"Inside Urban Charter Schools" offers an unprecedentedly intimate glimpse into the world of charter schools by profiling five high-performing urban charter schools serving predominantly low-income, minority youth in Massachusetts. Interviews, focus groups, and classroom observations conducted over the course of two years flesh out rich and colorful portraits of daily life in these schools. Using an analytic framework grounded in research on nonprofit management and effective schools, the authors show that these schools excel along the organizational dimensions of structure, systems, human resource strategies, culture, and clarity of mission. By raising provocative questions for parents, educators, policymakers, and scholars, the book makes a powerful contribution to important conversations about the purpose of K-12 schooling in the twenty-first century and what it will take to enable all schools--whether charter or traditional--to successfully educate all students. The following chapters are included in this book: (1) Community Day Charter Public School: Intimacy in a Data-Driven School; (2) Roxbury Preparatory Charter School: Planning and Executing for Achievement; (3) Boston Collegiate Charter School: Bringing College to Students and Students to College; (4) The Academy of the Pacific Rim Charter School: Paving the Way to Adulthood; (5) The MATCH Charter Public High School: Culture, Consistency, and Coherence; (6) Building a Foundation for Cross-School Themes: What Effective Schools and High-Performing Nonprofits Have to Say; (7) Culture, Missions,and Theories of Action; (8) The Right People; (9) Structures and Systems: Getting Organized for Instruction; (10) Classroom Instruction and Student Outcomes; and (11) Stepping Back and Looking Forward. An index is included. References are also included. [Foreword by S. Paul Reville. This book was written with Kristy Cooper, John Roberts, Mara Casey Tieken, Jon Valant, and Chris Wynne.]