decline in voter turnout in that district's school bond elections. this result is statistically significant even when controlling for other community and election characteristics associated with voter turnout. however, differential relationships are revealed for exit via charter schools and exit via interdistrict public school choice. the data do not reveal a significant relationship between school choice and the odds of bond passage on election day. background: with the expansion of charter school networks, population losses in urban district schools and stretched budgets have encouraged struggling districts to adopt closure-asreform. school closings have received considerable attention in the media as a controversial reform, reconfiguring the educational landscapes of over 70 post-industrial cities like chicago, detroit, and new orleans. however, in the last decade, few scholars have considered the project of examining closures-their process and their effects-empirically. purpose: in this article, we examine the rollout of 30 school closures in philadelphia in 2012 and 2013 to explain how school closures have become yet another policy technology of black community and school devaluation in the united states. moving beyond educational studies that have focused on the outcomes of mass school closures like student achievement and cost savings, we argue that a thorough theorization of how race, violence, and community values relate to school closure as process could help to explain the ways in which contemporary educational policy reforms are creating new modes of communal disposability in cities' poorest zip codes. setting/participants: data collection occurred in two comprehensive high schools in philadelphia slated for closure in 2012 and 2013: johnson high and franklin high. participants at both schools included students, teachers, parents, community members, and district officials. research design: the authors spent several years in their respective schools recording observations of instructional practice, community meetings, and district events and interviewing key informants such as students, teachers, administrators, and district officials. the first author spent three years at johnson high school, from september 2011 to june 2013. the second author spent five years at franklin high school, from september 2008 to june 2013. she also spent hundreds of hours at the /ugh school examining archival materials and interviewing students, teachers, and alumni about their experiences in the school and community. in addition to their individual case studies, the authors jointly transcribed and coded over two dozen community and district meetings' video recordings during the 2012 and 2013 closures. in the aftermath of the school closures process, we used a comparative ethnographic method to com are and contrast the events that occurred at these two schools. findings: suturing anthropologies of violence and education to frame the analysis,, we explore moments of collision between policy discourses deployed by state and local officials that crafted closures as inevitable and threatened school communities' articulations of the racialized implications of the closures. we further localize our analysis to demonstrate how two school communities-one majority asian and another majority black-with similar performances and characteristics met dramatically different fates. given the lack of transparency in how decisions were made around which schools to close, the ways in which these communities read and responded to the closure threat offer a window into the ways in which race informed the valuation process across schools. conclusions/recommendations: we conclude with a plea to state and federal policymakers to consider the long-term ramifications of school choice expansion and state disinvestment for the health and stability of traditional public schools. we encourage policymakers to move in a more reparative direction, prioritizing the needs of those "unchosen" by choice and imagining a system that might serve all students more equitably. today, states face the challenge of how best to educate their citizens in light of state constitutional obligations to provide public education. lawmakers must decide between investing more in traditional public schools or pursuing educational alternatives for students and their families. the school choice movement advocates for legal reform creating alternatives such as charter schools and school vouchers. this note examines the ongoing doctrinal and social effects of school choice in north carolina. doctrinally, school choice has successfully shifted the debate about what the purpose of state education law should be. as recently as one decade ago, statutory and decisional law was primarily premised on the idea that public education was a societal good designed to educate the citizenry and was governed by the costs and benefits to the community. now, north carolina education law increasingly emphasizes the importance of creating distinctive, varied school options and the benefits individual students accrue by accessing educational alternatives. the change in north carolina education law raises serious practical concerns. rationalizing the benefits of publicly sponsored education in terms of individual gain leaves some students behind and produces negative social outcomes, such as segregation of schools. charter schools and private schools funded by vouchers also have incentives to recruit high-performing students and not accommodate various disadvantaged groups within north carolina. unless the state is careful in considering the needs of all individual students, legalizing more state-sponsored school choice alternatives will exacerbate the relationship between family resources and educational opportunity. charter schools in urban environments have been scrutinized for their effectiveness. this study attempted to determine whether students attending midwestern urban charter schools outperformed students in traditional schools on the state's accountability system over a 5-year time period. using a quasi-experimental research design, data were collected from 31 midwestern urban school districts, along with data from 88 adjacent contiguous charter schools during the 2008 to 2012 school years. findings in this study suggest that students who transferred from traditional public schools to charter schools did not outperform academically as their corresponding counterparts in mathematics and reading, and had lower attendance rates, over the first three consecutive years of their attendance. in the succeeding 2 years, however, charter school students outperformed traditional students in both reading and mathematics, and had greater attendance rates, than students attending traditional public schools. the study also found that a student's ethnic and socioeconomic background had a significant influence on student outcome measures. the paper evaluates the viewpoints and proposals of american neoconservatives regarding the reform of the system of education in the 1990s. the author attempts to track the evolution of concepts and to determine the hierarchy of priorities. a detailed analysis of neoconservatives' views on the problems of school education gives the possibility to see the features of neoconservative approaches on ideological level, as well as on the level of philosophical and cultural understanding of reality. the author describes the differences between the neoconservative educational policy and the approaches of other groups of american conservatives to the problem. the article pays special attention to cooperation between the largest corporations and neoconservatives to promote school education reform in the 1990s. to take the interests of american businesses into account, neoconservatives are taking appropriate initiatives to reform the school system. the article examines the creation of the so-called "counterintelligentsia" and the intent of neoconservative intellectual centres to formulate new ideas and to promote them on the market of educational services. it is vital to note the role of the manhattan institute that promoted the idea of school choice and an educational voucher as its top priorities. the author also analyzes the role of neoconservatives in supporting charter schools. they are well-recognized experts on the issue, and their position is strongly supported by the key neoconservative intellectual center the hudson institute. an attention is paid to the analysis of documents adopted by the