A Defining Moment for Charter Schools?

How Networking Best Practices May Revolutionize the Movement, and Reshape Urban Education

By Richard Whitmire & Andrew J. Rotherham

Many who bought early personal computers fired them up, wrote a few paragraphs, played some Tetris, and then asked: What’s the big deal?

Then came the Internet.

You might want to think of the charter school movement in a similar way. Since the first charter opened in 1992 in St. Paul, Minn., they have grown quickly, passing the 4,000-school mark. Now there are some outstanding ones and some lemons, but charter schools overall are not proving to be radically dissimilar to other public schools. So...