Differing takes on the success of charter schools

Scholars in this report offer their widely differing takes on the success of charter schools, a "twenty-year experiment" in alternative education systems, largely based in for-profit, inner-city programs.



What New Orleans Can Teach Us

1. Carl L. Bankston III

Carl L. Bankston III is in the sociology department at Tulane University. He is the author, with Stephen J. Caldas, of Public Education—America’s Civil Religion: A Social History and Forced to Fail: The Paradox of School Desegregation.

Profits and Principles

1. Diane Ravitch

Diane Ravitch is in the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development at New York University. She is the author of Reign of Error: The Hoax of Privatization and Its Danger to America’s Schools.

Accounting for Academics

1. Linda A. Renzulli
2. Maria Paino

Linda A. Renzulli is in the department of sociology at the University of Georgia, where Maria Paino is in the sociology program. Renzulli studies the organizational, racial, and economic mechanisms, as well as school district policies, that affect charter school failure. Paino is studying the sociology of education.

Charter Schools’ Segregationist Roots

Christopher Bonastia

Christopher Bonastia is in the department of sociology at Lehman College and the City University of New York Graduate Center. He is the author of Southern Stalemate: Five Years without Public Education in Prince Edward County, Virginia.