INSIDE CHARTER SCHOOLS: The Paradox of Radical Decentralization.

• Author: Mathews, Jay
• Position: Review

INSIDE CHARTER SCHOOLS: The Paradox of Radical Decentralization edited by Bruce Fuller Harvard University Press, $29.95

Uncharted Waters

IN THE SUMMER OF 1997, AS COOL wisps of fog swept across Berkeley's warm hillsides, Bruce Fuller kindly agreed to come indoors and host a week-long summit conference on charter schools. Fuller is an associate professor of education and public policy at the University of California at Berkeley. He has a sharp eye for the contradictions in education policy and a well-developed sense of humor, which he needed once the conference got underway.

After presenting what he thought was an even-handed account of the strengths and weaknesses of the charter school movement, Fuller found speakers for rival factions gleefully uniting to skin him alive. The director of an ultra-conservative San Francisco think tank asked why he was so worried about faith-based charters being publicly accountable. "Isn't it time that we really question the wisdom of separating church from state?" the man asked. The next questioner was the parent organizer of a Los Angeles charter school. He took Fuller apart for making critical points that the young man thought smelled of the rotting educational establishment.

Fuller decided to assemble the thinking of others like himself caught in the middle of the often information-starved debate. The number of charter schools--tax-funded institutions that operate independently of public school bureaucracies--was growing rapidly, especially in California. But no one knew if they were doing much good. Fuller worried that their popularity foretold the disintegration of the public school system and the sense of community that was a vital part of growing up in America.

In this book Fuller offers six essays--as much works of journalism as they are academic pieces--on six very different charter school experiments. University of San Francisco Professor Patty Yancey looks at the growth of the El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz Academy in Lansing, Michigan. Teachers and graduate students Edward Wexler and Luis Huerta recount the difficult history of the Latino Amigos Charter Academy near Oakland. New York Times reporter Kate Zernicke describes the creation of a charter school in an affluent suburb of Boston. UCLA Professor Amy Stuart Wells and research associates Jennifer Jellison Holme and Ash Vasudeva probe the difficulties of a wealthy Southern California suburb that created a charter school and invited in transfer...