Books by RGK Faculty
The Strategic Management of Charter Schools: Frameworks and Tools for Educational Entrepreneurs
Thu, 09/01/2011
By Peter Frumkin, Bruno V. Manno, and Nell Edgington
The Strategic Management of Charter Schools addresses the challenges facing such schools by mapping out, in straightforward and highly pragmatic terms, a management framework for them.
The first charter school law in the United States was enacted in Minnesota in 1991. In the twenty years since that modest beginning, the movement has burgeoned and spread across the country: there are now more than five thousand charter schools attended by nearly two million students. Yet due to this rapid growth in the number of charter schools and to their generally independent character, the nature and quality of these institutions vary greatly. The promise of charter schools is great, but so are the organizational and educational challenges they face.
Organized around three crucial challenges to charter school leaders—managing mission, managing internal operations, and managing the larger stakeholder environment—the book provides charter school leaders with indispensable tools and insights for achieving educational and organizational success. In its elucidation of these managerial challenges, and in its equally helpful and detailed examinations of particular schools, the book offers a clear, credible approach to the efficient and sustainable management of what are still young and experimental educational institutions.
The Strategic Management of Charter Schools is a volume in the Educational Innovations series.
(via Harvard Education Press)
This book is a brilliant combination of theory and real-world cases. Free of the pointscoring common in charter school books, it focuses on the breakthroughs and mistakes made by people dedicated to the success of poor and minority children. Potential charter starters will learn from this book and so should those who know little about charter schools but support or oppose them on partisan or ideological grounds.
— Paul T. Hill, John and Marguerite Corbally Professor and director, Center on Reinventing Public Education, University of Washington, Bothell
The Strategic Management of Charter Schools should be required reading for anyone thinking about opening a charter school, anyone currently leading a charter school, and anyone sitting on the board of a charter school.
— Richard Barth, CEO, KIPP Foundation
Moral Movements and Foreign Policy
Sun, 10/31/2010
by Joshua Busby
Why do advocacy campaigns succeed in some cases but fail in others? What conditions motivate states to accept commitments championed by principled advocacy movements? Joshua Busby sheds light on these core questions through an investigation of four cases - developing country debt relief, climate change, AIDS, and the International Criminal Court - in the G-7 advanced industrialized countries (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States).
Drawing on hundreds of interviews with policy practitioners, he employs qualitative, comparative case study methods, including process-tracing and typologies, and develops a framing/gatekeepers argument, emphasizing the ways in which advocacy campaigns use rhetoric to tap into the main cultural currents in the countries where they operate. Busby argues that when values and costs potentially pull in opposing directions, values will win if domestic gatekeepers who are able to block policy change believe that the values at stake are sufficiently important.
Joshua Busby applies the “Page 99 Test” to Moral Movements and Foreign Policy.
The Essence of Strategic Giving A Practical Guide for Donors and Fundraisers
Wed, 09/15/2010
by Peter Frumkin
In the face of global financial problems and stressed government budgets, the ability of private philanthropy to step in and help solve public problems and support vital private institutions as well has perhaps never been more important. But how can donors be sure their contributions will be effective? And how can fundraisers make their case for support in a way that is compelling and productive?
With The Essence of Strategic Giving, Peter Frumkin distills the lessons of his comprehensive, award-winning study, Strategic Giving, into a concise, practical guide for everyone involved in private philanthropy, from donors to managers of nonprofits to fund-raisers. He defines five critical challenges that all donors must address if their philanthropy is to amount to more than indiscriminate charity, including being aware of the time frame that guides a gift, specifying the intended impact being pursued, and recognizing how a donation fits with a donor's own identity and style. Acknowledging and understanding these fundamental, strategic aspects of giving, Frumkin argues, will help ensure philanthropy that more effectively achieves its aims and at the same time builds a lasting relationship between donors and the institutions they support.
As the next generation of donors wrestle with the challenge of effectively distributing what Andrew Carnegie called "surplus wealth," Frumkin's road map will be an indispensable resource for years to come.
Serving Country and Community Who Benefits from National Service?
Tue, 06/01/2010
by Peter Frumkin and JoAnn Jastrzab
The United States has a long history of citizens rendering service to their communities. Examples of government-sponsored voluntary service organizations include the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Peace Corps, and Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA). During the Clinton administration, the national service movement was advanced by the establishment of AmeriCorps, a large-scale national service program designed to place young people in community service positions across the country. More recently, the Obama administration has set in motion a major program expansion of AmeriCorps over the coming decade.
Many decades, billions of dollars, and hundreds of thousands of volunteers after the creation of the first national service programs, it remains unclear who benefits from service, under what conditions these programs work best, and how exactly these service efforts contribute to the strengthening of communities. Serving Country and Community answers each of these questions through an in-depth study of how service shapes the lives of young people and a careful analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of these programs. Based on years of field work and data collection, Serving Country and Community provides an in-depth examination of the aims and effects of national service and, in the process, opens up a conversation about what works and what needs reform in national service today.
Inheritance in Contemporary America: The Social Dimensions of Giving across Generations
Fri, 12/21/2007
by Jacqueline L. Angel
RGK Center Faculty Fellow Jacqueline Angel has a new book on volunteering entitled Inheritance in Contemporary America: The Social Dimensions of Giving across Generations. In this book, she "tackles the complex legal, policy, and emotional issues that surround bequests and inheritances in an era of increasing longevity, broadening ethnicity, and unraveling social safety nets. Through empirical analyses, case studies, interviews, and anecdotes, Jacqueline L. Angel explains the historical nature of familial giving and how it is changing as the nation's demographics shift. She explores the legal, personal, and policy complexities involved in passing wealth down through generations and provides a cross-disciplinary context for exploring the indelible effects that newly unfolding inheritance practices will have on various societal cohorts and the nation in general.
