articles on urban education

A New Era in Urban Education?

Subscribe to governance weekly, diane ravitch diane ravitch nonresident senior fellow - governance studies.

August 1, 1998

• 15 min read

Many educators have come to realize that poverty and language barriers in urban schools are unacceptable excuses for appallingly low student performance. To write off these districts’ dismal achievement levels as inevitable is to consign a generation of city youth to lives without prospects or hope. Reform’s day has come. The rescue of urban schools entails dismantling entrenched and patronage-driven school board bureaucracies, holding schools accountable for their performance, and encouraging well-planned experimentation with charter and contract schools, and vouchers.

POLICY BRIEF #35

By any measure, student performance in the nation’s urban schools is low. In urban schools that enroll high proportions of poor students, performance is appallingly low. While almost every urban district has some exceptionally effective schools, outcomes for most students and most schools compare unfavorably to those in non-urban districts. School officials usually explain the dismal results by referring to the large concentrations of poor and non-English-speaking students in cities and to the fact that poverty is highly correlated with low academic achievement.

At a conference on urban education at Brookings last May, sponsored by the Brown Center on Education Policy, scholars and school superintendents agreed that urban schools are due for a massive overhaul. The new wave of school reform now underway rejects the idea that the failure of a huge proportion of poor children in the inner cities is inevitable. To accept educational failure on the current scale among poor children in urban public schools is to consign a large segment of the rising generation to lives without hope. The deliberations of the conference, which will be published early next year as the second volume of the Brookings Papers on Education Policy, considered the prospects for a variety of changes to the education system, including the introduction of charter schools, private contracting, and vouchers.

Performance in Urban Schools

Urban schools enroll 24 percent of all public school students in the United States, 35 percent of poor students, and 43 percent of minority students. In a massive survey of urban education, Education Week concluded that “most 4th graders who live in U.S. cities can’t read and understand a simple children’s book, and most 8th graders can’t use arithmetic to solve a practical problem.” Slightly more than half of big-city students are unable to graduate from high school in the customary four years, and many of those who do manage to graduate are ill-prepared for higher education or the workplace. Performance is worst in high-poverty schools, explain the Education Week editors, yet poverty is not the only reason for low performance: “Somehow, simply being in an urban school seems to drag performance down. Students in urban schools where the majority of children are poor are more likely to do poorly on tests than their peers who attend high-poverty schools outside cities.” The odds are against poor students in urban public schools. Equally disadvantaged students in urban Catholic schools outperform their public school peers and are far less likely to drop out.

On tests administered by the federally-funded National Assessment of Educational Progress, students in high-poverty schools in cities fall far behind all others. As Figure 1 shows, 63 percent of 4th grade students in nonurban schools across the nation reach the basic level in reading as compared to 43 percent of students in urban schools. In high-poverty schools in urban districts, only 23 percent of 4th graders meet that minimal standard. The urban-nonurban gap is even larger in some states (see Figure 2). Even more surprising, however, are the large differences between students in high-poverty schools in urban and nonurban districts. Poor children in city schools are far less likely to meet the basic achievement level on NAEP tests than poor children who do not live in cities.

Some Contributing Factors

Urban education suffers from many problems, but worst among them is the spread of dense areas of poverty, where multiple social ills converge. The correlates of poverty—poor health, inadequate housing, high crime rates, single-parent families, substance abuse—create an environment in which heroic efforts are necessary in order to sustain aspirations for the future and a willingness to work hard for delayed benefits. In some cities—such as East St. Louis, Illinois, and Camden, New Jersey, Detroit, New Orleans, Hartford, Miami, Atlanta, Cleveland, and Dayton—more than 40 percent of the children live in poverty. Schools can provide health services, adult education, and a variety of other programs to assist children and their families, but in the end their primary responsibility is to provide a superior education to the children; if they don’t do it, no other institution will. For children in poverty, effective schools are crucial; the schools are their last, best hope for a better life. Schools cannot create economic activity or jobs; what they can do is to teach children the knowledge and skills without which they cannot improve their life prospects.

Urban schools are not meeting this fundamental expectation. Not only is performance strikingly poor, but in many districts, school buildings are in disrepair, supplies are inadequate, and teachers’ salaries are not competitive with neighboring suburbs. Because of what are often poor working conditions and non-competitive salaries, urban districts have trouble attracting and retaining well-qualified teachers. Nationally, 39.5 percent of science teachers lack either an undergraduate major or minor in science and 34 percent of mathematics teachers lack either a major or minor in mathematics. The figures are even higher in urban districts. For example, in urban schools where half or more of the students are poor, 45 percent of the mathematics teachers have neither a major nor a minor in mathematics.

The large bureaucracies that are responsible for urban schools seem incapable of effective management, even when they do have the resources to repair their buildings and pay better salaries. Big-city school bureaucracies often seem to adopt self-serving strategies that protect administrative jobs rather than children. They have mastered the art of continual reform, loudly trumpeting the latest initiative, even though these heralded reforms do not produce significant change in the educational outcomes for children. The track record of these school systems has given rise to suspicion that additional resources will be absorbed by dubious one-shot programs and administrative spending, without any effect on what happens in the classroom.

Many school reformers believe that the current governance system is incapable of improving the achievement of inner-city students or creating the kind of schools that can successfully educate poor children. Urban schools continue to work on the assumption that there is one best way to manage every issue and that those who work in the central offices know best. Regardless of who is superintendent or who are members of the school board, administrators in the central office control the budget, hire and assign staff, and issue directives to the schools. Important decisions are made at central headquarters, not at the school. Compliance with rules and regulations is prized more than performance. Those who are closest to the children—the principals and teachers—are robbed of initiative by the nature of the system. Urban school systems are uncomfortable with the principle of student or teacher choice of assignment; they prefer a system in which all schools are as nearly identical as possible, with students and teachers as interchangeable as widgets. These systems are characterized by their absence of clear standards, acceptance of social promotion, lack of accountability, and administrative bloat. The proliferation of federal and state programs, many designed to correct urban problems, have exacerbated the bureaucratic tendencies of big-city districts by adding new layers of reporting, regulation, and micromanagement.

Challenging the Urban System

The systemic failure of urban education has provoked various efforts by state and local officials to shake up the status quo. Where school failure has been especially abysmal, the state has taken over certain school districts (the most aggressive state has been New Jersey, which took control of the schools in Newark, Paterson, and Jersey City). In Illinois, the legislature transferred charge of the school system in Chicago to the mayor. Some districts have hired non-educators to manage the school system. Others have shut down and reconstituted failing schools with a new staff.

Other promising strategies—charter schools, contracting, and vouchers—rely on market-based principles of competition and choice. Charter schools are public schools that receive a charter to operate outside the immediate control of any local school board. They are answerable to public authorities and must agree to meet state standards. If they do not, they may lose their charter. This is the difference that immediately sets charter schools apart from regular public schools, which may fail to meet state standards for years without any untoward consequences for anyone but the children. Jeanne Allen of the Center for Education Reform, which keeps count of charter schools, estimates that more than 50 percent of all charter schools today are in urban districts. The promise of charter schools is a straightforward exchange: autonomy from regulations in exchange for accountability for results. Some charter schools are regular public schools that opted out of their school district; others are run by nonprofit organizations, parents, or teachers. Fewer than 10 percent are managed by for-profit organizations like the Edison Project. A small proportion are operated by universities, teachers’ unions, or other agencies.

Minnesota passed the first charter law in 1991. By 1998, 34 states had adopted laws permitting the establishment of charter schools. According to the Center for Education Reform, nearly 800 charter schools, serving about 166,000 children, were open by the end of the 1997-98 school year, and 400 more had been approved to open in the fall of 1998. The typical charter school is small (fewer than 300 students), and most have a waiting list. The majority of charter schools are located in Arizona, California, and Michigan, but substantial numbers of schools are also operating in Colorado, Florida, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, and Texas. In some states, weak charter laws guarantee that few charter schools will ever open because local school boards have the exclusive right to grant charters. No agency is more hostile to charter schools than local school boards, which correctly see them as unwanted competition.

Charter schools have far more freedom than regular public schools, and one way that they use it is to provide smaller classes than regular schools, usually with fewer resources. Most charter schools are started by people who have a vision of what makes a successful school, and their visions are many. Some are very progressive, others are very traditional. In the Center for Education Reform’s annual survey, one-quarter of the charter schools had a back-to-basics curriculum and another one-fifth employed E.D. Hirsch’s core knowledge curriculum, which stresses a knowledge-rich curriculum. Forty percent served dropouts or students at risk of dropping out, while one-quarter were geared to gifted and talented youth.

What is particularly appealing about charter schools is that they are public schools that rely on choice (by parents and teachers) and accountability (to public authorities). When a charter school fails—some have been closed for mismanaging funds, one in the District of Columbia was closed after the principal assaulted a news reporter—the very fact of the charter’s termination is evidence that public officials take seriously their responsibility to monitor the financial and academic integrity of the school.

Given their short history, it is too soon to gauge whether charter schools will improve student test scores or graduation rates. In both urban and suburban districts, local school officials have disparaged charter schools for taking away students and dollars. Nonetheless, the establishment of charter schools often causes the regular public schools to act forcefully when faced with competition for students, using resources more wisely and focusing on student performance. Charter schools may be the wake-up call that spurs sluggish school systems to adopt effective reforms.

Contracting is another form of competition and choice that has the potential to change urban education. Paul T. Hill, Lawrence C. Pierce, and James W. Guthrie in their book Reinventing Public Education proposed that every public school should have a contract with public authorities that would allow the individual school to control its budget and staff. Basic to their argument is the belief that schools succeed when they have an integrative principle, a set of clear goals that describe what makes the school a community and that focus the school on student learning. In their scheme, schools would be self-governing, making most of the decisions that affect them. Unlike the current urban school system, which tends to level out differences among schools, contracting would encourage schools to pursue their own purposes so long as they agree to meet the academic standards established by public authorities. Local school boards like contracting, especially when it allows them to find an agency willing to take responsibility for hard-to-educate children. Some urban districts have contracted with for-profit organizations like the Edison Project to manage schools, and a few others (Seattle and Riverside, California) are considering contracting as an overall reform strategy. There are about half a dozen for-profit organizations and numerous not-for-profit organizations that offer their services as contractors to school districts. However, in some states—New York, for example—it is actually illegal for a school board to contract out instruction.

The proposal that generates the most passionate support and the most passionate opposition is vouchers. The original idea for vouchers came from Milton Friedman in 1955, who wanted to break up the public school monopoly by enabling every family to spend its education dollars at will. Over the years, voucher proposals have won the allegiance of free-market enthusiasts, but have been bitterly opposed by public employee unions and others who prefer the current system of public education run exclusively by government agencies.

In recent years, the voucher debate has shifted to focus primarily on low-income students. Dozens of privately-funded voucher programs are operating in the nation’s cities. They are intended to induce demand for publicly-funded programs. Currently, the only public voucher programs are in Milwaukee and Cleveland, where low-income students receive public grants to attend private schools, including religious schools. Both programs were challenged in state courts by the teachers’ union, the American Civil Liberties Union, and other plaintiffs who oppose not only the use of public money in nonpublic schools but specifically the inclusion of religious schools. In June 1998, the Wisconsin Supreme Court upheld the Milwaukee program, including the participation of religious schools, stating that the choice program has a secular purpose, will the primary effect of advancing religion and would not lead to excessive entanglement between church and state. Eventually, either the Milwaukee program or the Cleveland program will reach the U.S. Supreme Court, which will resolve the issue.

Perhaps because of despair over the dire condition of urban schools, public opinion is shifting toward support of vouchers. According to a Gallup Poll, 74 percent of the public was opposed to vouchers in 1993; by 1997, opposition had dropped to 52 percent. The highest level of support for vouchers was found among blacks (72 percent), 18-to-29-year-olds (70 percent), and urban residents (59 percent). In a poll by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, vouchers received the endorsement of 57 percent of blacks, and 86 percent of blacks between 36 and 50. The greatest support (70 percent) came from blacks with the lowest income (under $15,000). What is more, prominent black leaders such as former Democratic Congressman Floyd Flake in New York and former schools superintendent Howard Fuller in Milwaukee are stepping forward to not have support vouchers, charter schools, and other fundamental reforms.

Fig. 2. Student Achievement: Biggest Gaps Between Urban and Nonurban Districts

Percent of students scoring at “basic” level or higher on NAEP, ranked by percentage point difference

Source: Education Week. Published tabulations from 1994 NAEP reading test and 1998 mathematics and science tests.

The Direction of Education Reform

By now, there is general agreement that there is no silver bullet or panacea that will solve the problems of urban schools, but certain allied strategies are emerging as fundamental to lasting change. No one of these should be seen as free-standing, but rather as parts of a coordinated effort to redirect urban schooling.

• Urban school systems, and their states, must adopt clear and rigorous academic standards so that everyone knows what students are expected to learn.
• They must have high standards for those who teach in their schools, hiring only those teachers who have an academic major in the subject they intend to teach, and who have passed a qualifying examination, like people in other professions.
• Valid and accurate information about student performance must be readily available to the public. This information should be drawn from tests and assessments that gauge what children should know and be able to do, rather than norms that merely define average performance. One way to do this would be to allow school districts to have access to their NAEP scores in reading, mathematics, and science.
• Districts that have been starved for resources for capital improvements and teachers’ salaries should get them. Those that suffer from mismanagement and misallocation of resources need governance reform.
• Individual public schools should have far greater authority over resources and staffing. The academic standards should be set by city or state officials, but the school should be free to determine how to meet the standards, whom to hire, where to purchase supplies, services, and meals, and how to manage its schedule and organization, so long as it produces satisfactory educational results.
• Schools must be held accountable for student performance. Public officials must audit schools for educational and fiscal performance and be ready to reconstitute failing schools, suspend charters, and do whatever else is necessary to make sure that persistent failure is not tolerated.
• Choice should be encouraged by public authorities to stimulate higher performance and customer satisfaction. Families should be able to send their children to the school of their choice.
• Competition among schools should be encouraged by state and local officials by promoting charter schools, contracting, and low-income vouchers. Good schools will thrive.

In different cities and to different degrees, all of these changes have begun to happen. Tectonic plates are moving slowly but inexorably to change public education, especially where change is needed most. Responding to a concerned public, policymakers in most states are ready to try any reasonable alternative that offers hope of saving the rising generation in our nation’s cities.

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(Re)Defining Urban Education: A Conceptual Review and Empirical Exploration of the Definition of Urban Education

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Article contents

Urban school reform in the united states.

• Tiffanie Lewis-Durham Tiffanie Lewis-Durham School of Education, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
•  and  Craig Peck Craig Peck University of North Carolina at Greensboro
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264093.013.27
• Published online: 29 March 2017
• This version: 18 October 2023
• Previous version

In the United States, policymakers have exhibited a resilient confidence in the idea that reforming urban schools is the essential key to improving the life chances of children, especially Black and Latino youth. Since the mid-1960s in particular, this resonant belief, as articulated in different forms by politicians, interest groups, local communities, and the broader public, has served as motivational impetus for small- and large-scale school change efforts. Despite such apparent unanimity regarding the importance of city schools, disputes have emerged over the proper structural and systemic alterations necessary to improve education. Often at issue has been the notion of just who should and will control change efforts. Moreover, vexing tensions have also characterized the enacted reform initiatives. For instance, urban school policies created by distant, delocalized outsiders have routinely engendered unanticipated local effects and fierce community resistance. In addition, particular urban school reforms have manifested simultaneously as a means for encouraging social justice for marginalized youth and as mechanisms for generating financial returns for educational vendors. Regardless of such tensions, faith in urban school reform has persisted, thanks to exemplary city schools and programs that have helped students thrive academically. For many reformers, such success stories demonstrate that viable routes toward enabling academic achievement for more children living in urban areas do indeed exist.

• achievement

Updated in this version

The author has made substantial revisions to this article, including an updated section on School Discipline and Safety. The references reflect current scholarship around the topic.

Introduction

Policymakers in the United States have exhibited a resilient confidence in the idea that reforming urban schools is the essential key to improving the life chances of children, especially Black and Latino youth. Since the mid-1960s in particular, this resonant belief, as articulated in different forms by politicians, interest groups, local communities, and the broader public, has coalesced into a sustaining motivational force in both policy and practice. The concept that schools can and do matter substantially for youth from historically marginalized groups has helped compel successive school improvement efforts intended to induce greater equity in access to effective educational programs and generate increased equality in academic and life outcomes. In some ways, the pursuit of urban school reform has become symbolically tantamount to constructing paths necessary to enable more children to realize a quintessential American dream of prosperity, stability, democracy, and security.

