Are charter schools really different? Two studies published by the Fordham Foundation in recent years found that charter schools were serving as promising seedbeds for new approaches to finding, employing, and keeping better teachers. These innovative policies are described in "Do Charter Schools Do It Differently" by the Gadfly's own Chester Finn and Marci Kanstoroom, published in the September 2002 Phi Delta Kappan (which is not available online). The two reports that underlie this article, "Personnel Practices in Charter Schools" and "Autonomy and Innovation: How Do Massachusetts Charter School Principals Use Their Freedom," are available at http://www.edexcellence.net/issues/index.cfm?topic=4.
