Samuel Abrams is the director of the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, and the author of Education and the Commercial Mindset (Harvard University Press, 2016), an analysis of the impact of market forces on public education in the United States and abroad; the book is scheduled for publication in Chinese by the China Translation and Publishing House in 2022, with an introduction by Mingyuan Gu. Abrams was previously a high school history teacher for 18 years and has since been teaching courses in the economics and politics of education at Teachers College and in moral and political philosophy as part of the Core Curriculum faculty at Columbia College. He has written on matters of education policy for The New Republic, Le Monde, The Los Angeles Times, The Columbia Journalism Review, and Teachers College Record, ​​​​​​​among other publications. For his advancement of the understanding of Finnish education in the United States, he was made a Knight, First Class, Order of the Lion of Finland, by the Finnish government in 2014. His recent research projects include a study funded by the Southern Poverty Law Center concerning the impact of vouchers and tuition tax credit scholarships on public school budgets. He earned a B.A. in history, an M.A. in economics and education, and a Ph.D. in politics and education from Columbia.