Despite such apparent unanimity regarding the importance of city schools, essential reform actors have engaged in intense disputes over the proper structural and systemic alterations necessary to improve education. Often at issue has been the notion of just who should and will control change efforts; politics, in various forms, appears as a necessary condition and an inevitable calculation in urban school reform. Moreover, vexing tensions also have characterized the enacted improvement initiatives. For instance, urban school policies created by distant, delocalized outsiders have routinely engendered unanticipated local effects and fierce community resistance. In addition, particular urban school reforms have manifested simultaneously as a means for encouraging social justice for marginalized youth and as mechanisms for generating financial returns for educational vendors.

This article provides an introduction to urban school reform in the United States, with particular emphasis on how it has progressed since the 1960s. We begin with a brief historical overview that provides a general sense of context and terrain. Given the limited length of this work, our main intent is conceptual rather than comprehensive. Accordingly, we describe several key concepts and factors that have helped define urban school reform over the past several decades. We also discuss several enduring reform tensions that have remained unresolved in city school improvement efforts. Despite these tensions, faith in urban school reform has persisted, thanks to exemplary city schools and programs that have helped students thrive academically. For many reformers, such educational success stories demonstrate viable routes toward enabling academic achievement for more children living in urban areas.

From the “One Best System” to the Struggle for Something Better

As the United States began emerging as an urbanized, industrialized global power in the late 1800s, city schools became a focal point for change. The consolidation of rural schools into city districts led alliances of business representatives and educational professionals to develop complex educational systems marked by increased specialization of pedagogical and support functions ( Rury, 2012 ; Tyack, 1974 ). In the 1800s, a simple, one-room village schoolhouse under community oversight signified American education; by the 1920s, the prevailing symbol had become the “one best system”: urban, factory-style, multiservice institutions arranged into city-based districts controlled by a “corporate-bureaucratic model” ( Tyack, 1974 , p. 6). One main purpose was assimilation of the increasing number of immigrants arriving in cities. If part of the expressed intent of the preferred governance model was “taking the schools out of politics” ( Tyack, 1974 , p. 6), the imposed order in fact attempted to nest control in the hands of elites at the sake of local community voices. As accounts of schools in cities like Chicago demonstrate ( Lipman, 2011 ), over time, the “corporate-bureaucratic” model engendered as much politics, often in the form of community dissent and protest, as it prevented. Moreover, the new order generated extensive bureaucracies based on the principles of organizational science and efficiency ( Tyack, 1974 ). By the latter half of the century, urban educational bureaucracies in places like New York City struck some observers as Byzantine empires that perpetuated the entitlements of existing professional educators and solidified the status quo in terms of educational services delivered and withheld ( Rogers, 1968 ).

Beginning in the 1950s and accelerating in the latter half of the 20th century , the idea that urban schools represented a “best” system came under challenge as the socioeconomic context in urban areas changed dramatically ( Kantor & Brenzel, 1992 ). After World War II, African American migration from the South to northern cities, as well as influxes of new immigrants from Central America and the Caribbean, preceded urban deindustrialization and increased suburbanization in the 1960s and 1970s. Complicating matters, after the Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 rendered school segregation unconstitutional, efforts to desegregate city schools attacked de jure (by law) segregation in the South and de facto (in effect) segregation elsewhere. Although desegregation achieved some notable gains in the South, by the 1970s, White flight to the suburbs in resistance to busing to implement integration in other parts of the United States coupled with lowered economic prospects to signify that urban areas were in stark decline ( Kantor & Brenzel, 1992 ; Lytle, 2007 ). As educational historian John Rury (2012) explained, by the 1990s,

Destitution and isolation contributed to an atmosphere of nihilistic self-destruction. . . . Drop-out rates among urban teenagers came to be as high as 50% in many large American cities, with thousands of adolescents turning to the street in the absence of any real prospects of stable and meaningful employment. . . . In this fashion, the crisis in education can be linked to the economic crisis in inner-city minority communities. (p. 16)

In cities across the United States, socioeconomic and demographic change has had profound effects on urban schools and schooling ( Anyon, 1997 ; Cuban, 2010 ).

Amid such stark community realities, actors across the sociopolitical spectrum began to frame schools as central elements of the problems plaguing cities. Caustic exposés of educational conditions accentuated the idea that urban schools were in deep crisis, while accounts from principals and other educational professionals, many of whom were White, decried the effects of socioeconomic and cultural forces on their schools ( Irwin, 1973 ; Kozol, 1967 ; Miller & Smiley, 1967 ; Wasserman, 1970 ). Meanwhile, scholars questioned the degree to which schools could help youth overcome the effects of poverty, race, and other socioeconomic factors ( Coleman et al., 1966 ; Jenks, 1972 ). As a consensus was emerging that urban schools were dysfunctional, studies like these suggested that they were also ineffective tools for increasing equity and social justice for students of color. Tyack (1974) described the contemporary situation as “the one best system on fire” (p. 269), while Cuban (1976) portrayed urban superintendents as “school chiefs under fire” (p. iii).

By the late 1960s, as educational policymakers and others responded to this troubling context, enduring contours also emerged in urban school reform. First, scholars and programs identified and disseminated core characteristics of educators and institutions that have successfully served urban students of color ( Edmonds, 1979 ). Second, initiatives like the Comer School Development Program and, later, the Harlem Children’s Zone sought to establish symbiotic connections among urban schools, families, and communities ( Comer, 2009 ; Payne, 2008 ; Tough, 2009 ). Third, some reformers championed systemic improvement efforts as the way to take change to scale through means such as improving whole districts, using state control of local districts as a lever for broad-based change, and increasing federal funding and involvement ( Lytle, 2007 ; Stone et al., 2001 ). Finally, some advocates demanded new approaches to schooling, such as district-run alternative schools with unique operational norms and innovative pedagogy. More radically, proponents in what became known as “the choice movement” have encouraged the development of publicly funded charter schools that operate outside direct district oversight and tax-funded vouchers that enable parents to send their children to private schools ( Berends, 2014 ). Thus, today we have several general urban school reform modes that gestated initially in the 1960s and 1970s: effective pedagogy, educators, and schools as replicable examples; school–community connections; systemic change efforts; and market-based educational choice. In addition, reforms generally have been oriented toward two general entry points: changes intended to occur inside the school building and classrooms, as well as changes intended to occur in governance structures and community settings outside the school building. The unit of analysis is an important factor, then, when considering school reform.

Just as differences in the substance and points of entry of change efforts have helped define urban school reform, so have differences in determining what is meant by the word urban . At its essence, urban suggests certain geographical features, like a city’s population size and density. Prominent urban education researcher H. Richard Milner IV described three elements in what he called “an evolving typology of urban education”: “urban intensive” (major cities like New York and Chicago), “urban emergent” (large cities like Austin, Texas), and “urban characteristic” (smaller cities that encounter issues parallel to those in the intensive and emergent urban areas) ( Milner, 2012 , p. 560). Increasingly, urban also implies demographics characterized by significant populations of Blacks, Latinos, and other groups distinct from the country’s predominant White racial demographic ( Foster, 2007 ). Distinguished urban education scholar Pedro Noguera (2003) noted that “the term urban is less likely to be employed as a geographic concept . . . than as social or cultural construct used to describe certain people and places” and that the people the term described “are relatively poor and, in many cases, non-White” (p. 23). The word urban has increasingly taken on a negative connotation, suggestive of entrenched crime and poverty ( Dixson et al., 2014 ).

In this text, we rely on Milner’s conception of urban as an organizing mechanism, and we use the word city synonymously with urban to achieve some semantic variety. Disproportionate attention is paid in the existing research literature toward what Milner calls “urban intensives”; hence, the examples here reflect some geographic diversity while highlighting reforms in major cities such as Chicago and New York. Also, it is fair to assert that urban school systems in the United States typically serve diverse populations that include significant numbers of youth from historically marginalized groups who live in poverty. We remain mindful that urban can evoke negative connotations—but such is not our intent. In our view, urban areas have been, are, and will be the lifeblood of the United States. They are the complex places where different people can and do meet, struggle, make democracy over again and again, and aspire. Moreover, we agree that too often, urban community pathologies are overemphasized and urban community strengths neglected ( Dixson et al., 2014 ). Cities are perfect American imperfections, and the ongoing quest for urban school reform is part of that perfect imperfection.

Importantly, although common themes and experiences have surfaced in reform efforts as they have occurred across different urban areas in the United States, historian David Tyack (1974) asserted that “ the city school does not exist, and never did” (p. 5). Urban schools and the communities that they serve have always been unique places with distinct histories, cultures, and sociopolitical contexts ( Johanek & Puckett, 2007 ; Lightfoot, 1983 ). Given this reality, wide-scale improvement efforts predicated on generic, one-size-fits-all approaches have failed to make any significant, lasting impact inside (or outside) of individual schools and classrooms ( Tyack & Cuban, 1995 ). The idea that local context consistently matters joins the issue of outsider-led reform and the cyclical nature of change as key concepts and factors in urban school reform.

Key Concepts and Factors in Urban School Reform

While it is beyond the scope of this article to provide a comprehensive engagement of concepts and factors related to urban education reform, it is fair to assert that certain issues and elements, across time and city spaces, have disproportionately affected the effort to improve schooling. We consider several of these key concepts and factors below.

Race, Ethnicity, and Poverty

By the 1960s, race was the dividing line in city schooling: In the South, school systems in cities like Greensboro, North Carolina, became the settings for intensive desegregation efforts that attempted to overcome decades of separate schooling ( Batchelor, 2015 ; Chafe, 1981 ). Elsewhere, Whites still controlled the “one best” systems that were increasingly under challenge, often by Black community members who had long been excluded from meaningful input in local schooling. In subsequent decades, disputes and negotiations around race became an indelible aspect of urban school district reform efforts ( Lipman, 2011 ).

Meanwhile, in urban classrooms, teachers (many or most of them White) taught students from backgrounds different from their own. Given this context, by the 1970s, some Black people in urban areas outside the South advocated for holding city teachers directly accountable for student standardized test scores as a means to counteract the negative expectations and outright racism that faculty may have directed toward Black children ( Spencer, 2012 ). In more recent decades, scholars and advocates have identified ways that teachers might better reach and teach students of color through approaches that acknowledge, honor, and engage student cultural backgrounds ( Delpit, 2012 ; Gay, 2010 ; Howard, 2010 ; Ladson-Billings, 1994 ; Milner, 2010 ). As a general point, it remains a shameful American fact that after the widespread failure of desegregation to take hold as a mandated reform, the White majority has failed to enable sustained school improvement for multiple generations of urban Black people. To paraphrase Cornel West (1992) , race has mattered and does matter in urban school reform.

Ethnicity has also proved to be an important factor in education in cities. As urban schools consolidated and grew into large bureaucracies from the late 1890s into the 1920s, immigrants entered cities in vast numbers. Schools became the way that the dominant society attempted to acculturate these new ethnic populations at the same time that immigrant groups attempted to assert control over their children’s education by fighting for instruction in their native languages ( Tyack, 1974 ). These previous efforts extended into the latter part of the century. In the 1970s, for instance, Mexican Americans in Houston, Texas, fought for recognition as a minority group. They did so in order to defy Anglo-American efforts to evade desegregation edicts by deeming Mexican Americans “White” and putting them with African Americans in so-called desegregated schools that were separate from Anglo-American schools ( San Miguel, 2001 ). More recently, the issue of how to reform schools and engage communities in order to better educate Latino immigrant children has become a persistent concern in cities ( Lowenhaupt, 2014 ; Noguera, 2008 ).

Poverty is an additional factor that consistently matters in urban education. As cities deindustrialized and lost high-wage, stable jobs in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, chronic, multigenerational poverty became a common condition in many urban communities ( Kantor & Brenzel, 1992 ; Rury, 2012 ; Wilson, 1987 ). In cities like Newark, New Jersey, increasingly negative economic conditions coincided with school system decline ( Anyon, 1997 ). Poverty and urban school reform became inextricably linked in initiatives like the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), which was signed into law in 1965 by President Lyndon Johnson. ESEA’s Title I delivered funding for supplementary educational services as a means to reallocate resources to those most in need ( Lytle, 2007 ; Spencer, 2012 ). More recently, some popular professional development programs have decoupled poverty and race in ways that concern advocates who consider these factors deeply intertwined ( Delpit, 2012 ).

While race, ethnicity, and poverty have consistently mattered in urban school reform, it is important to note that there is fluidity in how each concept is defined and interrelates. For instance, Asian Americans represent significant populations in major cities, especially in the West, yet they are often neglected in the national public discourse, which tends to focus less on an emerging notion of the United States as a multicultural nation and more on the enduring notion of it as two nations—one Black and one White ( Takaki, 2008 ). In addition, since race and ethnicity are social constructs, just who counts in a particular demographic category can change ( Smedley & Smedley, 2005 ). For instance, throughout the 19th century and well into the 20th century , Irish Americans, Italian Americans, and Jewish Americans were considered distinct ethnic groups, but by the latter part of the 20th century , they were considered White ( Roediger, 2006 ).

Politics and Power

Significant disputes have emerged over the proper structural, systemic, and curricular alterations necessary to improve urban schools. Hence, the phenomenon of urban school reform has repeatedly encountered a central question of urban politics and power: Who should and will control school change efforts? In the 1960s in New York City, for example, tensions boiled over as parents and activists from the predominantly Black community of Brooklyn’s Ocean Hill–Brownsville sought and asserted control over their local schools. Their actions included teacher dismissals, leading the predominantly White, Jewish teachers to embark upon a citywide strike through their union ( Perlstein, 2004 ). In subsequent decades, decentralization of the New York City school system devolved power to local communities to determine educational actions in their children’s schools, although it also left some uncertainty as to who actually controlled the schools ( Lewis, 2013 ). In the 2000s, Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration persuaded New York State to recentralize the system and give him final control over it. In turn, Mayor Bloomberg invested his hand-chosen educational chief, Chancellor Joel Klein, with significant executive authority ( Lewis, 2013 ; Ravitch, 2010 ). As New York City’s example suggests, politics and power play an influential role in urban school reform.

In recent years, other issues of power and control have surfaced in local urban districts over who gets to regulate curriculum at the K–12 level. School boards and other elected officials across the country have taken up the call to control what teachers can or cannot say in classrooms, what books can be stocked in school libraries and media centers ( Kim, 2022 ), and how settled topics like slavery or the Holocaust can be discussed ( Dallacqua, 2022 ). In 2020 , as a response to the racial reckoning making its way across the United States ( Chang et al., 2020 ), the White House under the order of Donald Trump released a memo to condemn diversity trainings, which were alleged to be inherently racist toward White people ( White House, 2020 ). Politically conservative groups lobbied school boards and politicians to take action against these trainings ( Williams, 2022 ). This led to bitter fights between different groups of parents, educators, and school boards over topics like critical race theory (CRT), a theoretical ideology and analytical lens that centers racial explanations to make sense of common phenomena like political disenfranchisement and poverty ( Kamenetz, 2021 ).

On one side of the argument are politicians and some parents who contend that CRT is a divisive topic that should not be taught in K–12 schools because they claim it faults all White people for racism and discrimination. On the other side are politicians, educators, and parents who clarify that CRT is not an ideology taught in K–12 schools but one that is often discussed in law schools and graduate-level courses. They argue that topics peripheral to CRT, like the transatlantic slave trade, are factual parts of U.S. history and should be staples of the K–12 curriculum. Despite the split in perspectives, several state legislatures across the country have introduced laws that would ban teaching topics like racism and slavery ( López et al., 2021 ). Some states have even introduced parents’ rights bills, which give parents power to access and influence curricular decisions and school-level policies ( Pogarcic, 2022 ). These parents’ rights bills have set the stage for school choice campaigns that seek to provide public funding to private schools via vouchers ( Kim, 2022 ), and some give parents a legal right to know if their child changes their name or gender pronouns ( Granados, 2023 ). Although some see these recent conflicts as new or more vigorous fights to control schools, these battles reflect the constant turmoil that shapes public education in the U.S. school system ( Tyack & Cuban, 1995 ).

Furthermore, these clashes may serve as an entry point to rationalize and deepen critiques of urban school systems, where Gamson (2019) argues schools “provide the blend of expertise, breadth of scope, concentration of cultural resources, and supply of social services necessary to prepare students for life in an increasingly complex world” (p. 2). Urban school districts are often magnets for historically marginalized groups, in which educators often compete for resources and face the challenge to educate children in large, very complex systems.