leadership of the republican party in the field of school education. the article analyzes "goals 2000" as a key document of the party initiated by the neoconservatives. the educational policy is considered as an important factor in analyzing the conservative movement. governing boards are a critical asset for every public and nonprofit organization. scholars have found that effective boards are associated with organizations that tend to perform better than those with ineffective boards, in the public and nonprofit sectors. the attention these boards receive because of their crucial missions demands the need for high-quality training and development activities to give them the best chance at high performance. in this study, we examined the extent to which school boards in minnesota-both traditional public and nonprofit charter-engage in developmental activities, and we looked at differences between these board types in how they prioritize board development activities. our findings indicate a number of significant differences between public and nonprofit boards in terms of the extent to which they engage in board development activities, the reasons for engaging in those development activities, and how these boards prioritize development activities. chronic absenteeism in k-12 schools is strongly associated with critical educational outcomes such as student achievement and graduation. yet, the causes of chronic absenteeism are complex, with environmental, family/individual, and school factors all affecting the likelihood of a student attending school regularly. this exploratory study examines whether school organizational effectiveness has the potential to moderate external influences on chronic absenteeism. using school-level scores from the 5essentials surveys, we find that, in traditional public schools, schools that are organized for effectiveness have lower rates of chronic absenteeism, while controlling for student demographics and grade level. in particular, schools with higher scores for "involved families" have lower chronic absenteeism. while charter schools in detroit have significantly lower rates of chronic absenteeism than traditional public schools, we did not find an association between organizational effectiveness and chronic absenteeism in charter schools. this suggests that student sorting by school type may produce variation in chronic absenteeism rates that is not moderated by school actions. these findings have important implications for practice and policy, as educators seek to reduce chronic absenteeism in response to pressures from high-stakes accountability systems. the catholic school system in the united states is undergoing significant changes in size, populations served and the funding models which have traditionally supported such schools. the closing of many schools in urban areas in the last 10 years in conjunction with the rising costs of schooling suggests that unless a new approach to funding schools is developed, the future of catholic education in the united states is seriously threatened and with it the american church. this article explores the link between traditional sources of funding catholic schools and the increased role of federal and state funds. the rise of charter schools has added a significant model for catholic schools to emulate in regarding future sources of funding. three strategies for future funding are explored with an emphasis on the development of faith-based charter schools and the development of 'catholic' charter schools. scholars have found differences between older and newer foundations and their giving priorities and strategies, especially in education. foundations founded in recent decades with still-living benefactors have been more vocal, result-oriented, and focused on education initiatives like charter schools and alternative certification than their older counterparts. in this paper, i examine whether these differing patterns hold for new and old foundation grants to state departments of education, leading new foundations to target contexts politically amenable to education reform while old foundations focus less on politics and more on state need. using data on the largest 1000 foundations, in addition to grants from the gates and wallace foundations, i find that new, but not old, foundations, are more likely to support education reform policies when giving to state education agencies. i also find that new, but not old, foundations support state education agencies possessing political contexts conducive to education reform as well as higher levels of child poverty. i illustrate these findings with the case of kentucky. these findings suggest that, by taking advantage of state need while seeking out political allies, new foundations behave like interest groups in their grants to government. what happens after longstanding policies are overthrown in fierce political battles, events scholars refer to as punctuated equilibrium? do these new policies remain static and unchanging until the next big punctuation, or do they continue to change in explainable and predictable ways? in this article, we develop a model of postpunctuation policy change grounded in theories of boundedly rational decision-making by policymakers. uncertain about how well the new policy will perform, policymakers learn to rely on competing interest groups for information or, under certain circumstances, look to other political jurisdictions for cues on how their policies ought to be further refined. we test our predictions by studying changes in state charter school laws from 1996 to 2014. we find evidence of policy change, and even convergence, across states suggesting that policies after punctuation do change in ways explained as reactions to political pressures in an environment fraught with uncertainty. charter school advocates see the infusion of market competition into the educational sector as a means to achieving greater efficiency, effectiveness, and equity. within this framework, consumer demand is understood to regulate the charter sector. this article challenges the adequacy of this premise, arguing that the structure of the financing of charter schools plays a decisive, if not determining, role in directing growth. drawing on an analysis of the financing that enabled the dramatic growth of the uno charter school network (ucsn) in chicago during the 2000s, the article explores the implications of speculative borrowing and spiraling debt burdens on charter schools and on the functioning of the charter sector more broadly. the analysis reveals that (1) new debt was increasingly used to retire existing debt, (2) the structure of new financing assumed continued growth, and (3) schools within the network were yoked together as revenue from existingand anticipatedschools was pledged to repay new debt. this article takes advantage of a recently released national data set on school site expenditures to evaluate spending variations between traditional district operated schools and charter schools operated by for-profit versus nonprofit management firms. prior research has revealed the revenue-enhancement, private fund-raising capacity of major nonprofit providers. for-profit providers may face greater pressure to reduce operating expenses. as such, we hypothesize that regardless of average differences in staffing expenses between district and charter schools, school site staffing expenditures are likely to be lower in for-profit than in nonprofit managed charter schools. furthermore, school site instructional staffing expenditures may be lower yet. applying national, then state-level models to compare spending for schools of similar size, serving similar grade ranges and students with similar attributes (income status, special education, and language proficiency status), we find these assumptions largely to be true. specifically, on average across all settings (global model) we find that charters spend less per pupil on instructional salaries compared with districts; furthermore, for-profit charters spend less than nonprofits. furthermore, for-profit charters spend statistically significantly less (p < .05) on instructional salaries, compared with district schools in many states. purpose over the past decade, policy researchers and advocates have called for the decentralization of teacher hiring decisions from district offices to school principals. the purpose of this paper is to document the trends across two and a half decades in principals' reported influence over teacher hiring decisions in the