BOOK REVIEW

Deal, T., & Hentschke, G. Adventures of Charter School Creators: Leading from the Ground Up. Lanham, (2004). Scarecrow Education.

1. DEFINING CHARTER SCHOOL LEADERSHIP Charter school reform, now in its second decade, remains a controversial policy issue. Researchers, advocates, and opponents often debate what charter schools are and what they should be, as well as what the effects are for the students who attend them, the districts in which they are housed, the teachers who work in them, the parents who choose them, and the taxpayers who (mostly) fund them. Among the ideological drivers for charter schools are market advocates, professional and community advocates of local control, those who favor private sector management, and those who wish to dismantle public funding and provision of schooling, preferring that it be both privately financed and provided. For example, market-based advocates of school choice call for an educational system in which parents choose schools, holding that the competition between institutions will cause all schools to improve (Chubb & Moe, 1990). Ray Budde (1988) saw charter schools as allowing for the creation of educator, parent, or community-led organizations funded and sponsored by public bureaucracies to create more responsive schooling that better attended to student learning. Some reformers imagine that charter schools and other deregulatory educational reforms will allow for public-private hybrids in which the inefficiencies of public bureaucracies will be replaced or minimized by more efficient private management (Hill, Pierce & Guthrie, 1997). Others fear that this emphasis on the virtues of the private sector over the deficiencies of public school bureaucracies in advancing charter school reform is in fact, an attempt to ultimately privatize public education with vouchers, educational management organizations (EMOs), home schooling, and tuition tax credits, and remove public supports for and regulation of American schooling (American Federation of Teachers, 1996; Bracey, 2002). Journal of Educational Change (2005) 6: 293–305 DOI 10.1007/s10833-005-8252-3


Springer 2005

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Questions continue to surround charter schools’ governance structures, funding mechanisms, and the role of for-profit EMOs in shaping local charter school communities. Despite the controversies, charter schools remain a fixture on the U.S. educational landscape, and are a prominent feature choice option for students in schools designated failing under the federal educational policy, No Child Left Behind (NCLB). Into this policy fray, and nearly 15 years after the first charter school law passed in Minnesota, comes Adventures of Charter School Creators: Leading from the Ground Up, edited by Terrence E. Deal and Guilbert Hentschke with several others, but told predominantly in 13 first-person narratives by charter school founders and developers. Deal and Hentschke’s central goal is to identify, through schools they selected from around the U.S. (but primarily in California), the unique characteristics of charter school founders and leaders. While Deal and Hentschke provide an introduction, two beginning chapters and a final one, the rest of the chapters are written by the charter founders and operators in order to highlight what the editors believe are their unique leadership characteristics. In the introduction, they compare charter school and traditional school leaders: The difference, as we see it, seems to be that most charter school founders take the school mission much further. Their schools reflect the profound impact on their personal beliefs and life history on the school’s mission, passion, and instructional practices. This is not evident a priori; it only becomes so after we listen and walk some distance in their shoes (p. xi).

This storytelling strategy in which editorial analysis is kept to a bare minimum has a few advantages and ultimately several drawbacks. While it allows the perceptions of the founders to be expressed unencumbered by researcher or journalistic probing, it prevents the very unpacking that researchers and journalists do at their best, which can reveal important tensions, unexamined assumptions and mistakes, as well as successes, and can allow the reader a story that is less one dimensional than several stories read. For example, though the editors spend time in the first chapter discussing the educational needs of parents and their children that traditional public schools are not meeting, nowhere are the voices of parents, students, or even teachers heard in this book. Thus, it is not at all clear how the rest of any of the school communities featured experience these leaders and the extent to which the leaders’ impact upon the schools is a favorable

