Robert Maranto

}} Robert Anthony Maranto (born March 28, 1958) is a political scientist who holds the 21st Century Chair in Leadership at the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas (appointed in 2008).

Maranto earned his doctorate in political science from the University of Minnesota in 1989, and has taught at ten colleges and universities. The son of a career bureaucrat, he is strongly interested in efforts to make public bureaucracies better serve the public. He has written widely on civil service reform, university reform, and school reform, particularly on charter schools.

Prior to his appointment at UA, Maranto taught at Villanova University and served in the Clinton administration and at the Brookings Institution. With others including his wife April, he has produced eleven scholarly books, including ''President Obama and Education Reform'', ''A Guide to Charter Schools'', ''Beyond a Government of Strangers'', and ''Radical Reform of the Civil Service''. In 2009 he co-edited both the conservative-leaning ''The Politically Correct University'', and the liberal-leaning ''Judging Bush''. His co-authored ''Education Reform in the Obama Era: The Second Term and the 2016 Election'', will be published December 2015 by Palgrave. , he is working on a book for Rowman and Littlefield, tentatively titled ''For School Choice: Lessons from two decades of Arizona charter schools''. Maranto edits the ''Journal of School Choice''. His more than 70 scholarly publications have appeared in journals including ''Social Science Quarterly'', the ''Journal of Educational Research'', the ''Journal of School Leadership'', ''Education Next'', ''Computers and Education'', and ''Public Administration Review''. His newspaper op-eds have appeared in numerous venues including ''The Wall Street Journal'', ''Philadelphia Inquirer'', ''Baltimore Sun'', ''Arkansas Democrat Gazette'', and ''Houston Chronicle''. He currently serves on the board of a nonprofit cyber charter school serving at-risk youth, Achievement House. He also serves on the Arkansas Advisory Committee for the U.S. Civil Rights Commission. His children, Tony and Maya, attend public schools in Fayetteville. Provided by Wikipedia