Kathleen Riley begins this article by providing quotes from James H. Lytle, and Anissa Weinraub, which were published in "Perspectives on Urban Education" in the summer of 2013. While they hold different professional positions (Lytle is a retired administrator and professor; Weinraub is a teacher and organizer), both wrote as…

In "The Transformation of Great American School Districts", William Lowe Boyd, Charles Taylor Kerchner, and Mark Blyth argue that urban education reform can best be understood as a long process of institutional change, rather than as a series of failed projects. They examine the core assumptions that underlay the Progressive Era model of…

Like many other U.S. cities, Philadelphia experienced a prolonged period of deindustrialization and job loss during the second half of the 20th century. As in other northern cities, the process of suburbanization went hand in hand with white flight, increased racial segregation of the city and its schools, and increasingly inadequate funding of…

The goal of this article is to move beyond the more traditional question, "Does business have a role in public education?" A historical overview of education suggests that the involvement of the private sector is not a new phenomenon and is not likely to end in the near future. Here, the authors argue that a much more fruitful line of…

Since the state takeover, the Philadelphia school district has created a new governance model, in which for-profits, non-profits, and universities receive contracts to manage schools. Further, these and other organizations also receive contracts to provide a range of additional services. The shift to a public/private institutional structure,…

Public higher educational institutions, where about 80 percent of all college students and 65 percent of all four-year college students are educated, appear to be in serious trouble. In order to delve more deeply into this topic, the author invited a wide-ranging team of experts to examine changes in public higher education over the last quarter…