Adventures of Charter School Creators

Adventures of Charter School Creators takes the reader inside the world of individual educational entrepreneurs who have created charter schools from scratch and lived to tell about it. Drawn from examples across the country, individuals (and a few teams) tell their stories of the victories they enjoyed and the defeats they overcame to create their schools. They include an Episcopal priest working in the Pico-Union community of Los Angeles, a corporate attorney in Miami, a manpower training specialist in East Saint Louis, the chief financial officer of a major African American church in New York City, a retired military officer in North Carolina, as well as experienced school teachers and administrators. From these stories Deal and Hentschke extract and examine the issues of school leadership that are peculiar to those school leaders who have chosen to create schools from scratch. This book: Examines entrepreneurial leadership as a concrete manifestation of school leadership. Sheds light on the concrete differences between leadership in relatively autonomous start-up charters and the relatively dependent traditional schools. Anchors charter school leadership within the context of general (non-education) leadership and distinguishes it from what is typically associated with school leadership today. It describes: The general forces in society which are pushing public K-12 education into market-based initiatives. The general leadership issues of any break-away or start-up enterprise. Will be of interest to all educators.

Terrence E. Deal, currently a free agent, has served on the faculties of Stanford, Harvard, and Vanderbilt Universities and was most recently named Irving R. Melbo Scholar at USC's Rossier School of Education. Prior to his academic career, he taught high school in Pomona and was a teacher and school principal in Pacific Grove, California. In addition to his public school experience, he was the director of the Athenian School Urban Center in San Francisco. He is author of many books and articles on educational leadership. Guilbert C. Hentschke is the Richard T. and Mary Catherine Cooper Chair in Public School Administration and former dean at the University of Southern California's Rossier School of Education. In addition to teaching and writing, he serves on the boards of several U.S. K-12 education organizations. He served as faculty member and education dean at the University of Rochester, and prior to that was on the faculty at Columbia University Teachers College. He taught high school in San Jose, California, and was a school administrator in the Chicago public schools.