Charles Glenn, Jr.

Fellow

Charles L. Glenn is a professor of Educational Leadership and Development and former dean of the School of Education 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 state funding 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. He is a member of the Massachusetts State Advisory Committee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights.

Glenn is the author of several books, including:

  • The Myth of the Common School (1988; 2002; Italian, 2004; Spanish, 2006; Portuguese, 2012)
  • 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)
  • The Ambiguous Embrace: Government and Faith-based Schools and Social Agencies (2000)
  • Balancing Freedom, Autonomy, and Accountability in Education (2004), in three volumes covering 40 countries — a revised and expanded version of Finding the Right Balance: Freedom, Autonomy and Accountability in Education (2002), coauthored with Jan De Groof, which has been published in Italian and in English for distribution in Eastern Europe
  • Contrasting Models of State and School: A Comparative Historical Study of Parental Choice and State Control (2011), about educational policy in the Netherlands and Belgium, Germany, and Austria
  • Native American/First Nations Schooling: From the Colonial Period to the Present (2011)
  • African American/Afro-Canadian Schooling: From the Colonial Period to the Present (2011)

His book-in-progress is on the harmful influence of certain ideas about education. He is also the author of hundreds of articles, encyclopedia entries, book chapters, and monographs on education policy.

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 boards of the European Association for Education Law Policy and the Council for American Private Education. 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, bilingual education, and church-state relations in education. Glenn's BA and EdD degrees are from Harvard, and his PhD is from Boston University.