usa and explore how and whether principal influence varies systematically across contexts. design/methodology/approach regression analysis with secondary data using seven waves of nationally representative data from the schools and staffing survey. findings principals report increased influence over the 25 years that the data span. while principals of urban schools were much more likely to report having less influence over teacher hiring compared to their non-urban counterparts in the late 1980s and early 1990s, their reported influence increased more than that of other principals. research limitations/implications empowering principals as primary decision-makers assumes that they have the best information on which to make hiring decisions. at the same time, other research suggests that local teacher labor market dynamics contribute to the inequitable sorting of teachers across schools. this study raises questions regarding the implications of the increased influence of principals in teacher hiring on equity of access to quality teachers across schools. originality/value this is the first study to explore whether and how principal influence in teacher hiring decisions has changed over time. in this article, we use originally collected survey data to determine how nonprofit charter school board members in the states of wisconsin, michigan, and minnesota define accountability. we find that charter board members generally define accountability downward toward student achievement and staff performance, inward toward board performance, or upward toward authorizer compliance. we use the results of the survey to make a series of public policy recommendations to help charter school boards look outward in their accountability orientation as a means of addressing the calls for increased public accountability for the charter school sector. the results add practical value to policy discussions regarding charter school accountability and theoretical value to scholars studying public and nonprofit governance reforms. this article examines the relationship between neoliberalism and journalism as it relates to the articulation of a marketized education agenda. we examine the case of campbell brown, the former cnn anchor, who, after leaving journalism in 2010, reinvented herself as a high-profile education campaigner from 2012 to 2016, asserting an identity that was hostile to trade unions and supportive of charter schools. brown initially represented her advocacy as a departure from journalism, though the rationale changed in 2015 when she co-founded the 74, an educational news website that promised to reconcile a commitment to journalism and advocacy. we analyse the significance of brown's case from a field theory perspective, especially in how it captures the inter-field dynamics of journalistic power and highlights brown's specific ability to convert her media capital into a form of cultural capital to speak about educational issues. we then examine the resonances between a journalistic habitus and neoliberal logics, as illustrated in this case by the discursive importance of appeals to transparency and accountability to both journalism and neoliberal governance. we end by briefly reflecting on the general significance of our analysis, partly with reference to keane's concept of "monitory democracy" and crouch's concept of "post-democracy". charter schools can influence a school district's costs by reducing economies of scale and by changing the share of high cost students a district serves, but might also increase the district's efficiency through competition. utilizing data for new york state school districts from 1998/99 to 2013/14, we estimate difference-in-differences models to assess the effect of charter schools on enrollment and student composition. then, we estimate an expenditure function, using data prior to the charter school program, to measure the costs associated with reaching a given performance standard for students in various need categories and different enrollments. next, using the entire data set, we run a second expenditure function to determine changes in efficiency associated with charter school entry. we find that charter schools increase the cost of providing education, and that these cost increases are larger than short-run efficiency gains, but are offset by efficiency gains in the long term. context: given the growing popularity of the portfolio management model (pmm) as a method of improving education, it is important to examine how these market-based reforms are sustained over time and how the politics of sustaining this model have substantial policy implications. purpose of study: the purpose of this article is to examine important patterns and trends in the relationship between campaign contributions to local and state school board elections and the sustainability of the pmm in urban districts. we provide a descriptive analysis of the role of interest groups in education reform in post-katrina new orleans and document how the pmm changed the landscape of education politics, with a focus on the actors, both local and national, that sustain the pmm. research design: we describe the creation of act 35 and the evolution of educational governance changes in new orleans to determine whether the same interest groups that played a role in the origin of the pmm also contributed to its sustainment. we analyze how these educational governance changes influenced the politics of education reform using data from the louisiana ethics commission on campaign contributions to both state and local school board elections. we apply several non-board and board governance theories to examine interest group behavior: we also conduct interviews with stakeholders throughout the educational system to inform our discussion of the evolution of educational governance and the politics of education reform in post-katrina new orleans, as well as the categorization of candidates in school board elections. results: we find that in the post-katrina era, there was a diversification of actors in the interest group landscape. these groups influenced educational governance through unprecedented levels of campaign contributions to the state and local school board elections. the influence of interest groups, especially outofstate actors, contributed to an emerging shift in political control from "traditional" school board candidates to an increase in "pro-reform" board members. conclusions: the pmm is accompanied by heightened interest as well as an influx of out-of-state actors in educational policy making and the provision of public education. unprecedented levels of campaign contributions suggest that state and local school board elections may be one of the primary mechanisms through which interest groups influenced post-katrina educational governance. out-of-state campaign contributions were mostly in support of pro-portfolio candidates. there appears to be tangible national support for the pmm that may play a crucial role in sustaining these reforms. objective we compare academic achievement in charter schools versus two types of traditional public school in the state of michigan over a 10-year period. charter schools serve as a reform measure for failing public schools, so the natural research question is: do charter schools generate higher achievement levels than observationally comparable public schools? methods we have assembled a longitudinal data set spanning academic years 2002/2003-2011/2012 containing proficiency rates on standardized math and reading tests for grades 4, 7, and 11. our set of control variables includes demographic measures, free lunch eligibility, school characteristics, funding per student, and locational measures. we model unobserved heterogeneity using random effects estimation. results we find that michigan charter schools significantly underperform traditional public schools in both subjects and in all three grade levels early in the study period. these gaps narrow considerably, and in some cases disappear, by the end of the period. conclusion michigan is noteworthy among states with charter schools for its deregulated and competitive charter environment. our results suggest that michigan charters nevertheless were doing about as well on the state's academic achievement tests as observationally comparable public schools by the end of the period. national data trends underscore the "problem" of black male achievement. beneath the causes and consequences are the ideologies used to frame the problem and its solutions. the