Fighting To Save Our Urban Schools And Winning

Don McAdams, one of a small group of activists elected to the Houston Independent School District Board of Education in 1989, provides a fast moving first-person account of successful reform in the nation’s seventh largest school district. With tact and wisdom, the author shows that school reform is seldom about reading, writing, and arithmetic. Rather, it is mostly about power, status, and money. This is a great story filled with conflict and surprising turns of fate. No one interested in politics, governance, and management of urban school districts can afford to miss Fighting to Save Our Urban Schools . . . and Winning!

Rather than descriptions of cases or short three paragraph samples, The Case Study Anthology provides readers with full cases drawn from a variety of disciplines that illustrate different case study techniques (descriptive, explanatory, cross-case, and methodological). Throughout the text, Robert K Yin provides thoughtful insights and guidelines on the cases and the different approaches to doing case study research.

Black and Hispanic students are not learning enough in our public schools, and their typically poor performance is the most important source of ongoing racial inequality in America today—thus, say Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom, the racial gap in school achievement is the nation's most critical civil rights issue and an educational crisis; it's no wonder that "No Child Left Behind," the 2001 revision of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, made closing the racial gap in education its central goal. An employer hiring the typical Black high school graduate or the college that admits the average Black student is choosing a youngster who has only an eighth-grade education. In most subjects, the majority of twelfth-grade Black students do not have even a "partial mastery" of the skills and knowledge that the authoritative National Assessment of Educational Progress calls "fundamental for proficient work" at their grade. No Excuses marshals facts to examine the depth of the problem, the inadequacy of conventional explanations, and the limited impact of Title I, Head Start, and other familiar reforms. Its message, however, is one of hope: Scattered across the country are excellent schools getting terrific results with high-needs kids. These rare schools share a distinctive vision of what great schooling looks like and are free of many of the constraints that compromise education in traditional public schools. In a society that espouses equal opportunity we still have a racially identifiable group of educational have-nots—young African Americans and Latinos whose opportunities in life will almost inevitably be limited by their inadequate education. When students leave high school without high school skills, their futures—and that of the nation—are in jeopardy. With successful schools already showing the way, no decent society can continue to turn a blind eye to such racial and ethnic inequality.

Have urban schools failed, or has reform failed urban schools? This book examines existing urban school programs, ranging from desegregation to reading improvement, in light of available historical, empirical, and case study evidence. Miron and St. John and their contributors probe the underlying theoretical, normative, and political assumptions embedded in specific reform initiatives. They explore how reforms might be reconstructed to better address the underlying challenges and they demonstrate that reforms can be constructively critiqued throughout the stages of implementation, arguing that greater attention should be paid to ethnic and cultural traditions within urban educational settings. Contributors include Leetta Allen-Haynes; Joseph Cadray; Choong-Geun Chung; Richard Fossey; Barry M. Franklin; David Gordon; Carol Anne Hossler; Siri Loescher; Kim Manoil; Genevieve Manset; Louis F. Mirón; Glenda Droogsma Musoba; Kathryn Nakagawa; Carolyn S. Ridenour; Ada B. Simmons; Edward P. St. John; Neil Theobald; Sandra Washburn; Kenneth K. Wong; and Kim Worthington.

Exposes decades of rampant fraud, waste, and abuse in America's largest public school districts, analyzes how the widespread corruption has crippled schools and impeded learning, and offers a bold blueprint for reform.

To provide essential guidance to urban school board members committed to high achievement for all children, Don McAdams presents a comprehensive approach to board leadership he calls reform governance. This accessible framework brings together all the work of an urban school board, including everything from big ideas about core beliefs and theories of action for change to the fundamental relationships and processes through which boards and superintendents work together and the leadership role boards have in building community support for sustained change. Taking into account the hot political arena of urban education, reform governance: Helps school board members understand why it is necessary to redesign urban districts and what their role in the process should be. Sets forth principles that boards can use as guides to action, and gives real-life examples of how they work. Shows how a strong board and superintendent team can work together to be agents for change.