Robert Maranto
Biographic Data
| ID | 1418376 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Robert Maranto |
| GIVEN NAMES | Robert |
| FAMILY NAME | Maranto |
| SIGNATURE | MARANTO R |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Arkansas at Fayetteville |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6796-3627 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 59 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 122 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 59 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1988 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
An Exploratory Analysis of U.S. Academically Intensive Charter Schools (Aics)
Considerable amounts of research have discussed “No Excuses” charter schools preparing traditionally disadvantaged students for higher education. Yet, no scholarly work has identified or investigated U.S. academically intensive charter schools (AICS) that were founded to enable students to excel academically as much as their abilities and efforts allow. Here, we offer an exploratory study of AICS, defining them, describing the lived experience of…
Shameless Boosters and a Loyal Critic: Two Takes on the Ivory Tower
U.S. colleges are in trouble—financially, demographically, academically, politically—and two recent volumes offer answers to some of the most pressing problems. While one volume, by Brian Rosenberg, longtime Macalester College president, is more serious than the other, Robert Maranto points out that both fail to address the problems of burgeoning bureaucracies, ideological uniformity, and “the empirically verified free speech crisis on campus.”
How marginalized identities are related to cyber charter school enrollment
Education’s Critical Condition: Why Critical Theory Fails and How to Teach and Manage Diversity Far Better in Our Multicultural Society
Defiant school choice? Educational freedom, access, and Arkansas’s AP African American studies controversy
On August 11, 2023, the Arkansas Department of Education (ADE) notified schools just before the fall semester’s start that they would no longer support the college-board-approved AP African American Studies (APAAS) course. Subsequently, all five districts offering the course declared their intent to proceed despite the lack of state funding and course credits. We conduct a document and qualitative thematic analysis in this mixed methods study. In…
Forced choice? Is bullying pushing non-binary students into cyber schools
Little research addresses the schooling experiences of non-binary students; no prior work explores their experiences in cyber schools. Using unique data from a US multi-state cyber charter school, we compare the factors parents of non-binary students and parents of other students stated as reasons for leaving their prior schools to attend a cyber charter school in fall 2019 (before the COVID-19 pandemic). Despite a small sample size, we found sta…
Which Police Departments Make Black Lives Matter
Black Lives Matter (BLM) has gained support across racial lines and considerable financial backing. Yet it is unclear whether social science has responded with research likely to save Black lives. To encourage more applied research and related public discussion, we rank police departments in the 50 largest U.S. cities by their effectiveness in keeping homicides low and not taking civilian lives, while adjusting for poverty, which makes policing m…
The roles of Black women principals: Evidence from two national surveys
While two-thirds of Black principals are female, the extant research on Black female principals is almost entirely qualitative. Using data from the 2017–2018 National Teacher and Principal Survey ( n = 7,170 with 450 Black female principals) and the 2011–2012 Schools and Staffing Survey ( n = 7,510, with 360 Black female principals), we quantitatively examine the career paths, reported influence, and reported time use of Black female principals c…
Yelling Fire on Campus: Free Speech Leaders and Laggards
An evaluation of 2021 survey data measuring free speech on American college campuses has some surprising results
Class Struggle: How the Media Became the Ivory Tower
Robert Maranto reviews Batya Ungar Sargon’s Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy
Charter School Regulation as a Disproportionate Barrier to Entry
In response to concerns regarding school quality, state policy-makers reformed their charter school authorization processes to impose greater regulatory barriers to chartering. These barriers to market entry could impose substantial burdens for Black and Latino would-be charter operators, as well as independent operators, who may lack access to social and financial capital. We test these hypotheses by comparing application outcomes from states wi…
Elite schools lead: An Empirical Examination of Diversity Requirements in Higher Education Job Markets
Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) statements for job applicants in higher education are somewhat controversial. Advocates argue that DEI requirements ensure fair representation, counter historical discrimination, and improve efficiency. Critics contend that DEI requirements reduce faculty quality by limiting the number of eligible applicants and by screening out heterodox views, thereby limiting potential research. Anecdotal evidence suggest…
What You Can Do for the Counterrevolution
