Urban/City Schools

Dear Colleagues,

As the United States emerged as an urbanized, industrialized global power in the late 1800s, city schools became a focal point for change. The consolidation of rural schools into city districts led alliances of business representatives and educational professionals to develop complex educational systems marked by increased specialization of pedagogical and support functions. Schools became the centers of change assimilating new immigrants seeking the benefits of large industrialized cities (Tyack, 1974). City schools became bureaucracies grounded on principles of organizational science and efficiency. They became the places of social and industrial change. In 1974, Tyack captured the history of urban schools from the period of the one-room school house where discipline depended the teacher’s ability to physically control male students who may be as large as the teacher to the bureaucratic period with federal, state and local agencies controlling the daily lives administrators, teachers, students and parents.

The history of urban education is rich in such contrasts: of size and location; of the same community at different periods; of different ethnic groups and classes; and of similar organizations and occupational groups, such as welfare or police bureaucracies…Through using a variety of social perspectives and modes of analysis, I have sought to illuminate the transformation from village school to urban system…for the highly complex changes in ways of thinking and behaving that accompanied revolutions in technology, increasing concentrations of people inner cities, and restructuring of economic and political institutions into large bureaucracies (Tyack, 1974, p. 5). 

City schools were transformed into urban schools needing constant reform. Reforming urban schools is grounded in the major purpose of improving the life chances of children, especially Black and Latino (Peck, 2018). Since 1960 the rationale for urban school change efforts is based in the belief of different forms by politicians, interest groups, local communities, and the broader public. The debate was over structural and systemic changes necessary to improve education with community objections to outside policymakers and a cry for local control (Great Schools Partnership, 2014). Urban school reform has provided a means for encouraging social justice for marginalized youth and mechanisms for generating financial returns for educational vendors. Support of urban schools is reinforced by their ongoing exemplary work in producing student academic achievement (Ferguson, 2017; Peck, 2018). Urban schools improve the life chances of Black and Latinx youth.

Urban schools are challenged by ongoing changes of changing environments. Migration, immigration, school segregation, economic segregation, and the Brown v. Board of Education ruling increased urbanization and suburbanization (Ferguson, 2012; Rumbaut, 2014, 2017). De jure and de facto segregation, White Flight, dropout rates of 50 percent, and low achievement confirmed the decline of urban schools (Peck, 2018). While school professionals blamed socioeconomic and cultural student factors, scholars like Jencks (1972) and Coleman (1966) questioned the capacity of schools to overcome poverty, race, and other socioeconomic factors (Tyack, 1974) described the dysfunctionality of public schools as “the one best system on fire” (p. iii). In response to “blaming the victim theory,” scholars like Edmunds (1979) and Comer (2009) started the effective schools movement identifying core characteristics of educations and institutions that have successfully service urban schools of color. In 1983, A Nation at Risk targeted all stages of education from pre-school to school-to-work transition (Goetz, Floden, & O’Day, 1995). Systematic reforms served as the impetus of the school choice movement (Campbell, Heywrd, & Gross, 2017; Hanushek & Lindseth, 2010). Urban school reforms occurred in the school, in governance, and in communities (Ferguson, 2019; Peck, 2017; Schnieder, 2018). Most importantly school reform was the impetus for social justice for marginalized youth, especially Black and Latinx, and as mechanisms for generating financial returns for educational vendors (Peck, 2017). In 2019, the geography and the economy of city schools or urban schools in the United States have undergone a transformation from large urban school districts into large metropolitan area schools grounded in regions consisting of a densely populated urban core, urban emergent cities (Ferguson, Milner, 2012) that serves as the center of change and increasing concentrations of Black and Latino students, generally nonwhite.

Post-2000 urban school reform is affected by race and ethnicity (Diamond & Lewis, 2016; Ferguson,  2002; Milner, 2017; Morris, 2016: Barbara, Martinez, & Owens, 2006; Vasquez Heilig, Khalifa, & Tillman. 2014), poverty (Reardon, Coles, & Levin, 2015 ), politics and power (Levin, McEwan, Belfield, Bowden, & Shand, 2013); system control, an 80%  teaching force different from the students and disproportionate use of school-to-prison discipline (Barrett, McEachin, Mills, & Valant, 2017; Darling-Hammond, 2012; Delpit, 2012; Diamond & Lewis 2017; DiAngelo, Gordon, 2018; Noguera, 2003; Reyes, 2006; Vasquez Heilig, Khalifa, & Tillman, 2014).

The purpose of this special edition of the edition of the Journal of Education Sciences is to provide a series of urban education articles that explore the transformation of urban education from 1970-2020. 

Prof. Dr. Augustina Reyes
Dr. Linda Martinez
Guest Editors

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• College readiness and high-poverty schools
• Competitive STEM Curriculum and STEM Faculty and Teacher Credentials
• Choice
• Cultural contexts, connections, conflicts, and social justice
• Curriculum and racial equity
• Governance: Local and State
• Immigrants
• Early childhood Education: Maria Montesorri for low-income children
• Effects of desegregation in the South and hiring of Black teachers and Black administrators
• Effects of de facto desegregation of Mexicans in the South and hiring of Mexican American teachers and administrators
• Emerging political and power structures of metropolitan school districts
• Failures in urban school reform
• Income segregation
• Local control
• Outsiders v Insiders in Urban Transformation
• Politics and Power
• Population distribution, density and race/ethic groups
• Race, ethnicity, poverty and access to health
• School leadership: What it is, how it happens, why it matters (leadership for the common good)
• School Segregation
• Social Justice and equity
• Standards
• The Prison Pipeline