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one. Nor is it clear how the rest of the school community was involved in the start-up of the schools beyond the leaders’ perception of that involvement. Thus the stories, while dramatic and, often inspiring, also read at times as corporate marketing that emphasizes positive spin over struggle or difficulty. A school that finished at the bottom half of achievement for schools in California is described by its leader in Chapter 10 as having just missed ‘‘placing in the top half of California schools’’ (p. 144). The leader in Chapter 3 describes herself as ‘‘a change agent who consistently steps outside the box,’’ and who has ‘‘been faced with numerous obstacles, land mines, and outright assaults’’ (p. 41). This is not to minimize certain difficulty charter founders face in starting a new organization or raising student achievement, but rather to demonstrate how the narratives get in the way of telling a more layered and textured story. In addition, the editors choose to stay out of the policy debates surrounding privatization and charter school reform, rather than clearly articulating and developing their own stance in the introduction, first two chapters, and the final chapter. For example, EMOs or partnering organizations were involved in 8 of the 13 schools featured. Though many of the narratives make light of the involvement of EMOs, comparing them to other privatization aspects of public schooling such as textbook companies, this comparison obfuscates how EMO involvement might change the operation of schools at fundamental levels, such as the choice of curricula. An example is in Chapter 8. Judith Price tells the story of Sisulu Children’s Academy in Harlem (a school currently on probation with its authorizer, though this happened the year the book was published). Sisulu, started in collaboration with the Caanan Baptist Church of Christ, chose Victory Schools as its EMO. As Price writes, though there was community involvement in the planning stages of the school, ‘‘The actual charter application had been fully drafted by the EMO already and had been missing only the ‘where’ it would happen’’ (p. 114). None of the schools in the collection are parent, teacher, or community-run (though these parties are involved), yet the authors leave the reader to draw her own conclusion about the meaning of this for understanding charter school leadership. The schools in Chapters 5 and 7 were started by principals who converted existing public schools to charter status. It is interesting to note that the educator-led stories are the only ones in the book that discuss teaching and learning in any significant detail.

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Still, each story demonstrates the multifaceted skills and motivations charter school leaders, founders, and supporters bring to their organizations, and their hard work comes through clearly in each narrative. It is also clear that most of the founders come from outside traditional public schools, and that the charter school movement has succeeded in attracting educational and social entrepreneurs looking to realize a variety of visions for schooling. Deal and Hentschke do not delve into what lessons these leaders have for traditional public schools, if any, nor what lessons they could learn from traditional public school leaders, especially with regard to negotiating political and normative issues within districts and local schools – situations that almost all the leaders and founders reported, and usually blamed on district intransigence. Without context-building by the editors, the reader wonders if the resistance faced by the school in Chapter 15 from its host district stemmed from appropriate regulation by an authorizer or mere bureaucratic interference. The authors make it clear that starting and sustaining a charter school, be it a new, start-up, or an existing conversion, is extremely hard work. What is less clear is the degree to which the schools are actually successful in terms of student achievement on standardized assessments – the very accountability that charter school reformers promise. This is where some editorial analysis would have been helpful in order to put these stories into context though district descriptions and statistics such as achievement, school size, demographics, and funding. Also unclear is the long-term sustainability of some of the schools – many of the chapters are written by founders who are no longer involved in the day-to-day school operations, and thus may be unaware of pressing issues. Deal and Hentschke could help the readers to understand the stability of these schools, the challenges they continue to face, and the ways in which federal, state, and local policy might help to strengthen the schools that struggle. Charter School Creators is likely to be of greatest interest to those interested in starting charter schools or those who already have. The collection’s greatest strength is what the editors term the ‘‘worm’s eye view’’ of charter schools in their early years – a particularly challenging time. The book also demonstrates the diversity of the charter school movement. While the rate of new charter schools has slowed in recent years (Wells, 2002), broader policy initiatives such as NCLB that encourage school choice options, especially for children in underperforming schools, might facilitate a resurgence in charter

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school development. This book will likely inspire educational entrepreneurs and EMO officials to collaborate in this effort, but the core providers of education – parents, teachers, and community members – will likely find little about their role in charter school leadership from this text. References American Federation of Teachers. (1996). Charter School Laws: Do They Measure Up? Washington, DC: American Federation of Teachers. Bracey, G.W. (2002). The War Against America’s Public Schools: Privatizing Schools, Commercializing Education. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. Budde, R. (1988). Education by Charter: Restructuring School Districts, Key to Long term Continuing Improvement in American Education. Boston, MA: Learning Innovations. Chubb, J. & Moe, T. (1990). Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools. Washington DC: The Brookings Institution. Hill, P.T., Pierce, L.C. & Guthrie, J.W. (1997). Reinventing Public Education: How Contracting can Transform America’s Schools. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wells, A.S. (ed.) (2002). Where Charter School Policy Fails: The Problems of Accountability and Equity. New York: Teachers College Press.

