American School Reform - by Joseph P McDonald Hardcover

About the Book

In 1994, the Annenberg Challenge, the biggest philanthropic investment in education reform at the time, was launched with great fanfare in a White House ceremony. Although efforts to complete a comprehensive cross-site evaluation of the Challenge ultimately failed how on earth do you track and apply common measure to eighteen large projects, all uniquely fashioned to local contexts? its researchers refused to give up entirely. The result is "Cities and Their Schools," a study of large-scale school reform efforts in Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, San Diego, and the Bay Area over roughly twenty years. In it, McDonald and his collaborators explore what reform really is, how it really works, how it fails, and how it can make a difference nonetheless. Laying out four main ideas about school reform in big American cities, McDonald traces them through the many reform efforts the book examines, and exposes the hidden logic of the creation and collapse of action space in the apparent chaos of school reform efforts.
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Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"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"

About the Author

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.