ideology of meritocracy is routinely employed to rationalize educational disparities. this article examined how white male teachers, in a charter school designed to promote academic success among black boys, made sense of boys' academic achievement patterns. interview analysis revealed the persistence of meritocracy, as teachers (a) located the problem within black boys' identities; (b) constructed race, masculinity, and social class as barriers to students' academic success and teachers' effectiveness; and (c) positioned themselves relationally away from their students and the problem itself. we discuss implications for the academic development of black boys. informal and institutional barriers may limit teacher movement between charter schools and traditional public schools (tpss). however, we know little about how teachers choose schools in areas with a robust charter school sector. this study uses qualitative data from 123 teachers to examine teachers' job decisions in three cities with varying charter densities: san antonio, detroit, and new orleans. our findings illuminate different types of segmentation and factors that facilitate and limit mobility between sectors. we find that structural policies within each sector can create barriers to mobility across charter schools and tpss and that teachers' ideological beliefs and values serve as informal, personal barriers that reinforce divides between sectors. this study offers implications for policy in districts with school choice. purpose: this article describes one charter school's 'diversity' initiative-a relocation to a racially and socioeconomically diverse site-intended to reintegrate minoritized students displaced by gentrification. research design: we employ critical race quantitative intersectionality to frame the descriptive analyses of student enrollment, city census, and parent survey data that narrates the resulting student demographics after a school's relocation. our goal in utilizing an anti-racist framework rooted in critical race theory is to a) quantify the racist material impact of "race-neutral" reform through intersectional data mining, b) disrupt the notion of letting "numbers speak for themselves" without critical analysis, and c) taking a transdisciplinary perspective to reveal the hidden patterns of whiteness under the guise of diversity. findings: our findings highlight the limits of a school's agency to implement 'diversity' policies aimed at reintegrating minoritized students displaced from opportunity. while the relocation racially diversified the student population, the policy failed to reintegrate the district's historically minoritized population. this exclusion both limited who had the right to use and enjoy the school and reinforced the school's status and reputation, thus cementing its whiteness as property. charter schools enroll a growing share of public school students, leading to concerns about the financial implications of charter schools for traditional public schools (tpss). using detailed expenditure data for school districts in california, i exploit variation in charter school enrollment across time and between districts to evaluate how district spending and overall financial health change as nearby charter sectors expand. i find that larger charter enrollment shares are associated with lower levels of per-pupil spending and reduced fiscal health in tpss. however, these relationships in some cases exhibit significant nonlinearities and are much smaller in magnitude than what has been observed in other states. consequently, larger charter enrollment shares are not associated with major differences in the proportion of expenditures allocated to various activities, goods, or services. differences between these results and those from similar analyses in other states may be explicable in terms of california's economic and policy context, providing lessons for policymakers. despite the growing media attention paid to charter-school unions, comparatively little empirical research exists. drawing on interview data from two cities (detroit, mi, and new orleans, la), our exploratory study examined charter-school teachers' motivations for organizing, the political and power dimensions, and the framing of unions by both teachers and administrations. we found that improving teacher retention, and thus school stability, was a central motivation for teacher organizers, whereas, simultaneously, high teacher turnover stymied union drives. we also found that charter administrators reacted with severity to nascent unionization drives, harnessing school-as-family metaphors and at-will contracts to prevent union formation. as the charter sector continues to grow, understanding why teachers want unions and how those unions differ from traditional public school unions is crucial to analyzing the long-term viability of these schools and the career trajectories of the teachers who work in them. neoliberal education reforms in schools serving sizeable black populations throughout the united states have proliferated and are being transported to black educational contexts abroad. building on a framework of coloniality, antiblackness and a review of black colonial education this relational analysis argues that contemporary neoliberal education reforms not only resemble the early 20th century movement to spread black industrial education from the american south to regions of the global southincluding regions of west, south and east africa but also reproduce logics of antiblack coloniality. this framework is applied to two cases: the chartering of schools in new orleans louisiana following hurricane katrina in 2005, and the 2016 decision to privatize the entire school system in liberia. far from 'unlikely' this article argues that the application of market-based reforms to schools in the black souths (the 'urban' ghettos of the united states as well as the 'underdeveloped' global south) is a continuation of 20(th) century colonial education interventions and the persistent claim of blackness as always in crisis. background/context: a primary argument that supports charter school policy assumes students favor schools with high academic performance ratings, leading to systemic school improvement. previous research challenges this assumption but has limited generalizability because geographic and enrollment constraints limit student choice sets. purpose/objective: this study examines student enrollment patterns within cyber charter schools in pennsylvania, a state where elected policymakers tend to view choice as a means for school improvement. cyber charter schools are advantageous to study in this context because they have fewer enrollment barriers, helping researchers account for constraints found in previous studies. research design: using consecutive years of student level enrollment data, we use descriptive statistics and multinomial logistic regression analyses to answer the following questions: is a particular cyber charter school more popular if it displays relatively higher performance on academic indicators? to what extent do enrollments in the highest performing cyber charter school relate to the demographics of students and school environments that they left? findings/results: the findings suggest that despite the more accessible choice sets inherent in the cyber charter school sector, academic performance indicators still are not linked to popularity within the sector. enrollment clustering persists along student demographics and feeder district traits. conclusions/recommendations: these findings suggest that even in the cyber charter school sector where key enrollment restrictions are removed, inequitable enrollment patterns persist. these findings continue to challenge basic assumptions used in school choice policy framing. policymakers should consider this evidence when and if they design and implement charter school policy, creating policy that accounts for inequitable enrollments that occur under current policy logic. arizona's "wild west," free-market education approach via school-choice policies reflects the expansion of neo-liberal reforms, which emphasize private provision and governance of public services once markets are established. indeed, charter schools, tax credit programs for public (state) and private schools, inter-district open enrolment, and neovouchers are changing arizona's traditional public school systems and the communities where they are situated. it is known that new, incentivist market-based systems can result in decreased