Reinterpreting Urban School Reform

Have Urban Schools Failed, or Has the Reform Movement Failed Urban Schools?

Edited by Louis F. Miron & Edward P. St. John

Subjects: Education
Paperback : 9780791457085, 335 pages, April 2003
Hardcover : 9780791457078, 335 pages, April 2003
Out of print (Hardcover)

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Table of contents

Introduction: Rethinking Urban School Reform
Louis F. Mirón and Edward P. St. John

Part I. The Courts and Urban Schools

1. School Desegregation Is Over in the Inner Cities: What Do We Do Now?
Richard Fossey

2. The Need for Issues-Driven School Funding Reform in Urban Schools
Neil Theobald

Part II. Government Initiated, External Reforms

3. Federal Title I as a Reform Strategy in Urban Schools
Kenneth K. Wong

4. Inclusive Education in High Stakes, High Poverty Environments: The Case of Students with Learning Disabilities in Indiana's Urban Schools and the Graduation Qualifying Examination
Genevieve Manset and Sandra Washburn

5. Race, Restructuring, and Educational Reform: The Mayoral Takeover of the Detroit Public Schools
Barry M. Franklin

Part III. Independently Adopted Research-Based Reforms

6. Research-Based Reading Reform: The Impact of State-Funded Interventions on Educational Outcomes in Urban Elementary Schools
Edward P. St. John, Genevieve Manset, Choong-Geun Chung, Ada B. Simmons, Glenda Droogsma Musoba, Kim Manoil, and Kim Worthington

7. Comprehensive School Reform: An Exploratory Study
Edward P. St. John, Genevieve Manset, Choong-Geun Chung, Glenda Droogsma Musoba, Siri Loescher, Ada B. Simmons, David Gordon, and Carol Anne Hossler

8. Private Scholarships and School Choice: Innovation or Class Reproduction?
Carolyn S. Ridenour and Edward P. St. John

Part IV. Community-Based Reforms

9. Parental and Community Empowerment: The Chicago Model
Kathryn Nakagawa

10. Joint Ventures Between Public Schools and City Government: Implications for Community Development
Louis F. Mirón

11. Rediscovering the African-American Tradition: Restructuring in Post-Desegregation Urban Schools
Leetta Allen-Haynes, Edward P. St. John, and Joseph Cadray

Part V. A Critical-Empirical View

12. A Critical-Empirical Perspective on Urban School Reform
Edward P. St. John and Louis F. Mirón

13. Implications of the New Global Context for Urban Reform
Louis F. Mirón and Edward P. St. John

Contributors

Index

A critical look at urban school reform efforts.

Description

Have urban schools failed, or has reform failed urban schools? This book examines existing urban school programs, ranging from desegregation to reading improvement, in light of available historical, empirical, and case study evidence. Miron and St. John and their contributors probe the underlying theoretical, normative, and political assumptions embedded in specific reform initiatives. They explore how reforms might be reconstructed to better address the underlying challenges and they demonstrate that reforms can be constructively critiqued throughout the stages of implementation, arguing that greater attention should be paid to ethnic and cultural traditions within urban educational settings.

Contributors include Leetta Allen-Haynes; Joseph Cadray; Choong-Geun Chung; Richard Fossey; Barry M. Franklin; David Gordon; Carol Anne Hossler; Siri Loescher; Kim Manoil; Genevieve Manset; Louis F. Mirón; Glenda Droogsma Musoba; Kathryn Nakagawa; Carolyn S. Ridenour; Ada B. Simmons; Edward P. St. John; Neil Theobald; Sandra Washburn; Kenneth K. Wong; and Kim Worthington.

Louis F. Miron is Professor of Educational Policy Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of Social Construction of Urban Schooling: Situating the Crisis. Edward P. St. John is Professor of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at Indiana University at Bloomington. He is the coauthor (with Alison I. Griffith and Leetta Allen-Haynes) of Families in Schools: A Chorus of Voices in Restructuring.

Reviews

"This book offers a careful analysis of various reform strategies, including assessments of their strengths, weaknesses, successes, failures, and implications. It provides a reinterpretation of urban school reform through a critical empirical review, examining four kinds of reform, including court-ordered, government-initiated, research-based, and community-based. The contributors provide an examination of contexts, ideologies, theoretical claims, and assessments of relevant research. This is an ambitious undertaking and Mirón and St. John have done an excellent job. " — Kofi Lomotey, coeditor of The Racial Crisis in American Higher Education: Continuing Challenges for the Twenty-First Century and President of Fort Valley State University