research topics on school reform

Transforming education systems: Why, what, and how

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Rebecca winthrop and rebecca winthrop director - center for universal education , senior fellow - global economy and development @rebeccawinthrop the hon. minister david sengeh the hon. minister david sengeh minister of education and chief innovation officer - government of sierra leone, chief innovation officer - directorate of science, technology and innovation in sierra leone @dsengeh.

June 23, 2022

Today, the topic of education system transformation is front of mind for many leaders. Ministers of education around the world are seeking to build back better as they emerge from COVID-19-school closures to a new normal of living with a pandemic. The U.N. secretary general is convening the Transforming Education Summit (TES) at this year’s general assembly meeting (United Nations, n.d.). Students around the world continue to demand transformation on climate and not finding voice to do this through their schools are regularly leaving class to test out their civic action skills.      

It is with this moment in mind that we have developed this shared vision of education system transformation. Collectively we offer insights on transformation from the perspective of a global think tank and a national government: the Center for Universal Education (CUE) at Brookings brings years of global research on education change and transformation, and the Ministry of Education of Sierra Leone brings on-the-ground lessons from designing and implementing system-wide educational rebuilding.   

This brief is for any education leader or stakeholder who is interested in charting a transformation journey in their country or education jurisdiction such as a state or district. It is also for civil society organizations, funders, researchers, and anyone interested in the topic of national development through education. In it, we answer the following three questions and argue for a participatory approach to transformation:  

• Why is education system transformation urgent now? We argue that the world is at an inflection point. Climate change, the changing nature of work, increasing conflict and authoritarianism together with the urgency of COVID recovery has made the transformation agenda more critical than ever. 
• What is education system transformation? We argue that education system transformation must entail a fresh review of the goals of your system – are they meeting the moment that we are in, are they tackling inequality and building resilience for a changing world, are they fully context aware, are they owned broadly across society – and then fundamentally positioning all components of your education system to coherently contribute to this shared purpose.  
• How can education system transformation advance in your country or jurisdiction? We argue that three steps are crucial: Purpose (developing a broadly shared vision and purpose), Pedagogy (redesigning the pedagogical core), and Position (positioning and aligning all components of the system to support the pedagogical core and purpose). Deep engagement of educators, families, communities, students, ministry staff, and partners is essential across each of these “3 P” steps.    

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Our aim is not to provide “the answer” — we are also on a journey and continually learning about what it takes to transform systems — but to help others interested in pursuing system transformation benefit from our collective reflections to date. The goal is to complement and put in perspective — not replace — detailed guidance from other actors on education sector on system strengthening, reform, and redesign. In essence, we want to broaden the conversation and debate.

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What works in education reform a new database catalogs policies worldwide.

Across the globe, policymakers looking to improve schooling pursue all kinds of educational reforms – policies aimed at changing, for instance, unequal access to education, how student achievement is assessed, or how schools are funded.

Sometimes these reforms are successful, improving students’ and families’ lives and society more broadly. Other times, the reforms end up being regarded as costly failures, poorly executed and driven by political interests. And reforms that work in one country may not be successful in another: Without knowing the context of a particular reform – factors like cultural values, economic inequality, or levels of democracy – it’s not easy to identify what might transfer effectively from one country to the next. 

To help researchers better understand the effects of education policies around the world and the forces that drive these reforms, a team from Stanford Graduate School of Education (GSE) and the University of Toronto has developed a groundbreaking new research tool: the World Education Reform Database (WERD), the most comprehensive international database of education reforms currently available. 

The database contains more than 10,000 policy changes enacted by 183 countries, mainly from the past 50 years. An early study drawing from the database, published last month in Sociology of Education , documents and explains declining numbers of education reforms in recent years. Future work will look at the content of reforms. 

“Everything that gets talked about in education comes up in these reforms,” said Patricia Bromley, an associate professor at the GSE, who co-led the development of the database. “We hope this tool will bring a deeper understanding of the forces driving these reforms and their consequences, and that it contributes to strategic policymaking.” 

Patricia Bromley

Filling a research gap 

The idea for the project emerged several years ago from conversations between Bromley and Rie Kijima, MA ’03, PhD ’13, who was then interim director of the International Comparative Education/International Education Policy Analysis (ICE/IEPA) master’s program at the GSE. 

Kijima had been exploring the effects of international assessments in shaping education policy, interviewing policymakers around the world who attributed waves of reform to the testing system. She consulted Bromley, who teaches on global education policy and the sociology of education at the GSE. “We wanted to look into how testing might generate waves of reform,” Bromley said, “but we realized there was no data out there to look at that question.”

The two set out to compile data on national policy changes around the world to help answer this research question, using techniques that Bromley had used in earlier research to code textbook content. “I thought we could apply a similar framework to pull information out of the reports that countries submit to international organizations,” she said.

They assembled a team of research assistants and collected more than 800 reports submitted to organizations such as the World Bank, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and UNESCO. GSE doctoral students Lisa Overbey, Minju Choi, Heitor Santos, and Jieun Song have been central in the process, training cohorts of undergraduate student researchers to use a coding system to compile the data on education reforms.

Bromley and Kijima, now an assistant professor at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto, didn’t initially plan for the data set to become a public-facing database. “But once we began presenting papers that we were starting to develop out of the data, we found there was interest in the database itself,” said Bromley. “People had so many ideas for how they could use it.” 

By making the database freely available online, the team hopes researchers will further code the data to capture reforms about specific groups, revealing more about the distribution of these types of reforms around the world, how they may have changed over time, and their prevalence relative to other types of reforms.  

Future versions of the database, Bromley said, will include more historical sources, a wider range of documents, and reforms from other databases and studies. 

Learn more about and access the database, along with initial research studies developed with the data, at https://werd.stanford.edu .

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section School Reform

Introduction, general overviews.

• Sputnik and Civil Rights, 1950–1970
• Response to A Nation at Risk , 1980s
• Standards Movement and Goals 2000 and Whole-School Reform, 1990s
• Policy Reponses, 2000s
• Approaches to Reform
• School-Level Reform
• District-Level Reform
• Organizations

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School Reform by Heather Zavadsky LAST REVIEWED: 15 December 2011 LAST MODIFIED: 15 December 2011 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199756810-0035

School reform refers to the process of making changes in educational policy or practice, often in response to concern over student academic achievement. The term school reform is often interchanged with education reform or school improvement , but the most commonly used term is school reform. Most school reform falls into one of two categories: (a) teaching and learning or, in other words, what happens within classrooms, or (b) administrative reform, whereby either structures, governance, or decision-making strategies are addressed, either within or outside of the school. A third emergent approach combines both categories and typically refers to reform across entire districts and their schools, commonly known as comprehensive school reform, systemic reform, or district-wide reform. School reform has been a topic of urgent concern for decades and remains at the forefront of policy and practice, often prompted by particular historical events or major policies, including the launching of Sputnik, the civil rights movement, pivotal reports such as A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Education Reform , as citied in Response to A Nation at Risk, 1980s , and policy movements such as the Comprehensive School Reform Program, Goals 2000: Educate America Act, and No Child Left Behind Act. The topic of school reform is quite broad, and thus this bibliography focuses primarily on major reform movements at the school and district levels rather than on specific instructional reform movements. While there have been countless studies of the various approaches to school reform, many of those studies have conflicting findings and often are politically charged. For example, while there are many studies arguing that class size significantly impacts student achievement, there are almost as many studies illustrating that it has little impact on student achievement. These conflicts are often a result of disagreements over the methodology used in the studies, in implementation of the reforms themselves, or both. Class size provides a salient example of the stakes involved in many reform efforts. Because human resources comprise at least 65 percent of any district budget, and some of those resources are often scarce, an issue like class size is extremely important to both practitioners and policymakers. This bibliography is organized by decade and events and then details different reform approaches, current movements, and noteworthy case studies. A list of prominent education reform organizations is also provided. To the extent possible, multiple views on the utility and success of each reform are included as well as a list of researchers and authors that are important to each area.

Improving schools has been one of the longest surviving pursuits of both policymakers and practitioners, beginning in the 1960s. The recent anniversaries of the Coleman report and A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Education Reform , as citied in Response to A Nation at Risk, 1980s , brought heightened concern that little has changed in education despite numerous reform efforts. Several prominent education-thought leaders, historians, and researchers have detailed school reform in the decades since the 1960s, with the purpose of improving current practices through lessons from the past. Cross 2004 provides an insider’s view on federal influences on education reform on topics such as child poverty, children with disabilities, literacy instruction, education funding, and testing and accountability. The author also connects to his personal experience in education and policymaking in Finn 2008 , which highlights the innovative programs that have increased school choice options since 1960. Written by well-known education historians, Tyack and Cuban 1995 and Ravich 2000 point out how expectations for schools have moved well beyond academic learning to address social problems, leading to frenzied and unfocused approaches to school improvement. In contrast, Payne 2008 shows how the history of social issues such as poverty and race are important to understand to improve schools.

Cross, Christopher T. 2004. Political education: National policy comes of age . New York: Teachers College Press.

Presents a thorough review of US education policy from World War II to 2004, enriched by Cross’s own experiences in Washington, D.C., and interviews with key education decision makers.

Finn, Chester E. 2008. Troublemaker: A personal history of school reform since Sputnik . Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.

Provides an informative history of school reform from 1950 to the mid-2000s by the renowned president of the Fordham Foundation. The book details education reform in the typical “tongue-in-cheek” style of Finn.

Payne, Charles M. 2008. So much reform, so little change: The persistence of failure in urban schools . Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press.

Discusses thirty years of school reform in the Chicago Public School District. Payne discusses the realities of urban school reform through complex social obstacles such as race and poverty.

Ravich, Diane. 2000. Left back: A century of failed school reforms . New York: Simon & Schuster.

An opinionated overview of the history of reform from the turn of the last century to 2000 by political analyst Diane Ravich. Her central thesis is that progressive education has thrown education reform into an unfocused frenzy and that the standards movement is an attempt to reclaim rigor and educational equality for all student groups.

Tyack, David, and Cuban, Larry. 1995. Tinkering toward utopia: A century of public school reform . Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.

Gives a comprehensive overview of education reform history over the period of a century by well-known historians Tyack and Cuban. The authors connect education reform history to social and political realities and offer lessons learned from past successes and mistakes.

