Jeffrey R. Henig is a professor of political science and education at Teachers College at Columbia University and a professor of political science at Columbia University. He is the author or the coauthor of 10 books, including The Color of School Reform: Race, Politics and the Challenge of Urban Education (Princeton, 1999) and Building Civic Capacity: The Politics of Reforming Urban Schools (University Press of Kansas, 2001), both of which were named—in 1999 and 2001, respectively—the best book written on urban politics by the Urban Politics Section of the American Political Science Association. Spin Cycle: How Research Gets Used in Policy Debates: The Case of Charter Schools (Russell Sage Foundation, 2008) focuses on the controversy surrounding the charter school study by the American Federation of Teachers and its implications for understanding politics, politicization, and the use of research to inform public discourse; it won the American Educational Research Association’s Outstanding Book Award in 2010. Harvard Education Press published his most recent book, The End of Exceptionalism in American Education,in January 2013.
by Jeffrey Henig Twenty years ago, in the early days of the charter school movement, the hot controversy was “creaming.” Critics worried that charters would target more advantaged suburban populations, skimming off the students most likely to succeed and leaving traditional public schools in low-income and minority neighborhoods even more isolated, underfunded, and burdened with the toughest student cases.