School boards are fighting for their survival. Almost everything that they do is subject to regulations handed down from city councils, state boards of education, legislatures, and courts. As recent mayoral and state takeovers in such cities as Baltimore, Chicago, and New York make abundantly clear, school boards that do not fulfill the expectations of other political players may be stripped of what few independent powers they still retain. Teachers unions exert growing influence over board decision-making processes. And with the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act, the federal government has aggressively inserted itself into matters of local education governance. B esieged is the first full-length volume in many years to systematically examine the politics that surround school boards. A group of highly renowned scholars, relying on both careful case studies and quantitative analyses, examine how school boards fare when they interact with their political superiors, teachers unions, and the public. For the most part, the picture that emerges is sobering: while school boards perform certain administrative functions quite well, the political pressures they face undermine their capacity to institute the wide-ranging school reforms that many voters and local leaders are currently demanding.

When New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg centralized control of the citys schools in 2002, he terminated the citys 32-year experiment with decentralized school control dubbed by the mayor and the media as the Bad Old Days. Decentralization grew out of the community control movement of the 1960s, which was itself a response to the bad old days of central control of a school system that was increasingly segregated and unequal. In this probing historical account, Heather Lewis draws on new archival sources and oral histories to argue that the community control movement did influence school improvement, in particular African American and Puerto Rican communities in the 1970s and 80s. Lewis shows how educators with unique insights into the relationships between the schools and the communities they served enabled meaningful change, with a focus on instructional improvement and equity that would be familiar to many observers of contemporary education reform. With a resurgence of local organizing and potential challenges to mayoral control, this informative history will be important reading for todays educational and community leaders.

Urban education and its contexts have changed in powerful ways. Old paradigms are being eclipsed by global forces of privatization and markets and new articulations of race, class, and urban space. These factors and more set the stage for Pauline Lipman's insightful analysis of the relationship between education policy and the neoliberal economic, political, and ideological processes that are reshaping cities in the United States and around the globe. Using Chicago as a case study of the interconnectedness of neoliberal urban policies on housing, economic development, race, and education, Lipman explores larger implications for equity, justice, and "the right to the city". She draws on scholarship in critical geography, urban sociology and anthropology, education policy, and critical analyses of race. Her synthesis of these lenses gives added weight to her critical appraisal and hope for the future, offering a significant contribution to current arguments about urban schooling and how we think about relations between neoliberal education reforms and the transformation of cities. By examining the cultural politics of why and how these relationships resonate with people's lived experience, Lipman pushes the analysis one step further toward a new educational and social paradigm rooted in radical political and economic democracy.

The Future of School Board Governance combines theoretical debate as well as empirical evidence of the effectiveness and relevancy of local school boards today. Original theorists of competing school board governance theories, current researchers, and researcher/practitioners provided the latest empirical data about the role of school boards as well as applications for practitioners in the field. Such a combination of readings is rarely found in a single volume. This book has a unique and distinguished set of contributors representing a virtual Who's Who among governance researchers. Many of these authors represent the major school governance theorists of the 20th century. While other books generally include only scholars from a single academic field, this list of authors includes some of the top scholars in the fields of political science, educational administration, and sociology. The authors also come from the practitioner field including numerous former school administrators, school board members and state associate directors representing over 200 years of collective experience in K-12 education.

Those making decisions about education today argue that market strategies promote democratic educational reform, when really they promote market reform of education. Michael Engel argues against this tendency, siding with democratic values and calls for a return to community-controlled schools.

Originally published in 1985 Urban America Examined, is a comprehensive bibliography examining the urban environment of the United States. The book is split into sections corresponding to the four main geographic regions of the country, looking respectively at research conducted in the East, South, Midwest and West. The book provides a broad cross section of sources, from books to periodicals and covers a range of interdisciplinary issues such as social theory, urbanization, the growth of the city, ethnicity, socialism and US politics.

In this disturbing but ultimately hopeful personal account, Jean Anyon provides compelling evidence that the economic and political devastation of America's inner cities has robbed schools and teachers of the capacity to successfully implement current strategies of educational reform. She argues that without fundamental change in government and business policies and the redirection of major resources back into the schools and the communities they serve, urban schools are consigned to failure, and no effort at raising standards, improving teaching, or boosting achievement can occur. Based on her participation in an intensive four-year school reform project in the Newark, New Jersey public schools, the author vividly captures the anguish and anger of students and teachers caught in the tangle of a failing school system. Ghetto Schooling offers a penetrating historical analysis of more than a century of government and business policies that have drained the economic, political, and human resources of urban populations. Provocative and controversial, this book reveals the historical roots of the current crisis in ghetto schools and what must be done to reverse the downward spiral.