In his brilliant bestseller, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap ... and Others Don’t, author Jim Collins (2001) used research to examine key differences between companies that were best in class compared to their competitors. The constructs that emerged from his findings are so cogent that expressions like “getting the right people on the bus” and “the hedgehog principle” have made their way into everyday language. In contrast with Collins’s research which used ultra-successful companies as benchmarks for comparisons, I did the opposite: I studied charter schools that could be considered worst in class in the sense that they had all dissolved. One might say that these schools went from good to gone; they were good enough to have been granted a charter, but within a period of about four years, on average, they closed. So, just as Collins studied companies that, in his words, “made the leap,” I studied schools that made the leap— except that the schools in my research leapt into extinction instead of greatness.