JANELLE T. SCOTT

Department of Administration, Leadership, and Technology Steinhardt School of Education East Building, Suite 300 239 Greene Street New York, NY, 10003-6674 USA E-mail: [email protected] DOI 10.1007/s10833-005-8251-4

I run a charter school in its fourth year. The dust is gradually settling and we are beginning to do the fine-tuning the program requires. When I am speaking to groups and building our network of support I often complain that when I stopped being a jury trial attorney and television writer and decided to found an alternative public school in my own image, an awesome privilege, I couldn’t go into Borders and buy a copy of ‘‘Charter Schools for Dummies’’ and follow the pages and chapters in their appropriate order. So much of what we do

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seems like re-inventing the wheel. ‘‘Adventures of Charter School Creators’’ would have been a wonderful resource in 2001 when Susanne Coie and I started our planning for a social justice school in inner-city Los Angeles. I recommend it heartily for all those intrepid education warriors, entrepreneurs, dissatisfied workers in the public school vineyard, parent organizations, community-based organizations thinking about starting a school, and prospective Board members as they embark on their journey to join the charter school movement. At the barest minimum the book tells us that we are not alone. So many others have traveled this path before, encountered the same idiotic obstacles, and persevered and succeeded. I want to approach the book and this review by looking at the big picture – not the charter school movement only, but public education in the United States in general. What does the book and the charter school movement tell us about that bigger picture? The book doesn’t use these exact words, but over and over the experiences of the founders of schools demonstrate that the task of creating a successful charter school is vastly more difficult than it ought to be. This is so because of the opposition of powerful interest groups such as the overly centralized school districts and their teachers unions, locked in a dysfunctional death grip whose only mutual mission is job preservation, not educating kids. Charter schools must provide their own facility, a challenge referred to over and over again in the book. Facilities are public infrastructure, like roads, jails or army bases. Telling charter schools to provide their own infrastructure is like telling citizens to fill their own potholes. It’s a gross abdication of governmental obligation. Because parents of public school children do not vote in sufficient numbers to affect policy, it is only one tiny example of the underfunding that plagues all of public education. In my school we get $6000 per pupil per year, while at the same time, as Jim Blew points out in his chapter, the LAUSD gets $11,000 per year; from my $6000 per pupil I need to extract rent for two facilities. And so we begin to get the picture of charter school developers that the book portrays: people who are optimistic and crazy enough to take on the job of saving public education blindfolded with both hands tied behind their backs! The book illustrates another thing I often say when speaking about the experience: when asked what is the primary personality ingredient of a charter school creator, I quickly answer ‘‘naivete´.’’ The fact that so many successful charter schools can be created despite the political and financial challenges forces us to look again at the big picture. If the book has any real flaw it is in letting the readers

