About this product

Product Identifiers

PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press

ISBN-10022612472X

ISBN-139780226124728

eBay Product ID (ePID)19038268894

Product Key Features

Number of Pages208 Pages

Publication NameAmerican School Reform : What Works, What Fails, and Why

LanguageEnglish

Publication Year2014

SubjectEducational Policy & Reform / General, Urban, General, Elementary

TypeTextbook

AuthorJoseph P. McDonald, Cities and Cities and Schools Research Group

Subject AreaEducation

FormatTrade Paperback

Dimensions

Item Height0 in

Item Weight11.1 Oz

Item Length0.9 in

Item Width0.6 in

Additional Product Features

Intended AudienceScholarly & Professional

LCCN2013-043365

Dewey Edition23

Reviews American School Reform importantly advances a historically grounded conceptual framework to understand how the arguments, theories of action, and action space devoted to school reforms change over time, fail, and then get reincarnated in other forms as actors and contexts shift. The authors appreciate and use the past to underscore how earlier reforms have influenced contemporary ones, how the debris of collapsed reforms become building blocks for newer ones. In this way they do what many historians-but too few reformers-do: account for both continuity and change., American School Reform offers a substantive contribution to school reform debates, focusing on what it takes to create, sustain, and-importantly-continually renew the conditions for successful reform. It combines a notion of the precariousness of reform with optimism, outlining a pragmatic path of incremental improvement that recognizes the very severe and systemic obstacles in its way without stoking frustration or backlash that would undermine the long-term aspiration., Urban school districts have been the focal points for intensive reform efforts over the past two decades. All of these efforts have been highly contentious, and they have produced mixed results. The more that is known about what makes reform successful and unsuccessful in these contexts, the greater the likelihood for success in the future. American School Reform makes a significant contribution to this knowledge. It tells important stories about significant reforms in four cities and provides a new way of looking at reform that can be useful moving forward., McDonald and colleagues make a valuable theoretical contribution to the field of district-level school reform through their integrative framework and nuanced cross-case analysis of diverse school reform efforts.

IllustratedYes

Dewey Decimal370.973

Table Of ContentAcknowledgments Chapter 1. Introduction Chapter 2. The Theory of Action Space Chapter 3. Action Space in Chicago and New York Chapter 4. Action Space in Context: Philadelphia and the Bay Area Chapter 5. Learning from Collapse in Philadelphia and Chicago Chapter 6. Learning from Connections in New York Chapter 7. Implications for Practice Notes References Index

SynopsisIn 1994, the Annenberg Challenge, the biggest philanthropic investment in education reform at the time, was launched with great fanfare in a White House ceremony. Although efforts to complete a comprehensive cross-site evaluation of the Challenge ultimately failed--how on earth do you track and apply common measure to eighteen large projects, all uniquely fashioned to local contexts?--its researchers refused to give up entirely. The result is Cities and Their Schools , a study of large-scale school reform efforts in Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, San Diego, and the Bay Area over roughly twenty years. In it, McDonald and his collaborators explore what reform really is, how it really works, how it fails, and how it can make a difference nonetheless. Laying out four main ideas about school reform in big American cities, McDonald traces them through the many reform efforts the book examines, and exposes the hidden logic of the creation and collapse of "action space" in the apparent chaos of school reform efforts., Dissecting twenty years of educational politics in our nation's largest cities, American School Reform offers one of the clearest assessments of school reform as it has played out in our recent history. Joseph P. McDonald and his colleagues evaluate the half-billion-dollar Annenberg Challenge--launched in 1994--alongside other large-scale reform efforts that have taken place in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and the San Francisco Bay Area. They look deeply at what school reform really is, how it works, how it fails, and what differences it can make nonetheless. McDonald and his colleagues lay out several interrelated ideas in what they call a theory of action space. Frequently education policy gets so ambitious that implementing it becomes a near impossibility. Action space, however, is what takes shape when talented educators, leaders, and reformers guide the social capital of civic leaders and the financial capital of governments, foundations, corporations, and other backers toward true results. Exploring these extraordinary collaborations through their lifespans and their influences on future efforts, the authors provide political hope--that reform efforts can work, and that our schools can be made better., Dissecting twenty years of educational politics in our nation's largest cities, American School Reform offers one of the clearest assessments of school reform as it has played out in our recent history. Joseph P. McDonald and his colleagues evaluate the half-billion-dollar Annenberg Challenge-launched in 1994-alongside other large-scale reform efforts that have taken place in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and the San Francisco Bay Area. They look deeply at what school reform really is, how it works, how it fails, and what differences it can make nonetheless. McDonald and his colleagues lay out several interrelated ideas in what they call a theory of action space. Frequently education policy gets so ambitious that implementing it becomes a near impossibility. Action space, however, is what takes shape when talented educators, leaders, and reformers guide the social capital of civic leaders and the financial capital of governments, foundations, corporations, and other backers toward true results. Exploring these extraordinary collaborations through their lifespans and their influences on future efforts, the authors provide political hope-that reform efforts can work, and that our schools can be made better.

LC Classification NumberLA217.2.M394 2014