Big cities have mostly failed in their efforts to reform public schools. This book shows why, and offers a framework for achieving future success. Fullan and Boyle, internationally renowned thinkers on school change, demonstrate that while the educational challenges of big cities can be overwhelming, they are not insurmountable. They identify six essential "push" and "pull" actions that can enable big school systems to improve student achievement. Leaders need to push to challenge the staus quo, convey a high sense of urgency, and have the courage needed to intervene. But they need to also pull together to create a commonly owned strategy, develop a profesisonal power of capital, and attend to sustainability. Examining three major cities, New York, Toronto, and London, through the decade of 2002 - 2012. this book weaves case studies with careful analysis and recommendations to hone in on which policies and strategies generate quality implementation that in turn raise the bar for all students and reduce the gap for the disadvantaged. Big-City School Reforms offers invaluable advice to those leading the next phase of school reform in cities around the world.
A Decade of Urban School Reform looks at this critical era in the Boston schools and distills valuable insights and lessons for school leaders and reformers everywhere. In the last decade, the Boston Public Schools has undergone critical reforms that have been of intense interest to school leaders and policymakers throughout the country. Under the leadership of superintendent Thomas Payzant, the Boston schools implemented extensive reform strategies that yielded notable results. Fittingly, at the end of Payzant's superintendency in September 2006, the Boston Public Schools received the Broad Prize for Urban Education for being the most improved urban school district in the country. With chapters that explore questions pertaining to governance, human resources, instruction, data collection, disabilities, community engagement, and other topics, the book offers a detailed, comprehensive portrait of a school system managing the complex and daunting tasks of system-wide reform. The result is a timely, in-depth contribution to the small group of indispensable writings on urban school reform.
Bringing School Reform to Scale looks in detail at five school districts that have been honored in recent years by The Broad Foundation, whose annual award is granted "each year to the urban school districts that demonstrate the greatest overall performance and improvement in student achievement while reducing achievement gaps among poor and minority students." Heather Zavadsky examines five Broad Prize winners--Long Beach Unified School District, Garden Grove Unified School District, Norfolk Public Schools, Boston Public Schools, and Aldine Independent School District. As she notes, "the successes highlighted in this book do not represent one-year positive performance blips in these districts, and this book does not provide a list of 'best practice' silver bullets that sound effective but cannot be applied outside a unique context. Rather, the book describes the paths these districts have taken over years of intentional, sustained, patient focus on improving teaching and learning that fully aligns instructional practices across all organizational levels of a school system--something that can be done in any district given the right knowledge and tools." Bringing School Reform to Scale is a volume in the Educational Innovations series. "This book offers an unusually detailed look inside some of our best run school districts. Heather Zavadsky offers honest assessments, highlighting not only the inspiring successes, but also the many daunting challenges that remain. Very enlightening!" -- Ronald F. Ferguson, faculty cochair and director of the Achievement Gap Initiative, Harvard University "Bringing School Reform to Scale highlights the practices in five districts that won the prestigious Broad Prize--and shows how important fundamentals of good practices (including rigorous standards, aligned curriculum, and smart investments in human capital) can lead to great schools and successful districts." -- Mark Schneider, vice president, American Institutes for Research; former commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics "The media are good at spotlighting random school successes, education reforms that subsequently seem to evaporate. Why is it so difficult to sustain and spread productive change from school system to school system? The answers to these questions are crucial, and Bringing School Reform to Scale is a powerful contribution to an accumulation of knowledge regarding these issues." -- James W. Guthrie, Patricia and Rodes Hart Professor of Educational Leadership and Policy, Vanderbilt University "The analysis of the five high-performing districts points to practices, beliefs, systems, and structures that have led to dramatic turnarounds. The compilation of this work provides a road map toward scalable reform." -- William R. Hite, superintendent, Prince George's County Public Schools, Maryland Heather Zavadsky is director of policy and communications at the Institute for Public School Initiatives for the University of Texas system.
This frank and courageous book explores the persistence of failure in today's urban schools. At its heart is the argument that most education policy discussions are disconnected from the daily realities of urban schools, especially those in poor and beleaguered neighborhoods. Charles M. Payne argues that we have failed to account fully for the weakness of the social infrastructure and the often dysfunctional organizational environments of urban schools and school systems. The result is that liberals and conservatives alike have spent a great deal of time pursuing questions of limited practical value in the effort to improve city schools. Payne carefully delineates these stubborn and intertwined sources of failure in urban school reform efforts of the past two decades. Yet while his book is unsparing in its exploration of the troubled recent history of urban school reform, Payne also describes himself as "guardedly optimistic." He describes how, in the last decade, we have developed real insights into the roots of school failure, and into how some individual schools manage to improve. He also examines recent progress in understanding how particular urban districts have established successful reforms on a larger scale. Drawing on a striking array of sources--from the recent history of various urban school systems, to the growing sophistication of education research, to his own experience as a teacher, scholar, and participant in reform efforts--Payne paints a vivid and unmistakably realistic portrait of urban schools and reforms of the past few decades. So Much Reform, So Little Change will be required reading for everyone interested in the plight--and the future--of urban schools.
