The Transformation of Great American School Districts: How Big Cities Are Reshaping Public Education

In The Transformation of Great American School Districts, William Lowe Boyd, Charles Taylor Kerchner, and Mark Blyth argue that urban education reform can best be understood as a long process of institutional change, rather than as a series of failed projects. They examine the core assumptions that underlay the Progressive Era model of public education—apolitical governance, local control, professional hierarchy, and the logic of confidence—and show that recent developments in school governance have challenged virtually all of these assumptions. Drawing on case studies of five urban districts—Philadelphia, Chicago, Washington, D.C., New York, and Los Angeles—they trace the rise of new ideas and trends that are reshaping the institution of public education: mayoral control, shifting civic coalitions, federal and state involvement, standards-based accountability, and the role of educational outsiders in district administration. Although each city has evolved along a different path, the editors argue that a set of new underlying ideas is being auditioned in the transition to a new institutional model and describe the process by which institutional change occurs.