ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the basic skills restructuring of the urban school curriculum as a response to various crisis tendencies that afflict urban education. These crisis tendencies generate certain perennial problems. The chapter suggests how basic skills restructuring has been both a response to crisis and ironically a contributing factor in the perpetuation and extension of crisis tendencies in urban schools. It discusses the important implications when applied to the analysis of developments in urban schools and the basic skills reform movement. To the extent that these crisis tendencies have become more manifest in recent years, we may speak of a crisis in urban schooling that is composed of four interrelated sub-crises. These crises include: a crisis of work skills in the semi-skilled labor force, a legitimation crisis, a fiscal crisis, and a crisis of control. The fiscal crisis of the state and of urban public schools was a hard new reality by the early 1970s and it remains the 1990s.
