Christopher Lubienski

Christopher Lubienski is Professor of education policy, and Director of the Forum on the Future of Public Education at the University of Illinois, where he helped found the Forum, and organized the graduate program in Education Policy and Social Opportunity. Additionally, Lubienski is Sir Walter Murdoch Visiting Professor at Murdoch University, Western Australia. He is also a fellow with the National Education Policy Center, and convener and co-director of the World Education Research Association’s International Research Network on marketization and privatization in education. He is the author (with Sarah Theule Lubienski) of The Public School Advantage: Why Public Schools Outperform Private Schools (University of Chicago Press, 2013).

His research focuses on education policy, reform, and the political economy of education, with a particular interest in issues of equity, access and organizational behavior. His current work examines organizational responses to competitive conditions in local education markets, and the role of intermediary organizations in shaping policymakers’ use of research evidence.

Lubienski held post-doctoral fellowships with the National Academy of Education and with the Advanced Studies Program at Brown University, and was recently Fulbright Senior Scholar for New Zealand, where he studies school policies and student enrollment patterns.

He has authored both theoretical and empirical papers on questions of innovation, achievement and equity in school choice systems, including peer-reviewed articles in the American Journal of Education, the American Educational Research Journal, Educational Policy, and the Oxford Review of Education. His work has been featured in news media, including the New York Times, Washington Post, La Liberacion, Time Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, the Times Education Supplement, and Business Week.

In addition to School Choice Policies and Outcomes: Empirical and Philosophical Perspectives (with Walter Feinberg, SUNY Press, 2008), Lubienski recently published The Charter School Experiment: Expectations, Evidence, and Implications (with Peter Weitzel, Harvard E