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draw their own conclusions instead of laying it all out for us. Take the stories of Vaughn, Fenton, and Feaster, for example. Vaughn, Fenton and Feaster were three of the worst schools in California and now, a few years after converting to charter, they are three of the best. These chapters alone make the book a critical resource for anyone looking at the big picture. Yvonne Chan and Joe Lucente are two of the great educational leaders in the United States. They are an extraordinary resource for all of us mere mortals who follow in their footsteps and bug them incessantly for advice. Yet Yvonne and Joe will be the first to tell you that the success of their schools is not wholly dependent on their brilliant leadership. Critical to their success is the structure of the charter school itself – suddenly the leaders were no longer middle managers responsible to a huge bureaucracy ‘‘downtown.’’ The buck stopped with them. They made plenty of mistakes, but they were nimble and smart and corrected course quickly. The readers of the book should be asking the obvious: why shouldn’t all failing public schools immediately be converted to charters? Ready or not, No Child Left Behind (NCLB) may be heading us all in that direction. Reading the chapters again gives us some insight into the answer – converting all failing schools to charter makes sense if it occurs as a community effort and involves the enthusiastic support of all stakeholders – students, staff and parents. Joe and Yvonne (and for that matter, all the creators in the book) are the necessary catalysts, but the support of the stakeholders is critical. That support is out there waiting to be galvanized. If you think about it, other than buying pencils in bulk or organizing professional development conferences, what is the continued justification for a centralized school district? The experience of Fenton, Vaughn and Feaster would suggest there is none. The book describes a vast array of resources drawn upon to get a new school up and running. This is the converse of the facilities and other hurdles thrown up by the ‘‘system’’: the incredible reservoir of good will towards solving the public school crisis brings people to the fore who may never have thought much about the issue until circumstances forced them to take a long, sobering look. The charter school movement is an ecumenical one – beginning politically as a conservative effort, the next best thing to vouchers, it has spread its wings to include people of good will of all stripes. Many white, middle-class parents who have extracted their children from the public school system feel guilty, are themselves the products of good public schooling, and can be lured back into the system as board

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members, volunteers and contributors. As the book points out, it doesn’t hurt to have the support of an existing community based organization (CBO), such as Canaan Baptist Church or Pueblo Nuevo. The CBO brings money and skilled personnel, but most importantly it brings credibility in the community. Keep in mind that a new school must attract students and parents. It helps to have a long track record of trust in the community when you go about the business of asking folks to invest their children in a new institution. The chapter about Ryder suggests an entirely new dimension of support – a corporation which values its community roots so much that it is willing to bankroll a charter school. I often say that one of my jobs as Executive Director is to lure as many competent adults onto the premises as I can. Imagine what it would be like for a huge corporation to make volunteering at the school an essential corporate policy! Partnering with a corporation also injects the real world into the lives of the students. How great it would be to have hundreds of built-in internships available on site! Solving real world problems is empowering, and fun. Except for an introduction, first chapter overview and concluding chapter, the bulk of the book is first-person accounts by the charter school creators themselves. Because we all sincerely believe in our own future beatification for doing this work, the danger in first-person accounts is that our most humiliating and reprehensible decisions will be omitted or given a rosy spin. And because I’m the reviewer I’m going to keep mine to myself. Few of the writers elaborated upon their own personal changes, other than exhaustion. When they did talk about it, as when Hal Johnson describes the hugged farewell from his school’s (ABES) temporary host, the middle school principal, it was a powerful moment. The authors note that entrepreneurs and managers have totally different skill sets (and personalities!). But what if the creator of the school is asked to be both? Not everyone is as smart as Joe Lucente, who realized immediately that he needed an educator/ partner while he covered the business side. Reading about the experience at Odyssey, one might suppose that there was something about Kathleen’s leadership style that exacerbated the parent and staff rebellion. For those of us who came to secondary education from business or law, we quickly understood that schools cannot function as hierarchies. Either we master the collaborative leadership model or we die. What goes on in the classroom is all that matters. If teachers are not supported and happy, students will not be supported and happy. Unhappy students and teachers make parents unhappy. And

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so the unanticipated benefit of a successful school is that the creator him/herself becomes a better human being – more patient, a true listener, centered, a calming influence. The first time a 12 year-old pushed all my buttons until I exploded, a wise and experienced teacher took me aside and told me: ‘‘The trick is to find them endlessly amusing.’’ ‘‘But that’s like a lobotomy,’’ I said. ‘‘Exactly,’’ was the response. But that one exchange changed my life. In brotherly admiration for the wonderful charter school creators in the book, I urge you all to read about them, and then think about the big picture – why aren’t all public schools like theirs?