School Discipline and Safety

Scholars argue that there is a distinction between the terms school discipline and school violence ( Adams, 2000 ). Yet, the two phrases are often used interchangeably to describe delinquent and punishable offenses that take place in schools. Urban schools have perennially faced questions about discipline and violence, and in recent years, these questions have become more politically charged ( Justice, 2018 ). To examine the history of violence in schools, one could go back to colonial times when educators frequently used corporal punishment as a means to control students ( Spring, 2018 ). However, contemporary use of terms like school violence only became prevalent in the 1960s and 1970s when media outlets coined the phrase to describe social protests led by Black, Native American, Latinx, and Asian American students in urban schools ( Fuentes, 2011 ).

In the 1980s and 1990s, political leaders campaigned on promises to improve schools and reduce violence. For example, in 1994 , President Bill Clinton signed the Gun Free Schools Act, which required states to adopt zero-tolerance policies in schools. These policies often included increased surveillance and punishment similar to that seen in prisons ( Adams, 2000 ). Some scholars have argued that these measures have had an outsized impact on urban schools where large numbers of Black and Latinx students are enrolled ( Mallett, 2016 ), thus leading to racial disproportionality in the justice system ( Irby, 2014 ). Parents, educators, and community groups have pushed back against exclusionary practices and harsh discipline like zero tolerance ( Dunbar & Villaruel, 2002 ). Yet terms like school violence have become a mainstay given the horrific prevalence of school shootings and the inability of decision makers to agree on possible solutions. Educators have experimented with popular models like positive behavior intervention and supports, which refer to a tiered system to address offenses that run the gamut between minor and serious ( Carr et al., 2002 ). More progressive approaches include restorative practices, which focus on a communal approach to give offenders an opportunity to repair harm and address transgressions ( Gregory & Evans, 2020 ; Schiff, 2018 ). While the issue of school safety is not one that solely affects urban schools, the presumption that violence and crime are tantamount to the urban school experience is persistent and intractable.

Trust is an underlying factor that can propel or frustrate urban school reform ( Bryk & Schneider, 2002 ). In essence, there must be mutual, sustaining relational faith between those leading reform and those experiencing reform (or, less charitably, those who are being reformed). Hence, it is crucial that teachers, for instance, believe that legislators mandating standards-based reforms have their interests and the interests of their students in mind. However, due in large part to the interplay of the other crucial factors discussed here (like race, poverty, and power), trust in urban education is difficult to develop and hard to maintain ( Bryk et al., 2010 ). In addition, a long-established truism in school reform (regardless of its specific geographic location) is that teachers and students are the most frequent intended recipients of reform, but teachers and students rarely have authentic voices in developing reforms ( Tyack & Cuban, 1995 ). Their question becomes, “Why reform if we have no say in the reform’s design and implementation?” Teachers, moreover, often have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, which has served them adequately, rather than making considerable changes that might put their careers at risk—a situation that can complicate and frustrate the implementation efforts of reform advocates ( Payne, 2008 ). Trust is an elusive and often endangered element in urban education, and it is further complicated by a second key concept in city school reform: the outsider issue.

The Outsider Issue

Compounding the problematic nature of trust is the fact that policymakers and policy influencers with access to the financial and political power necessary to leverage significant change have developed and implemented urban education reforms—from district reorganizations to charter school startups to alternative teacher training initiatives—that have routinely engendered unanticipated local effects and fierce community resistance. Cultural, racial, and socioeconomic differences among reform advocates, school personnel, and community members have often produced a perception gap: Delocalized reformers assert only good intentions, while established locals discern only questionable motives.

Given such conditions, a reform approach like school closure can become a highly contested issue ( Berger, 1983 ; Lipman & Haines, 2007 ). Where supporters may frame a closing of a school as a necessary step toward improved educational options, the local urban community may experience it as a form of “social and civic death” ( Johnson, 2013 , p. 233). Given such experiences, it is easy to see why, as sociologist and urban educational reformer Charles Payne (2008) explained, “Outsiders coming to ‘help’ are going to be rejected, just for being Outsiders, so it seems” (p. 25).

On the other hand, the way outsider has been framed in recent years has garnered support from those looking for new or different ways to educate children outside of the typical district structure. Families in urban districts have seen and sometimes welcomed the influx of charter schools in their communities ( Houston, 2023 ). Many of the charters have been framed as viable alternatives to district schools, even though the large organizations that run these schools are often distant and sometimes disconnected from the communities they serve. Still, outsiders may not be rejected outright if they provide services that are desired or if their agenda aligns with the reform priorities of local communities ( Henig et al., 2019 ).

Urban School Reform as a Cycle

A final key concept in urban school reform is that it represents a perpetuating cycle ( Cuban, 1990 ; Hess, 1999 ; Payne, 2008 ; Tyack & Cuban, 1995 ). Under this dynamic, dispiriting accounts of urban school academic failure accompany calls for reform, while dispiriting accounts of urban school reform failure accompany calls for more reforms ( Tyack, 1974 ). Through initiatives such as teacher accountability systems, elected policymakers offer symbolic evidence of their efforts to improve the life chances of urban children through strong legislative action ( Lipman, 2002 ). The short tenures of urban superintendents, meanwhile, help encourage “policy churn” instead of actual change, ensuring that perpetual reform is the new status quo ( Hess, 1999 , p. 52). If a specific program proves successful in a small number of schools, expansion of that program brings risks. Charles Payne (2008) explained, “As they go into more and tougher schools, they find that their earlier experiences did not fully prepare them for dealing with the array of problems urban schools present. . . . The same people who encouraged rapid expansion—the policymaking community, the foundations, the media—become disappointed” (p. 184). Or successful programs can just fade away, succumbing to the demoralized, irrational nature of the status quo in urban education. Yet a lasting sociopolitical imperative to provide at least some symbolic evidence of efforts to improve urban schools virtually ensures that a new reform will soon be on its way ( Payne, 2008 ). In this way, urban school failure and urban school reform always go together.

Five Tensions in Urban School Reform

While several concepts and factors have routinely influenced urban education change efforts, some reform tensions have remained unresolved in city school improvement campaigns. These lasting dilemmas often emerged after common desires to improve urban schools progressed to polarized means of reform action. Next, we examine five enduring urban school reform tensions that have emanated around problems and solutions, schools and community, top-down and grassroots efforts, social justice and financial returns, and small-scale and large-scale reforms.

Problems and Solutions

In what has become an enduring tension in urban education reform, ideas and initiatives that some frame as solutions to urban school difficulties, others frame as problems that may exacerbate conditions. Stated in shorthand, solutions are problems and problems are solutions. Two phenomena that help illustrate this dynamic are accountability and charter schools. With accountability, schools and educators are professionally and publicly judged in terms of their ability to help students meet established academic standards, a measurement usually established through student performance on yearly, state-sanctioned, standardized tests ( Mehta, 2013 ). State-funded, independently operated charter schools are intended to increase educational options for children and families ( Berends, 2014 ).

In terms of accountability, the idea that urban schools and educators must be held responsible for student performance is a long-standing one. In 1874 , for example, a superintendent in Portland, Oregon, introduced a uniform curriculum and tested all students to see if they had mastered its material. For good measure, he published the results in the newspaper for full public view ( Tyack, 1974 ). Although this early case lasted only a few years, nearly a century later, test-based accountability began to gain more traction as states such as Michigan generated statewide assessments to gauge student performance ( Mehta, 2013 ). By the 1980s and then into the 2000s, test-based accountability for public schools became one of the nation’s operational school policy paradigms. Initial accountability systems in places like Texas and North Carolina gave way to federally mandated, state-designed yearly testing as sanctioned under the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), signed into law in 2002 , which represented reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) ( Mehta, 2013 ). By the late 2000s, the reigning definition of a good public school was a school whose students performed well on state-delivered standardized tests ( Chenoweth, 2009 ).

Still, a case can be made for accountability as a positive development for urban schools. At accountability’s infancy in the 1970s, some Black intellectuals championed test-based systems and community-based involvement in school governance as ways to ensure that Black children and other urban youth received proper educational services ( Peck, 2014 ; Spencer, 2012 ). Others emphasized the notion of shared accountability between a community and its schools as the only way forward in urban education ( Spencer, 2012 ).

Pursuing a different route forward, the effective schools movement identified a specific core of practices that helped urban students of color succeed academically ( Edmonds, 1979 ). By the 2000s, a rich tradition of scholarship replicated the effective schools idea by demonstrating those specific conditions and approaches that led to academic improvement in urban schools ( Bryk et al., 2010 ). Well-supported, teacher-driven professional learning communities examined formative student assessment data in ways that generated substantive student and school improvement ( Delpit, 2012 ).

In these ways, accountability as it manifested over the past few decades provided core attention to academic performance in urban schooling, ensured that personnel in the schools bore responsibility for the performance of their schools and students, and demonstrated replicable approaches designed to encourage greater student achievement. As Payne (2008) explained, “In the 1960s . . . it was nothing for a teacher, with a guest in the classroom, to spend a class period reading the paper or doing the crosswords.” Thanks to accountability, however, “from superintendents to classroom teachers, people are at least putting more effort into the work.” He cautioned, though, “I share the general concern with an overreliance on test scores. . . . The best we can do is be cautious in our interpretations and look at other measures where possible, particularly graduation rates and postsecondary activities” (p. 7).

As Payne’s caution suggests, accountability can resonate as a problem in urban education reform. For instance, the enduring presence of standardized testing has generated a high-stakes, narrow educational ethos that can negatively affect the socioemotional lives of children and adults in schools; devolves the complex act of schooling into mere test preparation; neglects to acknowledge (or even denigrates) the cultural backgrounds of students; and has encouraged adult-led cheating scandals ( Delpit, 2012 ; Ravitch, 2010 ; Vasquez Heilig et al., 2014 ). In high-stakes turnaround schools, teachers with unsupportive principals can feel pressure to focus narrowly on test score improvement to the detriment of other educational goals. Such pressure can also put them at risk of burnout and departure ( Cucchiara et al., 2015 ). What is even more concerning is that accountability pressures have even begun to shape teacher preparation programs, which focus almost solely on test preparation and the technical aspects of instruction ( Sleeter, 2008 ). Given the lack of compelling evidence that high-stakes testing has succeeded in improving urban student outcomes at scale, Vasquez Heilig et al. (2014) asserted that the NCLB system functioned as a means of colonial-style social control—including privileging of culturally exclusive knowledge through state-mandated standards and ongoing surveillance through testing—imposed by the dominant White society on urban people of color.

Just as accountability has constituted both a solution and a problem in urban school reform, so have charter schools. By the late 1960s, Dr. Kenneth B. Clark, a African American psychologist and public intellectual, articulated a vision for an alternative to the existing public school system. Clark, whose testimony was a key factor in the Supreme Court’s Brown decision in 1954 , insisted on pursuing desegregation, by then long delayed. At the same time, he called for alternative public school systems to provide improved educational opportunities for Black students and other marginalized youth. Declaring that “public school systems are protected public monopolies with only minimal competition from private and parochial schools,” he called for “realistic, aggressive, and viable competitors” in the form of schools operated outside the traditional district structures by states, the federal government, and businesses ( Clark, 1968 , p. 111). For Clark and others like him, expanding the educational options available to urban families was an important solution to larger issues, including poor schooling, poverty, and political disempowerment.

By the 1990s, beliefs in encouraging more competition and choice had propelled the development of charter schools, publicly funded but independently controlled institutions that by the 2000s were situated mostly in urban areas and served students who were primarily Black and Latino ( Berends, 2014 ; Chapman, 2014 ). As scholar and educational advocate Lisa Delpit (2012) noted, “In their first iteration, charter schools were to be beacons for what could happen in public schools. They were intended to develop models for working with the most challenging populations” (p. xv). Programs like the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP), a charter school started in the 1990s in Houston, Texas, by two White Ivy League graduates who were also Teach For America alumni, gained significant exposure and praise from some quarters as a viable means to improving urban education as the organization opened schools nationwide ( Mathews, 2009 ). Advocates touted charter schools as innovative and tailored to the particular needs of urban students. By the 2000s, charter schools had gained such popularity as a school reform that major urban districts like Chicago, New Orleans, New York, and Philadelphia operated as portfolio districts that offered parents an array of choices, including traditional district schools, alternative and magnet district-run schools, and charter schools that ran independently of the districts ( Buckley et al., 2010 ; Dixson et al., 2014 ). Extensive waiting lists at individual charter schools offered symbolic evidence that parents remain enamored with the concept, while federal policy during the administration of President Obama provided strong financial backing for charter school expansion ( Berends, 2014 ; Chapman, 2014 ).

Despite such apparently strong support, charter schools have also raised substantial concerns. Charter school academic performance as measured through state-mandated testing, for instance, has been mixed. While some studies have demonstrated that urban charter schools show positive effects on academic performance, little is known about what particular organizational features led to those results ( Chapman, 2014 ). Another issue is that certain charter schools have failed to offer proper services for children who needed special education ( Delpit, 2012 ). In addition, the fact that programs like KIPP required parents to sign a behavior contract for their children and provide required hours of volunteer service may have led to selection bias in the types of parents attracted to the schools ( Chapman, 2014 ). Delpit (2012) asserted, “I am angry because of the way that the original idea of charter schools has been corrupted . . . because of the ‘market model,’ charter schools often shun the very students that they were intended to help” (pp. xv–xvi). Private interests, such as foundations that support charter schools, provide startup institutions with funding to help give them the best possible chance to outperform traditional public schools, which may in turn promote the further privatization of public schooling ( Lipman, 2011 ). Just as with accountability, then, charter schools have engendered open admiration and fierce criticism. In the end, we are left with this enduring tension in urban school reform: Solutions are problems and problems are solutions.

Schools and Communities

A second enduring tension in urban education is as follows: Improving urban schools can improve their students’ educational and life opportunities, but educational outcomes in urban communities are inextricably linked to the community’s socioeconomic conditions. On the one hand, some have positioned schools as the main route available to a city’s students who may be growing up in poverty. In this way, a good education constitutes an urban student’s sanctioned vehicle toward future success. Also, under this construct, the “one best system,” although often racially exclusive, provides some form of structured opportunity to urban immigrant youth through its rights of open access. Through the 1950s, urban schools helped the assimilation of ethnic immigrants and provided means for individual and group social mobility ( Noguera, 2003 ; Tyack, 1974 ). By the 1960s and 1970s, new, racially diverse populations arrived in cities to find depleted socioeconomic conditions. Yet, faith that schools could help youth overcome the effects of poverty remained. The effective schools movement, for instance, rejected the notion that a child’s socioeconomic background determined their poor academic performance. School leader and academic Ronald Edmonds, a major figure in the movement, stated that “repudiation of the social science notion that family background is the principal cause of pupil acquisition of basic school skills is probably the prerequisite to successful reform of public schooling for the children of the poor” ( Edmonds, 1979 , p. 23). He stated further that believing that family background determined academic outcomes “has the effect of absolving educators of their professional responsibility to be instructionally effective” (p. 21). By the 2000s, advocates offered strong testimony to those high-performing schools “that demonstrate that schools can educate all children—even children burdened by poverty and discrimination” ( Chenoweth, 2009 , p. 1). The record is clear that urban schools can and do make a difference for urban youth of color and immigrant youth.

Others have contended, however, that drastic socioeconomic conditions in an urban community limit the potential for significant educational improvement in schools. For instance, as did many American cities, Newark, New Jersey, rose as a major industrial center before World War II and thereafter experienced a steep decline in economic fortunes through the 1990s. The school system itself traversed an analogous, connected pattern of rise and decline, suggesting that only an alleviation of deleterious economic factors could lead to alleviation of school ills ( Anyon, 1997 ). By 1995 , the state of New Jersey took control of Newark’s school district due to its pervasive corruption and sustained student academic performance issues ( Russakoff, 2015 ).

The close connection between a city’s financial interests and its educational interests has caused a call for systemic reform in the form of coordinated efforts to align a city’s economic initiatives and social service activities (including schools) through political means ( Stone et al., 2001 ). Others, however, have discussed how urban school improvement initiatives coincide with economic development efforts and housing policies that do not operate in the best interests of current residents. In neighborhoods in Chicago, for instance, reforms like public school closings and replacement by charter schools have encouraged gentrification of neighborhoods by middle-class White parents. Their arrival displaced working-class Black and Latino families and increased an area’s housing values ( Lipman, 2011 ; Lipman & Haines, 2007 ). Researchers who identified several characteristics associated with effective urban schools underscored that the social capital latent in children’s home community networks is an important element in determining the viability of a school to overcome the effects of poverty ( Bryk et al., 2010 ). In these ways, educational conditions in an urban community are inextricably linked to the community’s socioeconomic conditions.

