Building Civic Capacity: The Politics of Reforming Urban Schools

by Stone, Clarence N.; Henig, Jeffrey R.; Jones, Bryan D.; Pierannunzi, Carol

• ISBN13: 9780700611188
• ISBN10: 0700611185
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2001-07-01
• Publisher: Univ Pr of Kansas

Summary

The authors of this volume argue that urban education is in urgent need of reform and that, although there have been plenty of innovative and even promising attempts to improve conditions, most have been doomed. The reason for this, they agree, lies in the failure of our major cities to develop their "civic capacity" -- the ability to build and maintain a broad social and political coalition across all sectors of the urban community in pursuit of a common goal.

Drawing upon an ambitious eleven-city study funded by the National Science Foundation, the authors synthesize and make sense of the enormous amount of data from Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. Not only is this a vivid report from the front lines of big city schooling, but this work challenges us to rethink our approach to the crisis in our schools.

The authors vigorously contend that it is essential for all (or most) important actors in an urban community to join together in a shared vision of what is wrong

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Introduction	1	(9)
The Scope of the Problem	10	(22)
The Challenge of Change in Complex Policy Subsystems	32	(23)
The Urban Context: A First Look at the Case Cities	55	(19)
Civic Mobilization in Eleven Cities	74	(26)
Conducting Policy in an Ill-Structured Problem Space	100	(23)
Civic Mobilization and Policy Effort	123	(18)
Implications and Recommendations	141	(28)
Notes	169	(22)
Index	191