democratic school accountability and the thinning of collective democratic political actions. further, the rapid entry and growth of not-for-profit and profit-making charter schools and education management organizations in the usa raises questions about equitable student access. it is not fully understood, however, how mature school-choice systems affect local communities "on the ground"-that is, how are school policies understood and acted out? this study employed ethnographic methods to analyze the perceptions and actions of community stakeholders in arizona, including school leaders, teachers, parents, students, and institution and community organizers, at one district public school and in its surrounding community, including its charter schools. the author examines issues of power, since all community actors are not equally able to engage in school-choice practices. the purpose of our multi-case study was to understand the experiences of non-novice new york city and washington, dc public charter school principals who had participated in leadership coaching as a component of their leadership development. eight new york city and washington dc public charter school principal cases were selected through purposeful sampling. data were collected through semi-structured interviews, documents, and artifacts, which were analyzed, coded and grouped into three broader themes: the coaching process, the impact of coaching, and principal leader identity construction. the findings supported the following conclusions: (a) participants' experiences of coaching were inconsistent with the coaching literature; (b) the impact of coaching was shaped by perceived competencies of the coach and the structure of the coaching session; and (c) participants' leader identity construction was supported through the process of coaching. new orleans schools experienced drastic reforms after hurricane katrina in 2005. to examine teachers' perspectives on these reforms, we surveyed 323 teachers who taught in new orleans public schools before 2005 and in 2013-2014. teachers directly compared the learning and work environments and student and teacher outcomes of their current schools to those of their pre-katrina schools. returning teachers perceived significant and generally positive changes in learning environments and student outcomes but mixed positive and negative changes in work environments. despite improvements in school environments, the net result is that teachers became less satisfied with their jobs. these results show that intensive, sustained school reform can lead to significant changes, but these changes can have negative impacts on teachers. many studies have investigated whether students in charter schools differ systematically from those in traditional public schools with respect to prior achievement, special education, or english language learner status. none, however, has examined gender differences in charter school enrollment. using data for all u.s. public schools over 11 years, we find charters enroll a higher fraction of girls, a gap that has grown steadily over time and is larger in secondary grades and kipp schools. we then analyze longitudinal student-level data from north carolina to examine whether differential rates of attrition explain this gap. we find boys are more likely than girls to exit charters once enrolled, and gender differences in attrition are larger than in traditional schools. however, the difference is not large enough to explain the full enrollment gap between charter and traditional schools in north carolina, suggesting gaps exist from initial matriculation. the federal school improvement grant (sig) program allocated us$7 billion over nearly a decade in an effort to produce rapid and lasting improvements in schools identified as low performing. in this article, we use a regression discontinuity design to estimate the effect of ohio's sig turnaround efforts on student achievement and school administration. the results indicate that ohio's sig program significantly increased reading and math achievement, with effects in both subjects of up to 0.20 standard deviations in the second year after sig eligibility identification. estimates for the third year are somewhat larger, in the range of one quarter of a standard deviation. we provide evidence that these effects were primarily attributable to schools that implemented the sig turnaround model. we also show that sig eligibility had a positive effect on per-pupil spending, but no average effect on administrative outcomes, including staff turnover, the number of staff members in the school, and school closure. these null overall effects mask heterogeneity across sig models, however. most notably, turnaround schools experienced more turnover than they otherwise would have, whereas transformation schools experienced less. a particularly controversial topic in current education policy is the expansion of the charter school sector. this paper analyzes the spillover effects of charter schools on traditional public school (tps) students in new york city. i exploit variation in both the timing of charter school entry and distance to the nearest charter school to obtain credibly causal estimates of the impacts of charter schools on tps student performance, and i am among the first to estimate the impacts of charter school co-location. i further add to the literature by exploring potential mechanisms for these findings with school-level data on per pupil expenditures (ppe), and parent and teacher perceptions of schools. briefly, i find charter schools significantly increase tps student performance in both english language arts and math, and decrease the probability of grade retention. effects increase with charter school proximity and are largest in tpss co-located with charter schools. potential explanations for improved performance include increased ppe, academic expectations, student engagement, and a more respectful and safe school environment after charter entry. the findings suggest that more charter schools in new york city may be beneficial at the margin, and co-location may be mutually beneficial for charter and traditional public schools. reformers are increasingly calling for and adopting practice-based approaches to teacher preparation, with particular emphasis on identifying and centering core practices. in this article, we argue that organizing teacher education around core practices brings its own risks, including the risk of peripheralizing equity and justice. situating our argument within the broad economic trends affecting labor and higher education in the 21st century, we begin by examining the linkages between the core practices movement and organizations that advocate market-based solutions to education. we then explore how constructs of practice and improvisation and commitments to equity and justice are taken up, and with what implications and consequences, in core practices scholarship and its applications. in conclusion, we consider how work being done around core practices might contribute to a collective struggle for greater equity and justice in schools and in society. ubuntu-inspired leadership is substantial for responding, in an african way, to the needs of schools seeking to improve their performance. evoking practices, such as letsema and social cohesion, underpins an african panacea in executing work for desired outcomes. with little extant research on the concept of ubuntu leadership, this article reports on a pioneering study that examined the extent to which infusing the value of ubuntu influences the practices of schools seeking to improve their performance. the objective was to explore measures that ubuntu leadership could take to instil values that would bring about the desired performance. adopting an ethnographic approach, enquiring conversations were held with principals (individually), focus groups involving parents, other managers and teachers. this resulted in the triangulation of observations (formal and informal) and document analysis. the findings revealed three aspects epitomising ubuntu leadership, namely: holistic ubuntu deportment in leadership practice; cohesive oneness embodied by ubuntu and values within; and voluntarism as an enterprising exercise of letsema. the article concludes by chronicling a leadership charter towards harvesting the cliche simunye or esprit-de-corps. purpose analyzing data collected from the charter school board members and the superintendent in a charter school district in a southeastern state about the