Synopses & Reviews
We love the local. From the cherries we buy, to the grocer who sells them, to the school where our child unpacks them for lunch, we express resurgent faith in decentralizing the institutions and businesses that arrange our daily lives. But the fact is that huge, bureaucratic organizations often still shape the character of our jobs, schools, the groceries where we shop, and even the hospitals we entrust with our lives. So how, exactly, can we work small, when everything around us is so big, so global and standardized? In
Organizing Locally, Bruce Fuller shows us, taking stock of America’s rekindled commitment to localism across an illuminating range of sectors, unearthing the crucial values and practices of decentralized firms that work.
Fuller first untangles the economic and cultural currents that have eroded the efficacy of—and our trust in—large institutions over the past half century. From there we meet intrepid leaders who have been doing things differently. Traveling from a charter school in San Francisco to a veterans service network in Iowa, from a Pennsylvania health-care firm to the Manhattan branch of a Swedish bank, he explores how creative managers have turned local staff loose to craft inventive practices, untethered from central rules and plain-vanilla routines. By holding their successes and failures up to the same analytical light, he vividly reveals the key cornerstones of social organization on which motivating and effective decentralization depends. Ultimately, he brings order and evidence to the often strident debates about who has the power—and on what scale—to structure how we work and live locally.
Written for managers, policy makers, and reform activists, Organizing Locally details the profound decentering of work and life inside firms, unfolding across postindustrial societies. Its fresh theoretical framework explains resurging faith in decentralized organizations and the ingredients that deliver vibrant meaning and efficacy for residents inside. Ultimately, it is a synthesizing study, a courageous and radical new way of conceiving of American vitality, creativity, and ambition.
Review
As many public schools grow larger and more diverse, the charter school movement gains equal and opposite momentum statewide. Bruce Fuller has charted this movement as it gains momentum across the state and nation. His Inside Charter Schools: The Paradox of Radical Decentralization offers a peek inside six such schools...Fuller steers clear of a blanket like-or-dislike viewpoint. Instead, he shows the problems individual charter schools face. Library Journal
Review
As many public schools grow larger and more diverse, the charter school movement gains equal and opposite momentum statewide. Bruce Fuller has charted this movement as it gains momentum across the state and nation. His Inside Charter Schools: The Paradox of Radical Decentralizationoffers a peek inside six such schools...Fuller steers clear of a blanket like-or-dislike viewpoint. Instead, he shows the problems individual charter schools face.
Review
In this book Fuller offers six essays--as much works of journalism as they are academic pieces--on six very different charter school experiments...Fuller deftly ties the grab-bag together with his own opening and closing thoughts on the philosophical and political tension between allowing free-thinkers to experiment and maintaining a community commitment to free and equitable education for all...The book provides a useful benchmark for a movement that in many ways is just getting started. Jodi Wilgoren - New York Times
Review
This insightful...[and] wide-ranging discussion gives readers a real feel for what charter schools are like, allowing them to step inside a school and see what the hope and hype are all about...Providing no easy answers, this study offers practical lessons to parents, educators, and policymakers aiming for reform and support of public education as a whole. Leroy Hommerding
Review
Published a decade after the introduction of charter schools, the most dynamic and important school reform movement in recent memory, this collection offers rare insight into charter classrooms as well as a framework for the public policy discussion that surrounds them...The book is at its best when it lets the stories of the schools speak for themselves, unable to answer the broad policy questions but helping readers understand their complexity. Colleen Flannery - Education Beat
Review
“After eras dominated by economics-talk, it is refreshing to dip into a vision in which culture and social psychology play central roles. This is in some ways a call to arms, but it is not as didactic or gloomy as those to which we’ve become accustomed. It stirs the pot of what have become somewhat stale debates, and by incorporating such a broad range of cases extends its relevance far and wide.”
Review
“This is an enormously ambitious study, essentially taking on all organizational change of the past half century. Fuller places the move toward decentralized organizations into a thought-provoking portrait of success and failure of those trying to improve on the well-being of society. Moreover, while these societal institutions continue to evolve, he provides a map for understanding the continuing process.”
Review
“It is fairly easy to point out what is not working in medicine and why. But if I was given the opportunity to change some of it, would I lean towards more or less local control? Would I hire health educators, promoters, or patient navigators to improve the support and services for the families I care for? How would I rethink patient centeredness in the delivery of care? Fuller tackles complex questions such as these across a range of sectors, providing an approach that would help many businesses, institutions, networks, and systems grapple with the pressures to meet client needs and save costs.”
Synopsis
Deepening disaffection with conventional public schools has inspired flight to private schools, home schooling, and new alternatives, such as charter schools. Barely a decade old, the charter school movement has attracted a colorful band of supporters, from presidential candidates, to ethnic activists, to the religious Right. At present there are about 1,700 charter schools, with total enrollment estimated to reach one million early in the century. Yet, until now, little has been known about the inner workings of these small, inventive schools that rely on public money but are largely independent of local school boards.
Inside Charter Schools takes readers into six strikingly different schools, from an evangelical home-schooling charter in California to a back-to-basics charter in a black neighborhood in Lansing, Michigan. With a keen eye for human aspirations and dilemmas, the authors provide incisive analysis of the challenges and problems facing this young movement.
Do charter schools really spur innovation, or do they simply exacerbate tribal forms of American pluralism? Inside Charter Schools provides shrewd and illuminating studies of the struggles and achievements of these new schools, and offers practical lessons for educators, scholars, policymakers, and parents.
Synopsis
Deepening disaffection with conventional public schools has inspired flight to private schools, home schooling, and new alternatives, such as charter schools. Barely a decade old, the charter school movement has attracted a colorful band of supporters, from presidential candidates, to ethnic activists, to the religious Right. Inside Charter Schools provides shrewd and illuminating studies of the struggles and achievements of these new schools, and offers practical lessons for educators, scholars, policymakers, and parents.
About the Author
Bruce Fuller is Associate Professor of Public Policy and Education at the University of California, Berkeley.
University of California, Berkeley
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Growing Charier Schools, Decentering the State
Bruce Fuller
The Public Square, Big or Small? Charter Schools in Political Context
Bruce Fuller
We Hold on to Our Kids, We Hold on Tight: Tandem Charters in Michigan
Patty Yancey
An Empowering Spirit Is Not Enough: A Latino Charter School Struggles over Leadership
Edward Wexler and Luis A. Huerta
Selling Air: New England Parents Spark a New Revolution
Kate Zernike
Diversity and Inequality: Montera Charter High School
Amy Stuart Wells, Jennifer Jellison Holme and Ash Vasudeva
Losing Public Accountability: A Home Schooling Charter
Luis A. Huerta
Teachers as Communitarians: A Charter School Cooperative in Minnesota
Eric Rofes
Breaking Away or Pulling Together? Making Decentralization Work
Bruce Fuller
Notes
Contributors
Index