From Village School to Global Brand: Changing the World through Education.

• Author: Currie-Knight, Kevin
• Position: Book review

* From Village School to Global Brand: Changing the World Through Education

By James Tooley

London: Profile Books, 2012.

Pp.x, 373. $39.95, cloth.

James Tooley's 2008 book The Beautiful Tree (Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute, 2009) profiled several private schools successfully serving the poor in Africa, India, and China. His new book, From Village School to Global Brand, follows a similar theme but focuses exclusively on private schools created by the SABIS International Schools Network and its efforts to deliver quality schooling worldwide, particularly to the poor. Drawing from interviews with key figures in SABIS's history, observations of SABIS schools, and archival research, Tooley explains what SABIS is, how it evolved from a school in Lebanon to a successful international brand, and how it has achieved extraordinary results despite much resistance to its for-profit status.

The book is divided into three sections. With the first, Tooley tells the history of SABIS, from its 1886 inception as a private girls' school in Lebanon to an international brand of schools operating everywhere from Germany and United Arab Emirates to Pakistan and the United States. The second section tells specific stories of how SABIS schools have set up in various locations, paying attention to the various forms these schools take--from fully private schools to public-private partnerships, or charters. Much of this section, though, tells of SABIS's troubles

in opening charter schools in the United States, particularly in impoverished Springfield, Massachusetts. Despite having already run a successful charter school in Springfield, SABIS had to overcome loud public skepticism and an ambiguously denied charter application (which outlined the same basic plan SABIS used with much success in its first charter school in Springfield). This case and similar instances lead Tooley to conclude that even if SABIS (or companies like it) "went out of their way to try to make a difference in America and succeed, there's no guarantee that those with power and influence would acknowledge what they've done" (pp. 122-23). Tooley also discusses SABIS's extraordinary results: SABIS students consistently outperform their public-school peers on achievement tests and consistently close the achievement gap between African American and Caucasian students. In addition, SABIS schools expel fewer than 1 percent of students, and many of them expel none (which is all the more impressive...