A review of "Counter Wokecraft: A Field Manual for Combatting the Woke in the University and Beyond," by Charles Pincourt, with James Lindsay, New Discourses, 2021, pp. 100, $12.49 softcover
Charter School Closing Inequities: Do automatic closure laws target Black charter entrepreneurs and Black students
In some states, charter schools must meet inflexible, standardized performance standards to survive. Through lenses informed by Critical Race Theory, we hypothesize that charters that were established by African Americans and those which serve more African American students are more likely to close, and that state-imposed standardized closure rules exacerbate these inequities. We find that 31.9% charter schools serving predominantly African Ameri…
Choosing cyber during Covid
Substantial research has already examined how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected in-person schooling, but no prior work has explored its effects on cyber schools. Here, Robert Maranto, Dennis Beck, Tom Clark, Bich Tran, and Feng Liu compare the students entering a large national cyber charter school network in spring 2020, during the pandemic, with students entering in 2019 and 2018, before the pandemic. They find that the COVID cohort resembled …
Making Violence Transparent: Ranking Police Departments in Major U.S. Cities to Make Black Lives Matter
This study suggests that police professionalism can both reduce homicides and prevent unnecessary police-related civilian deaths (PRCD). Those improvements would particularly benefit African Americans, who fall victim to both at disproportionately high rates. Policing practices regarding African Americans have a frustrating history, highlighted by the fact that PRCD generally, and for African Americans in particular, were not even counted until r…
Still Pluralist After All These Years? Considering Whether Political Science Fosters Tolerance for Dissent or Merely Promotes Leftist Values
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Plague Day
Can Academia and the Media Handle the Truth
Department Chair
Incident at a Small Campus
Numbers from an Academic Conference (Apsa 2018)
To His Coy Coauthor
A Political Scientist Runs for School Board
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Gendered Ambition: Men’s and Women’s Career Advancement in Public Administration
We explore the relationships between gender, career ambition, and the emergence of executive leadership. Growing research in public administration shows that career systems shape bureaucrats’ ambitions, political behavior, and management. Yet career systems are not neutral conduits of talent: Administrators are more likely to pursue advancement when career systems favor them. This study proposes that women and men respond to gendered public caree…
Thinking the Unthinkable in Public Administration: A Case for Spoils in the Federal Bureaucracy
This article argues for ending tenure in the federal civil service. Arguments for tenure, and by extension against the old spoils system, are lacking. Even in the 19th century, relatively few federal managers lost their jobs after party changes. At the same time, limited rotation made the civil service relatively innovative and legitimate. Today, media scrutiny, more programmatic parties and presidents, and the limited capacity of the White House…
Still Clashing after All These Years: Ideological Conflict in the Reagan Executive
Right Turn: Political Ideology in the Higher Civil Service, 1987-1994
Principal-agent models can justify political management of career officials, while at the same time predicting challenges to it, in part reflecting the different ideological goals of careerists and political appointees. Indeed, the “administrative presidency” strategies Ronald Reagan pursued anticipated and heightened such conflict through attempts to “politicize” the federal executive. Such strategies may help account for the findings of Aberbac…
A Tale of Two Cities: School Privatization in Philadelphia and Chester
In August 2001, the state‐run Control Board for the Chester‐Upland School District awarded control of nine of their 10 schools to Edison Schools, with little opposition. In contrast, nearby Philadelphia fought state efforts to privatize schools. Finally, on July 31, 2002, the joint state‐city Philadelphia School Reform Commission partially privatized 45 (17 percent) of the city’s 264 public schools, while partly reconstituting 41 others. Publishe…
Comparing the Roles of Political Appointees and Career Executives in the U.S. Federal Executive Branch
This study uses Anthony Downs’s well-known typology of bureaucratic roles (climbers, conservers, advocates, zealots, and statesmen) as a theoretical template to examine the roles of political appointees and career executives serving in Washington, D.C. during the Reagan administration. Officials were asked to rank various personal goals in a 1987 survey. Political appointees were more likely to endorse climber (career advancement) and zealot (pol…
Neutrality: An Enduring Principle of the Federal Service
Although many proponents of civil service reform question the principles of classical American public administration and specifically reject its neutral competence model of federal service, the principle of neutrality continues to be an important belief of federal career executives. This finding is based on an analysis of responses to a survey of 1,045 high-level (SES and GM-15) careerists and 242 political appointees from 15 federal organization…
