In March 2020, school districts across California closed their doors, rapidly adapting operations and instruction in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Efforts to understand the immediate impact of the unprecedented closure of schools prompted grave concerns about meeting students' needs, particularly for the most vulnerable. This report details…

To fulfill educational promises such as "every student succeeds," district leaders must embrace an agenda committed to equitable opportunities for students. Doing so requires breaking from managerial norms to identify new ways forward that prioritize historically low-performing schools. Coby Meyers, Lamar Goree, and Keith Burton distill…

By law, a student's admission to one of New York City's eight elite high schools is determined by his or her score on the Specialized High School Admissions Test (SHSAT). Only a very small number of black and Hispanic students make the cut, a fact that has led Mayor Bill de Blasio to engineer what he regards as a more equitable racial distribution…

Urban principals lead complex schools. Although such schools often serve racially marginalized students from low-income families, they also exist within an environment that negatively stereotypes the students and their parents. Such stereotypes are even often held by school leaders and teachers in these environments. At the same time, there are…

In November 2014, the New York City Department of Education classified 94 low-performing schools as "renewal schools." New York's Renewal School Program (RSP), announced Mayor Bill de Blasio at the program's launch, represented a big change to the city's education policy: whereas former mayor Michael Bloomberg favored closing failing…

School choice reforms are increasingly common across the U.S. This symposium summarizes and presents the most recent research on the social effects of private school choice programs and public charter schools. All three papers consider heterogeneity in effects that can and should inform policymaking. The first paper, "Charter School Entry and…

Using framing theory to analyze reading coaches' leadership practices, this article surfaces the competency of framing reform. It presents findings from a qualitative case study of coaches' work in the implementation of a reading reform in an urban school district. As instructional leaders, coaches engaged in framing to catalyze change. The three…

This case highlights a school principal's leading practice as she worked to transform the social and educational status of students, teachers, and community in a small urban primary school. We employ shadowing, a technique popularized in work-based education and photography, as reflective and research tools. Teaching notes provide insight into the…

Our urban school systems struggle because so many of their students live in poverty, but they also struggle because they were designed a hundred years ago, for an industrial society. In an increasing number of cities, they are being replaced by 21st century systems, in which the central administration does not operate all schools and employ all…

In recent decades, changes to the education policy landscape have made local public engagement more difficult. Among these changes are increased centralization of policy making, the rise of school choice, and mayoral and state takeovers of urban school districts. Philadelphia is at the vanguard of these changes. We discuss how community-based…

This article documents five refugee families and their children's efforts to reestablish themselves in an urban school context in the US. A thematic analysis of the families' negotiation with the urban school system, the language programmes and their home engagement practices suggests that they were subjected to symbolic violence brought upon by…

In 2007, civic and philanthropic leaders founded the nonprofit Partnership for Los Angeles Schools to transform some of the city's highest-need, lowest-performing schools. Eleven years later, schools in the Partnership network have made notable improvements, with much more substantial gains in student performance relative to other schools in the…

Like many large districts in urban U.S. cities, L.A. Unified struggles to produce strong results for all students. On 2015-16 end-of-year state tests, 60 percent of students did not meet state standards in English language arts (ELA). Students fared even worse in math: 70 percent performed below grade level. High-need students are struggling the…

This article presents an exploration of the work of family engagement in a racially- and linguistically-diverse, high-poverty, urban school district in a state of continuous neoliberal reform. Drawing from qualitative research methods, it is argued that family engagement is being reshaped by the imperatives of educational neoliberalization while,…

This article examines an effort to spatially re-organise urban public schools in the largest city in Turkey. Recently, the Turkish government has made an effort to relocate inner-city public schools in Istanbul to less desirable parts of the city. Analysing how education policy in the country is tied to wider political mechanisms and considering…