The most comprehensive account yet of how the public schools are failing us and why. It is exhaustive in its detail, brutally honest—and politically incorrect. Everyone who cares about American education should read it. No one who does will ever look at the public schools in quite the same way again. Myron Lieberman has spent his adult life working in and around schools, studying them with care and intensity, and producing a steady stream of books and articles that challenge conventional wisdom and the powers that protect it… [<i>Public Education</i>] deserves to be hailed as a landmark event in our nation’s struggle for better schools—and it couldn’t come at a better time.

- Terry M. Moe, Washington Post Education Review

The public policy book of the year… [Lieberman] scrupulously, thoughtfully, and rigorously advances his position by examining trends that will erode public education even further in the near future… He [also] sets out an agenda for launching for-profit schooling, discusses obstacles that lie in its way and a strategy for overcoming them.

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This book both delighted and astonished me… In recent years there have been much-celebrated books on American education. None are as good as this one… Lieberman knows the literature, knows schools, knows teachers, administrators and their unions, and understands monopolies and markets. The book is thus not only a wonderful exploration of the educational hole we’re in, but a primer on the efficacy of markets as well.

- Abigail M. Thernstrom, Boston University,