Diversifying the Academy: How Conservative Academics Can Thrive in Liberal Academia
Researchers have long recognized that higher education is dominated by professors whose politics are well to the left of the American political center. The cause and implications of this ideological imbalance have been intensely debated since the 1960s. Although critics of higher education, such as David Horowitz, argue that the political imbalance in academia is largely the result of ideological discrimination, emerging research on the views, va…
Teachers’ Attitudes and the Success of School Choice
The 1990s witnessed growing attention to the adoption of choice‐based school reforms, particularly charter schooling and school vouchers. Although researchers have approached the school choice debate from theoretical, normative, and empirical directions, little attention has been paid to examining how teachers view school choice or what factors shape their attitudes. This oversight is significant because teachers can impact the success of school …
Coping With Competition: The impact of Charter Schooling on Public School Outreach in Arizona
Advocates of market‐based education reform hypothesize that competition will cause traditional public schools to increase outreach efforts as they seek to market themselves. Advocates hope such efforts will result in more information on school activities and performance and thereby enhance accountability. We examine the effect of charter school competition on outreach efforts by a sample of 98 Arizona district schools, finding that charter compet…
Knowing the Rational Peasant: The Creation of Rival Incentive Structures in Vietnam
This paper develops a rational model of individual participation in anti-regime activity based on the works of Tullock (1971), Mason (1986) and others, and applies it to the Vietnamese conflicts of the 1945-75 period. Concerns for physical security and expectations of victory by one side or another dominated the peasant `decision calculus' to the relative exclusion of such factors as ideology and provision of public goods. The critical factor in …
Gendered Ambition: Men’s and Women’s Career Advancement in Public Administration
We explore the relationships between gender, career ambition, and the emergence of executive leadership. Growing research in public administration shows that career systems shape bureaucrats’ ambitions, political behavior, and management. Yet career systems are not neutral conduits of talent: Administrators are more likely to pursue advancement when career systems favor them. This study proposes that women and men respond to gendered public caree…
Elite schools lead: An Empirical Examination of Diversity Requirements in Higher Education Job Markets
Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) statements for job applicants in higher education are somewhat controversial. Advocates argue that DEI requirements ensure fair representation, counter historical discrimination, and improve efficiency. Critics contend that DEI requirements reduce faculty quality by limiting the number of eligible applicants and by screening out heterodox views, thereby limiting potential research. Anecdotal evidence suggest…
Does Private School Competition H-arm Public Schools? Revisiting Smith and Meier's: The Case Against School Choice
Smith and Meier (1995a) empirically assess the market hypothesis advanced by Chubb and Moe (1988, 1990), which holds that compettion improves schools. Using Florida school district data, Smith and Meier find that higher private school market share lowers public school test scores; they conclude that competition harms public schools. Hoever, they do not take into account the impact of family income on copetition in traditionally organized educatio…
Making Violence Transparent: Ranking Police Departments in Major U.S. Cities to Make Black Lives Matter
This study suggests that police professionalism can both reduce homicides and prevent unnecessary police-related civilian deaths (PRCD). Those improvements would particularly benefit African Americans, who fall victim to both at disproportionately high rates. Policing practices regarding African Americans have a frustrating history, highlighted by the fact that PRCD generally, and for African Americans in particular, were not even counted until r…
Does Familiarity Breed Acceptance: Trends in Career-Noncareer Relations in the Reagan Administration
A number of researchers assert that relations between careerists and political appointees in Washington typically start badly but improve over the course of an administration. This article tested that proposition by surveying 1,04S high-level careerists and 242 political appointees serving in the Washington, DC offices of 15 federal organizations. In defense organizations, both career and noncareer officials felt that relations started well and c…
Which Police Departments Make Black Lives Matter
Black Lives Matter (BLM) has gained support across racial lines and considerable financial backing. Yet it is unclear whether social science has responded with research likely to save Black lives. To encourage more applied research and related public discussion, we rank police departments in the 50 largest U.S. cities by their effectiveness in keeping homicides low and not taking civilian lives, while adjusting for poverty, which makes policing m…
No Contractual Obligation to Improve Education: School Boards and Their Superintendents
