Moe and Chubb on Virtual Schools

This post reviews Terry M. Moe and John E Chubb, Liberating Learning: Technology, Politics, and the Future of American Education(San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 2009).

Moe and Chubb are legendary in the world of Educational Policy.  Their 1990 book Politics, Markets and America’s Schools is perhaps the most influential book ever written on the issue of privatization of public education.  In this new book the two scholar-activists reunite to make the case again for radical transformation of public education with private enterprise leading the way.  In this review I will only very briefly summarize their main argument.  My chief interest is in the portions of their book that deal directly with virtual public education, because it happens for the most part at home. 

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Cherlin on Marriage and Divorce in America

This post reviews Andrew J. Cherlin, The Marriage-Go-Round: The State of Marriage and the Family in America Today (New York: Knopf, 2009).  [Read an interview with Cherlin here. Publisher’s summary here. Buy it here.]

Cherlin, a sociology professor at Johns Hopkins, here presents a masterful synthesis of the historical and sociological scholarship on American and European families to explain why Americans marry more and get divorced more than other industrialized countries. 

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Monk on Regulating Homeschooling in Britain

This post reviews Daniel Monk, “Regulating Home Education: Negotiating Standards, Anomalies, and Rights” in Child and Family Law Quarterly 21, no. 2 (2009): 155-184

Monk, Senior Lecturer at the School of Law, Birbeck at the University of London, has been studying homeschooling for a few years now, his work largely concerned with challenging the dominant discursive tropes used by both advocates and critics of homeschooling, trying to get everyone to see that there is more at stake than the simplistic parent vs. government rhetoric suggests.  This new article is not available online, but a 2004 piece he wrote along these lines is available here.

In the present article Monk summarizes the current legal context of homeschooling in Britain and makes predictions for future policy directions. 

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Spiegler on the Failure of Homeschool Regulation in Germany

This post reviews Thomas Spiegler, “Why State Sanctions Fail to Deter Home Education: An Analysis of Home Education in Germany and its Implications for Home Education Policies” in Theory and Research in Education 7, no. 3 (November 2009): 297-309

This is the last post in a series I’ve devoted to the recent special issue of Theory and Research in Education, which was entirely about homeschooling [I didn’t review my own article].  Here Thomas Spiegler, a sociology professor at Friedensau Adventist University in Germany, draws some policy implications from his award-winning 2007 doctoral dissertation, which was the first ever study of homeschooling in Germany. 

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