When education issues come to be understood in terms that neatly overlay the standard ideological alignments, they often become proxies for the war between Right and Left. This has been the case in the instance of charter schools, with proponents and critics mustering up researchers and findings to buttress their respective claims and, in general,…

Public presentations of research about charter schools have been politicized, polarized, and personalized, fueling cynicism about whether research can generate objective knowledge and promote the collective good. This article draws two distinctions: between politics as a corrupting force and politics as a healthy and necessary component of…

One important aim of social science research is to provide unbiased information that can help guide public policies. However, social science is often construed as politics by other means. Nowhere is the polarized nature of social science research more visible than in the heated debate over charter schools. In "Spin Cycle", noted political…