Since the passage of No Child Left Behind, public schools have felt pressure to emphasize equitable academic outcomes. We investigate whether contracts agreed to by school boards and the superintendents they employ include academic and equity criteria to judge the performance of superintendents. Data come from the universe of 2013‐14 school superintendent contracts in North Carolina. Only nine of the 115 contracts include academic goals of any ki…
Not Separate and Not Equal? Achievement and Attainment Equity in College Towns
Objectives A vast literature documents unequal outcomes in American public education (e.g., Duncan and Murname, 2011), but no prior research explores whether inequities are moderated in progressive communities such as college towns. We test whether college towns have more equal educational outcomes than similar communities that lack higher education institutions. Methods We conduct two tests. First, we employ cross‐sectional ordinary least square…
Show Them the Mission: A Comparison of Teacher Recruitment Incentives in High Need Communities
Objective Most public organizations use both materialistic and idealistic appeals to attract valued employees, with the latter being particularly important for difficult jobs. Teaching in high poverty communities is one such job, though none have studied whether successful high poverty schools such as the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) schools make relatively greater use of public service appeals in teacher recruitment. In education, we identi…
Using “World Series Shares” to Fight Free Riding in Group Projects
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. As you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the 'Save PDF' action button
Better to Fight Another Day: A Pre-Theory of Insurgent Coalitions
The defense provided by interstate alliances operating in peacetime has often been considered a collective good subject to the free-riding and underprovision common to such goods I argue that within certain poorly integrated insurgent alliances, the exhaustion of allies may be a good valued almost as highly as the eventual collective victory. Coalition members might therefore limit their own participation in the conflict while encouraging allies …
Does Familiarity Breed Acceptance: Trends in Career-Noncareer Relations in the Reagan Administration
A number of researchers assert that relations between careerists and political appointees in Washington typically start badly but improve over the course of an administration. This article tested that proposition by surveying 1,04S high-level careerists and 242 political appointees serving in the Washington, DC offices of 15 federal organizations. In defense organizations, both career and noncareer officials felt that relations started well and c…
Neutrality: An Enduring Principle of the Federal Service
Although many proponents of civil service reform question the principles of classical American public administration and specifically reject its neutral competence model of federal service, the principle of neutrality continues to be an important belief of federal career executives. This finding is based on an analysis of responses to a survey of 1,045 high-level (SES and GM-15) careerists and 242 political appointees from 15 federal organization…
Knowing the Rational Peasant: The Creation of Rival Incentive Structures in Vietnam
This paper develops a rational model of individual participation in anti-regime activity based on the works of Tullock (1971), Mason (1986) and others, and applies it to the Vietnamese conflicts of the 1945-75 period. Concerns for physical security and expectations of victory by one side or another dominated the peasant `decision calculus' to the relative exclusion of such factors as ideology and provision of public goods. The critical factor in …
American Civil Service Reform in Historical Perspective
Still Clashing after All These Years: Ideological Conflict in the Reagan Executive
Thickening Government: Federal Hierarchy and the Diffusion of Accountability, by Paul C. Light
Governing the White House: From Hoover through LBJ. Charles E. Walcott , Karen M. Hult
Thinking the Unthinkable in Public Administration: A Case for Spoils in the Federal Bureaucracy
This article argues for ending tenure in the federal civil service. Arguments for tenure, and by extension against the old spoils system, are lacking. Even in the 19th century, relatively few federal managers lost their jobs after party changes. At the same time, limited rotation made the civil service relatively innovative and legitimate. Today, media scrutiny, more programmatic parties and presidents, and the limited capacity of the White House…
Rethinking the Unthinkable: Reply to Durant, Goodsell, Knott, and Murray on "A Case for Spoils" in Federal Personnel Management
In "Thinking the Unthinkable in Public Administration: A Case For Spoils in the Federal Bureaucracy" in the last issue, Robert Maranto argued for ending tenure in the federal civil service. His essay was critiqued by Robert F Durant, Charles Goodsell, Jack Knott, and William Murray. In this article, Maranto responds
Using “World Series Shares” to Fight Free Riding in Group Projects
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. As you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the 'Save PDF' action button
Who Speaks for the President? The White House Press Secretary from Cleveland to Clinton.
