Charter Schools: Hope or Hype?

Extract

Charter Schools: Hope or Hype? By Jack Buckley and Mark Schneider. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. 376p. $35.00.

The contribution of political science to an analysis of the effectiveness of recent reform efforts in American education has not been without its share of controversy. Balanced against the conclusions of a group of careful, theoretically grounded, and objective studies of school reforms have been questions about the role of ideology, lack of evidentiary support, and overly optimistic pronouncements raised against other studies in the field. It is against the backdrop of this sometimes tendentious literature that Jack Buckley and Mark Schneider examine the possibilities of one of America's larger and more controversial school reform initiatives in their recent book, Charter Schools.