Importantly, educators have navigated the tension between urban school improvement and urban community socioeconomic conditions by establishing authentic connections with students and their parents. Under the “one best system” in New York City in 1935 , for example, principal Leonard Covello sought to nurture relationships with his Italian American, Puerto Rican, and Black students in ways intended to “bring the people of the neighborhood into the school and to extend the school into the community” ( Tyack, 1974 , p. 240). In 1960s Philadelphia, African American principal Marcus Foster enacted the idea of “total school community,” in which “not just the principal and his teachers, but also families, politicians, economic institutions, and taxpayers” would “be accountable for student achievement” ( Spencer, 2009 , p. 292). Accordingly, he led 6,000 community members to agitate for improved facilities or providing clothing for students in need.

In the late 2000s, Geoffrey Canada gained national attention when he established a multiservice charter school in Harlem that provided extended community-based services for local community members, from infants through parents ( Tough, 2009 ). In Chicago, a White female facilitator organized parents in a predominantly Black school in Chicago through the Comer School Development Program. She overcame initial skepticism to earn abiding trust ( Payne, 2008 ). Illustrative of how the goal of school–community connections remains resonant, scholarship has provided guidance regarding how educators can engage parents and engender community-based accountability ( Khalifa et al., 2015 ; Vasquez Heilig et al., 2014 ; Warren & Mapp, 2011 ).

We can also define the notion of community by the people within it and their experiences. For urban schools, this has also meant an entangled and complicated relationship with aspects of gentrification ( Freidus, 2019 ) and social unrest ( Bell & Sealey-Ruiz, 2023 ). For example, the deaths of individuals like Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and George Floyd were harsh reminders of the volatility in American society. Their deaths deepened questions related to the value of Black lives, but they also sparked protests and proposals for policy changes. Schools have often operated within larger policy contexts that myopically focus on “fixing” students and their communities rather than removing structural obstacles like “the employment opportunity gap . . . [and] the affordable housing gap” ( Irvine, 2010 , p. xii). Some urban districts have thus responded with what they see as humane educational policies that focus on human development and “human dignity, equity, growth and solidarity over any alternative set of values—religious, ideological, economic or national” ( Aloni, 2011 , pp. 35–36). For example, cities like Chicago, Oakland, San Francisco, New York City, Portland, and Albuquerque, New Mexico, have established community schools that provide wraparound services like health clinics, afterschool programs, legal services, and social supports for students and families ( Maier et al., 2017 ). These kinds of practices push back against neoliberal ideologies that strategically frame economic problems as essentially education problems—or, in other words, the result of poor-quality schools ( Baltodano, 2012 ; Slater, 2015 ). Rather, they attempt to invest more resources to redress systemic inequality and social oppression.

A lasting tension, then, exists between the ideas that improving urban schools can enhance urban students’ educational and life opportunities. It is notable that educational conditions in an urban community are inextricably linked to the community’s socioeconomic conditions. But, there are emerging examples of how some educators try to address the systemic issues affecting communities on a daily basis through authentic community engagement and the provision of tangible and necessary material resources.

Top-Down and Grassroots Efforts

Another tension in urban school reform resonates in locating the proper fulcrum of change: Can a school district be transformed from new leaders at the top, or must change occur from community constituents agitating from inside and outside local schools? In summary, urban school reform orients both as top-down and as grassroots efforts. Toward the former, as districts consolidated into the “one best system” at the turn of the 20th century , administrative progressives (i.e., groups of elite professionals and businesspeople) attempted to consolidate power to ensure control over educational progress in cities ( Tyack, 1974 ). The notion of generating improvement through tight control at the top reemerged in the 1990s and into the 2000s. Educational leadership and reform experts Larry Cuban and Michael Usdan (2003) explained,

Business, political, and educational leaders . . . defined the problem as quarrelsome school boards; inept management that couldn’t clean buildings, deliver supplies, or help teachers do their jobs; and little accountability for producing satisfactory academic outcomes among administrators and teachers. . . . In city after city, these business and civic leaders urged district officials to restructure their control of schools and apply sound business principles in order to improve students’ academic performance. (p. 147)

This dynamic has led some cities to hire superintendents without backgrounds as professional educators who engaged in combat with what they framed as entrenched educational interests. In the late 1990s, for instance, U.S. attorney Alan Bersin was hired as superintendent of schools in San Diego, California. He pursued an aggressive, top-down improvement agenda that led to what reform scholar Frederick Hess (2005) called an “often stormy tenure” (p. 1). In New York City, former U.S. assistant attorney general Joel Klein, at the outset of his tenure as chancellor of schools in the early 2000s, employed a closed-ranks, business-minded approach in an effort to tame, subvert, and evade the city’s notorious school bureaucracy ( Peck, 2014 ; Ravitch, 2010 ). Echoing this perspective, some superintendents with a professional background in education approached their positions much as those superintendents without professional backgrounds in education did. In Washington, D.C., for instance, Michelle Rhee gained national notoriety for her willingness to hold accountable (i.e., dismiss) principals and teachers whose students performed poorly on standardized tests ( Whitmire, 2011 ). In these ways, urban school reform has proceeded in a top-down fashion.

At the same time, significant energies and efforts have been exerted toward grassroots reforms. Even as business and professional elites attempted to consolidate power in the “one best system” in the early 20th century , community representatives, ethnic power brokers, and others fought to maintain degrees of local control and input in each city’s educational affairs and governance ( Tyack, 1974 ). In the 1960s and 1970s, decentralization emerged as a notable effort to deconsolidate central districts and distribute more school-governing power to local communities ( Edwards & DeMatthews, 2014 ). Later, in the 1980s and 1990s, site-based management emerged as an educational leadership concept and coupled with a quest to provide parents with more direct input in the operation of their children’s schools. The most notable example of this fundamental devolution of power were Chicago’s local site councils, which gave an elected body of parents the authority to hire and dismiss principals and determine how to use discretionary funds. Importantly, as the Chicago Public Schools experienced top-down reforms under potent superintendents in the late 1990s and 2000s, local site councils of schools that performed poorly lost much of their authority or their management was outsourced entirely ( Edwards & DeMatthews, 2014 ). In the end, urban school reform orients as both top-down and grassroots efforts.

Social Justice and Financial Returns

A fourth enduring tension manifests itself in the ideas that urban school reforms promise social justice for marginalized youth, but they often fall short of their goals. In a sense, the quest to improve urban schools is, at its essence, a moral one. In calling for reform action and school improvement, individuals have highlighted the socioeconomic and racial injustices in the urban educational status quo. In 1967 , for instance, Jonathan Kozol described his exposé Death at an Early Age as providing insight into “the destruction of the hearts and minds of Negro children in the Boston public schools” ( Kozol, 1967 , p. iii). A decade later, Ronald Edmonds (1979) asserted, “Inequity in American education derives first and foremost from our failure to educate the children of the poor” (p. 15). Two decades later, Noguera (2008) explained,

There is no reason why we shouldn’t be able to educate all children, even those who are poor, who are homeless, who don’t speak English, who are emotionally and physically distressed, who come to us from single-parent households or from homes where no parent is present. We should be able to serve these children because we are a great nation, a nation with extraordinary talents, skills, and resources. (p. vii)

Urban school leaders have recognized that in order to center social justice or “equitable participation of people from all social identity groups in a society that is mutually shaped to meet their needs” ( Bell, 2016 , p.1), they must also ensure that the educators who work in the schools have the will and capacity to see it through. In New York City, former school chancellor Richard Carranza mapped out an agenda for “Equity and Excellence” ( NYC DOE, 2018 ), which, among many things, included widespread equity-centered professional development for all school-based staff. In Hartford, Connecticut, the district developed a “vision for equity and anti-racism,” which sought to “actively and mindfully oppose and dismantle cultural messages, institutional policies, practices and all systems of advantage based on race” ( West Hartford Public Schools, 2021 ). The district’s educational equity policy specifically includes recruitment and retention of educators who reflect the diversity of their schools and professional development as a mechanism to achieve their goals. In Portland, Oregon, the district’s Race, Equity, and Social Justice Department developed a framework and plan to “support all employees as they develop their competencies in Racial Equity and Social Justice” ( Portland Public Schools, 2023 ). As these examples and statement suggest, an underlying desire for basic social justice for children of color has consistently fueled the quest for urban school reform and improvement.

At the same time that social justice has remained a fundamental animating goal in urban school reform, initiatives to improve urban education have also generated substantial moneymaking opportunities. As urban districts consolidated in the late 1800s, for instance, “textbook scandals rocked the country as huge firms collided in conflict over the vast school market” ( Tyack, 1974 , p. 95). Suggesting the close connection between education funding and corporate interests, a lobbyist from the audiovisual manufacturers’ lobby was able to negotiate funding for audiovisual equipment into the first three titles in the approved ESEA legislation in the 1960s ( Davies, 2007 ). In the 2010s, as a state-appointed superintendent attempted to reform the Newark public schools with the help of $200 million in philanthropic funds, $21 million of that went to pay educational consultants who worked for the district ( Russakoff, 2015 ). A Newark school leader described the situation as the “school failure industry,” while a community leader stated, “Everyone’s getting paid, and Raheem still can’t read” ( Russakoff, 2015 , pp. 71–72). Given the close connection between urban school reform and moneymaking opportunities, Delpit (2012) explained, “I am left in my more cynical moments with the thought that poor black children have become the vehicle by which rich white people give money to their friends” (p. xv).

Tension continues, then, as urban school reforms promise and make good-faith efforts to center social justice but also deliver financial returns to educational vendors.

Small-Scale and Large-Scale Reforms

A final tension resonates in the idea that small-scale reforms have demonstrated success, but policymakers and external funders still prize large-scale reforms. Under a corresponding dynamic, what works to improve one school or a few schools in one location becomes promoted as an exportable, expandable solution that, in reformers’ minds, can help improve many schools. In recent decades, foundations have helped drive this quest for scalability as they seek returns on their significant investments. In Chicago, for instance, when funders asked Dr. James Comer to begin his school development program in 16 schools, he suggested that 2 schools would be more appropriate. As Payne (2008) noted, “The compromise reached was that the program started with four schools the first year and added four more the second year, and even that proved to be too many” (p. 174). Such pressure to act big with reforms has persisted, as is apparent in efforts at systemic reforms that have sought broad solutions to city problems that run across different socioeconomic and political domains ( Stone et al., 2001 ). As Payne (2008) explained, however, “the magic word systemic . . . seems to mean ‘Let’s pretend to do on a grand scale what we have no idea to do on a small scale’” (p. 169).

The progress of turnaround, a school reform approach that gained national prominence in urban education in the late 2000s, provides insight into the tension between small- and large-scale reform. Originating in the business sector, turnaround referred to rapid school improvement achieved through dramatic interventions such as staff reconstitution ( Duke, 2012 ). After NCLB was signed into law in 2002 , the search for and promotion of schools that demonstrated quick academic growth intensified. Major policy action soon followed. In 2009 , the U.S. Department of Education added $3 billion of stimulus funding to over $500 million in existing appropriations in the Title I School Improvement Grant (SIG) program and formally announced plans to use the funds to encourage the turnaround of 5,000 of the persistently lowest-performing schools throughout the United States ( Duke, 2012 ).

Although turnaround—as reform idea and enacted policy—appeared to provide a clear, generic, and scalable prescription for the improvement of failing schools, it proved problematic upon implementation in urban areas. It had a poor success rate as an improvement strategy in the business sector ( Murphy & Meyers, 2008 ), leading to open questions as to why it would succeed as a strategy in the education sector. Also, a central element of many turnaround efforts, staff reconstitution, had proven ineffective when implemented as an improvement strategy in the 1990s in cities such as Chicago and San Francisco ( Trujillo, 2012 ). At the same time, empirical studies demonstrated minimal evidence that turnaround strategies have led to demonstrable school improvement ( Aladjem et al., 2010 ; Stuit, 2010 ). In these ways, the prospect of turning around an urban school or a few urban schools remained plausible, but turning around thousands of urban schools seemed unlikely at best.

In the end, the temptation to do grandly what was successful locally has endured in urban educational reform. Unfortunately, as Payne (2008) stated, “When even good ideas are understood out of context, when they are reduced to The Solution, they become part of the problem” (pp. 5–6). Scholars have demonstrated that making incremental changes to schools is possible, but the fundamental changes often promoted in reform rhetoric rarely materialize. Hence, the idea that U.S. schools—urban or otherwise—are perpetually “tinkering toward utopia” holds sway ( Tyack & Cuban, 1995 ). A final tension, then, resonates in the idea that small-scale reforms have demonstrated success, but policymakers and external funders prize large-scale reforms.

Urban schools and reform have historically proceeded together, and this dynamic has deepened since the 1960s. Despite so much reform, however, some believe there is still too much “failure.” As Payne (2008) explained, “There is a mammoth disconnect between what we know about the complex, self-reinforcing character of failure in bottom-tier schools and the ultimately simplistic thinking behind many of the most popular reform proposals” (p. 46). Moreover, there appears an assertive, pervasive unwillingness from American society to engage fully with the fact that sociocultural factors such as race, ethnicity, and poverty can and do matter greatly in urban schools. You cannot simply “fix” city schools in order to “fix” city communities and people.

Still, we must perpetually question why the notion of failure has been so easily attached to urban schools. The idea that urban schools are too complex, too political, too Black, or too Brown frames urban schools as incapable of educating a large portion of students in the United States. These flawed perspectives typically only account for quantitative measures like high-stakes test performance and are often situated alongside neoliberal notions of the relationship between schools and the workforce ( Lakes, 2008 ). However, if we assume that these measures accurately reflect our collective definitions of “success,” then we would still be able to find countless examples of urban schools that effectively facilitate learning, like duPont Manual High School in Louisville, Kentucky, where students create tech devices to detect cancer cells ( Schanie, 2023 ); Masterman High Schools in Philadelphia, which was twice named a National Blue Ribbon School of Excellence ( Calhoun, 2022 ); or the Bronx High School of Science in New York City, which has graduated eight Nobel Prize winners ( Bronx High School of Science, 2023 ). As Welsh and Swain (2020) state, “Urban is success as well as failure” (p. 95).

The challenge for urban schools, as it is with schools across the United States, is to figure out how to learn from and manage successes and failures. As noted, there are exemplary city schools and programs that have helped students thrive academically. For many reformers, such success stories demonstrate that viable routes toward enabling academic achievement for more children living in urban areas do exist. Indeed, latent in each of the tensions explored in this article is the belief that circumstances can improve precipitously for all students, especially if districts can address the sociocultural and economic forces that may challenge or complicate improvement. In 1973 , Kenneth B. Clark responded ferociously to a study contending that poverty essentially negated schooling’s transformative potential. He wrote, “If education itself is of no value then there can be no significance in the struggle to use the schools as instruments for justice and mobility . . . the last possibility of hope for undereducated and oppressed minorities has been dashed” ( Clark, 1973 , p. 117). Ronald Edmonds, the leader of the effective schools movement, emphasized three points:

(a) We can, whenever and wherever we choose, successfully teach all children whose schooling is of interest to us; (b) We already know more than we need to do that; and (c) Whether or not we do it must finally depend on how we feel about the fact that we haven’t so far. ( Edmonds, 1979 , p. 23)

In such a context, a successful school, program, or student is not merely a “small victory” but rather a symbolic triumph that demonstrates the idea that better achievement is indeed possible.

In the end, urban school reform follows a cycle of start, try, fail, and try again, simply because it must be sustained. And one day, the belief continues, school reform will succeed at a significant scale . . . that has been and remains the hope in urban education, a hope as deeply aspirational and uncompromisingly complicated as American hope can be.

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VUE is an open-access journal published twice annually that endeavors to serve as a “roundtable-in-print” by bringing together diverse education stakeholders with a wide range of viewpoints, including leading education writers and thinkers and essential but frequently underrepresented voices in educational scholarship, such as students, parents, teachers, activists, and community members.

Each issue of VUE is organized around a theme and strives to provide cutting-edge analysis of a vital issue in urban public education—formats include visual arts, articles, interviews, video and written documentaries, poetry, and autoethnographies.

Our newly structured editorial board currently runs VUE. It consists of our lead editorial team, composed of faculty members in the roles of the editor-in-chief and the deputy editor. The Editorial Board also includes doctoral fellows who step into Senior Fellows, Junior Fellows, and Content Editor Fellows positions. These doctoral students join the board from various higher education institutions and bring a breadth of expertise to the board. 

