Martin Carnoy


Martin Carnoy is an American labour economist and Vida Jacks Professor of Education at the Stanford Graduate School of Education. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Education as well as of the International Academy of Education.

Biography

Martin Carnoy is the Vida Jacks Professor of Education at Stanford University School of Education. Prior to coming to Stanford, he was a Research Associate in Economics, Foreign Policy Division, at the Brookings Institution. Carnoy is affiliated with the Economic Policy Institute, Center for Education Policy Analysis, and is a member of the American Educational Research Association's Grants Board Committee. He is also an elected member of the National Academy of Education and the International Academy of Education. Carnoy has worked as a consultant to the World Bank, Inter-American Development Bank, Asian Development Bank, UNESCO, International Energy Agency, OECD, UNICEF, International Labour Office. Martin Carnoy received his B.A. in electrical engineering from the California Institute of Technology and a M.A. and Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago

Research

Dr. Carnoy is a labor economist with a special interest in the relation between the economy and the educational system. To this end, he studies the US labor market, including the role in that relation of race, ethnicity, and gender, the US educational system, and systems in many other countries. He uses comparative analysis to understand international comparative education, the economics of education and applied econometrics, with a focus on the political economy of education.
Through his research, Carnoy has argued that educational policy is used by capitalist nations' "bourgeois elites" as a form of cultural imperialism in order to perpetuate the conditions allowing for the exploitation of working classes both within and without these nations through e.g. education systems that support inherited advantages. He has chronicled how Marxist views on the role of the state shifted considerably throughout the 20th century, sometimes bearing little loyalty to the original views of Karl Marx. Dr. Carnoy also has explored how Cuba leverages small, personalized schools, highly trained teachers, strong principals, a coherent curriculum and long-term relationships between teachers and students to academically outperform most other Latin American countries . Together with Luis Beneviste and Richard Rothstein, Carnoy has weighed in on the debate between private and public education, arguing that many private schools in inner cities face the same problems as their neighboring public schools and thus questioning the extent to which they can be part of the solution. Similarly, Carnoy, Rothstein, Lawrence Mishel and Rebecca Jacobsen have contributed to the debate on charter schools through their book The Charter School Dust-Up'', wherein they compare student enrollment and achievement in charter and public schools and explain the finding that students in the later tend on average to academically outperform students in the former.
Carnoy has conducted research on the impact of school accountability on learning, the effectiveness and efficiency of private schools, the impact of globalization on education systems, school vouchers, flexible work, and the impact of structural adjustment on education. Key findings of Carnoy's research include: