Urban School Reform: To What End?

This chapter chronicles urban school reform in the United States from the 1950s to the present and argues that:

• For the past 50 years urban schools have been in a continuous process of reform.

• The reforms have addressed almost every imaginable dimension of urban schooling, from district organization to classroom practice to the racial and ethnic composition of student populations and school faculties.

• Since the early 1980s education reform, including improving urban schools, has been at the top of the national and state political agenda; the rationale for reform has been maintaining the preeminence of the United States in the world economy.

• The result is that the reform agenda is increasingly directed from outside urban districts – by mayors, state legislatures and departments of education, and the federal government.

• An area of continuing contention is whether the mandated reforms have been adequately funded given often ambitious goals and objectives.

• Increasingly federal and state policies have focused on the work of teachers in classrooms, constraining professional autonomy and prescribing standards, curriculum, assessments, and pedagogy.

• Increasingly urban school reforms have been evaluated in terms of student outcomes, but improvement as measured by standardized test scores and high school completion rates has been limited.

This essay begins with a brief historical review of reforms over a period of six decades, then considers these reforms from four perspectives – organization, instruction, human resource development, and locus of authority, and finally considers several recurrent and emergent issues of reform.