Katrina Bulkley and Priscilla Wohlstetter, editors, Teachers College Press
November 2003
Katrina Bulkley and Priscilla Wohlstetter edited this Teachers College Press collection of nine papers examining various aspects of the ten-year old charter-school scene. Some are solid pieces that repay attention. But it's a very limited review. The editors say their focus was on "the value-added [sic] by charter schools," in particular how such schools "contribute to the landscape of public education and, especially, how they compare to district-run schools." So you know from the outset that this is not a book about educational freedom or choice, but about whether charter schools deserve a niche within the public-education enterprise. The evidence adduced here is mixed. In a concluding chapter, David Plank and Gary Sykes acknowledge that charter schools are here to stay - if only because parents like them - but say it's "increasingly unlikely that early hopes that charter schools will transform or revivify public education will be realized." The main reason for that glum conclusion, say the authors, is that charters aren't very different from conventional public schools. Left unresolved and largely unexplored is whether that's because the proliferating constraints on charter schools KEEP them from being very different, i.e., whether the immune system of a change-averse public education system is succeeding in suppressing this intruder such that no widespread innovation-infection could possibly occur. The book's ISBN is 0807743933 and you can obtain additional information at http://store.tcpress.com/0807743933.shtml.
