What's Public About Charter Schools?: Lessons Learned About Choice and Accountability

"What′s Public About Charter Schools? by Gary Miron and Christopher Nelson deserves to be cited repeatedly as the debate about charter schools continues. The researchers′ careful and balanced analysis of the situation in Michigan has much to say about the charter school movement across the country and leads to important cautions about whether and how the movement should proceed. These recommendations provide concrete and practical solutions for improving charter schools by addressing some of the shortcoming that the authors have uncovered."
―Education Review, October 2002

"What′s Public About Charter Schools? provides valuable insights for charter school operators and advocates, school administrators, community members, politicians, and policy makers looking for data upon which to base decision making. Miron and Nelson have lived school reform evaluation for years, and their experience shows in this thoughtful and useful book."
Kyle L. Peck, Charter School Founder and Professor of Education
Pennsylvania State University

"This is the most comprehensive book that I have seen on charter schools. Both the descriptive data and the analysis are an important contribution."
Henry M. Levin, Director
National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education
Teachers College, Columbia University

"Miron and Nelson make a significant contribution to the debate about school restructuring reforms provide a strikingly balanced look at the charter school movement in action. Their conclusions and recommendations offer important lessons to school reformers, researchers, and policymakers both in the United States and internationally."
Priscilla Wohlstetter, Director
Center on Educational Governance
Rossier School of Education, University of Southern California

"This book covers essential material and will be of interest for classes on education policy and educational administration and will command an audience among school reformers and policy analysts."
William L. Boyd, Distinguished Professor of Education
Pennsylvania State University
University Park, PA

How much do we really know about the quality of education in charter schools?

Here are the documented answers to the questions we all have about student achievement, choice, innovation, and accountability:

• How do students in charter schools perform compared to students in public, non-charter schools?
• Have charter schools succeeded as "laboratories" of educational innovation?
• How do the costs of charter schools compare with non-charter schools?
• What types of professional development enhancements and teaching environments do charter schools provide for their teachers?
• What effect has privatization had on charter school students and operations?

Esteemed charter school researchers, Gary Miron and Christopher Nelson, have carefully examined a wealth of evidence about charter schools and boiled down the results in this insightful, accessible work. Policymakers, researchers, school administrators, parents, and others interested in school reform will find valuable information about school choice, privatization, and new forms of holding schools accountable―vital data on evaluating this new private/public hybrid and its success at serving the core purpose of public education.

Gary Miron has a diverse background in the field of education. He worked as a public school teacher in Michigan in the mid-1980s. Later he worked as an educational researcher and university instructor in the field of education. Currently, he is Principal Research Associate at Western Michigan University′s Evaluation Center. There, he has completed or is working on a variety of school reform evaluations including evaluations of charter schools in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Illinois, and Cleveland. In Connecticut and Cleveland, he has been involved in providing training and technical assistance to charter schools in terms of helping them develop and implement accountability plans and self-evaluations. He has also conducted a study of student achievement gains in schools operated by Edison Schools Inc. Before joining The Evaluation Center, Dr. Miron worked at Stockholm University where he had completed his graduate studies. While in Sweden he conducted a study on the national voucher reform in the early 1990s and later took part in a study of school restructuring in Europe. He has researched and written on such topics as educational evaluation, special needs education, educational planning and policy, multimethod research, charter schools, and school reform.

Christopher Nelson is Senior Research Associate at Western Michigan University’s Evaluation Center, where he works on large-scale evaluations of state charter school laws. He is project manager for evaluations in Pennsylvania, Illinois, and the city of Cleveland, and has contributed to evaluation reports on charter schools in Michigan and Connecticut. Before joining The Evaluation Center, Dr. Nelson was on the faculty of the H. John Heinz III School of Public Policy and Management at Carnegie Mellon University, where he taught courses on evaluation methodology, policy analysis, and public organizations. While in Pittsburgh, Nelson worked on a number of regional education policy studies,including a large-scale assessment of work force readiness among high school students, and a study of early-grade literacy. In addition, he played a leading role in the development of an education policy indicator system that is still in use today. Nelson holds an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a B.A. summa cum laude from the University of Minnesota, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa.