Charles Glenn, Jr.

Charles L. Glenn is professor of educational policy, and Fellow of the University Professors Program, at Boston University, where he teaches courses in education history and comparative policy. From 1970 to 1991 he was director of urban education and equity efforts for the Massachusetts Department of Education, including administration of over $500 million in state funds for magnet schools and desegregation, and initial responsibility for the nation's first state bilingual education mandate and for the state law forbidding discrimination in education.

Glenn is author of a number of books, including The Myth of the Common School (1988, 2002, Italian 2004), Choice of Schools in Six Nations (1989), Educational Freedom in Eastern Europe (1994, 1995), Educating Immigrant Children: Schools and Language Minorities in Twelve Nations (1996), and The Ambiguous Embrace: Government and Faith-based Schools and Social Agencies (2000) as well as the article on school choice in the International Encyclopedia of Education, articles on the education of immigrants in the Macmillan Encyclopedia of Education, and several hundred other articles, book chapters, and monographs. In 2002 he published, with Professor Jan De Groof of Bruges, Finding the Right Balance: Freedom, Autonomy and Accountability in Education, a study in two volumes of how 26 countries balance educational freedom with common standards and accountability, pupil and teacher rights with the integrity of the school's mission; volume 2 places these arrangements in an historical, legal, and policy context. A third volume, in preparation, will include more than a dozen additional countries. An abbreviated version appeared in Italian as Un difficile equilibrio (2003), and another has been widely distributed in Eastern Europe as Educational Freedom (2004).Glenn is currently writing The Long Tug-of-War: Schools between State and Civil Society since Antiquity (ISI, 2005), the first comprehensive history of education in the West in decades.

Glenn is active in educational policy debates in the United States and Europe, is vice president of OIDEL (the Geneva-based international organization promoting educational freedom), a member of the board of the Council for American Private Education and of the European Association for Education Law and Policy. He has served as a consultant to the Russian and Chinese education authorities, and to states and major cities across the United States, and as an expert witness in federal court cases on school finance, desegregation, and bilingual education. Glenn's BA and EdD degrees are from Harvard, and his PhD (on the history of education and the State) from Boston University.