Peter Cookson, and Kristina Berger
2002
Peter Cookson, a sociologist at Teachers College, and New York education consultant Kristina Berger wrote this new book on charter schools. It's a hatchet job, lightly disguised as social science and dressed up with a lot of left-wing sociology, the kind that sees nearly everything other than government itself as part of a right-wing plot to weaken the common weal by promulgating "markets," which they regard as creations of the devil. Though perceptive about the challenges of creating and operating a successful charter school - and nowhere are those challenges greater than in New York - the authors shed little fresh light on that familiar topic. At bottom, they're hostile to school deregulation and education freedom. They have a mystical (and often syrupy) faith in government to fix whatever is not yet quite right with our education system. No wonder two of the jacket blurbs are by school-system apologists Bruce Biddle and Alex Molnar. (The third is from Cookson's colleague Henry Levin.) Save your $26. In any case, about five of those dollars simply pay for a copy (reproduced in the appendix) of SUNY's charter school application kit, which you can probably get for free. If you cannot resist, the ISBN is 0813366313 and the publisher is Westview Press. You can find it at http://www.perseusbooksgroup.com/perseus-cgi-bin/display/0-8133-6631-3.
