Politics, Markets, and the Organization of Schools

Item

Title

Politics, Markets, and the Organization of Schools

Abstract/Description

We offer a comparative analysis of public and private schools, presenting data from a new national study—the Administrator and Teacher Survey—that expands on the pathbreaking High School and Beyond survey. We find that public and private schools are distinctively different in environment and organization. Most importantly, private schools are more likely to possess the characteristics widely believed to produce effectiveness. We argue throughout that the differences across the sectors are anchored in the logic of politics and markets. This argument derives from our belief that environmental context has pervasive consequences for the organization and operation of all schools and specifically that the key differences between public and private environments—and thus between public and private schools—derive from their characteristic methods of social control: the public schools are subordinates in a hierarchic system of democratic politics, whereas private schools are largely autonomous actors “controlled” by the market.

Author/creator

Chubb, John E.

Moe, Terry M.

Date

1988

In publication

American Political Science Review

Volume

82

Issue

4

Pages

1065-1087

Resource type

en Research/Scholarly Media

Resource status/form

en Published Text

Scholarship genre

en Theoretical

Language

en

Open access/full-text available

en Yes

Peer reviewed

en Yes

ISSN

0003-0554, 1537-5943

DOI

10.2307/1961750

URL

Official Publisher's Webpage (Cambridge Core)

Full-text PDF Shared by Author (ResearchGate)

Citation

Chubb, J. E., & Moe, T. M. (1988). Politics, Markets, and the Organization of Schools. American Political Science Review, 82(4), 1065–1087. https://doi.org/10.2307/1961750

Cited in

Democratizing Educational Innovation and Improvement: The Policy Contexts of Improvement Research in Education

Item sets

Handbook Chapter 10 Citations

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