Customer Reviews

Developing a Private or Charter School: the A to Z planning of a successful school

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The book and corresponding CD Rom are a practitioneers dream. The authors take you from visioning your ideal school through its development,design and operation.

Using their years of experience, they connect the work, chapter by chapter, to an actual case study of a school they designed and operationalized.

For 21st century educators and social entrepreneurs, this book is a success manual for creating the school, public,private or charter, of your dreams.

Although the book/CD-ROM, if judged on its own merits, is of a certain quality and has a certain value, I don't believe that the product description and book jacket presented on Amazon are accurate representations of the book's contents. The product description leads the customer to believe that this book was written by an author for any educational entrepreneur who is thinking about opening a private or charter school in the U.S. Such a book would list all of the major issues that must be addressed, would provide helpful content and resources that any type of educational entrepreneur could use in addressing each of these issues and, as shown in the product description, would explain how the issue was handled at the particular school that the authors started. This book/CD-ROM, to my disappointment, is really something else: it is what I would describe as an adaptation of the business plan that the authors wrote when they started their own independent school (with emphasis on the business plan and less so on the adaptation). If the educational entrepreneur who is considering purchasing this book would like to read what is mainly a comprehensive business plan that was used to open a real school, then this is the book for you; but if the entrepreneur is actually looking for a more general how-to book that raises the key issues, provides a variety of answers useful for a variety of educational visions, offers resources, and then, secondarily, offers examples from the opening of a real school... then keep shopping. In short, this is a re-purposed business plan, adapted by "entrepreneurs" for a new market.