In 2015, Amsterdam implemented a centralised primary school admissions policy, constraining school choice after a long history of highly autonomous schools and free parental choice which has resulted, in part, in the city's segregated schooling environment. Introduced out of concerns of inequality for parents and disorganisation by schools, this…

Urban school districts' educational leaders face what seem to be an endless number of challenges, such as closing the achievement gap, enhancing student performance, building teacher capacity, creating leadership opportunities, and adapting to a student population that is changing rapidly and increasingly made up of students from low socioeconomic…

This mixed-methods case study examines the emergency financial management legislation enacted in Michigan from 2009 to 2018 as an education policy for governance reform in three local school districts: Detroit, Highland Park, and Muskegon Heights. From its inception, the emergency financial manager law was an intervention strategy for local…

Despite multiple creative approaches to integrating Minnesota's segregated urban public schools, students of color in these schools remain the majority. The state's progressive, anti-racist sentiment toward education has not evolved into action on the part of White families, which leaves under-resourced urban districts struggling beneath a mere…

This article examines the ways in which teachers and community-based activists collaborated to advance an anti-privatisation agenda within an urban school district. The article emerges from our respective studies of privatisation in Oakland, one a historical study of the advance of neoliberalism and the other a case study (Merriam 2007,…

In the late 1990s, an extensive consolidation of schools in rural China led to the amalgamation of numerous primary and secondary schools into urban schools or their discontinuation. The study aimed to investigate whether China's school consolidation movement has influenced the educational attainment of rural students. The data are sourced from…

With the expansion of performance-based incentives, there is growing interest in understanding how they affect leadership quality and composition. This paper studies a reform in a large urban public school district that ties principal compensation to their performance. Using a regression discontinuity design, I investigate the effect of…

Mass school closures have become commonplace in urban school districts. To explain their actions, school system leaders often rely on a dominant frame that presents closures as an inevitable, data-driven, and politically neutral phenomenon in an educational landscape defined by shrinking budgets, demographic changes, and increased school choice.…

Trauma-informed Care (TIC), Restorative Justice (RJ), and Multicultural Education (MCE) are three approaches to school reform widely being discussed and promoted within schools. The authors of this paper, representing the fields of psychology, social work, and education, present an integrated framework that acknowledges the commonalities these…

In "The Enduring Promise of America's Great City Schools," Michael Casserly presents a forthright assessment of the past performance and future potential of large urban PreK-12 school districts in the United States. From a vantage of nearly five decades of work within the Council of the Great City Schools, which now represents…

Background: CS4All is an $81 million private-public investment aimed at creating the necessary infrastructure to provide computer science experiences to all New York City public-school students by 2025. Purpose: In this paper, we examine the history of the CS4All initiative and document the network of actors and their relationships in the system…

Research has recommended centering health disparities to make science instruction relevant to students from minoritized racial and ethnic groups. While promoted as a recent innovation, the repurposing of science instruction to improve the health of demographic groups has a longer history traceable to segregated and colonial schooling. Using a…

This case study investigates the professional learning and changes in teaching practices and leadership of four experienced, mid-career secondary mathematics teachers as a result of participation in the Midwest Master Teacher Partnership, a professional development partnership between a research university and a large, urban school district. The…

Research conducted in the twentieth century found urban Catholic schools in the U.S. had a legacy of providing high quality educational opportunities for low-income students and students of color. In an era of declining Catholic school enrollments, urban Catholic school advocates have argued that urban Catholic school closures would deny these…

This paper compares the evolution of two initiatives--one in Singapore and one in New York City--designed expressly to support the development and spread of new and innovative school models. These two initiatives--Future Schools in Singapore and the iZone in New York City--reflected the hope that new school models and associated innovations could…