Webb, L. Dean. 2006. The history of American education: A great American experiment . Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson.

Typically used as a textbook in education foundation programs. Provides an overview of the history of education, incorporating up-to-date information to show the changes in US education over time.

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Articles on School reform

Displaying 1 - 20 of 21 articles.

Student and teacher involvement in reforming schooling matters — how Montréal schools are tackling this

Aron Lee Rosenberg , McGill University and Lisa Starr , McGill University

City residents who support neighborhood schools are often divided by race and purpose

Hava Rachel Gordon , University of Denver

Ghana’s high school system sets many students up for failure: it needs a rethink

David Baidoo-Anu , Queen's University, Ontario ; Kenneth Gyamerah , Queen's University, Ontario , and Timothy Chanimbe , Hong Kong Baptist University

‘School choice’ policies are associated with increased separation of students by social class

Louis Volante , Brock University ; Dominic Wyse , UCL , and Gabriel Gutiérrez , London School of Economics and Political Science

School suspensions don’t just unfairly penalize Black students – they lead to lower grades and ‘Black flight’

Charles Bell , Illinois State University

Rethinking how we assess learning in schools

Geoff Masters , Australian Council for Educational Research

Are wealthy donors influencing the public school agenda?

Rebecca Jacobsen , Michigan State University ; Jeffrey Henig , Teachers College, Columbia University , and Sarah Reckhow , Michigan State University

Explainer: why Kenya wants to overhaul its entire education system

Daniel Sifuna , Kenyatta University

What if young people designed their own learning?

Megan O'Connell , Victoria University and Bill Lucas , Victoria University

Lessons from Newark: why school reforms will not work without addressing poverty

Robert W. Snyder , Rutgers University - Newark

Young people must be consulted on reforms to A-levels and GCSEs

Jannette Elwood , Queen's University Belfast

When it comes to New Orleans schools, who is making the choices?

J Celeste Lay , Tulane University

Explainer: what is a ‘coasting’ school?

Michael Jopling , Northumbria University, Newcastle

Finland’s school reforms won’t scrap subjects altogether

Pasi Sahlberg , Harvard University

Evaluate education reforms today to avoid mistakes being repeated for our grandchildren

Only one in ten education reforms analysed for their impact: OECD

Gemma Ware , The Conversation

Gove’s revolution leaves behind a fast-food education system

Graham Birrell , Canterbury Christ Church University

Explainer: what was the Louisiana school takeover?

Brian Robert Beabout , University of New Orleans

Are the tables turning in Michael Gove’s war on teacher unions?

Howard Stevenson , University of Nottingham

Relaxing zero tolerance in schools could be Obama’s boldest civil rights reform

Paul Thomas , Furman University

Related Topics

• Charter schools
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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
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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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 Welcome to the SRI Research and Resources Pages

This page is designed as a resource for people who are interested in the research related to:

1.The work of “building transformational learning communities fiercely committed to educational excellence and equity,” and

2.How this work is situated in the larger context of research, theory and scholarship.

This part of the SRI website is designed to allow readers to dig as deeply into this larger context as they need to support their own work. Included is a “ Overview of Research that Supports SRI Work ;” a recently completed impact study “ School Reform Initiative Scope of Work ” from Joshua Lawrence and his UC Irvine, CA Educational Research group; as well as a “ General Theory of SRI Intentional Learning Communities ” that explains more fully how the broad literature is connected to the specific goals of ILCs. Within the both the Summary of Research and General Theory documents are links to a subset of topics that inform SRI work . These 8 topics are:

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Each of the eight subtopics not only offers a bibliography of essential research and theory, but in many cases, a .pdf of the article itself is also provided. Periodically, we will be posting recently published and pre-publication research and theory that seems important to share with our community.

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If you would like to dig even deeper into this literature, have questions about the General Theory or Impact Study, would like some help in writing a grant proposal, have original research that you would like feature on our website, or just want to continue the conversation, please feel free to contact Dr. Kevin Fahey at [email protected] or Dr. Jacy Ippolito at [email protected] . Finally we are constructing a more comprehensive EndNote bibliography that supports SRI work. If you are interested in having access to this resource, please contact Kevin or Jacy.

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Fighting for fair school construction funding in California

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April 24, 2024

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Current reforms to public education include the new Common Core State Standards for learning, the Local Control Funding Formula for school districts, the rise of charter schools and the growth of partnerships between schools, nonprofits, businesses and other government agencies. You will also find reporting about new initiatives and smaller reforms throughout the EdSource site.

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June 27, 2024

California's method for funding school construction has exacerbated inequalities, many say.

Zaidee Stavely

Dozens of fixes proposed to deter more mega-cases of charter school fraud, may 7, 2024.

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How to evaluate California's groundbreaking community schools investment

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Public school choice exists in california, but few districts offer it, april 11, 2024.

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Homeless youth advocates call for dedicated state funding, local flexibility

March 20, 2024.

With the looming end to significant pandemic-era federal funding for homeless youth, advocates call for greater state support.

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Don shalvey, ‘fearless’ charter school pioneer and mentor, dies at 79, march 18, 2024.

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Research: Immigration enforcement hinders schoolwork; schools offer support 

February 16, 2024.

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Academic rigor versus cultural relevance is a false choice, february 14, 2024.

By reframing them as mutually reinforcing rather than mutually exclusive, we can transform education for every child.

Rainy day fund would bail out schools, community colleges in Newsom's 2024-25 state budget

January 10, 2024.

California faces a $38 billion state budget deficit, but, with rosier revenue estimates, it’s less than the Legislative Analyst had forecast. The rainy day fund can fill in most of the gap for schools and community colleges.

A refresher on the California School Dashboard | Quick Guide

December 15, 2023.

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It’s time to fix the fatal flaw in California education funding formula

December 12, 2023.

If we don't fix the LCFF now, schools are likely to end up with the worst of both the old and new school finance systems.

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Advanced algebra, data science and more: uc rethinks contested issues of high school math, december 8, 2023.

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On California funding formula’s 10th anniversary, celebrate progress but double down on fairness

November 29, 2023.

Local control funding operates like a dump truck, unloading extra dollars to the district — it’s not a backpack, where targeted dollars follow the child.

Bruce Fuller and Julien Lafortune

Districts groan as state board sets in motion newsom’s big changes to funding formula, november 15, 2023.

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How Federal Pandemic Aid Impacted Schools

• Posted June 26, 2024
• By Elizabeth M. Ross
• Disruption and Crises
• Education Finances
• Education Policy
• Education Reform
• Student Achievement and Outcomes

K–12 schools received nearly $190 billion in federal relief during the COVID-19 pandemic, 90% of which went directly to local districts. Financially disadvantaged districts received the most aid money, but how effective was the money at helping students make up the learning they missed during the pandemic?

Answers can be found in new research which measured the impact of the spending by looking at the average test scores in reading and math from the spring of 2022–2023, for students in grades 3–8. The researchers were not able to assess which intervention strategies were the most effective because school districts were not required to report how they spent the funds they received.

Professor Thomas Kane , economist and co-author of the new report from the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University and The Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University, explains the role that federal relief money played in the academic recovery story in 29 states.

Could you summarize what you found out about the impact of the federal relief money on student achievement during the 2022 to 2023 school year?

We found that $1,000 of federal aid per student that a district spent during the 2022–2023 school year was associated with a 0.03 grade equivalent rise in math achievement (or approximately 6 days of learning) and in reading, the effects were somewhat smaller, a 0.018 grade equivalent (or approximately 3 days of learning). So, the effects were not huge. I think readers might look at that and say, oh gosh, that's a small effect. But what people don't realize is just how strongly related to longer-term outcomes test scores are. So, although the impacts per dollar spent were not large, given the relationship between K–12 test scores and earnings later in life, our estimates imply they were large enough to justify the investment. 

In the conclusion of your report, you say that the average recovery was actually larger than what you expected based on your estimate of the effect of the spending. Why was that? 

We were surprised when we first got the 2022–2023 data and saw the total magnitude of the gains that year. They were 170% as large as the average annual improvement during the last period of rapid growth in achievement, between 1990 and 2013, in math and double the improvement in reading during that time period.

In this report, we investigated the role that the federal aid played in that growth. Our primary challenge was sorting out how much of the growth was due to spending, versus how much of the growth was related to community poverty — since poorer districts received more aid on average. We took several different approaches to doing that — for instance, using state differences in the Title I formula on which the funding was based and finding high-poverty districts which received large grants (because of the state they were in or because of anomalies in the aid formula) and similarly high-poverty districts with much smaller grants but similar prior trends in achievement. We tried multiple approaches and found similar answers each way we looked at it.

We're still surprised, partially because of the news over the past few years of districts spending the federal relief on athletics fields and across-the-board pay raises and the implementation challenges districts faced when trying to implement tutoring or recruiting students to summer school. But the dollars seem to have had an impact.

"Imagine if, at the beginning of the pandemic, the federal government did not even try to coordinate efforts to develop a vaccine. Instead, suppose they took all that money and sent it to local public health departments, saying, 'You figure it out.' Some would have succeeded, but many would have failed. That’s exactly what happened in the K–12 response."  Professor Thomas Kane

In your report you suggested that parental help at home, efforts on the part of teachers and students, and possibly increases in spending at the local level may have played a role in the recovery effort. And it's interesting because I remember the last time I talked with you , you mentioned your concerns about the lack of coordination with the spending of the federal relief money. Is that still a concern? 

Yes, in some ways the federal aid was like the first stage of a rocket — it got us started but was broadly focused and ultimately insufficient to get us all the way there. Part of that was due to a lack of coordination. Each district was developing and implementing plans largely on their own. It could have been much more effectively spent. For instance, research suggests that the cost effectiveness ratio for a high-dosage tutoring program was roughly 10 times as large as the cost effectiveness we found for each $1000 in aid spent.  

