• Winner of the Virginia and Warren Stone Prize, Awarded Annually by Harvard University Press for an Outstanding Book on Education and Society

By 2005 only 240,000 of America's 60 million school children attended public schools run by education management organizations. Few, if any, of those organizations were yet in profit and the educational gains their schools had made were bitterly contested. In Learning on the Job, Steven Wilson offers us a timely and convincing analysis of why this happened...There are real insights here, not just into the short-termism of entrepreneurial interest but also into the structural weaknesses of American public education. His book is enjoyable, clear, and fair-minded: on any basis, a major contribution to an important debate.
   --Michael Duffy, Times Educational Supplement

Refrain[s] from cant and puffery...[Wilson has] much good advice for others who might want to try starting their own schools.
   --Jay Mathews, Washington Post

[A] lucid and engaging analysis...[Wilson] proves to be a perceptive analyst of the industry.
   --Education Next

Steven Wilson spent years developing a business model that aimed to overcome the inefficiencies and ineffectiveness of urban public schools, and finally launched a company to run charter schools under contract. Sobered but still hopeful, he here gives a fascinating account of how his model, and that of six other private education organizations, have worked so far, and analyzes what they can do in the future to improve public education.
   --Nathan Glazer, author of We Are All Multiculturalists Now

Sage yet passionate, battle-scarred but optimistic, Steven Wilson has produced a magisterial appraisal of America's early experience with the privatizing, outsourcing, and reinventing of public education. This illuminating book offers a much-needed and timely set of lessons, challenges, and opportunities.
   --Chester E. Finn Jr., former Assistant Secretary of Education

Learning on the Job is a fair-minded, thoughtful, and deeply informed analysis of private education management organizations, which are assuming an increasingly important role in American public education. Steven Wilson has emerged from the trenches to give a balanced and perceptive critique of their promise--and their problems too.
   --Diane Ravitch, author of Left Back: A Century of Battles Over School Reform

Steven F. Wilson is Senior Fellow at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University.