DOI: https://doi.org/10.35240/vue.issue.5

Introduction

Introduction to Special Issue: Centering Community Healing, Sustenance, and Resilience in STEM and Computing Education Through Art and Social Justice

Kayla DesPortes, Clarisa James and Dejarelle Gaines

2024-07-31 Volume 52 • Issue 2 • 2024 • Centering Community Healing, Sustenance, and Resilience in STEM and Computing Education Through Art and Social Justice

Commentaries in Urban Education

Art, AI and Robotics: A New Pathway for Youth to Voice and Identity

Nettrice R. Gaskins

Cultivating Joy and Empowerment through Arts-Integrated STEM Education

Yamilee Toussaint and Jennifer Loving

DIVAS for Social Justice: Building Resilience in Youth Through STEAM

Clarisa James

STEAM for Social Change: The Anti-Gun Violence Asset Mapping Project

CWP 2.0 - A Transdisciplinary Program Expanding Access to Arts and Technology for High School Students

Elizabeth Argelia Leonard

Conversations in Urban Education

The Intentional Layering of Love, Imagination, and Expression as a Pathway to Freedom: A Conversation with Drs. Detra Price and Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz

Cami Touloukian, Detra Price and Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz

Research Perspectives in Urban Education

How Integrating Quilt-Making with Computation Supported Black Teens in Reimagining Liberatory Futures with Emerging Technologies

Mass Appeal: Designing Open Learning STEM Environments to Promote Participation for Black Boys

Kareem Edouard

An Artist/Researcher Model for Participatory Action Research in Transdisciplinary Learning Contexts

Lora Cawelti, Jessica Mueller, Maggie Dahn, Teju Adesida, Noé Cuéllar and Kylie Peppler

Expressions in Urban Education

Make Me Black Music Video: A Project of DIVAS for Social Justice

Roots: Poetry, Performance, and Photography

Divinity Nix-Sow

STEM From Dance in Action

Yamilee Toussaint

Posted by Pharoah Cranston on 2023-11-19

NYU Metro Center is overjoyed to present the latest issue of Voices in Urban Education (VUE). Each issue of VUE endeavors to serve as a roundtable-in-print by bringing together diverse education stakeholders with a wide range of viewpoints, including leading education writers and thinkers, as well as essential but frequently underrepresented voices in educational scholarship, such as students, [...]

Posted by Pharoah Cranston on 2023-07-24

Newly minted laws force families with trans children to seek gender reaffirming care in states other than where they reside. Twenty different states across the country “... have enacted laws restricting or banning gender-affirming care for trans minors …”(Alfonseca, 2023). This contemporary moment finds that queer and trans youth, “... and what they do with their own bodies and lives, are [...]

Posted by Paloma Garcia on 2023-04-19

Voices in Urban Education, VUE, is NYU Metro Center’s open-access journal. Each issue of VUE is organized around a theme and strives to provide cutting-edge analysis of a vital issue in urban public education. This “roundtable-in-print” endeavors to bring together diverse education stakeholders with a wide range of viewpoints, including leading education writers and thinkers, as well as essential [...]

Urban Education: The State of Urban Schooling at the Start of the 21st Century

Monday, November 1, 2004 Martin Haberman Distinguished Professor University of Wisconsin Milwaukee

These objective size/density definitions however do not convey the range of meanings intended or received when the term is most commonly used. Perceptions of urban areas differ widely. Rooted in the early history of this country and illustrated in the writings of Alexander Hamilton is a vision of urban as fostering freedoms. This perception defines cities as places of refuge and opportunity and is a vision widely accepted in most other countries. (Meyer, 1957) Also rooted in America’s history and illustrated in the writings of Thomas Jefferson is the opposing perception of urban as dysfunctional and the cause of many societal problems. (Malone, 1948) In American parlance “God’s country” is used to refer to rural areas or nature preserves not cities.

During the first half of the 20th century urban areas were viewed by many as economically dynamic, attracting and employing migrant populations from small towns, rural areas and abroad. During the second half of the 20th century however the term urban became a pejorative code word for the problems caused by the large numbers of poor and minorities who live in cities. Such negative perceptions of urban profoundly affect education and shape the nature of urban schooling.

URBAN EDUCATION: STUDENTS AND STRUCTURE

Unlike most other countries where education is a federal or national function schooling in America is a decentralized one. States are the legally responsible entities but local districts are generally perceived as the accountable units of administration. There were approximately 53 million American children entering public and private schools in the fall of the year 2000. Thirty five percent are members of minority groups. One in five comes from immigrant households. Nearly one-fifth live in poverty. (Education Week, Sept.27, 2000) Eleven states account for more than half of the children in poverty: California, Texas, New York, Florida, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, Michigan, North Carolina and Georgia. All these students are overseen by more than 15,000 local districts with almost 90,000 schools. (Cuban, 2001) The 120 largest school districts, generally defined as the urban ones, serve 11 million students most of whom are of color or in poverty. (Education Commission of the States, 1997).

Since 1962 the achievement gap between disadvantaged populations and more affluent ones has widened. At one extreme urban school districts graduate half or fewer of their students. (Arbanas, 2001) At the other extreme 11% of American students are now among the top 10 percent of world achievers. “If you’re in the top economic quarter of the population, your children have a 76% chance of getting through college and graduating by age 24…If you’re in the bottom quarter, however, the figure is 4 %.” (Loeb, 1999) White students’ achievement in reading, math and science ranks 2nd, 7th and 4th when compared with students worldwide. Black and Hispanic students however rank 26, 27th and 27th on these basic skills. (Bracey, 2002) Such data describe but do not explain the causes of such wide disparities among educational outcomes. The following section describes some of the challenges which, taken together, help to explain the failure of urban school districts. A final section describes many of the characteristics of successful urban schools.

URBAN EDUCATION: SPECIAL CHALLENGES

1.Highly Politicized School Boards. Board politics in major urban school districts often impede judicious decision-making (Ortiz, 1991) Two practices are particularly dysfunctional. First, in an effort to better represent diverse constituencies, citywide board seats have given way to narrowly drawn district seats. Board members elected from such districts may find it difficult to support policies and budgets aimed at the good of the total district when doing so is viewed negatively by parents, citizens and educators in their own neighborhood schools. Second, board members too frequently try to micromanage large, complicated school organizations thereby abrogating the leadership and accountability of their own superintendent. Finally, it is not unusual for narrow majorities on boards to change after a board election and for a superintendent to find his/her initiatives no longer supported and even have his/her contract bought out.

2.Superintendent Turnover. The average years of service for an urban superintendent are 2 and 1/3yrs. (Urban Indicator, 2000). As a result a new superintendent may function more as a temporary employee of a school board than as the educational leader of the district and the community. Administrators and teachers are reluctant to throw themselves into new initiatives that are not likely to remain in place long enough to show any results. Constituencies (governments, businesses, church groups, foundations, universities, etc.) with whom the superintendent must interact may take a wait and see attitude rather than become active partners in the new superintendent’s initiatives.

3.Principals as Managers and Leaders. The size and complexity of most urban schools inevitably lead to a focus on the principal as the manager or CEO of a major business enterprise. This emphasis has led to a transformation of the traditional principal role as an instructional leader. (Haberman, 2001) Few urban districts dismiss principals because of low student achievement unless the achievement falls low enough for the school to be taken over by the state or district and be reconstituted. In practice the typical urban principal who is transferred or coaxed into retirement is one that has “lost control of the building.” The district’s stated system of accountability may place student learning as the highest priority but the real basis for defining urban principals as “failing” is not because they have been unable to demonstrate increasing student achievement but because they have been unable to maintain a custodial institution. The fact that most urban principals spend the preponderance of their time and energy on management issues demonstrates that they fully understand this reality. (Kimball & Sirotnik, 2000)

4.Government Oversight. Local and state government officials involve themselves more and more in educational policies that impact urban districts. This politicization of education produces an endless stream of regulations and funding mechanisms, which encourage or penalize the efforts of local urban districts. Like an overmedicated patient the treatments frequently counteract one another or have unintended negative consequences.

5.Central Office Bureaucracies. In rural, small town and suburban districts, classroom teachers comprise 80% or more of the school district’s employees. In the 120 largest urban districts the number of employees other than teachers is approaching a ratio of almost 2:1; that is, for every classroom teacher there are almost two others employed in the district ostensibly to perform services which would help these teachers. (Knott & Miller, 1987) The effect of this distortion is frequently a proliferation of procedures, regulations, interruptions and paperwork that impedes rather than facilitates student learning. Many teachers leaving urban districts cite paperwork and bureaucratic over regulation as among the most debilitating conditions they face.

The self-serving nature of the district bureaucracy frequently impedes initiatives, which would decentralize decision making and transfer power to individual school staffs. (McClafferty, 2000) Historically centralized systems are reluctant to change. Prodded by parents, community and business leaders, urban districts are gradually allowing more decentralized decision making at the school level. In response to bureaucratic rigidities choices are proliferating within public systems. Examples include open enrollment plans, magnet and specialty schools, schools-within-schools, alternative schools, and public choice and charter schools. Urban parents also have increased options outside the public systems through private school voucher programs but these efforts account for less than one percent of enrollment in urban districts. (Hill, 1999)

6.School Staff Accountability. As public school options increase so do calls for accountability. The most frequently tried accountability efforts in the last century have been attempts at merit pay for teachers based on student achievement test scores. Many of these trials have been funded by private foundations and several have been supported initially by local teachers unions. Thus far, however, there have been no successful models for holding either principals or teachers accountable based on achievement scores. (Ross, 1994) In some cases superintendents have clauses in their contracts stating that their tenure or salaries are dependent on improvements in student achievement. In some districts school principals’ annual evaluations and contract extensions are now tied to improving student achievement. Currently, many states have adopted systems for declaring particular schools (or districts) as failing if a given number of the school’s students are below a minimum level of achievement. In these cases the state may mandate that a failing school be reconstituted and may grant the local district the authority to re-staff the school with a new principal and teaching staff. (Crosby, 1999) The staff of a failing school is typically permitted to transfer to other schools in the district. This means that while an urban school district is being held accountable based on achievement data the individual staff members are not. Furthermore the concept of accountability is non-existent for curriculum specialists, hiring officials, or those who appoint principals, psychologists, safety aides or other school staff.

7.Teacher Shortages. The public clearly understand the importance of well-prepared teachers: 82% believe that the “recruitment and retention of better teachers is the most important measure for improving public schools, more effective than investing in computers or smaller class size.” (Education Commission of the States, 2000) In the next decade there may be as many as 1 million new teachers hired because of turnover, retirement and the fact that the typical teaching career has shortened to approximately 11 years. (Langdon & Vesper, 2000) If the school age population continues to increase, another million teachers may be needed. While all districts face occasional selected shortages of special education teachers, bilingual teachers, math or science teachers, the major impact of the current and continuing teacher shortage falls on the urban school districts. These are the teaching positions that many traditionally prepared teachers are unwilling to take. This problem is confounded by the fact that many urban districts must lay off teachers to make up for budget deficits in a given year while they are simultaneously recruiting teachers to remedy their chronic shortages. (Reid, 2002)

In the states that prepare a majority of the teachers in traditional university based programs more than half of those who graduate and are certified never take teaching positions. (Schug, 1997) “ One third of new teachers leave the profession within five years.” (Education Commission of the States, 2000) The typical teacher education graduate is a 22-year-old white female, monolingual with little work or life experience. She will teach within fifty miles of where she herself attended school. The profile of teachers who succeed and stay in urban school districts differs in important respects. (Sprinthall, 1996) While they are still predominantly women, they are over 30 years of age, attended urban schools themselves, completed a bachelor’s degree in college but not necessarily in education, worked at other full-time jobs and are parents themselves. This successful pool also contains a substantially higher number of individuals who are African American, Latino and male. Typically, the teacher educators who serve as faculty in traditional university-based teacher preparation programs have had little or no teaching experience in urban school districts while those mentoring teachers in alternative licensure programs typically come from long, successful careers as teachers in urban districts.

8.State Licensure Laws. While traditional teacher preparation programs seek to attract more young people into the teaching profession, past experience suggests that many of these graduates will not seek employment in large urban school districts where most of the new hires will be needed. (Schug 1997) To assist in meeting this urban district need, new kinds of recruiting and training programs are being established to attract older, more experienced and more diverse candidates into the teaching profession. States differ widely in their response to these new programs. “Conventional wisdom holds that the key to attracting better teachers is to regulate entry into the classroom ever more tightly…” while others argue that “the surest route to quality is to widen the entryway, deregulate the processes, and hold people accountable for their results…” (Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, 1999) Forty-three states have passed alternative licensure laws which permit the hiring of college graduates who were not trained in traditional programs of teacher preparation. But licensure requirements vary greatly across the states and implementation of new approaches is often controversial even though an increasing number of urban districts now “grow their own” teachers using alternative training programs. (Feistritzer, 1993)

9.Funding for Districts and Classrooms. Students in urban school districts often have substantially less annual per student support than they need. The level of support in urban districts, however, generally exceeds the per pupil expenditures in small towns and rural areas. Many argue, therefore, that in total there is no shortage of funds for urban schools especially when categorical aids and grants are considered. The overall problem of inadequate funding is often exacerbated after the urban school district receives its funds and distributes the monies from the central office levels to the individual schools. Too often too many funds are expended to maintain central office functions leaving too little to cover the direct costs of instruction and equipment in specific school buildings. In addition, many urban districts are characterized by buildings that are outmoded, even unsafe, creating conditions which make learning problematic. New York City, for example, has over 150 buildings still heated by coal.

10.Projectitis. New school board members and superintendents often believe they must set their personal stamps on the district through new initiatives. It is common for urban districts to claim they are aware of and experimenting with the latest curricula in reading, math, science, etc. (Schuttloffel, 2000). In addition, administrators are pressured to try out new programs against drugs, violence, gangs, smoking, sex, etc. This proliferation of programs and projects results in so many new initiatives being tried simultaneously it is not possible to know which initiative caused what results. Furthermore, not enough time is devoted to the program to give it sufficient time to demonstrate intended results. The problem is compounded by the fact that many of these new initiatives are not systematically or carefully evaluated. Veteran teachers, when confronted with the latest initiative from the school board or administration, typically become passive resistors. “This too shall pass.” The constant claims of experts, school boards and superintendents that their latest initiative will transform their schools is frequently stonewalled by the very people who must be the heart of the effort for it to succeed. (Van Dunk, 1999)

11.Narrowing Curriculum and Lowering Expectations. As presented in state and local district philosophy and mission statements the list of what the American people generally expect from their public schools is impressive. A typical list is likely to include the following goals for students: basic skills; motivated life long learners; positive self concept; humane, democratic values; active citizens; success in higher education and in the world of work; effective functioning in a culturally diverse society and a global economy; technological competence; development of individual talents; maintenance of physical and emotional health; appreciation and participation in the arts. In many suburban and small town schools the parents, community and professional school educators maintain a broad general vision about the goals that 13 years of full time schooling is supposed to accomplish. But in the urban districts serving culturally diverse students in poverty these broad missions are frequently narrowed down to “getting a job and staying out of jail.” (Russell, 1986)

Narrowing down the curriculum is particularly evident among the burgeoning populations of students labeled as special or exceptional. The urban districts have disproportionately large and wildly accelerating numbers of students labeled with some form of disability. In urban districts the numbers of special students currently range from 6% to 20% of the student body. This means that exceptional education may account for between 20 and 35% of a total urban district’s budget. Well intentioned but sometimes misapplied state and federal initiatives for special education students encourage the labeling of increasing numbers of students as learning disabled, cognitively disabled or having attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. (Breggin & Breggin, 1994) It is not uncommon for many urban teachers who do not have in depth knowledge of child development to perceive undesirable behavior as abnormal rather than as a temporary stage or as student responses to poor teaching. Thus it is common in urban middle schools to find many students doing well academically who have been labeled as disabled in primary grades and who will carry these labels throughout the remainder of their school careers. Teacher expectations are likely to be very modest for such children; testing may be waived. Some low-income parents may be enticed to agree to have their children labeled exceptional because of financial grants. Recent efforts at inclusion for exceptional students in regular classrooms are aimed at breaking the cycle of low expectations and isolation. In urban districts, however, inclusion mandates are most frequently followed in the primary grades but seldom at the high school level. (Cohen, 2001) The disproportionate number of children of color, particularly males, labeled exceptional further exacerbates this problem.

