| Harold Wenglinsky
New York University
The promises and pitfalls of privatization: A comparison of public and private secondary schools
FINAL REPORT:
The purpose of the proposed dissertation is to assess the privatization of secondary schools through a comparison of public and private schools. Public and private schools will be compared in all of their various aspects, from administration, to classroom practices, to school environment, to student outcomes. The major previous studies in this area, by James Coleman in 1987 and by John Chubb and Terry Moe in 1990, suffer from the methodological difficulties of not measuring change appropriately, using a narrow set of educational indicators and treating multiple units of analysis as a single unit. Utilizing the National Educational Longitudinal Survey of 1988 (NELS:88), my dissertation will apply Hierarchical Linear Modeling to more precisely measure change and differentiate between variance at the school, classroom and student levels. Further, using data from the New York City Public Education Data-base, my dissertation will develop a broad set of educational indicators, use factor analysis to reduce them to a set of dimensions, and develop hypotheses about the differences between public and private schools to be tested using NELS:88. By identifying differences between public and private schools, my dissertation should be helpful to policymakers considering privatization as a method of educational improvement.
Back to Funded Dissertation Grants Page |