From nuclear and extended families to the state and nongovernmental bodies, Angel's engaging study explores how attitudes toward giving are evolving and confronts in stark terms the legacy that these shifts in attitude will leave. This book will be a vital tool for scholars and practitioners in gerontology, sociology, psychology, anthropology, economics, political science, and public policy."
Volunteers: A Social Profile
Wed, 11/07/2007
by Marc Musick and John Wilson
RGK Center Faculty Fellow Marc Musick has a new book on volunteering entitled Volunteers: A Social Profile. The book brings together the research of Musick and John Wilson (Duke University) and provides an examination of the causes and consequences of volunteering. The book argues that volunteers play a critical role in society; without them, many nonprofit, religious and governmental institutions would simply cease to function. Yet, recently a number of commentators have claimed that engagement in civic life and the quality of social connections are in decline, particularly in the United States. In this context, the need to know how and why people volunteer has become increasingly important.
Strategic Giving
Fri, 09/01/2006
by Peter Frumkin
On Being Nonprofit: A Conceptual and Policy Primer
Tue, 09/06/2005
by Peter Frumkin
This concise and illuminating book provides a road map to the evolving conceptual and policy terrain of the nonprofit sector. Drawing on prominent economic, political, and sociological explanations of nonprofit activity, Peter Frumkin focuses on four important functions that have come to define nonprofit organizations. The author clarifies the debate over the underlying rationale for the nonprofit and voluntary sector's privileged position in America by examining how nonprofits deliver needed services, promote civic engagement, express values and faith, and channel entrepreneurial impulses. He also exposes the difficult policy questions that have emerged as the boundaries between the nonprofit, business, and government sectors have blurred. Focusing on nonprofits' growing dependence on public funding, tendency toward political polarization, often idiosyncratic missions, and increasing commercialism, Peter Frumkin argues that the long-term challenges facing nonprofit organizations will only be solved when they achieve greater balance among their four central functions. By probing foundational thinking as well as emergent ideas, the book is an essential guide for nonprofit novitiates and experts alike who want to understand the issues propelling public debate about the future of their sector. By virtue of its breadth and insight, Frumkin's book will be an invaluable resource for anyone interested in understanding the complex interplay of public purposes and private values that animate nonprofit organizations.
Trustees of Culture: Power, Wealth, and Status on Elite Arts Boards
Sat, 05/15/2004
by Francie Ostrower
Cultural trusteeship is a subject that fascinates those who wonder about the relationship between power and culture. What compels the wealthy to serve on the boards of fine arts institutions? How do they exercise their influence as trustees, and how does this affect the way arts institutions operate? To find out, Francie Ostrower conducted candid personal interviews with 76 trustees drawn from two opera companies and two art museums in the United States.
Her new study demonstrates that members of elite arts boards walk a fine line between maintaining their status and serving the needs of the large-scale organizations they oversee. As class members whose status depends in part on the prestige of the boards on which they serve, trustees seek to perpetuate arts boards as exclusive elite enclaves. But in response to pressures to increase and diversify the audiences for arts institutions, elite board members act in a surprisingly open manner in terms of organizational accessibility and operations.
Written with clarity and grace, Trustees of Culture will contribute significantly to our understanding of organizational governance; the politics of fundraising; elite arts participation and philanthropy; as well as the consequences of wider social policies that continue to emphasize private financial support. Ostrower's study will prove to be indispensable reading for not just sociologists of culture, but anyone interested in how the arts are financially and institutionally supported.
In Search of the Nonprofit Sector
Tue, 02/10/2004
Peter Frumkin and Jonathan B. Imber, editors
At a time when boundaries between the nonprofit, business, and public sectors have grown increasingly confused and contested, this volume by leading experts on nonprofit organizations offers new ideas and and frameworks for understanding the terrain that lies between the state and the market. The chapters span a broad range of emerging issues including nonprofit commercialism, sector-bending hybrid organizational forms, increasingly sophisticated nonprofit advocacy activities, newly hatched forms of volunteerism and philanthropy, tensions in public-nonprofit contracting, and new roles for faith-based nonprofits in social provision.
Why the Wealthy Give: The Culture of Elite Philanthropy
Wed, 04/02/1997
by Francie Ostrower
Through a series of candid personal interviews with nearly one hundred donors, Why the Wealthy Give offers an in-depth look at the world of elite philanthropy. Francie Ostrower focuses on the New York City area, with its high concentration of affluent donors, to explore both the motivations of individual donors and the significance of philanthropy for the culture and organization of elite groups. In so doing, she offers an account of why the wealthy give that also provides insight into the nature of elite culture, status, identity, and cohesion. Emphasizing the diversity of philanthropy, the book also shows how and why different types of donors support different causes. It further demonstrates how, in the face of considerable change, elite philanthropy has adapted and therefore endured. A timely discussion explores the ways in which elite donors view the respective roles of government and philanthropy. Why the Wealthy Give shows that elite philanthropy involves far more than writing a check. The wealthy take philanthropy and adapt it into an entire way of life that serves as a vehicle for the social and cultural life of their class. This is reflected in the widespread popularity of educational and cultural causes among donors. At the same time, Ostrower finds divergent patterns of giving that reflect alternative sources of donor identity, such as religion, ethnicity, and gender, and explains why certain kinds of donors are more or less likely to diverge from the prestige hierarchy of their class in their philanthropy.
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