In the report, we also recommend efforts states should be doing now to continue the recovery, because it's pretty clear that there won't be another federal package, given what's happening in Washington. It’s alarming, but it’s just not on the radar screen of most governors — including here in Massachusetts, where the highest-poverty districts have actually lost additional ground since the pandemic. States have spent the last few years watching districts spend down their federal pandemic relief dollars, not recognizing that the recovery will not be complete when the federal dollars run out. Simply going back to business as usual will leave a lot of our neediest communities further behind than they were before the pandemic. So, we're hoping that these results become a call to action at the state and local level. It’s in governors and state legislators’ hands now. If they don’t step up, poor children will end up bearing the most inequitable and longest lasting burden from the pandemic. 

The aid did, by our estimates, seem to have a disproportionate effect on high-poverty districts, mostly because they got a lot more money. But that wasn't enough to completely offset the losses. The highest-poverty districts remain behind as well as the middle-income districts. The wealthiest districts we anticipate will be back to 2019 levels soon, not because they received much federal aid — they did not — but because they did not fall very far behind in the first place.

Are there lessons to be learned overall from the pandemic recovery effort? 

I do think it would have been beneficial to give federal regulators and state governments more opportunities to coordinate local efforts — like to plan statewide tutoring programs or to plan statewide summer learning programs. Most of the bigger districts would have had the staff to plan their own efforts, but the medium and smaller districts, they didn't necessarily have the bandwidth to be thinking about planning for major summer learning initiatives and tutoring programs. I think granting states, and the federal government, more say in approving local recovery plans, in ensuring that what districts were planning were sufficient to help students catch up and giving states more money to coordinate efforts would have helped. 

Imagine if, at the beginning of the pandemic, the federal government did not even try to coordinate efforts to develop a vaccine. Instead, suppose they took all that money and sent it to local public health departments, saying, “You figure it out.” Some would have succeeded, but many would have failed. That’s exactly what happened in the K–12 response. 90% of the federal aid went directly to local school districts. Some figured it out, but many did not.

States and districts should have plans on the shelf for what happens in the next pandemic. I'm sure there are individual schools that will say that they know exactly what they would do next time. But there has not been that sort of learning at the state level — since most states just took a back seat. I have not heard much planning at the state or federal level about what they would do differently next time — and how they might plan for a major tutoring initiative or assembling materials for summer learning, etc. We're not going to have better coordination next time unless somebody starts planning now. 

The latest research, perspectives, and highlights from the Harvard Graduate School of Education

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Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice: Can Historians Help School Reformers?

Historians are divided over what can be learned from history. Some find that knowing the past can inform the present. Others say that the past has no lessons to teach those living now but it is nonetheless worthwhile to recapture what occurred and their consequences.

But when policymakers, practitioners, parents, and public school students ask about the usefulness of history they want guidance from the past to avoid making mistakes now. And some even want predictions.

Historians who believe that the past can inform policy argue that even if “lessons” cannot be extracted from the past, policymakers can surely profit from looking backward. They say scholars can aid contemporary policymakers by pointing out similarities and differences between previous and current situations.

Or, of even more help to policymakers, historians can redefine existing problems and solutions by observing how similar situations were viewed by a previous generation. Finally, without stooping to offer “lessons,” historians can alert policymakers to what did not work, what might be preferable and what to avoid under certain conditions.

Other historians reject the notion that history can, or even should, serve the present. These historians point to their obligations as professionals to be disinterested in contemporary policies. Scholars must bring to bear their knowledge of the past and their craft in handling documents without paying attention to the present moment. Not to do so can corrupt their professional impartiality. Moreover, these historians point to the uniqueness of a past event—say, the war in Vietnam–that is seldom identical or even sufficiently similar for policy makers to compare with explosive situations such as the invasion of Iraq or nearly two decades of war in Afghanistan.

More specifically, there are contemporary situations for which no historical analogy can be drawn: To what, for example, can the collapse of Soviet communism in the early 1990s be compared?

Historians bothered about reading the present into the past also argue that policy-driven colleagues ask questions that are too tightly tethered to contemporary issues and heavily influenced by the scholars’ values and experiences. Some policy-oriented historians, for example, ask: Why do public schools seemingly fail to improve student achievement? They then search the past for answers to a question that few educators, parents, or policymakers ever asked in 1880, 1920, and 1950,

Historians uninterested in connecting the past to current policy issues call scholars who seek to influence reformers  presentists , researchers who read the present into the past, and, in doing so, distort history to fit contemporary situations. Historians should write history for history’s sake.

At times, I have leaned toward those who claim that scholars must disengage from contemporary policy issues when investigating the past because history seldom teaches explicit lessons. Still, more often than not, I find myself in the camp of policy-relevant historians. As a teacher, superintendent, and policymaker for a quarter-century before becoming a professor, my values and experiences shaped the questions that I have asked over the last two decades–many of which connect policy to practice.

The path I have chosen, however, has been troublesome. The tug of reading the present into the past is strong and unyielding even when I scrutinize high school yearbooks from the 1920s in the dank basement of a district office building. Resisting the temptation to select only those historical records and incidents that fit the contemporary scene or bolster a bias is a constant struggle. I have to constantly remind myself to take the past on its own terms, to welcome the document that challenges my beliefs or to spend more time investigating an event that undermines thoroughly what I had found. Juggling professional duties to the craft and discipline with insistent impulses to shape stories that fit particular contemporary policies consistent with my values is–in a trite phrase–hard work.

None of this would surprise colleagues deeply committed to both scholarship and improving schools. It is unsurprising because the public school, a core institution in a market-driven democratic society, has had a checkered history of being drafted again and again to uplift the lives of individual students and improve a society blessed by prosperity and freedom yet wracked by social ills and inequities. Historians of education, perhaps more so than other historians, particularly if their formative experiences included working in schools, have had to contend with this dilemma of hewing to scholarly obligations while seeking improved schools.

The compromise I have worked out draws from historian David Tyack’s conclusion that contemporary decision-makers already have a picture in their minds of what the past was like. Accurate or not, they will formulate policy based on those blurred images of the past.*

Like Tyack, I believe that more accurate renderings of the past than currently exist can inform the present not by prescribing particular policies but in helping educational decision makers and reformers, again in Tyack’s words: “not only to  use a sense  of the past (which they do willy-nilly) but also to  make sense  of it.” And that is how I believe historians can help school reformers. **

______________________________________

*David Tyack was my doctoral adviser at Stanford University (1972-1974).  He was also a close friend after I joined the faculty in 1981. Besides team teaching courses, I also joined him in his passion for biking up mountains and riding to the ocean for over three decades. David Tyack died in 2016.

**David Tyack, “The High School as a Social Service Agency: Historical Perspectives on Current Policy Issues,”  Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis , vol. 1 (no.5), p. 56, 1979.

This blog post has been shared by permission from the author. Readers wishing to comment on the content are encouraged to do so via the link to the original post. Find the original post here:

The views expressed by the blogger are not necessarily those of NEPC.

Larry Cuban

Rick Hess Straight Up

Education policy maven Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute think tank offers straight talk on matters of policy, politics, research, and reform. Read more from this blog.

What Is School Reform, Anyway?

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I was chatting with a reporter the other day who asked me why it seems like we hear a lot less about school reform than we did just a few years ago. It’s an interesting question and one that I hope to dig into sometime soon. But it also got us onto the interesting tangent of: “What is school reform, anyway?”

The term “school reform” tends to take on a very particular meaning at different points in time. Today, the school reform mantle is less visible than it’s been for a long time. And the school reformers have a new playbook. Instead of standards or teacher evaluation, “reform” circa 2022—at least according to the advocacy groups, funders, and conference conveners who once fetishized that other stuff—is now centered on issues like social and emotional learning, teacher retention, and “anti-racist” education.

Obviously, it wasn’t always thus. For much of the 2010s, “reformers” were the people who supported things like charter schooling, accountability, test-based teacher evaluation, and the Common Core State Standards.

In earlier eras, other reform orthodoxies have prevailed. A century ago, the list would’ve included “scientific management,” regular testing, sorting students by IQ, and depoliticizing school boards. In the 1980s, it would’ve included a more demanding high school curriculum, career ladders for teachers, a longer school year, and tougher teacher-certification tests.

But, at least in my mind, these various recitals of programs and policies don’t actually equate to “reform.” Why not? Well, it’ll make a little more sense if I first say a bit about why I became a “reformer” in the first place (spoiler: it had nothing to do with today’s reform litany nor with those earlier ones). The short version: It’s mostly because, as a student, a teacher, and a trainer of teachers, I found too many classrooms and schools to be spirit-eroding and mind-numbing. Bells rang, students took their seats, and minutes ticked by.

And it’s partly because I experienced and saw classrooms that were wholly different—places where students felt valued, inspired, and challenged. Most of us picture a particular classroom when we say that. For me, it was Selma Ziff’s 6th grade at Pine Ridge Elementary in Virginia, a room that was a whirlwind of math drills, Shakespearean plays, schemes to colonize Mars, and probability learned by gambling with M&Ms. It was a relentless, joyous race to learn. It was what school should be. Hell, it was what childhood should be.

For me, reform has never been about anything as high-flown as “social justice.” It’s been about wanting more classrooms to resemble the ones I loved and frustration that we weren’t making that happen.

It’s long seemed clear to me that we could do much better. Better at igniting imagination. At helping students master world languages. At teaching science and history. At instilling a sense of civic responsibility. At ensuring that all students are literate and numerate. At cultivating interest in the arts. At raising kids who are kind and curious. But it’s seemed equally clear that doing this will require allowing ourselves to reimagine and rethink schooling.

Too often, in their well-meaning focus on achievement gaps, curricular agendas, and equitable staffing models, reformers can seem remarkably unbothered that so many students find school tedious and mind-numbing. I’ve found that tedium and boredom are rarely front and center except when they’re linked to issues of poverty or race. That’s nuts. These broad-based frustrations ought to be at the beating heart of reform.

And yet reform is too often a spinning wheel of one reform after another, all of it serving to exhaust educators and breed cynicism. Teachers learn to shut their doors while muttering, “This too shall pass.” Through the decades, I’ve learned that reform done poorly is often worse than no reform at all and that the real challenge is more often one of execution than of action.

So what is true school reform, the kind that actually helps kids? Sometimes, I think it’s nothing more than having the courage to resist the groupthink of the moment, embrace first principles, and remember that school improvement is ultimately about the human dynamics of teachers and students.

The opinions expressed in Rick Hess Straight Up are strictly those of the author(s) and do not reflect the opinions or endorsement of Editorial Projects in Education, or any of its publications.

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Research identifies school reform strategies that actually work.

For years, education leaders have tried to push school reforms that have ultimately failed. It's time for a new approach.

So said Gary Ravani, 35-year veteran public school teacher and president of the California Federation of Teachers' Early Childhood/K-12 Council, in his article featured in The Washington Post . 

"It's time for policymakers to look at reforms that have actually succeeded in raising achievement for challenged populations of students," he said. 

Ravani, citing a study by the Consortium on Chicago School Research featured in Organizing Schools for Improvement , said schools with similar demographics saw dissimilar outcomes. 

"Reform strategies outlined in this post are models of reform demonstrated to work," Ravani said. "These emphasize the importance of school leadership that can organize teachers, parents and communities around a consensus-based goal. All emphasize that key supports must be in place for teachers and students. Such reform does not scapegoat teachers or demonize their unions. All provide evidence that it is time to stop banging our heads against the wall of false reform and begin implementing reform that works."

Read the full story. 

Article by Kassondra Granata, EducationWorld Contributor

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Sign up for our free weekly newsletter and receive top education news, lesson ideas, teaching tips and more! No thanks, I don't need to stay current on what works in education! COPYRIGHT 1996-2016 BY EDUCATION WORLD, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. COPYRIGHT 1996 - 2024 BY EDUCATION WORLD, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. SchoolNotes.com The Educator's Network LIVE @ ISTE 2024: Exclusive Coverage Ten of the best school-reform ideas from readers It seems like everyone has an opinion these days on what it will take to “fix” American public education. But research suggests that many of the ideas being touted by some of the leading school-reform advocates—such as merit pay , charter schools , and value-added assessment of teachers—have seen mixed results at best. Recently, we asked readers, via our newsletters: “If you could recommend only one idea for school reform, what would it be and why?” Here, we present—from No. 10 to No. 1—the best, most original, and most honest answers we received in response. What do you think of these ideas? And, what ideas of your own would you like to share? Leave your thoughts in the comments section of this story. Go to page 2 to begin the list… 10. Get disruptive student behavior under control. Our recent story “ Teacher who video-recorded disruptive student suing over job loss ” touched a nerve with readers, many of whom expressed sympathy for the teacher in question and noted that students cannot learn when others are disrupting class. Better training for both teachers and administrators in how to deal with disruptive students—and support from administrators in removing these students from the classroom when necessary—would go a long way toward improving achievement, many readers noted. Vinny Esposito, a former teacher and counselor, said he would recommend “a behavior specialist team to determine how best to meet the needs of disruptive students.” He added: “Such students must be removed from the classroom, decide to enjoy learning, or be placed in alternative programs.” 9. Hold students to higher standards of learning … without the draconian consequences for failure that encourage schools to ‘bend the rules.’ While the No Child Left Behind Act has drawn attention to the needs of students who often were marginalized in the past, its heavy sanctions for schools not meeting Adequate Yearly Progress in every subgroup has led to a “dumbing down” of standards to ensure that more students pass. Finding a better balance between flexibility and accountability would allow states and school districts to adhere to more rigorous standards without the fear of losing funding as a result, says Emil Butler of the Grayson County Day Report Center. “‘No Child Left Behind’ seems to mean ‘no child held accountable to any meaningful level of academic achievement,’” Bulter wrote. “Our schools now have no fewer than seven types of high school diploma. The lowest of these is commonly referred to as the ‘breath diploma’; if they can put breath on a mirror, they can get a diploma. I deal with convicted felons on a daily basis, and I am appalled at the number of young adults who have high school diplomas but cannot read. In fact, many can hardly write their own names. Most of these folks have convictions for drug-related offenses, and most do not have, and have never had, employment of any consequence. Little wonder, since it would be impossible for them to even complete an employment application. Equally astonishing is the fact that, as reported by the Associated Press in December 2010, almost 25 percent of recent high school graduates fail the U.S. Army entrance test (a passing score for the Army is 31 out of 99; higher scores are required for the other branches of service). The article notes that a typical question is: ‘If 2 plus X equals 4, what is the value of X?’” He concluded: “I’m afraid that ‘No Child Left Behind’ is ensuring that our country is being left behind.” 8.Get rid of grade levels. Some forward-thinking school systems, such as the Kansas City, Missouri, School District , have begun experimenting with the concept of grouping students by ability instead of age—an idea that Kurt D. Steinbach, a social studies, ESL, and ELA teacher, agrees with wholeheartedly. “End age grading. In other words, end the practice whereby students are assigned and assumed to be in or on their proper grade level according to their age instead of their (demonstrated) ability level,” he wrote. “No more age grading would eliminate the need for social promotion and the stigma associated with being held back. With students at different ‘grade levels’ in each subject area, the problems for students not reading and writing at the 3rd grade level by the end of the 3rd grade (after which students take two years to catch up for every year they fall behind) would disappear.” 7. Raise the bar on teacher (and administrator) certification. Higher standards for becoming a teacher or school administrator was an idea favored by Atila Mantels, an editor and public relations chair for Kiwanis Club of Pulaski Heights in Little Rock, Ark. “Do not issue a teaching certificate to anyone who cannot score at least 19 on all four sections (English, math, reading, science) of the ACT—this score is slightly below the ‘grade-level’ score for high school seniors,” Mantel wrote. “Ideally, the same requirement would apply to anyone serving as an administrator within the educational system. Though my suggestion for educational reform comes at least two decades too late for implementation, it still targets the essential problem of an entrenched educational bureaucracy staffed by undereducated educators.” 6. Open community-based computer centers so children from low-income families aren’t left behind. “Create computer centers, staffed by trained, paid teachers in community centers and churches that are in our poorest neighborhoods,” recommended Terri Yearicks, network manager and ITV director for Griffin Elementary School in Florida. “The biggest trend I see is the incorporation of online education [in] K-12. In fact, here in Florida, it has become state law that every student take one online class in order to graduate high school. While the idea is good, it does not provide computers and internet access to our many poor students. I work at a Title 1 school with an 83-percent poverty level, so I speak from experience. These centers need to be totally funded, including the teacher’s salary of no less than $20 an hour, by local businesses. The businesses would then have better trained young people and would receive a tax write-off for their involvement in the project. In addition, teachers struggling to make ends meet can choose to work the few extra hours a day to supplement their waning income. Plus, this would give our poorest students access to technology so that truly, NO child will be left behind!” 5. Invest more money in school librarians and media centers. At a time when many school districts are cutting school librarian positions to close widening budget gaps, reader Rebecca Vasilakis believes districts should be doing the exact opposite. Well-trained librarians and well-stocked school media centers, she says, are essential for helping students learn key information literacy skills—and for helping teachers integrating digital resources into their instruction. “I would upgrade or place in every school a school library media center that functions as a Learning Commons and staff it with a school librarian (teacher librarian [or] library media specialist) who takes learning into the 21st century,” Vasilakis wrote. 4. Move from seat time to learning competency as a basis for student promotion. Competency-based learning is “a fundamental reform, a requirement for next-generation learning, and creates a student-centered focus that changes all of our assumptions about the current system—allowing students to move on when ready,” says Susan Patrick, executive director of the International Association for K-12 Online Learning and a former ed-tech director for the U.S. Department of Education. 3. Boost students’ access to the internet at school and at home. An earlier suggestion was to make sure there are computer centers for students in low-income areas—but William Burkhead, assistant principal at Plymouth North High School in Massachusetts, would take that one step further. “Get every student in America online access at school and at home,” he wrote. “The World Wide Web represents a fountain of knowledge, in the form of information, research, innovation, communication, and growth. I believe this to be a fundamental right of ALL students. Kids without access to the WWW are at a distinct disadvantage and represent the chasm we have in achievement gaps. This is a solid starting point for reform, as it levels the playing field for all students. Before we can talk about having an iPad in every student’s hand at school, let’s make sure every student has access to the world [from wherever they are].” 2. Less testing, more creativity and inspiration. “Let teachers teach. Education is too involved in testing, as if test scores are the goal of education,” wrote David Wickemeyer, student magazine advisor and technology volunteer at Union Middle School in San Jose, Calif. “Testing cannot score creativity, insight, [or] new ways of looking at things—these are the skills more important in the real word.” He continued: “Employers don’t care if you scored a 689 on SAT Math Level II. They want to know if you can solve problems, see a project though, come up with new ideas, even work well with others (not a socialist idea alone). If I was Harry Potter, with my magic wand, I would free all teachers from the bonds of standardized testing (which isn’t standardized at all) and let them freely teach.” 1. Help policy makers truly understand the needs and challenges of public schools—and their students. Virginia Anderson, district instructional technologist for Columbus Independent School District in Texas, had what might be the best idea for fostering real school reform that works: “All legislators should be required to teach for one day in an elementary classroom.” Sign up for our K-12 newsletter Recent Posts Study from EPS Learning on Improving Literacy Outcomes for Special Education Students Meets ESSA Level 3 Evidence Standards - June 28, 2024 Casio America Relaunches Casioeducation.Com - June 27, 2024 ColdVentures Unveils First-of-its-Kind, Class 1 FDA Medical Device ColdVest to Prevent Heat-Related Deaths - June 27, 2024 Want to share a great resource? Let us know at [email protected] . Comments are closed. Username or Email Address Remember Me " * " indicates required fields eSchool News uses cookies to improve your experience. Visit our Privacy Policy  for more information. Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World Read our research on: Full Topic List Regions & Countries Publications Our Methods Short Reads Tools & Resources Read Our Research On: 72% of U.S. high school teachers say cellphone distraction is a major problem in the classroom New York Gov. Kathy Hochul recently announced that she will introduce legislation to ban smartphones in schools during her state’s 2025 legislative session. She cited the impact that social media and technology can have on youth, including leaving them “cut off from human connection, social interaction and normal classroom activity.” Hochul’s legislative push comes as K-12 teachers in the United States face challenges around students’ cellphone use, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in fall 2023. One-third of public K-12 teachers say students being distracted by cellphones is a major problem in their classroom, and another 20% say it’s a minor problem. Following news that New York Gov. Kathy Hochul is seeking to ban smartphones in schools, Pew Research Center published this analysis to examine how K-12 teachers and teens in the United States feel about cellphones, including the use of cellphones at school. This analysis is based on two recent Center surveys, one of public K-12 teachers in the U.S. and the other of U.S. teens ages 13 to 17. More information about these surveys, including their field dates, sample sizes and other methodological details, is available at the links in the text. High school teachers are especially likely to see cellphones as problematic. About seven-in-ten (72%) say that students being distracted by cellphones is a major problem in their classroom, compared with 33% of middle school teachers and 6% of elementary school teachers. Many schools and districts have tried to address this challenge by implementing cellphone policies , such as requiring students to turn off their phones during class or give them to administrators during the school day. Overall, 82% of K-12 teachers in the U.S. say their school or district has a cellphone policy of some kind. Middle school teachers (94%) are especially likely to say this, followed by elementary (84%) and high school (71%) teachers. However, 30% of teachers whose schools or districts have cellphone policies say they are very or somewhat difficult to enforce. High school teachers are more likely than their peers to report that enforcing these policies is difficult. Six-in-ten high school teachers in places with a cellphone policy say this, compared with 30% of middle school teachers and 12% of elementary school teachers. Our survey asked teachers about cellphones in general, whereas Hochul’s plan would apply only to smartphones. Even so, nearly all U.S. teenagers ages 13 to 17 – 95% – say they have access to a smartphone , according to a separate Center survey from 2023. Even as some policymakers and teachers see downsides to smartphones, teens tend to view the devices as a more positive than negative thing in their lives overall. Seven-in-ten teens ages 13 to 17 say there are generally more benefits than harms to people their age using smartphones , while three-in-ten say the opposite. And 45% of teens say smartphones make it easier for people their age to do well in school, compared with 23% who say they make it harder. Another 30% say smartphones don’t affect teens’ success in school. Smartphones Jenn Hatfield is a writer/editor at Pew Research Center . U.S. public, private and charter schools in 5 charts A quarter of u.s. teachers say ai tools do more harm than good in k-12 education, most americans think u.s. k-12 stem education isn’t above average, but test results paint a mixed picture, about 1 in 4 u.s. teachers say their school went into a gun-related lockdown in the last school year, about half of americans say public k-12 education is going in the wrong direction, most popular. 1615 L St. NW, Suite 800 Washington, DC 20036 USA (+1) 202-419-4300 | Main (+1) 202-857-8562 | Fax (+1) 202-419-4372 |  Media Inquiries Research Topics Email Newsletters ABOUT PEW RESEARCH CENTER  Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. It conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis and other empirical social science research. Pew Research Center does not take policy positions. It is a subsidiary of  The Pew Charitable Trusts . © 2024 Pew Research Center Three years after police reforms, Black Bostonians report harassment and lack of trust at higher rates than other groups A survey of Bostonians found wide disparities in the ways different racial groups experience their relationship with law enforcement, and negative interactions are also associated with trauma and chronic health conditions.  Three years after sweeping law enforcement reforms were enacted in Boston to address long-standing concerns of unequal treatment, there is still a striking difference in the way Bostonians of different races experience their interactions with their city’s police force, according to new findings from a team of Harvard Kennedy School researchers.  Not only did the research find large racial disparities in reports of police harassment and in trust in law enforcement, but it also showed a strong association between negative interactions with police and trauma and chronic health conditions. The report was conducted by a research team at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Program in Criminal Justice (PCJ) and was led by Sandra Susan Smith , the Daniel and Florence Guggenheim Professor of Criminal Justice at HKS. Smith is faculty chair of PCJ and director of the Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy . The team surveyed a representative sample of 1,407 Boston residents—including 286 Black, 245 Latino, 143 Asian American and Pacific Islander, and 667 white residents—about their contact with, and trust in, law enforcement, and about the impacts that those encounters have on their lives and their communities. The survey was conducted in January and February of 2024. The survey’s key findings include: Black Bostonians report various types of police harassment at much higher rates than non-Black Bostonians. In contrast to non-Black Bostonians, Black Bostonians feel a deep distrust towards law enforcement, and their distrust is strongly associated with experiences of police harassment. More than half of Boston residents report that law enforcement has made their community feel safer, but rates vary by race/ethnicity and are informed by experiences of police harassment and harassment perceived to be racially motivated. Among Bostonians, police harassment isn’t just predictive of distrust and feelings of community safety, it is also predictive of symptoms of trauma, especially so for Boston’s Black men. For some Bostonians, most notably AAPI residents, police harassment and associated distrust and trauma symptoms are linked with chronic health conditions. In June 2020, Boston’s then-mayor Marty Walsh formed a task force to review Boston Police policies and procedures. The move was part of a national reexamination of policing following George Floyd’s murder in May 2020 and the wave of national protests and outrage that followed. The task force recommendations, ultimately accepted by the mayor, included expanding the use of body-worn cameras; diversifying the police force and creating a culture of inclusion and belonging; engaging officers in implicit-bias training; creating an independent oversight review board; and enhancing police use-of-force policies. “All things considered, are there any signs to suggest that law enforcement officers treat Black residents of Boston the same as people from other racial and ethnic groups?” the report asks. “Based on results of analysis of these survey data, we have little reason to believe that Black Bostonians are treated the same as people from other racial and ethnic groups. “Racial disparities in police harassment, including harassment perceived to be racially motivated, are large and consistent with police patterns and practices in Boston described by many in the Black community in the years and decades before George Floyd’s murder, during that year of global protest, and in the years since. It is unclear that reforms responding to Boston’s racial reckoning have done much to alter these very troubling and long-standing patterns.” “The social costs associated with police harassment are far greater than we have imagined, extending well beyond penal system outcomes and distrust in law enforcement to include trauma and chronic health conditions.” Sandra susan smith. The survey also sought to measure the extent to which encounters with police were linked with mental health vulnerabilities. They asked respondents to remember an experience with police and then were asked the extent to which they agreed with a series of statements that might be indicative of trauma. “Black Bostonians responded affirmatively to a greater number of these statements,” the report found. While, on average, Latinos, AAPI, and white Bostonians agreed with 1.1, 1,  and 1.2 statements affirmatively, Black residents responded yes to 1.8. “Further, it is not just that a significantly lower percentage of Black Bostonians responded ‘no’ to all the trauma statements—43% relative to 65%, 63%, and 51% of Latino, AAPI, and White residents, respectively—it is also that a significantly higher percentage of Black Bostonians responded ‘yes’ to between 3 and 6 statements—34% relative to 20% of the other racial/ethnic groups.” “A growing body of research links aggressive policing to poor mental and physical health outcomes in communities targeted for such interventions,” according to the report. “In fact, in addition to mental health vulnerabilities like depression and PTSD-like symptoms, aggressive policing practices have been linked to high blood pressure, diabetes, and obesity/overweight.” While the analysis “produced several statistically significant findings, they are not always in the direction we would predict, and the strongest associations are not necessarily for the groups we might expect.” For example, “among Black Bostonians, self-reported high blood pressure is negatively associated with both racially motivated police harassment and distrust; a lower percentage of those who reported racially motivated police harassment and distrust also reported having high blood pressure. The opposite is true for AAPI residents, however; self-reported high blood pressure is positively associated not only with police harassment and racially motivated police harassment but also with trauma symptoms. Among Latino residents, distrust in the police is associated with high blood pressure as well.” “As with prior research conducted in other cities, findings from this Boston-based study suggest that the social costs associated with police harassment are far greater than we have imagined, extending well beyond penal system outcomes and distrust in law enforcement to include trauma and chronic health conditions,” Smith said. “Thus, even while Boston should be celebrated for the low rates at which its residents die immediately after contact with law enforcement, we should acknowledge and address the extent to which the slow violence of police harassment and the trauma and chronic health conditions it produces diminishes both the quality and likely the length of Bostonians’ lives, especially so for Bostonians of color, and particularly for its Black residents.”  _ Photography Photo by Matthew J. Lee/The Boston Globe via Getty Images. More from HKS Want a jury to be fair, impartial, and engaged in higher-quality deliberations diversify the jury pool, harvard researchers say., experts argue that more work is needed to remove the stigma of a criminal record on job applications, history, culture, and policy all influence the state of black america and democracy today, hks faculty explain. Get smart & reliable public policy insights right in your inbox.  Midwest Center for AIDS Research to help end regional HIV epidemic St. Louis-based center unites scientists, public health experts, nonprofits to fight virus Since the peak of the AIDS epidemic, the U.S. has achieved significant advancements in preventing and treating HIV, though progress has been uneven across regions and slower than necessary. In Missouri, where the number of new HIV diagnoses and deaths has not improved since 2017, there is a need to recapture momentum in addressing the disease. In a bid to jump-start the stalled campaign against HIV in the region, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and Saint Louis University plan to establish the Midwest Developmental Center for AIDS Research with funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The center, slated to open in September, will aim to create a platform for researchers and public health workers to collaborate and coordinate their efforts to fight the HIV epidemic together. “There’s a public perception that we’re on the other side of the HIV epidemic,” said  Elvin Geng, MD , a Washington University professor of medicine who will direct the new center. “St. Louis continues to have a significant HIV epidemic. One problem we face here in St. Louis is that the scientific and public health communities are strong but siloed. The goal of this center is to break down those siloes so we can all work together more effectively to end the HIV epidemic in the region.” Every year, about 500 people are newly diagnosed with HIV in Missouri, and nearly 200 die of disease related to HIV infection. Thirteen of the U.S. counties identified by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to be at highest risk of an HIV outbreak are in Missouri. Most people in the state get diagnosed late in the disease process, after their immune cells have begun to die off. This pattern of late diagnosis suggests that the official numbers probably underestimate the true infection rate in the state. Worse, it means that many people who could benefit from HIV treatment are not receiving it, which threatens their health and hinders efforts to limit the spread of the virus. The NIH established the Centers for AIDS Research (CFAR) program in 1988 to