Across the nation, school districts are intentionally integrating students of different racial and socioeconomic backgrounds in order to increase access to educational opportunity, boost achievement, and prepare students to be thoughtful and collaborative citizens in our multiracial society. Some districts have developed interdistrict integration…

For all the national and even international debate about the state of American education, public schooling in the U.S. is still a local matter--and the school district remains its hub. As administrators know, there's nothing abstract about the process of getting millions of students into their seats, assuring they receive the instruction they're…

Background: In 1991, Savage Inequalities quickly became the most riveting assessment of the inequalities in U.S. public schools. When Kozol visited East St. Louis for his book, the authors of this paper lived and attended schools there. As Kozol's readers in their respective graduate and undergraduate classes, the authors found it difficult to…

This report provides a new resource for understanding the state of urban public schools in the U.S. Geared specifically toward city leaders who want to evaluate how well traditional district and charter schools are serving all their city's children and how their schools compare to those in other cities, the report measures outcomes for all public…

The scholarly community has been neglectful in its study of those urban and predominantly African American schools that manifest agency in spite of persistent racial inequalities and poverty. Consequently, we are left to wonder whether anything good can come from urban African American schools, or from the communities where they are located. This…

In 2001, Missouri's K-16 project launched the K-12 Task Force on Achievement Gap Elimination, which believes that improving teacher quality is the single most important factor in eliminating the achievement gap among Missouri students. This report describes the significance of teacher quality on student achievement, emphasizing the uneven…