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From Village School to Global Brand: Changing the World Through Education By James Tooley London: Profile Books, 2012. Pp. x, 373. $39.95, cloth.
James Tooley's 2008 book The Beautiful Tree (Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute, 2009) profiled several private schools successfully serving the poor in Africa, India, and China. His new book, From Village School to Global Brand, follows a similar theme but focuses exclusively on private schools created by the SABIS International Schools Network and its efforts to deliver quality schooling worldwide, particularly to the poor. Drawing from interviews with key figures in SABIS's history, observations of SABIS schools, and archival research, Tooley explains what SABIS is, how it evolved from a school in Lebanon to a successful international brand, and how it has achieved extraordinary results despite much resistance to its for-profit status.
The book is divided into three sections. With the first, Tooley tells the history of SABIS, from its 1886 inception as a private girls' school in Lebanon to an international brand of schools operating everywhere from Germany and United Arab Emirates to Pakistan and the United States. The second section tells specific stories of how SABIS schools have set up in various locations, paying attention to the various forms these schools take-from fully private schools to public-private partnerships, or charters. Much of this section, though, tells of SABIS's troubles in opening charter schools in the United States, particularly in impoverished Springfield, Massachusetts. Despite having already run a successful charter school in Springfield, SABIS had to overcome loud public skepticism...