This chapter focuses on charter schools in poor urban areas. Charter schools are an organizational form that emerged in the early 1990s as one potential solution to failing public schools. Rather than address the performance of charter schools relative to district schools (see Hanushek et al. 2007, Hoxby et al. 2009), we seek to understand differences among urban charter schools. There is much heterogeneity among charter schools by design, and we examine the various human, financial and organizational resources that a charter school utilizes. For example, we measure the involvement of non-educators in the school, the extent to which charters rely on outside funding, and the formalization of the school model. We examine how these resources contribute to the survival of the school and to the academic success of charter students. We introduce a method useful for examining the combinations of resources and factors that are important to these two outcomes: fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA). FsQCA is a method that highlights multiple pathways to an outcome, rather than a single solution. It is a useful method for looking at an organizational form that has spawned a great diversity of models. Our results tell a story of two pathways – one driven by the power of community partnerships, and the other by the power of formalization.
Building Organizations to Change Communities: Educational Entrepreneurs in Poor Urban Areas
In K. Golden-Biddle and J. Dutton (eds.), Using a Positive Lens to Explore Social Change and Organizations.
Year: 2012