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Hard Lessons: Public Schools and Privatization
This book, the second in the Twentieth Century Fund's series of studies on the privatization of public services, finds that current arguments for privatizing schools are based on wishful thinking.After examining what the actual experience has been with privatization around the country, Hard Lessons concludes that the promise of saving money and improving educational quality through privatization is, at minimum, being oversold. While this report is likely to be disputed by those who have a strong attachment to the notion that privatizing always improves output--and by those with a financial stake in the for-profit school "industry"--it will be an important part of the ongoing debate.The report, which focuses on big city schools, argues that while the magic wand of privatization must be abandoned, the efforts to solve the problems facing our nation's urban schools must continue; there are hard questions to be asked, new solutions to be tried, and the case must continually be made for new resources for our public schools, even in today's political climate.
144 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 1996
About the author
Carol Ascher
42 books5 followersI was born in Cleveland three weeks after my parents arrived as refugees from the Nazi regimes of Central Europe. Our home was bilingual, with German the language of nostalgia, frightening memories, as well as intimacy.
I grew up in Topeka, Kansas, straddling two very different worlds: the Midwestern Christian world of my public school and neighborhood, and the community of Jewish refugees who, like my father, had been hired as psychoanalysts by the Menninger Foundation, one of the early psychoanalytic clinics in America.
My novel, The Flood, describes a ten-year-old whose biographical information is similar to mine, as she comes to understand the nature of prejudice. The novel takes place in Topeka in 1951, the year the Kansas River overflew, turning hundreds into refugees, and Reverend Oliver Brown sued the Topeka Board of Education, because his daughter had to travel across town to attend a segregated school.
I attended Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, for two years, and completed my BA at Barnard College. After taking off a few years to experience the life of a writer while taking a variety of jobs in New York City, I returned to Columbia, where I earned a doctorate in Anthropology and Education. I then spent several decades studying urban public schools, with most of my research directed at understanding issues of inequality and prejudice as they occur in public schools.
In the 1970s, sexual, reproductive and artistic issues in the Second Wave of feminism became the focus of my personal and public life. This led to two books, Simone deBeauvoir, a Life of Freedom, and a collection I edited with Sara Ruddick and Louise deSalvo, Between Women: Biographers, Novelists, Critics, Teachers and Artists Write about their Work on Women.
My refugee background has been a rich source on which I draw over and over in my writing. My memoir, Afterimages, focuses on how my parents' struggles to leave their homelands and make new lives for themselves in America, and describes my own journeys back to Germany and Austria to discover more about their pasts. This complicated background is also the xx of several personal essays, including The Dress, My Father's Violin, and, most recently, To Be Human in a Jewish Way, an essay about my aunt's experiences in the Jewish schools initiated by Martin Buber during the early years of the Nazi regime in Germany.
I grew up in Topeka, Kansas, straddling two very different worlds: the Midwestern Christian world of my public school and neighborhood, and the community of Jewish refugees who, like my father, had been hired as psychoanalysts by the Menninger Foundation, one of the early psychoanalytic clinics in America.
My novel, The Flood, describes a ten-year-old whose biographical information is similar to mine, as she comes to understand the nature of prejudice. The novel takes place in Topeka in 1951, the year the Kansas River overflew, turning hundreds into refugees, and Reverend Oliver Brown sued the Topeka Board of Education, because his daughter had to travel across town to attend a segregated school.
I attended Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, for two years, and completed my BA at Barnard College. After taking off a few years to experience the life of a writer while taking a variety of jobs in New York City, I returned to Columbia, where I earned a doctorate in Anthropology and Education. I then spent several decades studying urban public schools, with most of my research directed at understanding issues of inequality and prejudice as they occur in public schools.
In the 1970s, sexual, reproductive and artistic issues in the Second Wave of feminism became the focus of my personal and public life. This led to two books, Simone deBeauvoir, a Life of Freedom, and a collection I edited with Sara Ruddick and Louise deSalvo, Between Women: Biographers, Novelists, Critics, Teachers and Artists Write about their Work on Women.
My refugee background has been a rich source on which I draw over and over in my writing. My memoir, Afterimages, focuses on how my parents' struggles to leave their homelands and make new lives for themselves in America, and describes my own journeys back to Germany and Austria to discover more about their pasts. This complicated background is also the xx of several personal essays, including The Dress, My Father's Violin, and, most recently, To Be Human in a Jewish Way, an essay about my aunt's experiences in the Jewish schools initiated by Martin Buber during the early years of the Nazi regime in Germany.
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