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BUY FROM PUBLISHER Available as an ebook at: Amazon Kindle Apple iBooks Barnes & Noble Nook CafeScribe Chegg Inc Copia Interactive ebrary EBSCO eBooks Google Play Kno Kobo Scribd	American School Reform: What Works, What Fails, and Why by Joseph P. McDonald and Cities and Schools Research Group University of Chicago Press, 2014 Cloth: 978-0-226-12469-8 \| eISBN: 978-0-226-12486-5 \| Paper: 978-0-226-12472-8 Library of Congress Classification LA217.2.M346 2014 Dewey Decimal Classification 370.973 ABOUT THIS BOOK \| AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY \| REVIEWS \| TOC \| REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE ABOUT THIS BOOK Dissecting twenty years of educational politics in our nation’s largest cities, American School Reform offers one of the clearest assessments of school reform as it has played out in our recent history. Joseph P. McDonald and his colleagues evaluate the half-billion-dollar Annenberg Challenge—launched in 1994—alongside other large-scale reform efforts that have taken place in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and the San Francisco Bay Area. They look deeply at what school reform really is, how it works, how it fails, and what differences it can make nonetheless. McDonald and his colleagues lay out several interrelated ideas in what they call a theory of action space. Frequently education policy gets so ambitious that implementing it becomes a near impossibility. Action space, however, is what takes shape when talented educators, leaders, and reformers guide the social capital of civic leaders and the financial capital of governments, foundations, corporations, and other backers toward true results. Exploring these extraordinary collaborations through their lifespans and their influences on future efforts, the authors provide political hope—that reform efforts can work, and that our schools can be made better. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Joseph P. McDonald is professor of teaching and learning at the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development at New York University. He is the author or coauthor of many books, including, most recently, Going Online with Protocols and Going to Scale with New School Designs. The Cities and Schools Research Group consists of Jolley Bruce Christman, Thomas B. Corcoran, Norm Fruchter, Milbrey W. McLaughlin, Gordon Pradl, Gabriel Reich, Mark Smylie, and Joan Talbert. REVIEWS “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.” — Jeffrey Henig, Teachers College, Columbia University “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.” — Larry Cuban, author of Inside the Black Box of Classroom Practice “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.” — Robert Rothman, author of Fewer, Clearer, Higher “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.” — Teachers College Record TABLE OF 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 REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE If you are a student who has a disability that prevents you from using this book in printed form, BiblioVault may be able to supply you with an electronic file for alternative access. Please have the disability coordinator at your school fill out this form. It can take 2-3 weeks for requests to be filled. See other books on: Educational change \| Educational Policy & Reform \| Pennsylvania \| Philadelphia \| Why See other titles from University of Chicago Press

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REVIEWS

“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.”

— Jeffrey Henig, Teachers College, Columbia University

“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.”

— Larry Cuban, author of Inside the Black Box of Classroom Practice

“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.”

— Robert Rothman, author of Fewer, Clearer, Higher

“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.”

— Teachers College Record