This book tells the real-life story of Locke High School. Locke High--originally known for its excellence--became one of the toughest, most dysfunctional schools in the nation. Then in 2007 teachers voted to bring in an upstart charter school organization called "Green Dot" to try and restore the Locke Saints' past glory. It was a brave…

Deficient urban schooling remains one of America's most pressing--and stubborn--public policy problems. This important new book details and evaluates a radical and promising new approach to K-12 education reform. "Strife and Progress" explains for a broad audience the "portfolio strategy" for providing urban education--its…

Drawing on a four-year study of the last 40 years of education reform in Los Angeles, "Learning from L.A." captures the sweeping change in American education. It puts forth a provocative argument: while school reformers and education historians have tended to focus on the success or failure of individual initiatives, they have overlooked…

The most exciting innovation in education policy in the last decade is the emergence of highly effective schools in our nation's inner cities, schools where disadvantaged teens make enormous gains in academic achievement. In this book, the author takes readers inside six of these secondary schools and reveals the secret to their success: they are…

The first U.S. charter school opened in 1992, and the scale of the charter movement has since grown to 4,000 schools and more than a million students in 40 states plus the District of Columbia. With this growth has also come a contentious debate about the effects of the schools on their own students and on students in nearby traditional public…

This collection of papers suggests that the laissez-faire policies of charter school reform often exacerbate existing inequalities in U.S. schools. It is based on a study of 10 urban, suburban, and rural school districts and 17 diverse charter schools in California, focusing on accountability and equity to explore how charter school policies…

This book contains a report of a study commissioned by the California Legislature to examine charter schools in the state. The study considered the following four questions: (1) What population of students attends charter schools? (2) Is student achievement higher in charter schools than in conventional public schools? (3) What oversight and…