promote high-quality research to combat the AIDS epidemic, which was then raging out of control. Over the years, 19 CFARs have been established throughout the country. The new center in St. Louis is a developmental CFAR, meaning it is in a five-year initiation phase. “This center is built on collaboration between our regional universities,” said Enbal Shacham, PhD, a professor of behavioral science and health equity at Saint Louis University and the associate director of the center. “It will focus our efforts to grow research on HIV prevention, care and treatment to our St. Louis region together. I am thrilled to lead the Saint Louis University partnership particularly because of the opportunities this creates for our communities in improving HIV-related health equity and outcomes.” The mission of the CFAR program is to provide a framework to bring the people who conduct the research into conversation with the people who are fighting the epidemic on the ground. To that end, Geng and center co-director  Juliet Iwelunmor, PhD , a professor of medicine at Washington University, have pulled together a stakeholder advisory committee including representatives from the city and state health departments, as well as from Fast-Track Cities St. Louis, the local branch of an international campaign to end the HIV/AIDS epidemic by 2030, and the Metro St. Louis HIV Health Services Planning Council. The center will institute a variety of programs to enhance collaboration including: Show Me the Response, an annual regional symposium that will give scientists and public health practitioners the opportunity to meet in person and share data and insights. Partner Pilot Awards, which will go to research teams co-led by investigators from traditional research universities and nonresearch organizations. Internship opportunities at the city’s Department of Health for students from Harris-Stowe State University, a historically Black university. “The Midwest Center for AIDS Research will help diversify the approach to, and the leaders engaged in, efforts to mitigate the AIDS epidemic,” said Harvey R. Fields Jr., PhD, dean of the College of STEM at Harris-Stowe. “The inclusion of Harris-Stowe State University leverages institutional strengths, enhances institutional capability and provides Harris-Stowe’s developing health-care scholars with opportunity to make meaningful contributions to their own communities even as undergraduates.” In addition, the center will participate in the  STAR  (Stimulating Training and Access to HIV Research Experiences) program, an innovative, multicenter, yearlong educational program that aims to develop the next generation of HIV research leaders by training undergraduate and graduate students in problem-based and bottom-up strategies for HIV-prevention research using community assets and resources to enhance efforts to end the HIV epidemic. The center will be based in St. Louis and initially will focus on building relationships within the city and county. Over the longer term, the center will expand into outlying counties to address the state’s significant rural epidemic as well. Dima Dandachi, MD, the medical director for the Columbia/Boone County Public Health and Human Services Department in central Missouri and the medical director of the HIV/AIDS treatment and prevention program at University of Missouri Health Care, sits on the center’s scientific working group to help guide research priorities. The center aims to support HIV research at all levels, from laboratory experiments to community program pilots. To ensure that research funded by the center will answer the questions most critical to public health efforts and to people living with HIV, projects will be selected by a committee composed of people from academic and nonacademic organizations. “Ending the HIV epidemic in the Midwest region demands that we, the public health communities, scientific communities as well as everyday citizens and persons living with HIV, all work together as partners and leaders,” Iwelunmor said. About Washington University School of Medicine WashU Medicine  is a global leader in academic medicine, including biomedical research, patient care and educational programs with 2,900 faculty. Its National Institutes of Health (NIH) research funding portfolio is the second largest among U.S. medical schools and has grown 56% in the last seven years. Together with institutional investment, WashU Medicine commits well over $1 billion annually to basic and clinical research innovation and training. Its faculty practice is consistently within the top five in the country, with more than 1,900 faculty physicians practicing at 130 locations and who are also the medical staffs of  Barnes-Jewish  and  St. Louis Children’s  hospitals of  BJC HealthCare . WashU Medicine has a storied history in MD/PhD training, recently dedicated $100 million to scholarships and curriculum renewal for its medical students, and is home to top-notch training programs in every medical subspecialty as well as physical therapy, occupational therapy, and audiology and communications sciences. Originally published on the School of Medicine website Comments and respectful dialogue are encouraged, but content will be moderated. Please, no personal attacks, obscenity or profanity, selling of commercial products, or endorsements of political candidates or positions. We reserve the right to remove any inappropriate comments. We also cannot address individual medical concerns or provide medical advice in this forum. You Might Also Like Latest from the Newsroom Recent stories. Moon ‘swirls’ could be magnetized by unseen magmas WashU Medicine launches Center for Translational Bioinformatics Anderson honored with Gloria White Award WashU Experts Ten Commandments display probably not legal Social workers key to psychedelic-assisted therapies DeFake tool protects voice recordings from cybercriminals WashU in the News Here’s What the Court’s Chevron Ruling Could Mean in Everyday Terms New Study Uncovers An Alarming Consequence Of Chronic Loneliness The brain makes a lot of waste. Now scientists think they know where it goes Jay Z wants school vouchers in Pa. The move is 'infuriating' to some. Philadelphia parents learned about school choice on Friday at a lunch provided by an unusual benefactor: Jay Z's entertainment company Roc Nation. The A-lister is making his final push in a campaign to urge Pennsylvania lawmakers to spend millions on school vouchers ahead of the state's budget deadline, June 30. The vouchers would entitle families to use public funds traditionally used for public schools toward private and parochial schools. Jay Z's New York-based entertainment company announced this month it was backing a $100 million private school choice program in Pennsylvania. Desiree Perez, Roc Nation's CEO, said the state's public school system doesn't work for some disadvantaged students, and their families deserve unfettered access to alternative options, including high-performing private schools. "It's an immediate need," Perez said. Jay Z was not available to comment. The free meals, training sessions, advertising and advocacy from the entertainment mogul sparked criticism from public school advocates and national figures who said school vouchers hurt students of color and low-income students. They worry that public schools will lose vital funding: They said schools need all the cash they can get. A recent court ruling indicates the state has not provided sufficient resources for all students. The Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania ruled last year that the state's funding system was fundamentally unfair to public school students , and the court directed the state to increase public school funding. Also, earlier this month, the state House passed a plan to spend billions more in state funds on public schools, the Associated Press reported . Amid the added pressure from the court, the state's impending decisions about spending on public education could be a "historic moment," said Dan Urevick-Ackelsberg, a senior attorney at the Public Interest Law Center which sued the state, alleging unfair funding. He said he and others will "be back in court" if they feel the state doesn't allocate fair funding in its budget decisions. After the legal victory against the school system, Urevick-Ackelsberg said, Jay Z's activism comes at a particularly inopportune moment. The lawyers, he said, were "right on the verge" of overhauling Pennsylvania's system of education "when an out-of-state billionaire comes in and says, instead 'Let's enact school vouchers.' It's crazy ... infuriating." Roc Nation officials have said they also support public schools, but the organization backs school choice as "a strategic, near-term solution" to help low-performing kids. The argument over vouchers has been around for years. Many states recently passed laws expanding school choice, through vouchers, education savings accounts, refundable tax credits and tax-credit scholarships. President Donald Trump signed an executive order in 2020 allowing states to spend federal funds on school vouchers during the COVID-19 pandemic. Many Republican lawmakers , conservative parents rights groups like Moms for Liberty and other school choice advocates say parents should have access to all options when deciding where to send their kids to school. What Jay Z said about school access Roc Nation announced earlier this month it would support several Pennsylvania bills calling for funding that could be used toward private schools. The company hosted informational sessions in Philadelphia to teach parents and voters about the Pennsylvania Award for Student Success program, encouraging them to share their support for it with legislators. If the measure passes, the program would grant scholarships to families of students at the state's lowest-performing schools. These families could use the funds to attend private schools and to cover other school-related fees. State Sen. Patrick Stefano, a Republican from Western Pennsylvania, sponsored one of the measures, which calls for taxpayer funding. The state's Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro has also said he supports the Stefano bill, according to Chalkbeat Philadelphia . A related bill was introduced by Democratic Sen. Tony Williams of Philadelphia. It calls for $300 million towards school choice scholarships instead of the $100 million in the measure Jay Z has publicly backed. The program Jay Z is backing is also supported by Republican billionaire, megadonor and voucher advocate Jeffrey Yass . Roc Nation has previously contributed to private schools through the company's Shawn Carter scholarship program , which grants eligible students money for tuition and other school costs, Perez said. The case against vouchers One of the largest teachers unions in the nation and the largest in Pennsylvania both said the state should focus on funding the public school system. Following Jay Z's announcement supporting school vouchers, Randi Weingarten , head of The American Federation of Teachers, wrote in a statement: "Vouchers are, in effect, a tax cut for the rich – with most going to wealthy families who have never even been part of the public school system. They are bankrupting state budgets and leading to closed schools and programs – in Florida and elsewhere." "Instead of spending billions on vouchers in Philly, we should be strengthening and investing in public schools so all kids can thrive," Weingarten said. Aaron Chapin, president of the Pennsylvania State Education Association, has said the state should focus on funding its public schools. "We shouldn’t even think about sending taxpayer money to private and religious schools when our focus should be on fixing Pennsylvania’s unconstitutional public school funding system,” Chapin wrote. The fundamental questions for families should be what entity should be providing public education and the purpose of public education, said Erika K. Wilson, a law professor and education researcher focused on equity issues at the University of North Carolina School of Law. The purpose should be to make Americans better citizens and improve our democracy, and public schooling is the avenue for that, she said. Black parents have a legitimate gripe about the low performance rates and underfunding of their public schools, she said, and Jay Z and Roc Nation's support for private schools as an alternative might look good on its face. But market mechanisms for education are infused with a lot of racial bias, hurt Black communities, in her view. "If Jay Z really wanted to help, why not partner with public schools and create community schools with wraparound services?" she said. What’s new in the school voucher discussion? School choice programs in the U.S. date back to at least 1869. That year Vermont created its town-tuition program , which provided scholarships to students in towns without public schools, which could be used at public or private schools. In 1991, Wisconsin implemented the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, the first modern school voucher program, according to the nonprofit EdChoice. The program grants low- and middle-income families educational vouchers to pay for private schools "they couldn't otherwise