Fixing Urban Schools

By Paul T. Hill

Book Overview

Every year, in one out of three big cities, the school superintendent leaves his or her job, sending local community leaders back to square one. Cleveland, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C., are struggling to recreate their failed school systems, and many more cities are likely to follow. City leaders need more than new superintendents. They need stable reform strategies strong enough to move an entrenched system. Unfortunately, it is not clear where they can turn for help. Education experts are deeply divided about whether teacher retraining or new standards are enough to reform a struggling city system, or whether more fundamental changes, such as family choice and family-run schools, are needed. Based on new research, this book identifies the essential elements of reform strategies that can transform school performance in big cities beset by poverty, social instability, racial isolation, and labor unrest. It also suggests ways that local leaders can assemble the necessary funding and political support to make such strategies work.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0815736134
• ISBN13: 9780815736134
• Release Date: August 1998
• Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
• Length: 128 Pages
• Weight: 0.44 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

A pointed and useful overview of educational restructuring.

Hill and Celio have done a remarkable job of summarizing over 15 years of various attempts to "restructure" urban public education systems. In this brief book, they (1) carefully outline the strengths and weaknesses of each particular strategy - from site-based management, to school "models," to vouchers, to contracting; (2) reveal what each strategy presumes but does not itself provide for, and (3) highlight the political and ideological assumptions that drive reformers to favor one particular strategy (or way to implement a particular strategy) over another. What oft has been thought but never so well expressed, Hill & Celio's articulation of "integrative capital" theory draws together numerous threads in the reform literature and, for my money, is worth the price of the book alone.A short book but by no means a quick read, Fixing Urban Schools is about the one thing that can finally transform public education -- not more educationist gimmicks, new ideas.