12.Achievement and Testing. There are four curricula operating in schools. The first is the broadest. It is the written mission of the school district. The second curriculum is what the teachers actually teach. The third operative curriculum is what the students actually learn which is considerably less than what the district claims or what the teachers teach. The fourth curriculum is what is tested for and this is the narrowest of the four. The tested for curriculum frequently supports the narrowing and lowering of expectations. (D’Amico, 1985) As total school and district programs are evaluated by norm referenced tests the accountability of teachers and principals is also narrowed and lowered to the kinds of learning that can be readily tested. Recognition of this problem has led to a new emphasis on standards-led testing or performance assessment closely linked to curriculum in place of the norm reference testing that compares student’s performance to that of others. Done carefully, such assessment measures the performance of successive cohorts of students against an annual rate of improvement (local or state) that is sufficient to achieve whatever curriculum goals have been set. (Education Commission of the States , 1997) For the most part, aligning the goals, curriculum, instruction and testing is yet to be accomplished.

After decades of ignoring low student scores in urban schools or explaining them away as predictable because of family income, national attention has shifted to the numerous and widespread examples of individual urban schools in which students’ scores are being raised and increasing numbers of low income children are reaching grade level achievement. Educators at all levels are being called upon to focus time, thought and resources on the poorest performing schools and the persistent cultural and racial gaps between high and low performing students.

13.Research on Urban School Practices. The research literature in teaching, learning and best practice is robust. We know how children learn, best practices for teachers and what makes specific urban schools successful. (Ascher & Flaxman, 1985) The problem is that schools, even failing schools in urban districts which we would expect would be more amenable to change, are resistant institutions shaped by history, culture and their economic support systems. Schools reflect not only general American norms and values but also their local cultures. In recent years the plethora of federal and state laws and local administrative mandates is testimony to the fact that education is also a flourishing political activity. It seems clear that schools reflect culture more than research, or even logic and theory. (Hunt Jr., 1996) Schools reflect and maintain a multiplicity of social norms contradicted by research based knowledge regarding best practice. It is ironic that those seeking to transform failed urban school districts are frequently expected to prove beforehand that their advocacies are research based while those who stonewall change rely on a rationale of laws, funding mechanisms, school organization and practices which reflect culture and tradition, unsupported by a research knowledge base.

One example lies in what has been described as the pedagogy of poverty (Haberman, 1991). Teaching in many urban schools consists of ritualized teacher acts, which seldom engage students in meaningful learning that is connected to their lives. Such teaching includes giving directions and information; making assignments; monitoring seatwork; testing and grading; settling disputes and punishing noncompliance. While such activities are part of teaching, the research literature is clear that more is needed if schools are to reach diverse groups of students with widely varied backgrounds, interests and experiences. (Smith, 1979) Allowing these limited teaching practices to become the typical ones in the urban districts serving diverse student populations of low income students not only dumbs down the content of the curriculum but also narrows the pedagogy by which it is offered. It is a process in which the student is treated in a disrespectful manner—as if she/he is incapable of appreciating or responding to the genuine teaching of important knowledge.

Taken together, these formidable urban challenges demand the best of educational practices if children are to succeed. While there are no fully successful urban districts every district has individual schools which are effective. Indeed there are examples of outstanding schools in some of the poorest performing urban districts. This anomaly of how individual schools can be successful in the midst of chaos and failure has been sufficiently documented to enable us to state with some certainty the characteristics that account for their effectiveness.

CHARACTERISTICS OF SUCCESSFUL URBAN PROGRAMS

The correlates of the effective school literature are as follows: a clearly stated mission; a safe climate for learning; high expectations for students, teachers and administrators; high student time on task; administrators who are instructional leaders; frequent monitoring of student progress; and positive home-school relations. (Taylor, 2002) These and other necessary conditions are demonstrated in urban schools in the following ways: First, such schools have outstanding principals who serve as leaders rather than building managers. These individuals are instructional leaders with a deep understanding of the teaching and learning process. They also know, appreciate and respect the cultures of the ethnic/racial groups the school serves. (Mitchell, 2000)

Second, there is a critical mass of star teachers or teachers on their way to becoming stars. These are individuals who believe the students and their families are the clients. They believe that student effort rather than ability accounts for success in school and their teaching reflects their ability to generate student effort. These teachers not only know the content of what they teach as well as best practice, but also have effective relationship skills that connect them with students. The ideology and behaviors of star teachers has been well documented. (Haberman, 1995) While there are numerous exceptions star urban teachers tend to be people who are more mature with more varied life experience than college youth. They are often people of color who have attended urban schools themselves. Many have experienced poverty first hand. It is also increasingly likely that they did not go through traditional teacher training.

Third, effective urban schools have a vision of the school’s mission commonly held by students, the entire staff, parents, caregivers and the community. There is a unity of purpose that grows out of everyone who is involved with the school believing, sharing and contributing to this common vision.

Fourth, there is a deep and growing knowledge of how computers and information systems can be used in classrooms and for all school activities. The students and staff are connected to the full resources of the Internet and to the latest instructional programs and not engaged in merely drill and kill activities using a computer.

Fifth, parents are involved in integral ways in the life of the school and not merely as homework tutors or disciplinarians. Parents have a strong voice in all aspects of the school’s decision-making processes. They are regarded as resources able to inform school policy and curriculum.

Sixth, the curriculum is aligned with achievement tests. There is also a closed loop so that the results of testing inform and guide curriculum revisions as well as what teachers teach everyday. Student evaluation includes more than norm referenced tests and places great emphasis on the systematic use of students’ work samples and work products. While achievement tests are important the teachers offer a broad curriculum and do not narrow or dumb it down to prepare for the tests. The acquisition of important knowledge for all students, including those with special needs, is maintained as the school priority.

Seventh, the curriculum is sensitive to issues of equity and social justice. What the teachers plan to teach on any given day can be set aside as students and teachers consider issues that arise in the school. “Problems” are not generally seen as intrusions on the curriculum but are dealt with as opportunities to make learning relevant. The students learn that school is not preparation for living later but rather learning to deal with issues and challenges now.

Eighth, there are frequent celebrations of student achievements. These take the form of student accomplishments in all areas which then culminate in exhibits, publications, performances and displays for other students, parents and the community. The climate and schedule of the building clearly manifest student learning and accomplishment.

Ninth, the faculty and staff are themselves a community of learners. Teachers and administrators design annual educational plans to develop further as people and as professionals. Such plans include team and cooperative activities to help teachers combat isolation. Professional development occurs during the workday as well as during non-school periods. It provides “opportunities to build meaningful partnerships with parents, businesses, educational and cultural institutions to create exciting new learning experiences.” (Renyi, 1996)

Tenth, the school provides a healthy, safe environment for learning. The staff is expert at deescalating rather than escalating student behavior problems. There are few suspensions and expulsions. Every effort is made to continue student learning during a suspension period. (Hyman & Snook, (2000)

Finally, successful urban schools frequently find ways to extend the time children spend with knowledgeable, caring adults through preschool, extended day, weekend and summer school programs, often working as partners with their communities.

At the beginning of the 21st century the greatest challenge to every major urban school system is to create and replicate these effective conditions, already practiced in specific school buildings, throughout the district as a whole.

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McClafferty, Karen A., Torres, Carlos A. & Mitchell, Theodore R., (eds.) (2000)

CHALLENGES OF URBAN EDUCATION: SOCIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES FOR THE NEXT CENTURY. State University of New York Press. Albany, NY

Meyer, Adolphe E. (1957) An Educational History of the American People.

McGraw-Hill, New York: p. 245

Mitchell, Lourdes Z. (2000) “A Place Where Every Teacher Teaches and Every Student Learns” EDUCATION AND URBAN SOCIETY v32n4: p.506-518

Olson, Lynn (2000) “2000 & Beyond: The Changing Face of American Schools”

Education Week. September 27, 2000: p. 31-41

Ortiz, Flora I. (1991) Superintendent Leadership in Urban Schools. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association. Chicago, IL, April 3-7, 1991

Reid, Karen S. (2002) “City Schools Feel the Pain of Fiscal Bites” Education Week. January 23, 2002: p. 410

Renyi, Judith (1996) Teachers Take Charge of Their Learning, The National Foundation for the Improvement of Education, Washington, D.C.: p. 18

Ross, Randy (1994) Effective Teacher Development Through Salary Incentives, Rand Corporation. Santa Monica, CA: p.17

Russell, Avery (ed) (1986) “The Urban School Principal: The Rocky Road to Instructional Leadership” CARNEGIE QUARTERLY v31n1. Carnegie Corporation. New York: p.49-68

Schug, Mark and Western, Richard D. (1997) “Deregulating Teacher Training”

Wisconsin Policy Research Institute. Madison 10(4): p. 1-3

Schuttloffel, Merylann J. (2000) “Social Reconstruction of School Failure”

EDUCATION POLICY ANALYSIS ARCHIVES v8n45: p. 157-171

Sprinthall, Norman A., Rieman, A.J. and Tries-Sprinthall, Lois (1996) “Teacher Professional Development” in J. Sikula (ed.) Handbook for Research on Teacher Education. Rand McNally, New York: Chapter 29 p. 666

Smith, Bunny Othanial in collaboration with Stuart H. Silverman, Jean M. Borg and Betty V. Fry (1979) A Briefing for a College of Pedagogy, University of South Florida. Tampa, FL

Taylor, Barbara O. (2002) “Effective Schools Process: Alive and Well” KAPPAN v83n5. January, 2000: p. 377

Thomas B. Fordham Foundation (1999) The Teachers We Need and How to Get More of Them: A Manifesto p. 1

Tuneberg, J. (1996) The State’s Role in Implementing Legislative Mandates: The Urban School Superintendent’s Perspective. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, New York, April 8-12, 1996

Van Dunk, Emily (1999) Encouraging Best Practices at MPS, The Public Policy Forum Milwaukee, WI: p.11

Haberman Educational Foundation https://habermanfoundation.org

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The Haberman Foundation and theoretical framework that encompasses the work of Dr. Martin Haberman continues to be one of the most influential frameworks I believe to identify the core beliefs of teachers and administrators alike. As a previous school teacher, human resource chief and current school superintendent, I continue to rely on the Haberman Foundation to help select individuals to fill some of the most important positions in the school district. Students deserve the best possible teachers and administrators.

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What is Urban Education?

Industry Advice Education

You may not spot any schools while walking through downtown districts of major cities, but that doesn’t mean that all schools are tucked away in the suburbs. In fact, 30 percent of public school students and 43 percent of private school students go to class in urban areas each day.    

“Kids all need the same skills and knowledge, but when we think more deeply about urban education, we’re diving in and thinking about what that context means for students,” says Sara Ewell, director of Northeastern’s Doctor of Education program and teaching professor in the Graduate School of Education. 

Though each urban school has its own unique context, there is often overlap. Here’s what you need to know about urban education and how to best prepare for working within this space. 

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The Urban Classroom 

As more families with the means to move out of cities take advantage of the opportunity to do so, the proportion of poor, non-white, and English language learning students has increased . 

“Urban public school systems are, because of the United States’ history of segregation and racism, overwhelmingly attended by students of color from families of low socioeconomic status,” says Shaunna Harrington, associate teaching professor and faculty lead for Northeastern’s Master of Arts in Teaching program . “Low-income kids often have additional needs in the classroom.” 

Those needs can include everything from support for children who have been exposed to violence to free or reduced meal programs for those who would otherwise go without breakfast and lunch. Chronic underfunding , however, has made it difficult for educators to meet these needs—and created a pervasive idea that urban schools are automatically “less than,” Ewell says. 

“It’s approached with a deficit view, as if there’s something wrong with those kids, families, and teachers,” she continues. “When we use the term ‘urban education,’ we are actually just looking at the unique aspects in each of these contexts and what can we do to best meet learners in those spaces based on their needs.” 

To best address those needs, educators need to focus on the factors that make urban education both rich and complex and how they can work in tandem with their communities to help students succeed. 

Considerations of Urban Education 

Familiarizing yourself with some of the unique aspects of urban education can help you better prepare for effective leadership within it. Some of the most important aspects to consider are the rich multiculturalism of urban schools, their often limited resources, and the likelihood that you’ll be working in an unfamiliar environment.  

Great Diversity 

In the 20 largest urban school districts in the U.S., an average 80 percent of students are non-white, according to the National Center for Education statistics, meaning urban classrooms are more likely to have a diverse mix of students. 

“A high percentage of our educators are white, and a large percentage of them are female,” Ewell says. “In an urban classroom, you’re often dealing with multiple languages, cultural norms, and racial biases, so to meet the needs of each learner it’s important to acknowledge the diversity and use culturally relevant strategies in the classroom.” 

Ewell notes that while respecting each student’s background and perspective is important no matter where schools are located, it can be particularly relevant in urban schools, where teachers and students often come from different backgrounds. 

Limited Resources  

During the COVID-19 pandemic, 43 percent of urban district leaders surveyed by Education Week said they could provide all students with online learning opportunities, and only 12 percent of urban teachers reported that families were picking up classwork in person—even though physical materials may be the only way children without reliable Internet connections can keep up with their studies. 

“We need to be really aware of the inequities in the ways in which public education is structured in the United States,” Harrington says. 

By keeping this front-of-mind, without slipping into the assumption that urban schools are worse than suburban or rural schools, teachers are better equipped to address the challenges of underfunding. 

Navigating New Spaces 

While many teachers who choose to work in urban schools have personal experience in similar environments, many find themselves adapting to a new one. 

“We need to be really aware of our own social position in terms of understanding our own relationship to different types of privilege,” Harrington says. 

This means taking the time to understand how your own experiences have shaped your perspective, and how the context of students’ lives —their families, neighborhoods, cultures, and communities as a whole—have impacted the way they approach education. Educators who understand and acknowledge any resulting differences may be better prepared to collaborate with the school community to effectively support students and meet their specific needs in the classroom. 

Making an Impact in Urban Schools 

Several strategies can help professionals make an impact on their students, and all continue the themes of collaboration , community , and attention that Ewell and Harrington emphasize in their own classrooms. 

Check Your Mindset 

Because urban schools are often characterized as struggling or deficient, educators must combat the idea that they are entering schools to save them. One way to accomplish this is to constantly seek out opportunities for collaboration and learning. 

“It’s a reciprocal relationship where you’re bringing in the content expertise, but your community is bringing in the contextual expertise,” Ewell says. “Learn as much as you can about your students and families, and ask them what they need.” 

Similarly, Harrington recommends paying attention to any unconscious biases you may find in yourself and how your own experiences have created your mindset. 

“Shift into an assets-based perspective, and recognize the different assets that families and communities can bring,” she says. 

Use Culturally Responsive Teaching 

Ensuring that your teaching materials and curriculum reflect the varied backgrounds of students is another way to increase the likelihood of success in urban schools. According to multiple studies , representation really does matter—and a consistent lack of it could signal to students that they aren’t important.  

Consider implementing culturally responsive teaching strategies , like reading stories about characters with similar backgrounds to your students and encouraging students to leverage their own experiences when it comes to making sense of information. 

Culturally responsive teaching may also mean working with English language learners who don’t have the same grasp on the language as their peers. 

“We have larger numbers of English language learners in our urban districts, though in Massachusetts that’s increasingly true across the state,” Harrington says. “Teachers should have the skills to appropriately adapt curriculum resources and instructional strategies to meet the needs of those students.” 

The Northeastern Difference 

Northeastern’s Doctor of Education (EdD) program is grounded in experience-based learning that encourages students to immerse themselves in urban school communities. Research typically entails holding on-site interviews, conducting field research, and other in-depth learning based in real classrooms around the world. 

“Our courses are all built so that they have students going out into communities, even if they’re not in that student-teaching moment,” Ewell says.

In addition to this commitment to experience, Northeastern also highlights the importance of cultural understanding in teaching. Harrington notes that the state of Massachusetts has made it a priority to prepare and credential teachers who can work with culturally, linguistically, and economically diverse students, seamlessly supporting Northeastern in the university’s efforts to do the same. 

“There’s a reflection, equity, and action framework that’s really threaded throughout all our coursework in a very intentional way,” she says. 

Northeastern also offers the unique MacFarland Scholarship for new students who are working (or have the intention of working) as an educator in a public school at the elementary or secondary level within an urban area. These students are eligible to receive a scholarship award of up to $20,000 to help unburden them financially so they can go on to help make an impact in urban education.

Learn more about pursuing your Doctor of Education through Northeastern’s online and on-ground programs. 

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The New Problem Facing Urban School Districts

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Many of our great urban school districts have been in crisis for decades, struggling to deliver on the promise of a high-quality education for all students. That is especially true for Rust Belt cities that have seen years of declining public school enrollment, eroding the operational foundations of districts and thus making it even more difficult to set a steady course for improvement.

