For more than two generations, the traditional urban school system—the district—has utterly failed to do its job: prepare its students for a lifetime of success. Millions and millions of boys and girls have suffered the grievous consequences. The district is irreparably broken. For the sake of today’s and tomorrow’s inner-city kids, it must be replaced. The Urban School System of the Future argues that vastly better results can be realized through the creation of a new type of organization that properly manages a city’s portfolio of schools using the revolutionary principles of chartering. It will ensure that new schools are regularly created, that great schools are expanded and replicated, that persistently failing schools are closed, and that families have access to an array of high-quality options. This new entity will focus exclusively on school performance, meaning, among other things, our cities can thoughtfully integrate their traditional public, charter public, and private schools into a single, high-functioning k-12 system. For decades, the district has produced the most heartbreaking results for already at-risk kids. The Urban School System of the Future explains how we can finally turn the tide and create dynamic, responsive, high-performing, self-improving urban school systems that fulfill the promise of public education.

In recent decades a growing number of middle-class parents have considered sending their children to—and often end up becoming active in—urban public schools. Their presence can bring long-needed material resources to such schools, but, as Linn Posey-Maddox shows in this study, it can also introduce new class and race tensions, and even exacerbate inequalities. Sensitively navigating the pros and cons of middle-class transformation, When Middle-Class Parents Choose Urban Schools asks whether it is possible for our urban public schools to have both financial security and equitable diversity. Drawing on in-depth research at an urban elementary school, Posey-Maddox examines parents’ efforts to support the school through their outreach, marketing, and volunteerism. She shows that when middle-class parents engage in urban school communities, they can bring a host of positive benefits, including new educational opportunities and greater diversity. But their involvement can also unintentionally marginalize less-affluent parents and diminish low-income students’ access to the improving schools. In response, Posey-Maddox argues that school reform efforts, which usually equate improvement with rising test scores and increased enrollment, need to have more equity-focused policies in place to ensure that low-income families also benefit from—and participate in—school change.

The updated edition of a highly-regarded work in educational studies.

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.

Americans worry continually about their schools with frequent discussions of the "crisis" in American education, of the "failures" of the public school systems, and of the inability of schools to meet the current challenges of contemporary life. Such concerns date back at least to the nineteenth century. A thread that weaves its way through the critiques of American elementary and secondary schools is that the educational system is not serving its children well, that more should be done to enhance achievement and higher performance. These critiques first began when the United States was industrializing and were later amplified when the Soviets and Japan were thought to be grinding down the competitive position of America. At the start of the twenty-first century, as we discuss globalization and maintaining our leadership position in the world economy, they are being heard again. The Urban School: A Factory for Failure challenges these assumptions about American education. Indeed, a basic premise of the book is that the American school system is working quite well-doing exactly what is expected of it. To wit, that the schools in the United States affirm, reflect, and reinforce the social inequalities that exist in the social structures of the society. Stated differently, the schools are not great engines for equalizing the existing social inequalities. Rather, they work to reinforce the social class differences that we have had in the past and continue to have in more pronounced ways at present. Rist uses both sociological and anthropological methods to examine life in one segregated African-American school in the mid-western United States. A classroom of some thirty children were followed from their first day of kindergarten through the second grade. Detailed accounts of the day-by-day process of sorting, stratifying, and separating the children by social class backgrounds demonstrates the means of ensuring that both the poor and middle-class students soon learned their appropriate place in the social hierarchy of the school. Instructional time, discipline, and teacher attention all varied by social class of the students, with those at the bottom of the ladder consistently receiving few positive rewards and many negative sanctions. When The Urban School was first published in 1973, the National School Boards Association called it one of the ten most influential books on American education for the year. It remains essential reading for educators, sociologists, and economists.

The twelve case studies in this book were written to be taught at school board training institutes conducted by the Center for Reform of School Systesm (CRSS). They were selected from the CRSS portfolio of over fifty cases because their center of gravity is district reform strategy. They describe reform initiatives in nine major urban school districts across the United States. Of the nine shcool boards, seven were elected, one was appointed, and one was a hybrid board with both elected and appointed members. Collectively, these cases span the last two decades. They should be of interest to all who seek to understand the challenges of urban education reform, but they will be particularly compelling for urban school leaders charged with the repsonsibility of transforming their school districts.