Introduction
Paul E. Peterson, the Henry Shattuck professor of government at Harvard University, is best known in education circles for his controversial studies on school voucher programs. But Peterson has also played a major role in recruiting and mentoring a new generation of scholars who are making their own mark in education debates. Most of them, like Peterson, are political scientists challenging public education's core conventions, and most of them, like Peterson, advocate choice, competition, and other market-based reforms.

"A large percentage of the people doing research in education that I would consider outside the mainstream have a connection to Paul," says Terry Moe, a Stanford University political science professor and co-author of an influential 1990 study advocating market-based reforms in elementary and secondary education. "They are generally more critical of the existing system and more willing to challenge its basic structure."

These include people like Moe and John Chubb, Moe's co-author of Politics, Markets and America's Schools and now a vice president of Edison Schools Inc., a for-profit school management company; Frederick Hess, the director of education policy studies at the conservative American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., and Marci Kanstoroom, both executive editors of Education Next, a journal critical of the educational status quo published by Stanford's Hoover Institution that Peterson edits; Jay P. Greene, head of the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute; Bryan C. Hassel, a private consultant and expert on charter schools; and Kenneth K. Wong, director of the Urban Education Policy Program at Brown University.

Peterson had been a distinguished political scientist well before he began studying school vouchers—at Harvard, in the departments of government and education at the University of Chicago, and as director of governmental studies at the Brookings Institution. Hess, Kanstoroom, Greene, and Hassel studied with Peterson at Harvard, Wong was his student at Chicago, and Moe and Chubb published Politics, Markets and America's Schools under Peterson's sponsorship at Brookings.

Earlier in his career, Peterson was known for his scholarship on urban politics and the effect of government policies on the poor. No one was calling him a conservative in those days, though many do now. In his influential 1981 book, City Limits, he maintained that city governments are constricted more by their place within the larger political and social order than by internal political struggles and he called for a larger federal role in the delivery of services to poor people. "I consider it a liberal analysis," Peterson says. In his later work, Welfare Magnets, he made an even stronger case for nationalizing welfare policy, arguing that poor people moved where benefits were higher. As a result, he says, generous states and cities were penalized, causing states to reduce benefits in a "race to the bottom" so as not to be an attractive place for more poor people. Peterson maintained that cities should not have to choose between an obligation to the poor and serving the middle class.

"He made an argument for a national welfare standard that bothered people in different ways," says Greene. "[Liberals] said the suggestion that low-income people made decisions to maximize benefits was unflattering to the poor. [Conservatives] objected that a national welfare policy was an increase in centralization."

Today, Peterson directs the Program on Education Policy and Governance (PEPG) at the Kennedy School, a program he launched in 1996 after seven years at Harvard. The program has been the source of much of the research conducted on school voucher programs over the past decade. And the program's stance on vouchers isn't hard to discern in its publications. "Parents Satisfied With Private Schools," "Voucher Programs in Three Cities Show Gains for Blacks," and "New Data Counter Old Fears: A Liberal Case for Vouchers" are among the titles of articles in a recent PEPG annual report.

But PEPG also brings together scholars to discuss a variety of education issues. The conferences, on such subjects as desegregation, school finance, and the role of school boards, attract thinkers from across the political and ideological spectrum and result in books edited by Peterson and others that help drive the educational debate.

"Paul performs a convening function at Harvard," says Richard Elmore, a professor at Harvard's Graduate School of Education and a sometime Peterson critic. "Because he is visible and active, he gets good people to come. He should be praised for that. It often has not much to do with his own research but is about getting issues on the table." Recent colloquia sponsored by PEPG discussed whether parental satisfaction is a valid measure of teacher effectiveness and whether voters hold school boards accountable for the performance of their schools.

A Respectable Field
Peterson's supporters and critics alike credit him with helping make the study of education a respectable field for political scientists. And several of his students, including Greene and Patrick Wolf, switched from more prestigious political science specialties under Peterson's influence.

