The Kansas City, Missouri School District (KCMSD) avoided federal oversight to comply with the desegregation ruling for nearly 30 years after "Brown v. Board of Education" by establishing a neighborhood concept for school attendance boundaries. "Jenkins v. Missouri" ended in 1995 with a U.S. Supreme Court decision to…

Urban community leaders describe their perceptions of critical issues in education and offer recommendations for the creation of a college-going culture (CGC). This qualitative study employed a maximum entropy analysis. Results demonstrate critical issues with increasing educational attainment including complexity of the urban school system,…

After receiving a multiyear federal grant, an urban school district and community agency that focused on family literacy implemented a comprehensive school reform initiative called Providence Full Service Community Schools (PFSCS). A host of community partners collaborated to develop the PFSCS model with the broad goal of strategically connecting…

How engaged families are in their children's lives, whether at home or in school, predicts their success in school and in life. The purpose of this study was to explore parent, educator, and community member perspectives of family engagement, preschool through grade 12, to inform state-level policy from an ecological framework. Ten semi-structured…

To challenge deficit thinking concerning immigrants and refugees in urban schools, we engaged members of local immigrant and refugee communities from China, Mexico, Liberia, and Sudan in focus group discussions about their prior educational experiences, their hopes and aspirations for education, and the supports and challenges they encountered in…

Using critical race discourse analysis, this study examines descriptions of a heated controversy over the proposed closure of the only primarily black high school in a large urban city. Participants included community members and the district and school leaders who were key in the controversy. Based on Foucault's analysis of power we looked for…

This study chronicles the historical divisions of race and class between Detroit and its suburban neighbor as an explanation for current tensions in the communities and schools. This analysis poses implications for educational apartheid and stark disparities between urban and suburban boundaries and consequent discomfort among practitioners when…

This assessment of the climate of racial and ethnic attitudes in Howard Beach (New York) was conducted at John Adams High School, the public school attended by the greatest number of high school children in the Howard Beach community. The survey of 1,217 students was administered in December, 1986, several weeks before the incident in which a…

This agenda for educational improvement in Oakland (California) outlines community expectations of the school system and gives specific examples of what those expectations mean in practice. More than 800 individuals from neighborhood groups, churches, parent organizations, school district staff, and business and professional associations testified…

Evidence from 10 cities indicates that large city school systems' difficulty in closing schools stems from administrators' value conflicts between responsiveness to the community and efficiency, and from competing role interests between board members and administrators. (MJL)

Since the 1954 Brown decision, Dallas residents have engaged in avoidance, resistance, legal battles and, finally, cooperation and compromise in the desegregation of Dallas schools. It now appears that Dallas is making some progress toward desegregation. Except for some segments of the black community, who felt they had been betrayed because of a…

A career education needs assessment conducted by the Dallas (Texas) Independent School District focused on fourteen schools (K-12) located in the East Oak Cliff Subdistrict, a predominantly (98%) black urban community. Work already completed by the Partners in Career Education (PCE) project, in which the District was a participant, was used for…

A companion piece of volume 1, this section of the feasibility study consists entirely of eight appendixes. Appendix A describes the objectives of the study and how they were operationalized. Appendix B consists of the information kit used to inform community members about the education voucher program and includes clippings of newspaper articles…

A survey of a multicultural urban community investigated attitudes about the high school, including what the school should do for the students and how it should develop. Results will be used to guide the school's progress and help improve retention in grades 11 and 12. (MSE)

A survey of marketing and market research activities in large, urban, two- and four-year colleges was conducted to identify the nature of marketing problems faced by institutions; current and preferred emphasis placed on market research activities; modes of assessing the needs of target groups and developing appropriate programs; the location of…