DOMINIC W. MASSARO, editor
University of California, Santa Cruz

Charting Charter Schools

Charter Schools: Lessons in School Reform
By Liane Brouillette. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2002. xiii + 270 pp. Cloth, $59.95.

From the standpoint of psychology, school reform can be considered a largescale experiment in human behavior. By altering institutions, educators and policy makers often believe that they can change the ways children and adults learn. The problem is that most participants in the process have only the dimmest outline of a theory of action (much less of human behavior) to guide their efforts. The result is a process that resembles anything but an orderly experiment of the sort most academics prefer. But often it is left to the academics to come in afterward and make sense of the results. Liane Brouillette's book Charter Schools: Lessons in School Reform is a good example of just such an accounting exercise, and it exhibits many of the virtues of the genre, along with a few of its limitations.