Journal Article Who Speaks for the President? The White House Press Secretary from Cleveland to Clinton. By W. Dale Nelson. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press and At the President's Side: The Vice Presidency in the Twentieth Century. Ed. by Timothy Walch. Columbia: University of Missouri Press Get access Robert Maranto Robert Maranto Federal Executive Institute, Charlottesville, Virginia Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic …
Does Private School Competition Harm Public Schools? Revisiting Smith and Meier's The Case against School Choice
Comparing the Roles of Political Appointees and Career Executives in the U.S. Federal Executive Branch
This study uses Anthony Downs’s well-known typology of bureaucratic roles (climbers, conservers, advocates, zealots, and statesmen) as a theoretical template to examine the roles of political appointees and career executives serving in Washington, D.C. during the Reagan administration. Officials were asked to rank various personal goals in a 1987 survey. Political appointees were more likely to endorse climber (career advancement) and zealot (pol…
Does Private School Competition H-arm Public Schools? Revisiting Smith and Meier's: The Case Against School Choice
Smith and Meier (1995a) empirically assess the market hypothesis advanced by Chubb and Moe (1988, 1990), which holds that compettion improves schools. Using Florida school district data, Smith and Meier find that higher private school market share lowers public school test scores; they conclude that competition harms public schools. Hoever, they do not take into account the impact of family income on copetition in traditionally organized educatio…
Coping With Competition: The impact of Charter Schooling on Public School Outreach in Arizona
Advocates of market‐based education reform hypothesize that competition will cause traditional public schools to increase outreach efforts as they seek to market themselves. Advocates hope such efforts will result in more information on school activities and performance and thereby enhance accountability. We examine the effect of charter school competition on outreach efforts by a sample of 98 Arizona district schools, finding that charter compet…
Reinventing Government: Shaping Culture
Right Turn: Political Ideology in the Higher Civil Service, 1987-1994
Principal-agent models can justify political management of career officials, while at the same time predicting challenges to it, in part reflecting the different ideological goals of careerists and political appointees. Indeed, the “administrative presidency” strategies Ronald Reagan pursued anticipated and heightened such conflict through attempts to “politicize” the federal executive. Such strategies may help account for the findings of Aberbac…
Teachers’ Attitudes and the Success of School Choice
The 1990s witnessed growing attention to the adoption of choice‐based school reforms, particularly charter schooling and school vouchers. Although researchers have approached the school choice debate from theoretical, normative, and empirical directions, little attention has been paid to examining how teachers view school choice or what factors shape their attitudes. This oversight is significant because teachers can impact the success of school …
A Tale of Two Cities: School Privatization in Philadelphia and Chester
In August 2001, the state‐run Control Board for the Chester‐Upland School District awarded control of nine of their 10 schools to Edison Schools, with little opposition. In contrast, nearby Philadelphia fought state efforts to privatize schools. Finally, on July 31, 2002, the joint state‐city Philadelphia School Reform Commission partially privatized 45 (17 percent) of the city’s 264 public schools, while partly reconstituting 41 others. Publishe…
The Reagan Presidency: Assessing the Man and His Legacy – Edited by Paul Kengor and Peter Schweizer
Ideas Matter
Seeking Relevance: American Political Science and America
Cops, Teachers, and the Art of the Impossible: Explaining the Lack of Diffusion of Innovations That Make Impossible Jobs Possible
In their 1990 book Impossible Jobs in Public Management, Erwin C. Hargrove and John C. Glidewell argue that public agencies with limited legitimacy, high conflict, low professional authority, and weak agency myths have essentially impossible jobs. Yet some such positions have proven operationally possible. For example, over a 17‐year period, the New York City Police Department achieved dramatic reductions in crime. A second impossible job discuss…
Diversifying the Academy: How Conservative Academics Can Thrive in Liberal Academia
Researchers have long recognized that higher education is dominated by professors whose politics are well to the left of the American political center. The cause and implications of this ideological imbalance have been intensely debated since the 1960s. Although critics of higher education, such as David Horowitz, argue that the political imbalance in academia is largely the result of ideological discrimination, emerging research on the views, va…
Political science (55 works) · Law (45 works) · Sociology (42 works) · Politics (22 works) · Law (21 works) · Public Administration (19 works) · Higher education (18 works) · Pedagogy (18 works) · Economics (17 works) · Public Administration (17 works)