ROGER LOWENSTEIN

Executive Director Los Angeles Leadership Academy 668 South Catalina Street, Los Angeles, CA, 90005 USA E-mail: [email protected] DOI 10.1007/s10833-005-8250-5

This book has international significance even though it is about a uniquely American project in school reform. There are barely 3000 charter schools in America. Along with magnet schools, they represent a tiny fraction of the total number of schools. Despite this, observers in other countries follow developments with great interest, since the issue of school choice transcends national boundaries, as does concern for how levels of achievement can be raised for large numbers of students in challenging circumstances. The lead authors are Terrence Deal and Guilbert Hentschke. Their interests over the years suggest that they would be inclined to support charter schools. Hentschke has written extensively in recent times on the role of the private sector in public education and of the need for an entrepreneurial approach to leadership in schools. They are mindful, however, of the range of views about charter schools, and their co-authored chapters – two at the start and one at the end – are meticulous in balance and elegant in language. They write in respectful terms about the major critiques and the unanswered questions. They acknowledge frankly that there are many unanswered questions. For example:

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Do partnerships undergirding charter schools portend a new definition of public responsibility and promise new kinds of schooling consonant with 21st century urban America’s needs and demands? Or, alternatively, are they precursors of a form of privatization unresponsive to the welfare of underserved children? Answers to these questions are important but as yet unclear (Deal & Hentschke, 2004, pp. 9–10).

Having framed the book in this manner, Deal and Hentschke leave the stage to leaders of 13 charter schools to tell their stories. These leaders are remarkably frank in their account of the challenges and conflicts. What appeared at the outset to be a shared vision and a common commitment to the way it would be achieved would often give way to debilitating debate that threw doubt on whether the venture would survive. Kathleen O’Connor wrote about this in her story of the Odyssey Charter School in Los Angeles. The charter was approved on May 25, 1999 but ‘‘the first wave of discontent…was in February 2000…by the end of May, there was an attempted mutiny initiated by seven families who enlisted the aid of those who had the power to end our journey’’ (p. 47). These stories are superb sources for analysis of leadership using frames or lenses that help ‘‘figure out what is going on’’ (p. 24): human resource, structural, political, and symbolic (Bolman & Deal, 2003). Some charter schools enjoy international as well as national renown, notably the Vaughn Next Century Learning Center in Los Angeles. As she has done on seemingly countless occasions, Yvonne Chan tells how it was achieved. Hers is undoubtedly one of the most remarkable achievements in leadership in any setting. What stood out in her account on this occasion are the kinds of sacrifice that were necessary to get the venture off the ground. ‘‘When no government funds flowed to us in July, when our year-round school began, I mortgaged my house. All staff agreed not to be paid until August’’ (p. 65). The book does not set out to provide evidence that the charter school project is a success as far as educational outcomes are concerned. In this respect, the international reader may be disappointed. It is essentially a book about leadership under conditions of extraordinary complexity and uncertainty. The final chapter by Deal and Hentschke is one of the most important statements about leadership to appear in recent times. They pose three questions: ‘‘Does starting a charter school from scratch require fundamentally different leadership skills than taking a position in an existing suburban public school? If so, how do those leadership requirements vary? If not,

