"How a City Learned to Improve Its Schools" tells the story of the extraordinary thirty-year school reform effort that changed the landscape of public education in Chicago. Acclaimed educational researcher Anthony S. Bryk joins five coauthors directly involved in Chicago's education reform efforts, Sharon Greenberg, Albert Bertani, Penny…

Challenging the popular perception that the free market can objectively ameliorate inequality and markedly improve student academic achievement, this book examines the overly positivistic rhetoric surrounding charter schools. Taking a multifocal approach, this book examines how charter schools reproduce inequality in public education. By linking…

School choice is an increasingly important part of today's educational landscape and this timely volume presents fresh research about the competitive admissions policies of choice systems. Based on their investigation of a unique civil rights challenge to school choice admissions policies in politically and racially divided Buffalo, New York, and…

A series of policy shifts over the past decade promises to change how Americans decide where to send their children to school. In theory, the expanded use of standardized test scores and the boom in charter schools will allow parents to evaluate their assigned neighborhood school, or move in search of a better option. But what kind of data do…

The creation of a separate and unequal system of education for blacks and whites in Chicago in the 1920s and 1930s, and black responses to the situation are described and analyzed in this book. Drawing upon material from black newspapers and journals, Chicago Board of Education documents, census data, private manuscript collections, and personal…

This book addresses the American Dilemma, the reality of segregation in a country that claims adherence to the principles of equality and democracy. Segregation is viewed as fostering decentralization in the educational system; this decentralization subordinates African Americans in the competition for educational resources while legitimizing that…

Racism has not been eradicated in U.S. schools, even though many educators do not view it as a major deterrent to the learning of minority students. Overt racism among students, racism demonstrated in the ignorance of teachers and administrators, and racism revealed in the internal struggles of students are common in today's schools. This book…

The problems commonly associated with inner-city schools were not nearly as pervasive a century ago, when black children in most northern cities attended school alongside white children. In "Schools Betrayed", her innovative history of race and urban education, Kathryn M. Neckerman tells the story of how and why these schools came to…