Changing Urban Education (Studies in Government and Public Policy) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0700609024 ISBN 13: 9780700609024

Publisher: University Press of Kansas, 1998

Synopsis

With critical issues like desegregation and funding facing our schools, dissatisfaction with public education has reached a new high. Teachers decry inadequate resources while critics claim educators are more concerned with job security than effective teaching. Though urban education has reached crisis proportions, contending players have difficulty agreeing on a common program of action. This book tells why.

Changing Urban Education confronts the prevailing naivete in school reform by examining the factors that shape, reinforce, or undermine reform efforts. Edited by one of the nation's leading urban scholars, it examines forces for change and resistance in urban education and proposes that the barrier to reform can only be overcome by understanding how schools fit into the broader political contexts of their cities.

Much of the problem with our schools lies with the reluctance of educators to recognize the profoundly political character of public education. The contributors show how urban political contexts vary widely with factors like racial composition, the role of the teachers' union, and relations between cities and surrounding metropolitan areas. Presenting case studies of original field research in Baltimore, Chicago, Houston, and six other urban areas, they consider how resistance to desegregation and the concentration of the poor in central urban areas affect education, and they suggest how cities can build support for reform through the involvement of business and other community players.

By demonstrating the complex interrelationship between urban education and politics, this book shows schools to be not just places for educating children, but also major employers and large spenders of tax dollars. It also introduces the concept of civic capacity—the ability of educators and non-educators to work together on common goals—and suggests that this key issue must be addressed before education can be improved.

Changing Urban Education makes it clear to educators that the outcome of reform efforts depends heavily on their political context as it reminds political scientists that education is a major part of the urban mix. While its prognosis is not entirely optimistic, it sets forth important guidelines that cannot be ignored if our schools are to successfully prepare children for the future.

About this title

From the Back Cover

"This is the most important nationwide study of urban education politics in the last twenty years. The scope and quality of the case studies will generate intense discussion among policy makers and scholars. The concluding sections provide an incisive analysis of whether change in urban education is possible."--Michael W. Kirst, coauthor of Schools in Conflict: The Politics of Education

"A unique resource for understanding why systematic educational reform is so hard to achieve today. Based on extensive and original research, the essays bring school reform into the broader political arena, showing how stakeholders across communities combine to promote-or prevent-change. This book will be of great interest to students of urban politics as well as practitioners in the education community."--Margaret Weir, coauthor of Schooling for All

"A must read for those who want to learn about urban education and for all who care about improving schools."--Susan H. Fuhrman, editor of Designing Coherent Education Policy

"Unlike most other studies of urban education policy, which either ignore politics or treat it only as a source of interference and distortion, this volume emphasizes that school reform must come through collective political engagement; reformers who try to work around politics are destined to fail."--Jeffrey R. Henig, author of Rethinking School Choice

About the Author

Clarence Stone is a professor in the department of government and politics at the University of Maryland, where he also directs the Urban Education Project. Recipient of the Ralph J. Bunche Award and the APSA's Career Achievement Award, he is the author of Regime Politics: Governing Atlanta, 1946-1988 and coeditor of The Politics of Urban Development, both published by Kansas.

Contributors: Michael N. Danielson, Kathryn M. Doherty, Bari Anhalt Erlichson, Luis Ricardo Fraga, Connie Hill, Jennifer Hochschild, Cheryl L. Jones, Sandy Lee, Thomas Longoria, Jr., Kathryn A. McDermott, Marion Orr, Timothy Ross, Dorothy Shipps, Stephen Samuel Smith, Clarence N. Stone

Edition details

• Publisher: University Press of Kansas
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0700609024
• ISBN 13: 9780700609024
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 332
• Editor: Stone Clarence N.