Samuel Abrams is the director of the International Partnership for the Study of Educational Privatization, anchored at the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado in association with Stockholm University as well as the University of Turku and the Turku University of Applied Sciences. He is 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. Abrams was previously a high school history teacher for 18 years and has since taught courses in the economics and politics of education at Teachers College, Columbia University, and in 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 The Political Science Quarterly, ​​​​​​​among other publications. In 2022-23, he served as a Fulbright scholar at the University of Turku. 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 and published in 2023 concerning the impact of vouchers and tuition tax-credit scholarships on public school budgets. He earned his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from Columbia.