"Education policy is on the fringe of political science; there weren't people doing education policy for the most part that I knew in grad school," says Greene, who wrote his dissertation at Harvard on Congress and the presidency. He got involved in education issues after Peterson asked him to help with research on the Milwaukee voucher program. Kanstoroom, who had been studying political philosophy, also became more interested in education research under Peterson's influence. She wrote a dissertation under Peterson that explored the question of whether states actually equalize their school finance systems after courts order them to do so.

"He's a very important scholar," says Wong, who migrated to education from his interest in bureaucracy and state-federal relations while studying with Peterson in Chicago in the 1980s. "These days, people only look at him as someone who has tried to advocate choice, but he came through a deep and rich intellectual journey and has trained a whole new generation of policy analysts and political analysts."

Moe and Chubb got support from Peterson to write their book, arguably the most influential modern call for introducing free-market principles into public education. As young assistant professors of political science, they had already started their work when Peterson met them at Stanford while on a fellowship. When he moved on to Brookings, he invited them to continue their research under the auspices of what until then had been known as a fairly liberal think tank.

"He brought us both there, supported our research, and made it OK for Brookings to do research that had pretty conservative implications," says Chubb. "Paul was critical in making it possible for us to go from junior political scientists to respected leaders in the field in a short period."

Chubb and Moe's book made the argument that traditional education reform wasn't likely to be effective because the politics of school systems get in the way. Their work was partly influenced by Peterson's School Politics, Chicago Style published in 1976. In that book, Peterson looked at how the system actually functioned—how decisions got made on school desegregation, for instance—as school board members and other power brokers juggled the competing demands of unions, politics, ethnic groups, and bureaucracy.

Crippling Bureaucracy
"Terry and I said the political process will never let you get it right by having unintended consequences, that bureaucracy and unionization cripple schools regardless [of] what reformers say about how to teach reading," Chubb says. Peterson "encouraged us to be as radical as we wanted to be. None of that would have happened without Paul. If we had stayed at Stanford, I think it would not have made the splash it did."

Since the mid-1990s, Peterson has primarily studied vouchers. He describes it as an outgrowth of his earlier work on the politics of urban school systems and the limits of city governments to help their poor and disadvantaged residents.

"I'm an urbanist," he says. "Educating the next generation…and educating poor kids in big city schools…is really an important area to look into. If we find out vouchers can be a way to improve educational opportunity, I want to know whether that is in fact the case." Another influence, Peterson says, was sociologist James Coleman. Peterson was at the University of Chicago in the 1960s when Coleman did his studies, still a matter of debate, indicating that low-income students did better in private—at the time mostly Catholic—schools.

Peterson also says that personal experiences played a part in the evolution of his thinking. "When we lived in D.C., our children attended a public school in Northwest Washington, the same one [that President Jimmy] Carter's daughter [attended]. It proved to be a difficult experience for our children, and we had to quickly look for a private school alternative. We found one in a suburban area, and I did think about the issue of choice in a different way after that."

Peterson says that his family was able "to solve the problem poor families in the inner city encounter all the time. They can't do anything about it. I was not going to be a hypocrite after that. I wasn't going to talk about the need to preserve public education while sending my own kids to private school." When Peterson moved back to the Boston area to take the Harvard position, he sent his children to public schools in the affluent suburb of Wellesley.

Peterson says "creative destruction" is necessary to promote improvement in settings where elementary and secondary education persistently fails. Good schools can emerge only if talented educators have incentives to create new learning environments and poor performing schools are eliminated. The recreated environment must include private schools, Peterson says. Public schools cannot be expected to "repair themselves," he argues in Learning From School Choice, one of the many volumes on choice he has edited or co-edited in recent years.

"I think that the way he looks at it is that over the last 30 years, a lot of strategies have been tried, and he got frustrated with the lack of significant improvement throughout the system," says Wong, who specializes in studying mayoral takeovers of urban systems and is not a combatant in the voucher debates. "He concluded that there was no way bureaucracy by itself would have a strong enough incentive to really turn itself around, and the way to do it is to create a competitive environment to make the bureaucracy pay attention or lose its power."

