American School Reform
What Works, What Fails, and Why
- Contents
- Review Quotes
- Awards
Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1. Introduction
Chapter 2. The Theory of Action Space
Chapter 3. Action Space in Chicago and New York
Chapter 4. Action Space in Context: Philadelphia and the Bay Area
Chapter 5. Learning from Collapse in Philadelphia and Chicago
Chapter 6. Learning from Connections in New York
Chapter 7. Implications for Practice
Notes
References
Index
Chapter 1. Introduction
Chapter 2. The Theory of Action Space
Chapter 3. Action Space in Chicago and New York
Chapter 4. Action Space in Context: Philadelphia and the Bay Area
Chapter 5. Learning from Collapse in Philadelphia and Chicago
Chapter 6. Learning from Connections in New York
Chapter 7. Implications for Practice
Notes
References
Index
Review Quotes
Teachers College Record
“McDonald and colleagues make a valuable theoretical contribution to the field of district-level school reform through their integrative framework and nuanced cross-case analysis of diverse school reform efforts.”
Jeffrey Henig, Teachers College, Columbia University
“American School Reform offers a substantive contribution to school reform debates, focusing on what it takes to create, sustain, and—importantly—continually renew the conditions for successful reform. It combines a notion of the precariousness of reform with optimism, outlining a pragmatic path of incremental improvement that recognizes the very severe and systemic obstacles in its way without stoking frustration or backlash that would undermine the long-term aspiration.”
Larry Cuban, author of Inside the Black Box of Classroom Practice
“American School Reform importantly advances a historically grounded conceptual framework to understand how the arguments, theories of action, and action space devoted to school reforms change over time, fail, and then get reincarnated in other forms as actors and contexts shift. The authors appreciate and use the past to underscore how earlier reforms have influenced contemporary ones, how the debris of collapsed reforms become building blocks for newer ones. In this way they do what many historians—but too few reformers—do: account for both continuity and change.”
Robert Rothman, author of Fewer, Clearer, Higher
“Urban school districts have been the focal points for intensive reform efforts over the past two decades. All of these efforts have been highly contentious, and they have produced mixed results. The more that is known about what makes reform successful and unsuccessful in these contexts, the greater the likelihood for success in the future. American School Reform makes a significant contribution to this knowledge. It tells important stories about significant reforms in four cities and provides a new way of looking at reform that can be useful moving forward.”
Association of American Publishers: PROSE Book Award
Won
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