Over the years, the nation's large urban school districts have consistently learned from the progress of their peer districts across the country. Great City School districts that have embraced the challenge of educating America's urban children have recognized the value of benchmarking their performance and growth against the progress of others.…

For years, points out David L. Kirp, critics have lambasted public schools as fossilized bureaucracies run by paper-pushers and filled with time-serving teachers preoccupied with their job security, not the lives of their students. Yet, as this article describes, running an exemplary school system does not demand heroes or heroics, just hard and…

In the second of two continuous improvement briefs on selection, UIC Center for Urban Education Leadership researchers and UIC Ed.D. program administrators describe how they build program capacity to assess & measure the characteristics they associate with school leader success. [For Part I, see ED622510.]

Disparities in educational outcomes exist between students in rural areas as compared to students in urban settings. While there is some evidence that these rural disparities are present in eastern Europe, little is known about young peoples' lives in the rural areas of this region. This paper presents an analysis of science achievement by…

"Learning as a subversive activity" is about working with public school students to debunk the shallow conception that achievement equals learning. That means exposing the power relations that keep in place such a narrow definition of what counts and exploring the implications of those powerful forces for students' lives and for society at large.…