quality and usefulness of training, the purpose of this paper is to provide an important foundation for understanding training and development for charter school boards in the usa. design/methodology/approach this study uses a qualitative case study approach to examine a charter school district and the preparedness of charter school board members to serve in that district. the authors sampled one charter school district in the southeast region of the usa and interviewed five charter school board members and the superintendent. findings the first theme is composition and responsibility of charter school board members, which outlines the roles and responsibilities that charter school board members assume when they serve on this charter district board. the second theme is preparedness to serve, which traces the readiness of charter school board members to serve on a board. the final theme is training and documents related to the kind of training charter school board members receive once they are appointed to the board. originality/value this study provides a conceptual framework about the dimensions and standards associated with preparedness to serve as a charter school board member and broadens the authors' understanding of the roles and responsibilities of charter school boards, their preparedness to serve and the training and development they receive. over the past quarter century, charter schools have evolved from a fringe educational philosophy to a prominent academic option for american school children and their families. while the history and political positioning of charter schools have been well documented, the tenet of choice continues to be central in the debate regarding the merit of the charter alternative to traditional public schools. in this essay, i seek to dispel the notion that choice is a simple selection between binary opportunities, but rather a complex exchange between stake-holders. i present how educational options such as charters present a different paradigm of values when compared to precedents of the common schools of the mid-nineteenth century and established public education policy. although some practices in charter schools may challenge the comforts of long-standing educational traditions, i assert that within these choices there may be opportunity for the music education community to truly reimagine its practices. i conclude with a call to music educators to make important decisions regarding charter schools and music education. thoughtful steps can be taken to develop this curricular conversation and music educators have a professional duty to begin the dialogue. failing to do so will be, by default, a choice to limit music education to traditional venues, thereby ignoring one of the fastest growing educational enterprises of our generation and an opportunity to provide a music education for all. this article presents a study of state-imposed neoliberal education reform and resistance in post-katrina new orleans. in hurricane katrina's aftermath, the city's school system was dramatically reformed with most of its public schools replaced by privately administered "charter schools:" the article examines the social contradictions created by this reform and characterizes how the city's education activists articulate their resistance to education privatization. situating the reform within new orleans's post-katrina neoliberal reconfiguration, it analyzes how simultaneous processes of education privatization and racial dispossession have made the reform lack popular legitimacy. the article concludes by considering how the neoliberal policies implemented after the storm were conditioned by race, arguing that racial politics should be considered fundamental, rather than adjacent, to the study of neoliberalization in us cities. across the united states, the no-excuses' charter school movement featuring strict discipline policies and rigorous academic standards has gained popularity among schools serving poor and working-class students of color. in this article, we examine how black and latinx parents of students with disabilities(1) negotiated and experienced these charter school practices of rigor, which disciplined, managed, and regulated students' social differences. drawing from a yearlong qualitative research study, we examine interviews with black and latinx parents who experienced conflict with charter schools and the school lawyers, along with school artifacts we gathered such as parent handbooks and website information. we found parents experienced what we refer to as the irony of rigor:' the contradictory double-movement through which students of color with disabilities desired inclusion into rigorous' charter schools which then excluded them using rigor' as a central feature of student pushout practices. we present the irony of rigor in three interrelated acts: act i: the lure of rigor (i.e. what drew parents to charter schools); act ii: the body meets rigor (i.e. how schools disciplined and managed student differences); and act iii: the consequences of rigor (i.e., what happened to students and parents while and after experiencing rigorous practices). we contextualize the irony of rigor within the relationship between disability, race, and neoliberalism. few studies have investigated what occurs inside charter schools with respect to instructional leadership, teaching, and learning. to address this gap in the literature, this case study examines two major issues: how the principals at four charter schools enact instructional leadership in their respective schools, and what barriers the principals encounter when enacting instructional leadership at their school sites. the results highlight three main categories of instructional leadership practices: developing a school mission, managing curriculum and instruction, and promoting school climate and culture. in addition, the data reveal that while the principals attempted to engage in instructional leadership, they encountered barriers related to budgeting and staffing. the paper broadens the scholarly understanding of instructional leadership in schools with high levels of autonomy. background/context: studies that compare the achievement benefits of charter public schools versus traditional public schools (tpss) yield quite uneven results. the quality and long-term commitment of teachers represent related mediators that may help to explain effective and ineffective charter schools. early findings on the comparative rates of annual turnover-exiting from one's school-appear to show higher turnover in charter schools relative to tpss. but longitudinal data that allow scholars to track teachers over time remain rare. little evidence exists on how organizational context may interact with individual teacher characteristics to further explain the propensity to leave one's school. purpose/objective: prior research on teacher turnover focused mostly on whether or not and who leaves. our research builds on and extends prior studies by investigating not only whether and who but also when a teacher leaves. the phenomenon of our study emphasizes the dynamic nature of teacher exit; namely, we are interested in examining when teachers are at the greatest risk of exiting schools. this dynamic focus marks a departure from the typical teacher turnover analysis in which exit is conceptualized as a status (i.e., exit or not). population/participants/subjects: we used a large sample of elementary (4,788) and secondary teachers (8,467) panel data (from 2002-03 to 2008-09) from the lausd. a little over 80% of the teachers in the elementary sample were female, while 61% of the secondary teachers were female. about 40% of the elementary and 47% of the secondary teachers were white. the average years of teaching experience was about two for both elementary and secondary teachers. special education teachers accounted for 12% of the elementary and 15% of the secondary study sample, respectively. research design: we combined event history and multilevel modeling analysis in order to investigate when a teacher exits his or her first assigned school and how organizational membership conditions decision processes at the individual level. conclusions/recommendations: the longitudinal and multilevel analysis of teacher turnover supports our theoretical position that organizational dynamics and contextual factors are likely to condition the decision process made at the individual level and thereby influence individual behaviors (i.e., decision to leave a school at certain point in