Inside Urban Charter Schools: Promising Practices and Strategies in Five High-Performing Schools. This item is unavailable.Inside Urban Charter Schools: Promising Practices and Strategies in Five High-Performing Schools

Inside Urban Charter Schools offers an unprecedentedly intimate glimpse into the world of charter schools by profiling five high-performing urban charter schools serving predominantly low-income, minority youth in Massachusetts. Interviews, focus groups, and classroom observations conducted over the course of two years flesh out rich and colorful portraits of daily life in these schools. Using an analytic framework grounded in research on nonprofit management and effective schools, the authors show that these schools excel along the organizational dimensions of structure, systems, human resource strategies, culture, and clarity of mission. By raising provocative questions for parents, educators, policymakers, and scholars, the book makes a powerful contribution to important conversations about the purpose of K–12 schooling in the twenty-first century and what it will take to enable all schools―whether charter or traditional―to successfully educate all students.

Dr. Katherine K. Merseth, the principal investigator of this study, has over forty years of experience in instruction, administration, and research in public education in the United States and internationally. She taught math in traditional public middle and high schools for ten years, has provided instruction in math pedagogy, and is the director of the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) Teacher Education Program, which she founded in 1984. Mara Casey Tieken is a doctoral candidate at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a cochair of the Harvard Educational Review.