When data from the Milwaukee voucher experiment became available in 1995, Peterson suggested an experimental research design comparing students who applied for and received the vouchers with those who applied but were turned down. University of Wisconsin researcher John Witte had compared the voucher students with a larger sample of students who stayed in public schools and had found little benefit. Peterson found that voucher students pulled ahead of those who declined to use the vouchers in their third and fourth years of private schooling.

Ever since, he has been at the center of fierce debates about the methodology and conclusions of his studies and the delicate line between advocacy and dispassionate fact-gathering. Any effort to sort out the true import of the voucher findings—whether they are strong enough to merit a major policy shift—leads deep into arcane debates on the validity of varying study designs and research decisions, and to a debate about the proper means for publicizing findings.

Peterson's findings were controversial in part because he wrote articles in the Wall Street Journal extolling his findings and the virtues of vouchers before his research had been thoroughly peer-reviewed. It didn't help that the first Journal piece appeared in 1996, just after Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole had endorsed vouchers as an urban school-improvement strategy.

But researchers who have reanalyzed Peterson's findings from Milwaukee and from studies he has done of privately funded voucher plans in New York and other cities were less sanguine about the effects of vouchers on student achievement. Princeton economist Alan Krueger, for example, reanalyzed voucher data from New York, Dayton, and Washington, D.C., and concluded that the effects were smaller than Peterson claimed. Peterson and Witte for years debated which findings from Milwaukee were correct.

Moe says he agrees with David Myers of Mathematica Policy Research Inc., who helped Peterson gather data on the privately funded voucher program in New York City. Myers urges caution in interpreting the findings that black students who attended private schools with vouchers did significantly better on reading and math tests than did those who stayed in public schools. He says the results by themselves should not be a reason to endorse vouchers.

Nonetheless, the Bush administration and legislators in many states have cited Peterson's research in support of a two-year-old federally funded voucher program in Washington, D.C., voucher aid to displaced students in New Orleans, and proposals for state-funded voucher plans.

Peterson's studies have been funded largely by conservative foundations that have either sponsored private voucher programs themselves or have an interest in seeing them become more widespread. But Peterson rejects the "advocate" label. "I go where the research leads me," he says, noting that support from foundations interested in a particular reform is common across the ideological spectrum. "Researchers who do work on global warming care about that topic. They care about whether the earth is warming up and why. They do careful research to get an answer on a topic about which they care deeply."

Voucher Storm
Peterson's reasoning is unconvincing to scholars like Henry Levin, head of the Center for the Study of Privatization in Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. "Paul is basically on one side of the issue, a true believer," Levin who was an early supporter of vouchers now believes the research doesn't support their effectiveness. "The people whom he works with and [who] work with him as graduate students know he has a strong view on the subject and gravitate to him on that basis. The ones who come out are not those he has a lot of differences with."

But those who have worked with Peterson see it differently. While controversial, says Hess, Peterson's research "is on the whole certainly much more rigorous than the work the education community traditionally has done." Greene says that despite the naysayers, all the methodologically rigorous studies have shown some positive effect of vouchers, especially for black students.

The voucher storm has not damaged Peterson's standing at Harvard. And his influence, if anything, is growing as his prolific followers continue to produce books, studies, and reports that push the envelope not just on vouchers and choice but on such issues as accountability, private management of public schools, teacher training and compensation, principal licensure, and dropouts. Some, like Wong, Greene, and Moe, have stayed in academia; some, like Hess and Kanstoroom, are at think tanks; and some, like Chubb and Hassel, a charter school consultant, are knee-deep in creating new and different models of urban education.

Please download the entire 11-page report, including profiles (see link, above right).

Dale Mezzacappa is a Philadelphia writer and a former education correspondent for the Philadelphia Inquirer.