The Strategic Management of Charter Schools: Frameworks and Tools for Educational Entrepreneurs
by Peter Frumkin, Bruno V. Manno, and Nell Edgington
The Strategic Management of Charter Schools addresses the challenges facing such schools by mapping out, in straightforward and highly pragmatic terms, a management framework for them.
The first charter school law in the United States was enacted in Minnesota in 1991. In the twenty years since that modest beginning, the movement has burgeoned and spread across the country: there are now more than five thousand charter schools attended by nearly two million students. Yet due to this rapid growth in the number of charter schools and to their generally independent character, the nature and quality of these institutions vary greatly. The promise of charter schools is great, but so are the organizational and educational challenges they face.
Organized around three crucial challenges to charter school leaders—managing mission, managing internal operations, and managing the larger stakeholder environment—the book provides charter school leaders with indispensable tools and insights for achieving educational and organizational success. In its elucidation of these managerial challenges, and in its equally helpful and detailed examinations of particular schools, the book offers a clear, credible approach to the efficient and sustainable management of what are still young and experimental educational institutions.
The Strategic Management of Charter Schools is a volume in the Educational Innovations series.
(via Harvard Education Press)
This book is a brilliant combination of theory and real-world cases. Free of the pointscoring common in charter school books, it focuses on the breakthroughs and mistakes made by people dedicated to the success of poor and minority children. Potential charter starters will learn from this book and so should those who know little about charter schools but support or oppose them on partisan or ideological grounds.
— Paul T. Hill, John and Marguerite Corbally Professor and director, Center on Reinventing Public Education, University of Washington, Bothell
The Strategic Management of Charter Schools should be required reading for anyone thinking about opening a charter school, anyone currently leading a charter school, and anyone sitting on the board of a charter school.
— Richard Barth, CEO, KIPP Foundation