Reinterpreting Urban School Reform

A critical look at urban school reform efforts.

Mayoral takeovers of big city public education systems are desperation measures. After decades of decline in school quality, something must be done to make sure city children learn enough to function as adults in American society. But how can city leaders make a real difference? This book, a sequel to Fixing Urban Schools (Brookings, 1998), is a practical guide for mayors, civic leaders, school board members, and involved citizens. Based on case studies of city reform initiatives in Boston, Memphis, New York City District #2, San Antonio, San Francisco, and Seattle, the book provides practical guidance on how to formulate a plan bold enough to work and how to deal with political opposition to change. It concludes that mayors and private sector leaders must stay engaged in education reform by creating new public-private institutions to support high quality schools.

Advocates of the ‘back-to-basics’ movement argue that a basic skills programme ensures that students are educated to a minimum level of literacy required to enter the labour force. Critics charge that these efforts only increase school bureaucracy and undermine teachers’ autonomy in the classroom. First published in 1992, this book moves beyond the rhetoric surrounding the basic skills debate by providing a thorough yet critical examination of urban education, urban school reform, and teachers’ work culture. Beginning with a sparkling theoretical discussion of the problems and pitfalls of back-to-basics reform efforts, author Dennis Carlson argues persuasively that the movement’s exclusive emphasis on functional literacy skills rather than higher-order thinking assures that students will remain on the lower rungs of the socio-economic ladder. He then proceeds with an empirical study of two urban high school districts in which he documents the latent effects of back-to-basics on teachers’ work lives as well as staff-administration clashes over efforts to implement restructuring programmes. This book offers a sensible and sophisticated treatment of some of the important issues facing urban education and will be of great interest to anyone working in Education.

This book asserts that efforts to reform schools, particularly urban schools, are events that engender a host of issues and conflicts that have been interpreted through the conceptual lens of community.

This book critically examines how the narrative of global economic competition was used to rationalize college preparatory curriculum for all high school students and promote charter schools in Detroit. Using mixed qualitative and quantitative methods, the study identifies neighborhood risk factors undermining students’ academic success, along with the positive effects of churches and service centers as mitigating forces. The authors focus on a range of topics and issues including market competition, urban decline, community resources, testing and accountability, smaller schools, and engaged learning. The volume illustrates how action studies by engaged scholars working with community activists empowers students to overcome emerging barriers.

The universality of the problematics with urban education, together with the importance of understanding the context of improvement interventions, brings into sharp focus the importance of an undertaking like the International Handbook of Urban Education. An important focus of this book is the interrogation of both the social and political factors that lead to different problem posing and subsequent solutions within each region.

Almost everyone agrees that America's urban schools are a mess. But while this agreement has fostered widespread support for aggressive reform, Frederick Hess argues that much of what ails urban education is actually the result of continuous or fragmentary reform. Hess explains that political incentives drive school superintendents to promote reforms--to demonstrate that they are "making a difference." Superintendents have to do this quickly, both because their tenure is usually three years or less and because urban communities are anxious to see educational improvement. However, the nature of urban school districts makes it very difficult to demonstrate concrete short-term improvement. The result is what he terms "policy churn," which distracts teachers and principals from efforts to refine classroom teaching while seldom resulting in successful long-term changes. Hess argues that policymakers have misallocated resources by pursuing the "right" structure or the "best" pedagogy while paying insufficient attention to the more mundane--and more important--questions of how to implement, refine, and sustain a particular approach in their particular district. Hess explains that previous research on high-performing schools suggests that the best schools are characterized by focus and by an ability to develop expertise in specific approaches to teaching and learning. To help educators and policymakers adopt and nurture a focused agenda, he recommends institutional changes that increase the effectiveness of performance outcomes and reduce the incentives to emphasize symbolic reform.

Maintaining that urban teaching and learning is characterized by many contradictions, this work proposes that there is a wide range of social, cultural, psychological, and pedagogical knowledge urban educators must possess in order to engage in effective and transformative practice. It is necessary for those teaching in urban schools to be scholar-practitioners, rather than bureaucrats who can only follow rather than analyze, understand, and create. Ten major sections cover the myriad issues of urban education as it exists today.