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The Cultural Politics of Urban School Reform

Municipal Government to the Rescue

While educational researchers and curriculum theorists have called for a more culturally responsive pedagogy in urban environments, municipal governments have increasingly made such theorizing appear to be irrelevant to actual practice. Usdan and Cuban (2002) recently wrote about “Powerful Reforms With Shallow Roots: Educational Change in Six Cities,” which is also the title of their new book documenting the way in which city governments have assumed control of large urban school systems in Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Diego, and Seattle.

Although the increased involvement of municipal governments in urban school governance has taken different forms, it has been triggered by years of frustration with the slow pace of educational improvement. Usdan and Cuban note that urban systems like Baltimore and Philadelphia are also subject to state takeover. In Chicago, it took an act of the state legislature to hand control of the public schools to the mayor.

Usdan and Cuban indicate that the municipal control of urban schools has not been all bad news for schools and students. Among the positive developments they include:

	Linking to existing political structures leads to increases in standardized test scores, partly because non-educationist managers, linked to urban political structures, are more efficient and effective at achieving measurable outcomes.
	Buy-in from business and political community has produced at least a temporary stability for reform efforts.
	Accountability to measurable standards will continue to be driving force; good when this focuses efforts on student learning and staff development, bad when it leads to iatrogenic problems such as increased failure rates, dropouts, and teacher alienation.
	These linkages have brought with them at least the potential for greater collaboration among schools, health services, social services, mental health services, and related agencies.

However, Usdan and Cuban indicate that these positives are accompanied by a range of concerns about the sustainability of early, fragile successes in school reform through city government intervention:

	In the seesaw of centralization, decentralization, and recentralization, the “search for structural panaceas will continue.”
	The fragility of urban politics makes sustainability of reforms questionable, in part because the top-down nature of the reforms makes them regime-dependent, and practitioners are alienated by feeling not included. For example, teachers’ unions in San Diego and Chicago have expressed resistance to what they perceive as top-down control, and without these groups, sustainability of reform is still more fragile. Challenge is focusing scarce resources on meaningful systemic change and staying the course over several years—short attention span
	Higher education has also felt alienated due to lack of inclusion of colleges and universities in the reform process. This might not matter so much were it not for the strong sense among college and university educators that the top-down solutions implemented fly in the face of what we know about good teaching and learning (e.g. strong staff development, engaged student learning, enlightened assessment approaches). While in the short term, funding may be showering the schools from several directions—foundations, business, and state sources—there are serious concerns about the coherence of the initiatives these short-term funds support. In particular, the most under-resourced, lowest-performing schools become flooded with programs and initiatives that resemble ornaments on a Christmas tree but do not fundamentally change the future of the school in terms of sustainable improvements in student learning.
	Sustainability of reform is also compromised by backlash against disempowerment of school boards.

Significance for teacher preparation. The business connection that is so central to the ascendancy of municipal governance of the schools involves a commitment of efforts and resources to market-metaphor “solutions” such as charter schools, choice, and the aforementioned alternatives to teacher education, leadership preparation, and staff development. This is particularly problematic in the face of the strong overlapping directorates of the business community and the philanthropic foundations that fund such market-metaphor efforts. Alternative routes to teacher certification, for example, turn out to be very expensive “models” for teacher preparation, yet they appeal, ironically, to a market-based ideology that seeks to challenge the “monopoly” of teacher education programs. (Imagine if underresourced education programs were funded at levels comparable to alternative routes.)

Usdan and Cuban report, “The postsecondary sector has not been a particularly relevant or influential participant in urban governance issues. Unless there is much more responsiveness to urban school realities on the part of higher education, staff-development activities increasingly will fall under the purview of local school systems and new leadership and teacher-development academies that are divorced from traditional postsecondary education” (p. 40).