afford," according to School Choice Wisconsin. More recently, school choice advocates won support for state-funded voucher and educational scholarship programs with backing from parents upset about COVID-19 pandemic-related closures. Some parents unenrolled their kids from their neighborhood public schools and moved them to other types of schools, including private schools, home schools and charter schools. Many kept them in those schools , and some in states with voucher and scholarship programs have used state dollars to pay for alternative options. What it means for students and schools: School choice remains popular following COVID closures At least 29 states and the District of Columbia have some form of school choice program, according an Education Week analysis . This year at least six states – Alabama , Louisiana , Georgia , Missouri , Nebraska and Utah – enacted new school choice programs or expanded previously existing ones, according to the nonprofit EdChoice, which supports school choice. EdChoice is tracking 83 bills in 30 states this year related to education savings accounts, vouchers, refundable tax credits and tax-credit scholarships, said Chantal Lovell Fennell, a spokesperson for the organization. What research reveals about voucher programs Roc Nation's position on school choice is idealistic but not realistic, said Kevin Welner, a professor of educational policy and law at the University of Colorado Boulder. Research has shown that students who use voucher programs to leave a public school and attend a private school do worse academically, especially in math, Welner said. He cited several studies , including one that showed students who participated in the Indiana Choice Scholarship Program performed worse in mathematics during their first year attending a private school compared with similar students who remained in public schools. "From my perspective as a researcher, it's incomprehensible that we’re still pursuing these policies that are showing to be so harmful," Welner said. "The explanation for that, I think, is that billionaires really love the idea, like Jeffrey Yass. I think of Betsy Devos pushing it for years, and Donald Trump, and now we have Jay Z." School choice legislation is being pushed, he thinks, "not because of evidence, but because of a lot of billionaires who have a lot of wealthy interests in them." "Part of it is I think is an ideological faith in getting rid of public institutions and moving toward a deregulated free market," Welner said. Joshua Cowan, an education policy professor who has spent nearly two decades studying choice programs, cited findings showing students lose ground in academic achievement in an article for The Brookings Institute . In the meantime, Jay Z's organization plans to continue educating parents about their options, Perez said, even if doing so means, "We’ve become the public enemy." Contact Kayla Jimenez at [email protected]. Follow her on X at @kaylajjimenez. The state of EV charging in America: Harvard research shows chargers 78% reliable and pricing like the ‘Wild West’ Featuring Omar Asensio . By Barbara DeLollis and Glen Justice on June 26, 2024 . BiGS Actionable Intelligence: BOSTON — New data-driven research led by a Harvard Business School fellow reveals a significant obstacle to increasing electric vehicle (EV) sales and decreasing carbon emissions in the United States: owners’ deep frustration with the state of charging infrastructure, including unreliability, erratic pricing, and lack of charging locations. The research proves that frustration extends beyond “range anxiety,” the common fear that EV batteries won't maintain enough charge to reach a destination. Current EV drivers don’t see that as a dominant issue. Instead, many have "charge anxiety," a fear about keeping an EV powered and moving, according to scholar Omar Asensio, the climate fellow at HBS’s Institute for the Study of Business in Global Society (BiGS) who led the study. Asensio’s research is based on a first-ever examination of more than 1 million charging station reviews by EV drivers across North America, Europe, and Asia written over 10 years. In their reviews, these drivers described how they regularly encounter broken and malfunctioning chargers, erratic and secretive pricing, and even “charging deserts” — entire counties in states such as Washington and Virginia that don’t have a single public charger and that have even lost previously available chargers. EV drivers also routinely watch gas-engine vehicle drivers steal parking spots reserved for EV charging. Asensio said that listening to the current drivers — owners rather than potential buyers — provides a new window on the state of America’s charging system because drivers are incredibly candid about their experiences. “It’s different than what any one company or network would want you to believe,” said Asensio, who is also an associate professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology . He added that most charging providers don’t share their data and have few regulatory incentives to do so. Research: EV chargers less reliable than gas pumps One of the study’s main findings, discovered using customized artificial intelligence (AI) models trained on EV review data, is that charging stations in the U.S. have an average reliability score of only 78%, meaning that about one in five don’t work. They are, on average, less reliable than regular gas stations, Asensio said. “Imagine if you go to a traditional gas station and two out of 10 times the pumps are out of order,” he said. “Consumers would revolt.” Elizabeth Bruce, director, Microsoft Innovation and Society, said, "This project is a great example of how increasing access to emerging AI technologies enables researchers to better understand how we can build a more sustainable and equitable society.” Asensio’s research is timely as U.S. policymakers, entrepreneurs, automakers such as General Motors and Tesla , and others grapple with how to develop the nation’s charging network, who should finance it, and who should maintain it. Because charging influences vehicle sales and the ability to meet emissions targets, it’s a serious question. EV sales have climbed, topping 1 million in 2023, but concerns over batteries and charging could slow that growth. Today, there are more than 64,000 public EV charging stations in the U.S., according to the U.S. Department of Energy's Alternative Fuels Data Center. Experts say that the nation needs many times more to make a smooth, sustainable, and equitable transition away from gas-powered vehicles — and to minimize the anxiety surrounding EVs. “I couldn’t even convince my mother to buy an EV recently,” Asensio said. “Her decision wasn’t about the price. She said charging isn’t convenient enough yet to justify learning an entirely new way of driving.” Reviews give voice to 1 million drivers An economist and engineer by training, Asensio has been studying EV infrastructure since its infancy in 2010. At that time, the consensus among experts was that the private sector would finance a flourishing charging network, Asensio said. But that didn’t happen at the scale expected, which sparked his curiosity about how the charging market would emerge at points of interest rather than only near highways. To get answers, Asensio focused on consumer reviews “because they offer objective, unsolicited evidence of peoples’ experience,” he said. The smartphone apps that EV drivers use to pay for charging sessions allow them to review each station for factors such as functionality and pricing in real-time, much like consumers do on Yelp or Amazon. Asensio and his team, supported by Microsoft and National Science Foundation awards, spent years building models and training AI tools to extract insights and make predictions from drivers leaving these reviews in more than 72 languages. Until now, this type of data hasn’t existed anywhere, leaving consumers, policymakers, and business leaders — including auto industry executives — in the dark. Research reveals five facts about EV life Here are some of the top findings from Asensio’s research about public EV charging stations: Reliability problems. EV drivers often find broken equipment, making charging unreliable at best and simply not as easy as the old way of topping off a tank of gas. The reason? “No one’s maintaining these stations,” Asensio said. Entrepreneurs are already stepping in with a solution. For example, at Harvard Business School’s climate conference in April 2023, ChargerHelp! Co-founder Evette Ellis explained that her Los Angeles-based technology startup trains people to operate and maintain public charging stations. But until quality control improves nationwide, drivers will likely continue to encounter problems. Driver clashes. One consumer complaint that surprised Asensio was a mysterious gripe from drivers about “getting ICE’d.” The researchers didn’t know what it meant, so they did some digging and discovered that ICE stands for “internal combustion engine.” EV drivers adopted the term to grouse about gas-fueled car drivers stealing their public EV charger spots for parking. Price confusion. Drivers are vexed by the pricing they encounter at public charging stations, which are owned by a mix of providers, follow different pricing models, and do not regularly disclose pricing information. The result is often surprises on the road. As one reviewer wrote, “$21.65 to charge!!!!!!! Holy moly!!!! Don’t come here unless you are desperate!!” Equity questions. Public charging stations are not equally distributed across the U.S., concentrated more heavily in large population centers and wealthy communities and less so in rural areas and smaller cities. The result is that drivers have disparate experiences, well-served in some areas and starved in others. Some parts of the country have become “charging deserts,” with no station at all. Commercial questions. Commercial drivers in many areas can’t find enough public EV charging stations to reliably charge their cars. Here too, drivers are having very different experiences, well-supplied in some areas and not in others. ‘Wild West’ pricing is a major pain point The research shows that EV drivers are dissatisfied with EV charging station pricing models, likening the situation to the “Wild West.” Indeed, vehicle charging is both unregulated and non-transparent. Pricing can vary substantially by facility, level of demand, time of day, and other factors, including the type of charger available. A 45-minute fast charger may have one price, while a traditional charger that takes 3 to 5 hours may have another. Pricing can also change by the hour, based on market conditions. Unlike traditional gas stations, which often display fuel prices on lighted signs, EV stations rarely advertise what charging will cost. Drivers often arrive without any information on what to expect or how to make comparisons, because there’s no reliable way for consumers to find the most cost-effective places to charge. “The government has a source that lists all locations, but not in real-time,” Asensio said. “You might need five different apps to figure it out.” The driver reviews in Asensio’s data reflect the irritation caused by the current system. “People are getting frustrated because they don’t feel like they’re getting their money’s worth,” he said. Why is the charging network so opaque? Research conducted by Asensio and his colleagues in 2021 found that charging station hosts, in the absence of regulation, have no incentive to share data — and they don’t. Station hosts are typically privately owned, highly decentralized, not well-monitored, and have highly varied patterns of demand and pricing. The lack of transparency prevents researchers — and journalists — from investigating trends. In stark contrast to headlines trumpeting the ups and downs of gas prices, news organizations are not reporting on differential pricing among EV charging stations. ‘Charging deserts’ emerge With municipal, state, and federal governments all pushing to increase the number of electric vehicles on the road and decrease carbon emissions, experts agree that America will need more charging stations — a lot more. Looking only at Level 2 chargers, which top off an EV battery in 3 to 5 hours and are the most common type, S&P Global Mobility estimates a need for 1.2 million nationwide by 2027 and almost twice that by 2030. That’s in addition to in-home chargers. Of course, that assumes robust growth in EV sales. “The transition to a vehicle market dominated by electric vehicles (EVs) will take years to fully develop, but it has begun,” said Ian McIlravey, an analyst at S&P. “With the transition comes a need to evolve the public vehicle charging network, and today's charging infrastructure is insufficient to support a drastic increase in the number of EVs in operation.” Making matters more difficult, the chargers that do exist are not evenly distributed. Predictably, the places with the most public chargers installed are those with the highest number of registered electric vehicles, including states like California, Florida, and Texas. Yet, even as the federal government invests billions in new charging stations, many of them along major transportation corridors, places are left behind. Asensio’s