Creating New Schools: How Small Schools Are Changing American Education. - Review - book review

School Administrator, May, 2001 by Ernie Jean

Creating New Schools: How Small Schools Are Changing American Education offers fairly detailed accounts of experiments in educational reform in Boston with the Pilot School Charter program and New York City with its Coalition Schools Campus School Plan. The contributors to this book, brought together by Evans Clinchy, believe these initiatives provide a model of reform for American schools. Contributors, including Seymour Sarason, Robert Pearlman and Linda Darling-Hammond, present insights into school reform involving teachers' unions and the connection of the central office to reform efforts.

Though the title is somewhat misleading, this is an excellent book about successful reform in Massachusetts and New York.

The essays deal far more with reforming operational patterns in larger systems than they do with small schools. The writers suggest small schools push for "curricular autonomy"-- the capacity to develop their own curricular mandates. Other necessary ingredients are parental choice and some degree of fiscal autonomy.

The contributers detail a school improvement plan that decentralizes a unit of a larger system into autonomous and somewhat independent smaller units.

(Creating New Schools: How Small Schools Are Changing American Education, edited by Evans Clinchy, Teachers College Press, 1234 Amsterdam Ave., New York, N.Y. 10027, 2000, 226 pp. with index, AASA member price $21.50. Available from AASA Online (www.aasa.org) or from AASA Distribution Center, P.O. Box 411, Annapolis Jct., Md. 20701-0411. Toll free: 888-782-2272 or 301-617-7802, Stock #SA5-007)