This long-standing problem in cities like Detroit and Memphis, Tenn., that have had overall declining populations is now a problem for school systems in cities like Austin, Texas; Denver; and Nashville, Tenn. These cities are thriving economically yet because of declining birthrates and rising housing costs, now have school districts with decreasing student populations.

And all these changes are happening in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has exacerbated many preexisting problems, including academic learning that falls significantly short of state standards, especially for students from poor families and those of color. It has also created a mental health crisis for millions of students.

Our big-cit y school systems are on the front lines of these challenges and have historically had the greatest difficulty adjusting to change because of their politics, size, cultures, and management structures. They were designed a century ago when student populations seemed to be ever-growing and middle-income-generating factory jobs required just a basic education—a far cry from the present.

And now, in most American cities, housing costs are increasing, pricing out younger families who then move elsewhere. At the same time, birthrates are dropping. The two trends together leave many populations with smaller proportions of school-age children. That often impacts urban-district enrollment to a greater extent than the defection of families to other kinds of schooling—private, nondistrict charter, or home schooling, even with pandemic-related increases.

Many demographers have focused on the long-term risk to Social Security or Medicare posed by the lower birthrates, but K-12 education is actually the first institution to be dramatically affected. Shrinking is hard. But it does not have to be catastrophic and if done thoughtfully can even be an opportunity to restart or build higher-quality schools.

Many demographers have focused on the long-term risk to Social Security or Medicare posed by the lower birthrates, but K-12 education is actually the first institution to be dramatically affected.

We know. We’ve both had considerable experience with district downsizing, Brian from the inside as the director of planning for the Denver public schools from 2014 to 2018 and Van from the outside supporting a civic organization interested in the proces s over the past two decades. We have also observed districts do this work poorly, though some like Denver, nearby Mapleton, and Indianapolis have so far managed these difficult changes with far more wins than losses for students.

In general, school districts are good at adjusting to growth but not its opposite. Ribbon cuttings create far fewer protesters than a school closure. Few district actions are as unpopular as consolidating schools, given how deeply people care about them and how much they view them, rightly, as the center of their communities

Nonetheless, the budget constraints of operating an aging set of underutilized facilities can create political, operational, and educational challenges. Certainly pandemic-related staffing shortages among classroom teachers, nurses, mental health professionals, bus drivers, and more, exacerbated by too many schools for the number of children, deprive students of the education they deserve. Further, given tight budgets, the fewer dollars that are spent on the educational “envelope” (including utilities and maintenance), the more dollars that can flow to the classroom.

School closings and consolidations become inevitable, and the sooner districts start grappling with that reality, the better for students, their families, and their neighborhoods. We’ve found that a steady focus on preparing students for the future by delivering as high-quality education as possible creates the best path forward.

Here are three actions we would encourage districts and their partner organizations to pursue:

• Create a fact base that incorporates demographic trends like birthrates, housing prices, and U.S. Census Bureau data with district, charter, and private school enrollment data to forecast enrollments and build a common understanding among key stakeholders about the underlying dynamics and the magnitude of the challenges.
• Design stakeholder engagement plans to capture the voice of city, district, school, and community members in designing solutions that respect these voices while addressing the challenges. Often, processes have greater buy-in from the community when the school district works in collaboration with existing community organizations rather than working alone without trusted community partners.
• Ensure impacted students have dramatically stronger educational opportunities as a result of the tough decisions districts will need to make. If school closure must occur, prioritize the entry of the students most affected into higher-performing existing schools, providing transportation for the students and additional resources to the schools so their effectiveness is not compromised. Or instead of using existing schools, especially if that means merging several low-performing ones, consider implementing the practices of high-performing schools and launching new school models that reflect the wants and needs of the impacted community.

The district must also create financial and other incentives so that the most effective teachers and leaders are serving in the schools with the students most affected by downsizing. It is critical that the entire system shift to focusing on these students and their communities. All these efforts, if done with rather than to communities, can lead to wins for those affected.

Declining school district enrollment is inevitable in most cities, and system leaders should be prepared to educate their communities and make short- and long-range plans to meet the challenges. Right-sizing doesn’t have to be a torturous process aimed just at reducing financial strain on a district. If done well, it can be an opportunity to reset district organizational structures and finances to drive student achievement upward.

A version of this article appeared in the March 09, 2022 edition of Education Week as The New Problem Facing Urban School Districts

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Find Journals & Other Periodicals by Title

Search here for journal, magazine or newspaper titles. If you're looking for articles on a topic, use the  databases .

Examples: Newsweek , Journal of Educational Psychology .

Selected Journals for Urban Education

These links take you to a source with recent issues of the journal. Additional issues may be available via other sources. Use  Find Journals by Title  (above) to find alternate sources for a title.

• American Educational History Journal Peer reviewed articles provide an historical analysis of educational issues. Published by the Organization of Educational Historians .
• American Educational Research Journal AERJ "publishes original empirical and theoretical studies and analyses in education that constitute significant contributions to the understanding and/or improvement of educational processes and outcomes." A blind peer reviewed journal from the American Educational Research Association.
• American Historical Review The flagship journal of the American Historical Association.
• American Journal of Education Sponsored by the Pennsylvania State College of Education, this peer reviewed journal publishes articles "that present research, theoretical statements, philosophical arguments, critical syntheses of a field of educational inquiry, and integrations of educational scholarship, policy, and practice."
• Anthropology & Education Quarterly "Anthropology & Education Quarterly is a peer-reviewed journal that draws on anthropological theories and methods to examine educational processes in and out of schools, in US and international contexts. Articles rely primarily on ethnographic research to address immediate problems of practice as well as broad theoretical questions."
• British Educational Research Journal A peer reviewed journal of the British Educational Research Association.
• British Journal of Sociology of Education This international peer-reviewed journal "publishes high quality original, theoretically informed analyses of the relationship between education and society."
• Curriculum and Teaching Dialogue The journal of the American Association of Teaching and Curriculum (AATC).
• Education and Urban Society "EUS publishes articles exploring the functions of educational institutions, policies, and processes in light of national concerns for improving the environment of urban schools that seek to provide equal educational opportunities for all students."
• Educational Researcher "Educational Researcher publishes scholarly articles that are of general significance to the education research community and that come from a wide range of areas of education research and related disciplines." A peer reviewed journal from the American Educational Research Association.
• Educational Studies "publishes fully refereed papers which cover applied and theoretical approaches to the study of education"
• Educational Theory Sponsored by the John Dewey Society and the Philosophy of Education Society, this refereed journal aims to "to foster the continuing development of educational theory and to stimulate discussion of educational concepts and aims among educators."
• Equity & Excellence in Education "publishes research articles and scholarly essays that address issues of equity and social justice in education."
• History of Education: Journal of the History of Education Society "The journal publishes original research and major reviews of books in the history of education."
• History of Education Quarterly The official journal of the History of Education Society,
• Intercultural Education "Intercultural Education is a global forum for the analysis of issues dealing with education in plural societies."
• International Journal of Multicultural Education IJME "is a peer-reviewed open-access journal for scholars, practitioners, and students of multicultural education."
• Journal of American Ethnic History JAEH "addresses various aspects of North American immigration history and American ethnic history, including background of emigration, ethnic and racial groups, Native Americans, race and ethnic relations, immigration policies, and the processes of incorporation, integration, and acculturation." Note: This source doesn't have the current year. If you need the current year, you may need to do an interlibrary loan.
• Journal of American History This publication from the Organization of American Historians publishes "interpretive essays on all aspects of American history."
• Journal of Applied Research on Children - JARC Published by the CHILDREN AT RISK Institute, this open access. peer reviewed journal publishes "interdisciplinary research that is linked to practical, evidenced-based policy solutions for children’s issues."
• Journal of Curriculum Theorizing - JCT "Historically aligned with the "reconceptualist" movement in curriculum theorizing, and oriented toward informing and affecting classroom practice", JCT is published by " Foundation for Curriculum Theory and is associated with the Bergamo Conference on Curriculum Theory and Classroom Practice." Open access.
• Journal of Educational Controversy This open access, peer reviewed journal examines "the dilemmas and controversies that arise in the education of citizens in a pluralistic, democratic society."
• Journal of Negro Education JNE, "a refereed scholarly periodical, was founded at Howard University in 1932 to fill the need for a scholarly journal that would identify and define the problems that characterized the education of Black people in the United States and elsewhere, provide a forum for analysis and solutions, and serve as a vehicle for sharing statistics and research on a national basis."
• Journal of Philosophy of Education Published by the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain, the "journal aims to promote rigorous thinking on educational matters and to identify and criticise the ideological forces shaping education. Ethical, political, aesthetic and epistemological dimensions of educational theory are amongst those covered."
• Journal of Social History "JSH publishes articles in social history from all areas and periods."
• Journal of Social Theory in Art Education JSTAE is the official journal of the Caucus of Social Theory in Art Education (CSTAE), an Issues Group of the National Art Education Association (NAEA). Open access and peer reviewed.
• Journal of the Historical Society Note: This journal ceased publication in 2013. Older issues of this journal can be found via other library subscriptions (use Journal Finder above).
• Journal of Urban Learning, Teaching, and Research This open access, peer reviewed journal from a special interest group of the American Educational Research Assn publishes "quantitative, qualitative, and mixed method research that addresses issues of urban learning, teaching and research."
• Journal of Urban Mathematics Education A peer reviewed open access journal.
• Middle Grades Review This open access, peer reviewed journal publishes articles that explore "Democratic Education, Innovation, and Social Justice, in relation to middle grades education and early adolescence."
• Multicultural Education offers peer reviewed "articles, research, reviews, promising practices, art, music, literature, and listings of resources related to the evolving field of multicultural education."
• Online Yearbook of Urban Learning, Teaching, and Research Published from 2006 to 2012 by a special interest group of the American Educational Research Assn. Free online.
• Paedagogica Historica: International Journal of the History of Education "A trilingual journal with European roots, Paedagogica Historica discusses global education issues from an historical perspective."
• Philosophical Studies in Education Open access journal published annually by the Ohio Valley Philosophy of Education Society.
• Race Ethnicity and Education This peer-reviewed journal publishes "research that explores the dynamics of race, racism and ethnicity in education policy, theory and practice."
• Sociology of Education "SOE publishes research that examines how social institutions and individuals' experiences within these institutions affect educational processes and social development." A blind peer reviewed journal from the American Sociological Association.
• Teachers College Record "The Teachers College Record is a journal of research, analysis, and commentary in the field of education. It has been published continuously since 1900 by Teachers College, Columbia University."
• Urban Education "Urban Education (UEX) publishes papers addressing urban issues related to those from birth through graduate school, from both a U.S. and an international perspective." Peer reviewed.
• The Urban Review: Issues and Ideas in Public Education This peer reviewed journal "provides a forum for the presentation of original investigations, reviews, and essays which examine the issues basic to the improvement of urban schooling and education." This source does not have full text for the current year.
• Voices in Urban Education (VUE) VUE is an open-access journal published twice annually and endeavors to serve as a “roundtable-in-print” by bringing together diverse education stakeholders with a wide range of viewpoints, including leading education writers and thinkers, as well as essential but frequently underrepresented voices in educational scholarship, such as students, parents, teachers, activists, and community members.

Selected Education Journals

• AERA Open "A peer-reviewed, open access journal published by the American Educational Research Association (AERA)."
• Afterschool Matters An open access peer-reviewed journal from the National Institute on Out-of-School Time.
• Australian Journal of Teacher Education This open access peer- reviewed journal publishes research related to teacher education.
• Child Development "As the flagship journal of the Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD), Child Development has published articles, essays, reviews, and tutorials on various topics in the field of child development since 1930." Uses blind peer review.
• Cognition and Instruction This peer reviewed journal publishes articles on the "rigorous study of foundational issues concerning the mental, socio-cultural, and mediational processes and conditions of learning and intellectual competence." Articles are sometimes blind reviewed.
• Comparative and International Education This open access peer-reviewed journal "is published twice a year and is devoted to publishing articles dealing with education in a comparative and international perspective."
• Computers and Education Publishes peer reviewed articles on the use of computing technology in education.
• Contemporary Educational Psychology "publishes articles that involve the application of psychological theory and science to the educational process."
• Current Issues in Emerging eLearning (CIEE) "an open access, peer-reviewed, online journal of research and critical thought on eLearning practice and emerging pedagogical methods."
• Democracy and Education Open access peer-reviewed journal "seeks to support and sustain conversations that take as their focus the conceptual foundations, social policies, institutional structures, and teaching/learning practices associated with democratic education."
• Developmental Review This peer reviewed journal "emphasizes human developmental processes and gives particular attention to issues relevant to child developmental psychology."
• Education 3-13: International Journal of Primary, Elementary and Early Years Education This official publication of the Association for the Study of Primary Education (ASPE) publishes peer reviewed articles related to the education of children between the ages of 3-13.
• Educational Administration Quarterly This peer reviewed journal from the University Council for Educational Administration (UCEA) offers conceptual and theoretical articles, research analyses, and reviews of books in educational administration."
• Educational and Psychological Measurement "scholarly work from all academic disciplines interested in the study of measurement theory, problems, and issues."
• Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis EEPA "publishes scholarly articles of theoretical, methodological, or policy interest to those engaged in educational policy analysis, evaluation, and decision making." Blind peer reviewed journal from the American Educational Research Association.
• Educational Measurement: Issues and Practice Sponsored by the National Council on Measurement in Education, this journal promotes "a better understanding of and reasoned debate on assessment, evaluation, testing, and related issues."
• Educational Policy "focuses on the practical consequences of educational policy decisions and alternatives"
• Educational Research Quarterly ERQ "publishes evaluative, integrative, theoretical and methodological manuscripts reporting the results of research; current issues in education; synthetic review articles which result in new syntheses or research directions; book reviews; theoretical, empirical or applied research in psychometrics, edumetrics, evaluation, research methodology or statistics" and more. Uses blind peer review.
• Educational Research Review Publishes review articles "in education and instruction at any level," including research reviews, theoretical reviews, methodological reviews, thematic reviews, theory papers, and research critiques. From the European Association for Research on Learning and Instruction (EARLI).
• Education and Culture This peer reviewed journal from Purdue University Press "takes an integrated view of philosophical, historical, and sociological issues in education" with a special focus on Dewey.
• FIRE: Forum of International Research in Education This open access, peer reviewed journal promotes "interdisciplinary scholarship on the use of internationally comparative data for evidence-based and innovative change in educational systems, schools, and classrooms worldwide."
• Frontline Learning Research An official journal of EARLI, European Association for Research on Learning and Instruction. Open Access.
• Future of Children Articles on policy topics relevant to children and youth. An open access journal from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University and the Brookings Institution.
• Harvard Educational Review "a scholarly journal of opinion and research in education. It provides an interdisciplinary forum for discussion and debate about the field's most vital issues."
• High School Journal "The High School Journal publishes research, scholarship, essays, and reviews that critically examine the broad and complex field of secondary education."
• IDEA Papers A national forum for the publication of peer-reviewed articles pertaining to the general areas of teaching and learning, faculty evaluation, curriculum design, assessment, and administration in higher education.
• Impact: A Journal of Community and Cultural Inquiry in Education A peer-reviewed, open-access journal devoted to the examination and analysis of education in a variety of local, regional, national, and transnational contexts.
• Instructional Science "Instructional Science promotes a deeper understanding of the nature, theory, and practice of the instructional process and resultant learning. Published papers represent a variety of perspectives from the learning sciences and cover learning by people of all ages, in all areas of the curriculum, and in informal and formal learning contexts." Peer reviewed.
• Interdisciplinary Journal of Problem-based Learning - IJPBL This open access, peer reviewed journal "publishes relevant, interesting, and challenging articles of research, analysis, or promising practice related to all aspects of implementing problem-based learning (PBL) in K–12 and post-secondary classrooms."
• International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning An Official Publication of the International Society of the Learning Sciences
• International Journal of Educational Leadership Preparation - IJELP An open access journal from the National Council of Professors of Educational Administration. Articles undergo a double-blind peer review process.
• Internet and Higher Education Publishes peer reviewed articles "devoted to addressing contemporary issues and future developments related to online learning, teaching, and administration on the Internet in post-secondary settings."
• Journal for Research in Mathematics Education An official journal of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM), JRME publishes peer reviewed research articles and literature reviews, as well as commentaries and book reviews. Concerned with mathematics education at both the K-12 and college level.
• Journal of Computer Assisted Learning JCAL "is an international peer-reviewed journal which covers the whole range of uses of information and communication technology to support learning and knowledge exchange."
• Journal of Education A scholarly peer-reviewed journal focusing on K-12 education. This long-standing journal is sponsored by the Boston University School of Education.
• Journal of Educational Psychology This blind peer reviewed journal from the American Psychological Association publishes "original, primary psychological research pertaining to education across all ages and educational levels," as well as "exceptionally important theoretical and review articles that are pertinent to educational psychology."
• Journal of Educational Research "publishes manuscripts that describe or synthesize research of direct relevance to educational practice in elementary and secondary schools, pre-K–12."
• Journal of Interactive Media in Education - JIME This long-standing peer reviewed open access journal publishes research on the theories, practices and experiences in the field of educational technology.
• Journal of Research in Science Teaching - JRST This blind peer reviewed journal is the official journal of NARST: A Worldwide Organization for Improving Science Teaching and Learning Through Research, which "publishes reports for science education researchers and practitioners on issues of science teaching and learning and science education policy."
• Journal of Teacher Education The flagship journal of the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE) publishes peer reviewed articles on teacher education and continued support for teachers.
• Journal of the Learning Sciences "JLS provides a multidisciplinary forum for research on education and learning as theoretical and design sciences." This official journal of the International Society of the Learning Sciences uses a double blind review process.
• Journal of Vocational Behavior "The Journal of Vocational Behavior publishes empirical and theoretical articles that expand knowledge of vocational behavior and career development across the life span. " Peer reviewed.
• Learning and Instruction This peer reviewed journal from the European Association for Research on Learning and Instruction (EARLI) publishes "advanced scientific research in the areas of learning, development, instruction and teaching."
• Mentoring & Tutoring: Partnership in Learning - National Council of Professors of Educational Administration (NCPEA) Publishes "papers on all aspects of mentoring, tutoring and partnership in education, other academic disciplines and the professions."
• Merrill-Palmer Quarterly Publishes "empirical and theoretical papers on child development and family-child relationships."
• Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning MJCSL is an open-access journal focusing on research, theory, pedagogy, and other matters related to academic service-learning, campus-community partnerships, and engaged/public scholarship in higher education. Published by the University of Michigan. All articles are free online --don't worry about the "Buy a copy" messages.
• Michigan Reading Journal Open access journal from the Michigan Reading Association.
• NACADA Journal - National Academic Advising Association "The NACADA Journal is the biannual refereed journal of the National Academic Advising Association. It exists to advance scholarly discourse about the research, theory and practice of academic advising in higher education."
• Numeracy Published by the National Numeracy Network, this open access and peer reviewed journal "supports education at all levels that integrates quantitative skills across disciplines."
• Policy and Society A highly ranked open access journal that publishes peer-reviewed research on critical issues in policy theory and practice at the local, national and international levels. Includes articles on Education policy.
• Reading Research Quarterly RRQ publishes peer reviewed scholarship on literacy, including original research, theoretical and methodological essays, review articles, scholarly analysis of trends and issues, as well as reports and viewpoints. Published by the International Literacy Association.
• Review of Educational Research RER "publishes critical, integrative reviews of research literature bearing on education." A blind peer reviewed journal from the American Educational Research Association.
• Review of Higher Education Published by the Association for the Study of Higher Education this journal provides peer-reviewed research studies, scholarly essays, and theoretically-driven reviews on higher education issues.
• Review of Research in Education RRE "provides an annual overview and descriptive analysis of selected topics of relevant research literature through critical and synthesizing essays."
• Science Education "Science Education publishes original articles on the latest issues and trends occurring internationally in science curriculum, instruction, learning, policy and preparation of science teachers with the aim to advance our knowledge of science education theory and practice."
• Scientific Studies of Reading The official Journal of the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading "publishes original empirical investigations dealing with all aspects of reading and its related areas, and occasionally, scholarly reviews of the literature and papers focused on theory development. " Uses blind peer review.
• Studies in Science Education This blind peer reviewed journal publishes review articles that offer "analytical syntheses of research into key topics and issues in science education."
• Theory into Practice "TIP publishes articles covering all levels and areas of education, including learning and teaching; assessment; educational psychology; teacher education and professional development; classroom management; counseling; administration and supervision; curriculum; policy; and technology." Peer reviewed.
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The Continued Impact of Neoliberalism on Urban Education