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what are the generic characteristics of school leadership relevant across the range of situations?’’ (p. 247). Synthesizing the accounts provided by leaders, they suggest that charter schools offer allure, attraction, and a chance to ‘play’. They contend that enthusiasm, beliefs and experience trump professional preparation and, with some memorable phrases, observe that ‘‘school leadership is a contact sport,’’ ‘‘relentless optimism comes with the territory,’’ and ‘‘unbending ideologies, pragmatic approaches, and pride are at a premium’’ (pp. 249–250). Deal and Hentschke conclude that the leadership is different in charter schools from that in regular public schools. It is the opportunity to create and shape that is ‘‘enormously heady and compelling…like the rush that drives an entrepreneur who believes she or he has a novel idea for the marketplace’’ (p. 250). This is familiar territory for these authors and they complete the analysis with concise descriptions of the kinds of decisions that characterize such leadership: decisions about what business to be in, how to organize and operate service delivery, the kinds of people to employ and their compensation, about customers and clients to be served, and how to allocate operating revenue. While entertaining the possibility that charter schools may end up an ‘‘ignominious flop,’’ they conclude on an optimistic note by offering a contestable historical comparison. ‘‘In many ways charter schools are modern, expanded versions of the old one-room schoolhouse where dedicated teachers pursued their calling with parental backing and helped students learn and grow’’ (p. 255). After reading the heroic accounts of leadership in 13 charter schools, the reader might expect Deal and Hentschke to conclude that the role is beyond most people or that few will be attracted to it. This is not the case. They suggest that those who have taken on the role are not the kind of people who are attracted to leadership in a regular school. ‘‘Far from being more demanding and less attractive, charter schools are attracting people to school leadership who seem to thrive on ‘daunting opportunities’’‘ (p. 256). The challenge for policymakers and other key stakeholders is therefore to ‘‘extend an invitation to entrepreneurs with a passion for fulfilling the most sacred calling of all – to create places where every child can learn and grow’’ (p. 250). Given the small scale of the charter school movement in America, one is left to ponder the importance of the project and the relevance of this report for the international reader. The answer can be gleaned

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by searching out similar groundbreaking initiatives in other places that provide the same opportunities and challenges for leaders. While there are few examples of schools that have the same kind of ‘start up’ as the American charter school, a useful comparison is offered by a development in England where all schools have a high level of autonomy (schools control more than 90% of their budgets and selection of staff is a local responsibility). It involves the shift from the general comprehensive model of secondary schooling to the specialist model. With momentum building over 15 years, and with support from successive governments of different persuasion, more than 2000 of about 3100 secondary schools now offer one of ten specialisms, for example, science, mathematics, business, languages, music, and sport. Value-added data on student performance reveal that specialist schools outperform non-specialist schools on key indicators of achievement across all socio-economic settings. Apart from the high level of local autonomy, leaders of these schools are required to create partnerships with a range of public and private entities and thus build support for their area of specialism. Two observations may be made. First, this book about leadership in American charter schools has a counterpart in a book of similar genre related to England’s specialist secondary schools. Sir Cyril Taylor and Connor Ryan have written a comprehensive account of the latter that is packed with the stories of successful leaders, and offers comparisons with developments in other nations, including the charter school movement in America (Taylor & Ryan, 2005). Like Deal and Hentschke, the authors are predisposed to the kind of school they are describing, especially Taylor, who is chair of the Specialist Schools Trust that advocates and supports the movement. It is timely that such books are written to complement the range of publications that offer a critical perspective. They are strengthened by first hand accounts of leaders who have helped created success. Second, there is much to be gained by sharing knowledge about the distinctive approaches to leadership that emerge in projects of these kinds. The Adventures of Charter School Creators makes an important contribution. Cross-nation authorship is important and it is noteworthy that Hentschke has collaborated with Brent Davies at the University of Hull on a range of publications on school leadership that draws on international practice (see for example their respective contributions in Davies, 2005). More generally, the networking of knowledge about innovative approaches to leadership in challenging circumstances is going to be important in the years ahead, and the

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experiences of practitioners themselves are central to such an endeavor. This book from one side of the Atlantic is a superb example. On the other side, the Specialist Schools Trust has created a practitioner-led project in International Networking for Educational Transformation. These provide important new ways of learning about leadership. References Bolman, L. & Deal, T. (2003). Reframing Organizations. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. B. Davies(ed.) (2005). The Essentials of School Leadership. London: Paul Chapman. Taylor, C. & Ryan, C. (2005). Excellence in Education: The Making of Great Schools. London: David Fulton.

AUTHOR’S BIO Brian J. Caldwell is Managing Director of Educational Transformations in Melbourne, Australia and Professorial Fellow in the Department of Education Policy and Management at the University of Melbourne where he served as Dean of Education from 1998 to 2004. BRIAN J. CALDWELL

Educational Transformations Suite 718, 1 Queens Road Melbourne, Victoria 3004, Australia E-mail: [email protected]