Urban Renewal and School Reform in Baltimore examines the role of the contemporary public school as an instrument of urban design. The central case study in this book, Henderson-Hopkins, is a PK-8 campus serving as the civic centerpiece of the East Baltimore Development Initiative. This study reflects on the persistent notions of urban renewal and their effectiveness for addressing the needs of disadvantaged neighborhoods and vulnerable communities. Situating the master plan and school project in the history and contemporary landscape of urban development and education debates, this book provides a detailed account of how Henderson-Hopkins sought to address several reformist objectives, such as improvement of the urban context, pedagogic outcomes, and holistic well-being of students. Bridging facets of urban design, development, and education policy, this book contributes to an expanded agenda for understanding the spatial implications of school-led redevelopment and school reform.
For over a century, Americans have translated their cultural anxieties and hopes into dramatic demands for educational reform. Although policy talk has sounded a millennial tone, the actual reforms have been gradual and incremental. Tinkering toward Utopia documents the dynamic tension between Americans' faith in education as a panacea and the moderate pace of change in educational practices. In this book, David Tyack and Larry Cuban explore some basic questions about the nature of educational reform. Why have Americans come to believe that schooling has regressed? Have educational reforms occurred in cycles, and if so, why? Why has it been so difficult to change the basic institutional patterns of schooling? What actually happened when reformers tried to reinvent schooling? Tyack and Cuban argue that the ahistorical nature of most current reform proposals magnifies defects and understates the difficulty of changing the system. Policy talk has alternated between lamentation and overconfidence. The authors suggest that reformers today need to focus on ways to help teachers improve instruction from the inside out instead of decreeing change by remote control, and that reformers must also keep in mind the democratic purposes that guide public education.
Drawing on extensive interviews with teachers of an earlier generation, Rousmaniere lets readers see the complexity of teachers' work, their problems with reform implementation, and the conditions they believed were necessary for real change. It is an important book because it raises questions about the power and legacy of teachers' historical work culture and the effect of teachers' working conditions on teacher practice and broader school reform policy.
In 2012, Chicago's school year began with the city's first teachers' strike in a quarter century and ended with the largest mass closure of public schools in U.S. history. On one side, a union leader and veteran black woman educator drew upon organizing strategies from black and Latinx communities to demand increased school resources. On the other side, the mayor, backed by the Obama administration, argued that only corporate-style education reform could set the struggling school system aright. The stark differences in positions resonated nationally, challenging the long-standing alliance between teachers' unions and the Democratic Party. Elizabeth Todd-Breland recovers the hidden history underlying this battle. She tells the story of black education reformers' community-based strategies to improve education beginning during the 1960s, as support for desegregation transformed into community control, experimental schooling models that pre-dated charter schools, and black teachers' challenges to a newly assertive teachers' union. This book reveals how these strategies collided with the burgeoning neoliberal educational apparatus during the late twentieth century, laying bare ruptures and enduring tensions between the politics of black achievement, urban inequality, and U.S. democracy.
Written in an accessible style, the papers in this volume document and analyse particular components of the Children First reforms, including governance, community engagement, finance, accountability, and instruction. Aimed at instituting evidence-based practices to produce higher and more equitable outcomes for all students, the policies that comprise the Children First initiative represent an attempt at organisational improvement and systemic learning.
In this ground breaking analysis, Terry M. Moe treats Hurricane Katrina as a natural experiment that offers a rare opportunity to learn about the role of power in the politics of institutional reform. When Katrina hit, it physically destroyed New Orleans' school buildings, but it also destroyed the vested-interest power that had protected the city's abysmal education system from major reform. With the constraints of power lifted, decision makers who had been incremental problem-solvers turned into revolutionaries, creating the most innovative school system in the entire country. The story of New Orleans' path from failure to revolution is fascinating, but, more importantly, it reveals the true role of power, whose full effects normally cannot be observed, because power has a 'second face' that is hidden and unobservable. Making use of Katrina's analytic leverage, Moe pulls back the curtain to show that this “second face” has profound consequences that stifle and undermine society's efforts to fix failing institutions.
