Deindustrialization, white flight, and inner city poverty have spelled trouble for Baltimore schools. Marion Orr now examines why school reform has been difficult to achieve there, revealing the struggles of civic leaders and the limitations placed on Baltimore's African-American community as each has tried to rescue a failing school system. Examining the interplay between government and society, Orr presents the first systematic analysis of social capital both within the African-American community ("black social capital") and outside it where social capital crosses racial lines. Orr shows that while black social capital may have created solidarity against white domination in Baltimore, it hampered African-American leaders' capacity to enlist the cooperation from white corporate elites and suburban residents needed for school reform. Orr examines social capital at the neighborhood level, in elite-level interactions, and in intergovernmental relations to argue that black social capital doesn't necessarily translate into the kind of intergroup coalition needed to bring about school reform. He also includes an extensive historical survey of the black community, showing how distrust engendered by past black experiences has hampered the formation of significant intergroup social capital. The book features case studies of school reform activity, including the first analysis of the politics surrounding Baltimore's decision to hire a private, for-profit firm to operate nine of its public schools. These cases illuminate the paradoxical aspects of black social capital in citywide school reform while offering critical perspectives on current debates about privatization, site-based management, and other reform alternatives. Orr's book challenges those who argue that social capital alone can solve fundamentally political problems by purely social means and questions the efficacy of either privatization or black community power to reform urban schools. Black Social Capital offers a cogent conceptual synthesis of social capital theory and urban regime theory that demonstrates the importance of government, politics, and leadership in converting social capital into a resource that can be mobilized for effective social change.

Desperate to jump-start the reform process in America's urban schools, politicians, scholars, and school advocates are looking increasingly to mayors for leadership. But does a stronger mayoral role represent bold institutional change with real potential to improve big-city schools, or just the latest in the copycat world of school reform du jour? Is it democratic? Why have efforts to put mayors in charge so often generated resistance along racial dividing lines? Public debate and scholarly analysis have shied away from confronting such issues head-on. Mayors in the Middle brings together, for students of education policy and urban politics as well as scholars and school advocates, the most thoughtful and original analyses of the promise and limitations of mayoral takeovers of schools. Reflecting on the experience of six cities--Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and Washington, D.C.--ten of the nation's leading experts on education politics tackle the question of whether putting mayors in charge is a step in the right direction. Through the case studies and the wide-ranging essays that follow and build upon them, the contributors--Stefanie Chambers, Jeffrey R. Henig, Kenneth J. Meier, Jeffrey Mirel, Marion Orr, John Portz, Wilbur C. Rich, Dorothy Shipps, and Clarence N. Stone--begin the process of answering questions critical to the future of inner-city children, the prospects for urban revitalization, and the shape of American education in the years to come.

While government provides the structure of public leadership, governance is the art of public leadership. This timely book examines current trends in metropolitan governance issues. It analyzes specific cases from thirteen major metropolitan regions in the United States, Canada, and Mexico, all woven together by an overall framework established in the first three chapters. The distinguished contributors address such governance issues as city-county consolidation, local-federal coordination, annexation and special districting, and private contracting, with special attention to lessons learned from both successes and failures. As urban governance innovations have clearly outpaced urban government structures in recent years, the topics covered here are especially relevant.