The goal of this book is to provide parents, teachers, administrators, school board members, and the general public with a systematic and comprehensive view of the condition of urban education in the 1970's. Previously, city educators tended to project the failure of the school on to "bad homes" and other conditions. The authors stress that new explanations of and proposals for ameliorating the school's shortcomings are needed. We cannot have good public schools in bad cities, nor are we likely to have good cities without developing good urban schools. Thus, the authors point out that we cannot look at urban school systems in isolation from the larger urban milieu. For this study, the topic "urban education" has been limited by focusing principally, although not exclusively, on the public elementary and secondary school systems in the nation's fifty largest central cities (each of these cities has a population in excess of a quarter of a million and a public-school enrollment that exceeds 50,000 students). Topics discussed in relation to urban schools are: social setting, size and scope, organization, financial condition, trends and probable outcomes, people in urban schools, and a strategy for reform. (Author/SB)