time). this cross-level theoretical perspective adds further support to the argument that focusing on recruiting capable teachers and paying attention to working conditions for long-term staffing stability are aspects of schooling that matter most for student learning, as opposed to a horse-race game (i.e., choice and competition). background/context: research on the patterns of philanthropic funding of charter schools has largely focused on the behavior of major foundations. this work has documented how the once diffuse giving by these major foundations has become increasingly concentrated on a small number of jurisdictional challengers in the form of charter schools, charter management organizations, and intermediary organizations. purpose: the current study examines whether this convergence in giving has spread to the entire network of foundations giving to charter-school-related organizations. we do so by extending current work and focus on the broader institutional field that includes the interactions between major foundations, smaller foundations, and grantees over time. moreover, we look to see, if such a field-wide convergence is present, whether there is evidence consistent with the institutional process of isomorphism in which low-status foundations match the giving strategy of higher status ones. research design: we test for these dynamics using exponential random graph models (ergms), a hypothesis-testing framework for network analysis. more specifically, we analyze the funding ties among 809 foundations that gave grants to california charter schools and charter-school-related organizations between 2003 and 2014, as available through the foundation directory online. we constructed multiyear windows to examine funding ties between foundations and recipients, using organizational characteristics, such as foundation type, foundation year, professionalization, foundation size, organizational type, and location, and endogenous features of the network as independent variables. findings: results indicate centralization of giving over time, as larger and newer foundations began practicing more targeted giving and the most connected recipients were involved in a disproportionate number of funding ties. we also found evidence consistent with institutionalization, as foundations with professional staffs played a larger role in giving, and smaller foundations increasingly engaged in behavior similar to their larger peers over time. finally, we found evidence for the consistent effect of propinquity: we observe co-funding and co-receiving ties between foundations and grantees in geographical proximity to each other. conclusions: this work examines the network dynamics of charter school philanthropic giving and provides evidence for the centralization and institutionalization of the field. in turn, this may create inequity in funding for charter schools because it may be more difficult for smaller or less ideologically popular organizations to penetrate the field. policymakers should be aware of these forces and should take them into account when making budgetary and funding decisions. purpose this paper considers the implications of reform efforts that rely on charter management organizations to assume operational control of underperforming neighborhood schools. the purpose of this paper is to examine the way in which changes to the education sector place enormous pressure on these organizations to both manage instruction and their social environments. design/methodology/approach the research presents the results from a longitudinal case study of two organizations operating within the tennessee achievement school district (asd). interviews, observations and document analysis provided insight into the perspectives of school operators, state officials and community leaders. the study design allowed researchers to observe the influence of the environment on school operators over a four-year period. findings results show that the environment that included a muscular state, market pressures, ngos and local communities placed an extreme and contradictory set of demands on organizations operating schools, pressing them to develop robust systems of instruction, leadership and teacher development while actively working to ensure social legitimacy in the community. neither a national network nor a small local startup began with a strategy aligned to these environmental demands, and both needed to make substantial revisions. research limitations/implications research into contemporary educational reform should account for rapidly evolving environments that feature a complex mix of resources and incentives. careful examination of the consequences of these environments for educational organizations will further our understanding of how markets, communities and governments are shaping the education sector. practical implications the extraordinary challenges that confront organizations that operate in crowded and contested environments preclude fast or dramatic results. policymakers and the public should assume an incremental process of organizational learning and improvement. setting unrealistic expectations and focusing exclusively on impact risks delegitimizing organizations and policy initiatives before they have time to adapt. originality/value this research reported here is among the few studies that have explored the experiences and implications of ngos that have attempted to assume operational control of underperforming neighborhood schools. the popularity of this approach among a growing number of states highlights the importance of this topic. us charter schools experience higher rates of teacher turnover than traditional public schools. the purpose of this study was to examine charter principals' professional dispositions and practices that might contribute to teacher turnover. specifically we asked how do charter school principal professional dispositions and practices affect school working conditions and impact teacher commitment to remain or leave a charter schools? the study design was an embedded three-year case study of principal leadership in two charter schools. data sources included principal and teacher interviews, school observations, and artifacts. themes were derived from two constant comparative analyses, one of principal dispositions, a second of principal practices that might impact teacher working conditions. analysis indicated that principals' dispositions were related to practices that affected working conditions, which in turn, impacted teacher turnover. principals' dispositions autocratic 'no excuses' attitudes and valuing management leadership and accountability results led to practices that created limited support for teachers, both organizationally and personally. when the new orleans school board appointed e. j. edmunds, a light-skinned afro-creole man, the mathematics teacher for the city's best high school in 1875, the senior students walked out rather than have a "negro" as a teacher of "white youths." edmunds's appointment was a final, bold act by the city's mixed-race intellectual elite in exercising the political power they held under radical reconstruction to strip racial designations from public schools. white supremacist redeemers responded with a vicious propaganda campaign to define, differentiate, and diminish the "negro race." edmunds navigated the shifting landscape of race in the new orleans public schools first as a student and then as a teacher, and the details of his life show the impact on ordinary afro-creoles as the city's warring politicians used the public schools both to undermine and reinforce the racial order. the article argues that creative confrontations with damaging discourses as part of a critical literacy curriculum can be viewed as acts of love, for self and community. using data from a multi-sited critical ethnography, the study considers the literacy productions of two focal students in diverse schools, a charter middle school and a large urban high school. mediated discourse analysis of their work explores their aesthetic and critical literacy productions as refusals of oppressive discourses pressing against marginalized identities, and as expressions of desire for imagined, better realities. this research views such performances of multimodal creative resistance as an audacious literacy of desire, valuable as standards-meeting persuasive compositions, but also immeasurably valuable because of the emotional experience of the student producers, who were powerfully affected through