Charter Schools: Another Flawed Educational Reform? The Series on School Reform

This book examines why most charter schools will fail. It opens with a historical overview, describing the fate and significance of the precursor to charter schools: President Nixon's Experimental Schools Program. It then turns to the author's personal experiences in educational theory and practice, presenting and discussing the essential features and problems of the process whereby new settings come into existence. The book outlines a willing merger of two organizations seeking to create a new setting that will be better and stronger than a solo effort will allow, and it looks at charter schools in terms of the features common to the process of creating a setting. The volume examines charter schools in light of what is known about a new setting that has been comprehensively described: the Manhattan Project. It explores how charter schools create numerous stakeholders who are to have a role in education and looks at a new, non- traditional high school in Providence, Rhode Island, and its first year of operation, pausing to discuss those features that will determine the fate of new settings. Most charters, it concludes, will fail or fall short of their goals due to politics, resistance from vested interests, and ignorance of inevitable problems. (Contains 37 references.) (RJM)