Book Review

Norm Fruchter, a leading researcher and advocate of community orga-nizing for school reform, believes that public will is the source of both fail-ure and potential salvation for urban schools. “The nation’s public will has imposed failing schools on students of color and then blamed those students for the resulting achievement gap, ” he writes (p. 1); such schools “can be transformed to effectively educate students of color, if sufficient public will can be mobilized ” (p. 2). Rather than pointing to bureaucratic, cultural, or individual roots of the problem, he focuses on ill-conceived or poorly imple-mented social policies and suggests that the key change agents are school districts. He illustrates his case in loosely connected chapters on account-ability, school choice, and districtwide reform, which may be of interest to urban educational leaders. Despite the boldly stated thesis of its opening pages, the book does not break much new ground; it relies heavily on summarizing the research and theorizing of others on educational inequality, urban schooling, and pro-posed remedies. Its main interest lies in Fruchter’s perspective on school politics, derived from his unusual resume. He has worked in multiple roles within and outside the system—from continuation school teacher and school board member to parent organizer, evaluator, foundation grantor, and research center director. Before recently becoming director of th