This call for submissions to a special issue in The Urban Review beckons authors interested in keeping the critique and examination of neoliberalism’s failure alive, particularly regarding the ongoing undermining of urban education and schooling (broadly conceived) by neoliberal interests in the face of overwhelming failures and underwhelming successes. The special issue sets out to bring together contemporary scholars who seek to address the ongoing influence of neoliberalism on urban education and bring out positive change for urban education across the world. The special issue welcomes manuscripts consisting of empirical research, theoretical work, ethnographic and autoethnographic inquiry, practitioner-oriented experiential work, and book reviews related to neoliberalism’s ongoing impact on urban education.

Neoliberalism is a broad term that has been described as an ideology, an economic theory, a set of discourses, a political position and a practice. The term is generally associated with the writings of Milton Friedman (1962) and Friedrich Hayek (1944) who were proponents of a puritanical free-market economic approach, privatization of all aspects of human sociality, reduction in the role of government to the barest essentials, emphasis on the individual over collective and community social forms, and the use of competition to improve, among other things, education (Brown, 2019). Neoliberalism gained political power on the world stage in the 1980s with the administrations of Ronald Reagan in the USA and Margaret Thatcher in the UK, and was exported across the West and subsequently around the globe (Klein, 2008).

Since, coalitions of policymakers, corporate and financial elites (Heilig, et al. 2019), foundations, think tanks, philanthropists (Baltodano, 2017), academics, the media (McDonald, 2014) and opportunistic entrepreneurs have rallied to bring neoliberal thinking squarely into the realm of educational policy, and are directly responsible for the growth of interest and appeal to a so-called school choice movement that includes charter schools and school vouchers. They have also profited mightily. The dogmatic adherence to purist capitalism has brought all manner of entrepreneurs (sometimes referred to as edu-preneurs see Howard, 2017; Brewer et al, 2018) into the PK-12 and higher education realms, from charter school management corporations, to educational technology firms, to curriculum developers, all looking to profit off of the tax-payer funded education system in the USA, and internationally (Lipman, 2015).

Despite egregious failures of neoliberalism in theory and practice, including the 2008 financial crisis and the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, neoliberalism has not loosened its grip on educational policy and practice. Rather, neoliberal approaches to education have become so entrenched in politics and discourse as to now seem common sense to the public, and neoliberalism has experienced what Crouch (2011) called a strange non-death.

Baltodano, M. P. (2017). The power brokers of neoliberalism: Philanthrocapitalists and public education. Policy Futures in Education, 15(2), 141-156. Doi: 10.1177/1478210316652008

Brewer, T. J., Hartlep, N. D., & Scott, I. M. (2018). Forbes 30 under 30 in education: Manufacturing “edu-preneur” networks to promote and reinforce privatization/marketization in education. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 26(76). Doi: 10.14507/epaa.26.3563

Brown, W. (2019). In the ruins of neoliberalism: The rise of antidemocratic politics in the West. New York: Columbia University Press.

Crouch, C. (2011). The strange non-death of neo-liberalism. Polity.

Friedman, M. (1962). Capitalism and freedom. University of Chicago Press.

Hayak, F. (1944). The road to serfdom. University of Chicago Press

Heilig, J.V., Brewer, T.J., & Adamson, F. (2019) The Comingling of neoliberal ideology, methods, and funding in school choice politics and research. In Mark Berends, Ann Primus, Matthew Springer (Eds.), Handbook of Research on School Choice. Routledge.

Howard, C. (2017). 30 under 30 education 2017: Revolutionizing learning inside the classroom, post-college and online. Forbes. Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinehoward/2017/01/03/30-under-30-education-2017- revolutionizing-learning-inside-the-classroom-post-college-and- online/?ss=30under30#5f939abb6667

Klein, N. (2008). The shock doctrine: The rise of disaster capitalism. MacMillan Publishers.

Lipman, P. (2015). Capitalizing on crisis: venture philanthropy’s colonial project to remake urban education. Critical Studies in Education, 56(2), 241-58. Doi: 10.1080/17508487.2015.959031

McDonald, L. (2014). Think Tanks and the Media: How the conservative movement gained entry into the education policy arena. Educational Policy, 28(6), 845-880. Doi: 10.1177/0895904813492372

Bob Spires, Ph.D. University of Richmond, USA

Bob Spires is an Associate Professor in Graduate Education and teaches a variety of courses in teacher education. His research interests include international non-formal education through charities, non-profits and NGOs, as well as social justice-related issues impacting teacher training. He currently serves as co-Editor-in-Chief of The Urban Review

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The 2024-25 Outstanding Teaching Awards: Jack Swab

Each Wednesday, UKNow is highlighting one of the winners of the University of Kentucky’s 2024-25 Outstanding Teaching Awards, given by the Office for Faculty Advancement with the Office of the Provost.

LEXINGTON, Ky. (July 31, 2024)  — John “Jack” Swab, a former teaching assistant (TA) in the  Department of Geography  in the  University of Kentucky College of Arts and Sciences , is one of nine winners who received a 2024-25 Outstanding Teaching Award this past spring.

The awards identify and recognize individuals who demonstrate special dedication to student achievement and who are successful in their teaching. Recipients were selected via nomination and reviewed by a selection committee based in the UK Provost’s  Office for Faculty Advancement  and the  Center for the Enhancement of Learning and Teaching . Swab is one of three Category 3 winners, which honors UK teaching assistants.

“I’m incredibly grateful to have been recognized with a 2024 Outstanding Teaching Award,” Swab said. “One of the highlights of my graduate school experience has been working with and helping the diverse students that attend UK grow into individuals with a sense of purpose about their lives. I often think about the teachers that inspired me as a student: to be able to pay that back — and be recognized for it — is very meaningful.”

After graduating with dual bachelor’s degrees from Penn State in 2017, Swab came to UK to pursue master’s degrees in geography (2020) and library science (2022) and ultimately his doctoral degree in 2024. 

During these past six years at UK, Swab has taught several courses in the geography department, making “an outstanding contribution to undergraduate education at UK” according to Matt Wilson, professor and chair of the department, who nominated Swab for the award.

In addition to being TA for recitation sections, Swab has been the primary instructor for five introductory geography courses and one core course.

“The decision to make a Ph.D. student a sole instructor is not something we do lightly, but the department had great confidence in his professionalism and teaching ability,” Wilson said. “I am happy to report that our confidence was well justified based both on his TCE scores and on the positive reviews given by our faculty during classroom observations.”

Swab’s excellence in teaching is also reflected in his student evaluations, which Wilson says are consistently “outstanding.”

“The scores are all the more remarkable given that these independently-taught classes are (1) introductory courses, (2) mostly taken by nonmajors, and (3) taught during the constantly changing classroom conditions brought on by the pandemic,” Wilson wtrote in his nomination of Swab. “Jack was adapting to course modality flexibilities during this time and his ability to get such high scores are a true testament to his skills in the classroom. The students are incredibly fortunate to have Jack as their instructor.”

In his teaching statement, Swab says a true collegiate experience goes beyond just graduating, but rather planting seeds for a life of personal happiness, career success and civic engagement.

“Geography is an important discipline from which to craft this version of undergraduate education — whether it be a general education class, an upper- division elective or a major-required class,” he said. “I enjoy teaching geography, because it requires commitments to consistently be relevant, thoughtful and engaging.”

In addition to this award, Swab received the 2022 Outstanding Geography Teaching Assistant Award and UK’s 2022 GradTeach Live! People’s Choice Award.

Swab will graduate with his Ph.D. this August and will begin a tenure-track faculty position at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, this fall.

This year’s Outstanding Teaching Awards were given to six faculty and three graduate teaching assistants. Each winner received an award certificate, a commemorative engraved gift and a cash award in recognition of their teaching excellence at a campus ceremony on April 25.  Read more here .

As the state’s flagship, land-grant institution, the University of Kentucky exists to advance the Commonwealth. We do that by preparing the next generation of leaders — placing students at the heart of everything we do — and transforming the lives of Kentuckians through education, research and creative work, service and health care. We pride ourselves on being a catalyst for breakthroughs and a force for healing, a place where ingenuity unfolds. It's all made possible by our people — visionaries, disruptors and pioneers — who make up 200 academic programs, a $476.5 million research and development enterprise and a world-class medical center, all on one campus.   

In 2022, UK was ranked by Forbes as one of the “Best Employers for New Grads” and named a “Diversity Champion” by INSIGHT into Diversity, a testament to our commitment to advance Kentucky and create a community of belonging for everyone. While our mission looks different in many ways than it did in 1865, the vision of service to our Commonwealth and the world remains the same. We are the University for Kentucky.   

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Distinguished Economist Spots the Lodestar in China’s Economy

Together with the Youth of Guangzhou and Hong Kong Association, CityUHK’s College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences (CLASS) hosted a public seminar, featuring distinguished guest speaker Professor Justin LIN Yifu, on China’s economy and its influential role in the global arena

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Wars and conflicts have erupted across nations. Grappling with a complex web of challenges emanating from global and domestic uncertainties, China’s economy stands at a crossroads. How will it navigate these obstacles in the face of cut-throat competition?

In collaboration with the Youth of Guangzhou and Hong Kong Association, the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences of City University of Hong Kong (CityUHK) invited an esteemed economist, Professor Justin LIN Yifu, to deliver a public lecture titled “How to understand the opportunities and challenges in mainland China” on 9 September 2023. Drawing an audience of over 500 students, faculty members and guests, the seminar brimmed with insightful perspectives and thought-provoking discussions.

Setting the stage for the captivating lecture was Professor Jennifer LIN Fen, Associate Vice-President (Global Strategy) and Associate Professor in the Department of Media and Communication at CityUHK. With great enthusiasm, she first welcomed and introduced the keynote speaker.

Lin is a member of the Standing Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) National Committee and vice-chairman of the Committee on Economic Affairs of the CPPCC National Committee, focusing on development policy, agriculture and poverty in China and abroad. In 2008, he made history by becoming the first individual from a developing country to assume the position of Senior Vice President and Chief Economist of the World Bank. After his tenure at the World Bank, he returned to Peking University, where he contributed to higher education and academic research.

Lin has maintained a long-standing collaboration with CityUHK and was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Social Science degree by the University in 2009.

Conflicts Pose Challenges

Lin then took to the stage and brought his astute observations and expertise to the audience. The very first question one would raise was: How did China manage to distinguish itself economically?

Karl MARX once preached his belief that history repeats itself. Lin thus drew parallels between the long-standing dominance of the Group of Eight (G8) in global economic affairs and the characteristics observed during the era of the Eight-Nation Alliance a century ago. This prevailing status quo remained unshaken throughout the last century.

Yet, the dynamics shifted following the global financial crisis in 2008 as a new key player came: China. According to Lin, the nation’s rapid economic growth altered the global order. One of the many far-reaching impacts was the recalibration of Sino-American relations, which was a significant hurdle to China’s ongoing economic development.

The speaker then unpacked the tension between two mighty nations. “The outbreak of a war between China and the United States would pose challenges to the entire world, constituting an unprecedented global paradigm shift,” he remarked.

The Silver Lining

While identifying China’s current predicaments in the global economy and within its society, the speaker also presented a promising forecast for future opportunities as the silver lining. Lin noticed that China is realising its potential in developing innovative technologies. It will consequently drive growth in high-value-added sectors and facilitate the transformation into a digital society.

With a compelling blend of business acumen and political insight, Lin also supported his analysis with a data-driven approach. He skilfully interpreted key indicators such as GDP per capita and unemployment rate, spelling out their implications for the mighty nations.

“As the world watches with bated breath, China’s economic trajectory is poised to shape not only its future but also the international economy at large,” said Lin, concluding the importance of the Chinese market to economic stability worldwide.

The seminar later reached its culmination with an engaging dialogue facilitated by Professor Linda LI Chelan, Director of CityUHK’s Research Centre for Sustainable Hong Kong and Professor of Department of Public and International Affairs, and Professor Isabel YAN Kit-ming, CityUHK’s Associate Provost (Student Life) and Associate Professor of Department of Economics and Finance. Alongside Lin, the moderators guided a discussion and Q&A session, in which the participants eagerly seized the opportunity to delve into the complex issues at hand.

Lin offered valuable recommendations when asked about the increasing youth unemployment rate and shortage of skilled labour in China. He suggested government officials implement policies to promote investment and instil confidence among consumers and private enterprises. He was optimistic that the youth unemployment rate would show improvement by the end of 2023.

As the discussion wound down, it was not difficult to realise that opportunities and challenges are two sides of the same coin. The insightful seminar indeed left the audience inspired and better equipped to navigate the ever-changing economy.