the twin pleasures of resisting and imagining. this study illustrates how literacy projects might both inhabit and move forward freire's concept of armed love. in recent years, there have been programs aimed at increasing the number of science and math teachers in high-need areas by offering scholarships to candidates in exchange for their agreement to teach in a high-need school for a period of time. however, there has been concern that recipients might fulfill the terms of their agreement, then leave for other jobs. this qualitative study of four science and math teachers who received noyce scholarships examines whether commitment is stable or variable over time, and the impact of structural factors and supports on commitment, professional identity, and retention. results suggest that while some aspects of commitment demonstrate stability, other aspects may change due to factors including the types of professional identities that are prioritized by teachers, and recognition and support of these identities in work settings. in this study, the teachers who emphasized studentand pedagogical-centered identities, rather than subject-centered identities, were more likely to stay in their positions, provided that these identities were supported through school structures and positive interactions with colleagues, supervisors, and students. results suggest that scholarship programs may be useful not only for supporting teachers who have already expressed commitment to science and math teaching in high-need schools, but also for encouraging new commitments. teacher labor markets are evolving across the united states. the rise of charter schools, alternative teacher certification, and portfolio districts are transforming teachers' access to employment, changing the way they search for and apply for jobs, and may also change the role that social networks play in the job search. however, we know little about how teachers use their networks to find jobs, particularly in increasingly fragmented local labor markets. we draw on interviews with 127 teachers in three districts chosen to reflect an increasing presence of charter schools: new orleans, detroit, and san antonio. we find that the extent of fragmentation in a city's labor market drives the use of networks, with important implications for job access and equity. performance measurement systems (pmss) are used to diagnose and remediate problems, termed the "decision-facilitating" or feedback role of management control. we examine whether use of pmss by individual decision makers is associated with better performance. experimental studies have isolated individual-level effects of feedback on decision quality; however, it is difficult to extend these findings to natural settings. archival and survey studies offer evidence on the association between the presence of pmss and performance but have had limited success in measuring decision makers' actual use of pmss and addressing endogeneity of the decision to use pmss. we use unobtrusively collected data on actual pms use in 30 k-12 charter schools over three years to test whether teachers who make greater use of two pmss are associated with greater growth in student learning. we find that teachers' use of pmss is associated with increased student learning, consistent with the premise that pmss facilitate teacher interventions and improve student outcomes. the results are both statistically and materially significant, and they are better explained by pms use than by selection effects of better teachers using pmss. consistent with the organization's focus on "at-risk" students, the strongest effects of teachers' use of one pms are concentrated among the lowest-performing students. in sum, we find broad support for the thesis that the feedback role of pmss is associated with meaningful performance improvement. background/context: charter schools are commonly discussed as being more effective at matching student and family interests with school mission, ensuring family choice of educational products and improving education quality and the efficiency of resource use as a result of the competitive dynamics they are assumed to generate between themselves and public schools. the rhetoric around charter schools in general puts little attention on teacher management and resource acquisition, and the literature on charter schools has tended to focus on outcomes such as student achievement. the prevalence of charter schools within and outside the united states underscores the need to understand what role such issues as teacher management and resourcing play in this increasingly popular education reform. focus of study: the purpose of this article is to uncover and present the strategies that charter schools employ for managing teachers and acquiring resources, and with what implications. research design: through a qualitative case study of a charter school program in bogota, colombia, that began in 1999, we investigated (a) the regulations that governed the hiring firing. and compensation of charter school teachers,, in addition to (b) how charters respond to those regulations in contracting teachers, and (c) the overall approach of charter principals and the charter management organizations (cmos) that oversee them when it comes to teacher engagement. collaboration, supervision, and professional development. in terms of resource acquisition, the focus was on understanding (d) the extent of government provided resources to charter schools, (e) the perceptions of charter principals and cmo directors of the resources provided by the government. (f) the ways in which these actors have sought to complement these resources, and (g) the kinds of additional resources that have been obtained. data in the form of documents, archives, literature and evaluations, and qualitative interviews were collected over eight months. conclusions: findings indicate that charter school teachers in bogota feel that many aspects of their work environment are positive, though they also report tradeoffs in terms of job security and financial compensation. charter schools use the flexibility afforded to them around employment to spend half as much on teachers by hiring nonunionized teachers, contracting them for periods of a year or less, assigning teachers to lower compensation categories, and offering significantly lower salaries, despite teachers working over 12 hours more each week than their public school counterparts. findings with regard to resource acquisition address differences between public and charter schools, perceptions of school leaders, and the routes to resource acquisition used by charter schools, namely budget prioritization, donations, volunteers, partnerships, and alumni networks. implications for future research are discussed, including the need for studies to distinguish among types of charter schools. the article concludes that, when addressing the costs and benefits of charter schools, we need to ask: costs in what sense? benefits for whom? and at whose expense? numerous studies have shown that secondary and college students are increasingly apathetic and disengaged from their schooling. the problem of student disengagement is not confined to under-represented socioeconomic groups; it is found across the country: in cities, suburbs, and rural communities; in wealthy schools and poor schools; in public schools and charter schools; in majority white schools and those composed largely of students of color. in this essay, we argue that friedrich nietzsche's birth of tragedy contains crucial pedagogical and conceptual resources for responding to this widespread problem. in particular, the conception of "dionysian pessimism" nietzsche advances in this early work and its relationship to the escapist, "alexandrianism" he observes in late 19th century german education are relevant to the contemporary problem of student disengagement because they address head on the reality of struggle in students' academic experiences and can potentially explain the disengagement they experience when they fail to acknowledge, accept and even embrace the struggle of education. when struggle is seen as something to be avoided and endured only for the sake of later academic and career success, as it often is, nietzsche argues that apathy, disengagement, and even resentment can result. thus, while nietzsche's diagnosis is rooted in an analysis of his own culture and time, this essay hopes to show that it has the potential to speak to important practical issues in contemporary education. 