The Warped Logic of School Privatization

With a quarter-century of advocacy and institution building under its belt and extraordinarily deep pockets financing it, the movement to privatize public schools has become an influential presence in American education. After twenty-five years this movement has a substantial record that demands careful, thorough evaluation. Samuel Abrams's Education and the Commercial Mindset makes a signal contribution to such an evaluation. The bulk of the book is taken up with well-documented comparative studies of two different moments of the school privatization movement—for-profit educational management organizations and nominally non-profit charter management organizations.