research shows that small urban centers and rural areas attract fewer public charging stations, and in some cases, there are “charging deserts” with no facilities at all — and they may not be where you think. For example, electric vehicles are popular in Washington state, which ranked fourth in number of EV registrations and sixth in number of public charging stations in 2023. Yet Ferry County , an area outside Spokane with about 7,500 residents, where the average commute is 25 minutes and the median income is about $46,000, had only one charging station for several years. And now there are none. Similarly, Virginia ranked 11th in EV registrations and 13th in public chargers in 2023. There, researchers found Wise County, an area outside Roanoke and Knoxville, Tennessee, with about 3,500 residents and a median income of almost $45,000. The county has an average commute time of 22 minutes, but there are no public charging stations available. EV charging presents a classic “chicken and egg” situation, begging the question of whether cars or charging facilities must come first. However, a lack of public charging in areas like Ferry County and Wise County makes electric vehicle adoption difficult. As American drivers debate whether to swap their gas-powered vehicles for EVs and lower emissions, Asensio said research should play a larger role. Policymakers, auto manufacturers, entrepreneurs, and investors need more and better data to build infrastructure where it’s needed, provide reliable charging, and facilitate EV sales. “How [else] can we make effective decisions about the economics of EVs?” Asensio said. General Motors: ‘Anxiety around EV charging’ Omar Vargas, head of public policy at General Motors, emphasized the importance of public EV charging infrastructure to driving EV adoption during an interview with The BiGS Fix at one of BiGS’ business leadership roundtables in Northern Virginia. “We're looking at what are the best places to install an EV charging station for a community,” Vargas said. “The anxiety around EV charging is an inhibitor to EV adoption.” Beyond the public investment in rolling out charging infrastructure, GM (whose brands include Chevrolet and Cadillac) has committed $750 million in private capital to the development of EV charging stations. It is partnering with car dealerships and other companies. For instance, GM is testing charging stations at Flying J rest stops. GM, which reported full-year revenue of $171.8 billion for 2023 , also is joining community partnership efforts that are being formed to secure federal dollars through state and local governments. “We're helping that kind of planning, and we're pretty confident that in the next couple of years, we're going to have a vigorous EV charging network in the United States,” Vargas said. HOW TO ENGAGE WITH HBS BiGS Actionable insights in your inbox. Get the latest from BiGS 310 IMAGES (PDF) Three Perspectives on School Reform (PDF) Readiness for School Reform SCHOOL REFORM PROPOSALS: THE RESEARCH EVIDENCE Education Reform Research Project by teachupsidedown (PDF) Implications of One Comprehensive School Reform Model for (PDF) Comprehensive School Reform and Achievement: A Meta-Analysis VIDEO The Current School Reform Landscape: Christopher H. Tienken 🔥SCHOOL BOOK SUMS SERIES (Sum-1 to 3) ✅TOP 100 SUMS ✅ UMA TNPSC MATHS 🏆 🔥SCHOOL BOOK SUMS SERIES (Sum- 73 to 75) ✅TOP 100 SUMS ✅ VERY IMPORTANT TNPSC EXAM SUMS ✅UTM🏆 An Open Discussion on Public School Reform 🔥SCHOOL BOOK SUMS SERIES (Sum-4 to 6) ✅TOP 100 SUMS ✅ UMA TNPSC MATHS 🏆 🔥SCHOOL BOOK SUMS SERIES (Sum- 91 to 93) ✅TOP 100 SUMS ✅ VERY VERY IMPORTANT TNPSC EXAM SUMS ✅UTM🏆 COMMENTS Preparing Schools for Educational Change: Barriers and Supports Introduction. Policymakers worldwide have pressured education systems to improve performance and student outcomes. By-and-large reform efforts have been motivated to ensure access to high-quality education for all (Addonizio & Kearney, Citation 2012), develop human capital to advance international competitiveness (e.g., Matsumoto, Citation 2019), and improve domestic development and living ... Transforming education systems: Why, what, and how Today, the topic of education system transformation is front of mind for many leaders. Ministers of education around the world are seeking to build back better as they emerge from COVID-19-school ... What the Last Two Decades Have Taught Us About School Reform Education policy maven Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute think tank offers straight talk on matters of policy, politics, research, and reform. Read more from this blog. What works in education reform? A new database catalogs policies To help researchers better understand the effects of education policies around the world and the forces that drive these reforms, a team from Stanford Graduate School of Education (GSE) and the University of Toronto has developed a groundbreaking new research tool: the World Education Reform Database (WERD), the most comprehensive international ... PDF Why Reform Sometimes Succeeds: Understanding the Conditions That Our analysis is based on a thorough search of research on school reform in the U.S. We discuss a range of reforms, including those which spread widely, were institutionalized, and made significant changes to what schools did, those which tried to do such things and failed, and those which succeeded as . 2 niche ... School Reform A third emergent approach combines both categories and typically refers to reform across entire districts and their schools, commonly known as comprehensive school reform, systemic reform, or district-wide reform. School reform has been a topic of urgent concern for decades and remains at the forefront of policy and practice, often prompted by ... (PDF) Educational reform in the United States: Politics ... The role of the state in educational reform increased, as. did the calls for site-based restructuring and more local control. In some cases, these two. opposing forces, namely the opposing goals ... School reform News, Research and Analysis Only one in ten education reforms analysed for their impact: OECD. Gemma Ware, The Conversation. Only a tenth of education reforms carried out around the world since 2008 have been analysed by ... 8 Subtopics The research that supports SRI's core concepts can be usefully divided into 8 broad categories: 1. The connections between collaborative school cultures and student learning. This literature makes the case that that there are strong connections between the ways that adults work and learn together, and student learning. Bryk, A. S. (2010). Urban School Reform in the United States 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. The Futures of School Reform: An Introduction and an Invitation All Topics Jobs Back Jobs ... From this concern, a national working group on the "Futures of School Reform" was born in 2008. Composed of a dynamic cohort of education researchers ... The Kind of School Reform That Parents Actually Want Education policy maven Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute think tank offers straight talk on matters of policy, politics, research, and reform. Read more from this blog. School Choice ... Research Welcome to the SRI Research and Resources Pages. This page is designed as a resource for people who are interested in the research related to: 1.The work of "building transformational learning communities fiercely committed to educational excellence and equity," and. 2.How this work is situated in the larger context of research, theory and ... Topics Reforms Reforms. Current reforms to public education include the new Common Core State Standards for learning, the Local Control Funding Formula for school districts, the rise of charter schools and the growth of partnerships between schools, nonprofits, businesses and other government agencies. You will also find reporting about new initiatives and ... School Reform Whole School Designs for Enhancing Student Achievement. S. Stringfield, J. Nunnery, in International Encyclopedia of Education (Third Edition), 2010 Implications for Practice. Research on school reform has produced a range of implications for educational practitioners interested in achieving specific goals. The first several might be thought of as a gut check. (PDF) Three Perspectives on School Reform Most research on school reform over the past several decades is characterized by three perspectives-the technological, political, and cultural (House, 1979; House, 1981). Studies based on these ... School Reform Proposals: The Research Evidence In order to clarify what we know about effective public schools, the Education Policy Studies Laboratory (EPSL) at Arizona State University invited a group of distinguished education scholars to review the research on a series of education reform topics. The following literature reviews are the result. Some reviews focus on specific proposals that are proffered for making public schools more ... How Federal Pandemic Aid Impacted Schools Education Reform. Student Achievement and Outcomes. K-12 schools received nearly $190 billion in federal relief during the COVID-19 pandemic, 90% of which went directly to local districts. Financially disadvantaged districts received the most aid money, but how effective was the money at helping students make up the learning they missed ... Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice: Can Historians Historians are divided over what can be learned from history. Some find that knowing the past can inform the present. Others say that the past has no lessons to teach those living now but it is nonetheless worthwhile to recapture what occurred and their consequences. But when policymakers, practitioners, parents, and public school students ask about the usefulness of history they want guidance ... What Is School Reform, Anyway? (Opinion) Obviously, it wasn't always thus. For much of the 2010s, "reformers" were the people who supported things like charter schooling, accountability, test-based teacher evaluation, and the ... Research Identifies School Reform Strategies That Actually Work Ravani, citing a study by the Consortium on Chicago School Research featured in Organizing Schools for Improvement, said schools with similar demographics saw dissimilar outcomes. "Reform strategies outlined in this post are models of reform demonstrated to work," Ravani said. "These emphasize the importance of school leadership that can ... Ten of the best school-reform ideas from readers 8.Get rid of grade levels. Some forward-thinking school systems, such as the Kansas City, Missouri, School District, have begun experimenting with the concept of grouping students by ability instead of age—an idea that Kurt D. Steinbach, a social studies, ESL, and ELA teacher, agrees with wholeheartedly. "End age grading. High school teachers say phone distraction in ... 72% of U.S. high school teachers say cellphone distraction is a major problem in the classroom. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul recently announced that she will introduce legislation to ban smartphones in schools during her state's 2025 legislative session. She cited the impact that social media and technology can have on youth, including leaving ... Three years after police reforms, Black Bostonians report harassment Three years after sweeping law enforcement reforms were enacted in Boston to address long-standing concerns of unequal treatment, there is still a striking difference in the way Bostonians of different races experience their interactions with their city's police force, according to new findings from a team of Harvard Kennedy School researchers. Midwest Center for AIDS Research to help end regional HIV epidemic About Washington University School of Medicine. WashU Medicine is a global leader in academic medicine, including biomedical research, patient care and educational programs with 2,900 faculty.Its National Institutes of Health (NIH) research funding portfolio is the second largest among U.S. medical schools and has grown 56% in the last seven years. Jay Z and Roc Nation take sides on school vouchers USA TODAY. 0:00. 18:48. Philadelphia parents learned about school choice on Friday at a lunch provided by an unusual benefactor: Jay Z's entertainment company Roc Nation. The A-lister is making ... Research: EV chargers less reliable than gas pumps BOSTON — New data-driven research led by a Harvard Business School fellow reveals a significant obstacle to increasing electric vehicle (EV) sales and decreasing carbon emissions in the United States: owners' deep frustration with the state of charging infrastructure, including unreliability, erratic pricing, and lack of charging locations.. The research proves that frustration extends ... UCSF AIDS Walk Teams Call for Donations to Support Those Living with AIDS Walk San Francisco and UC San Francisco have formed an unbreakable bond through the decades. The University - a trailblazer in HIV/AIDS care, prevention and research - has been involved in the storied event each year since its inception in 1987, often finishing among the top five fundraising teams. With its roots tracing back to 1864, UCSF is a San Francisco institution that has ... essay homework paper phd project resume review study thesis