A discussion of urban education in relationship to the current crisis in Britain, the United States and Australia may seem, at first sight, a daunting project in the space permitted here. From another point of view, however, it poses an exciting opportunity to use the comparative method as a means of elaborating an analysis, an impossibility with a single case study. Had the sociology of education learned some of the lessons of its founding fathers, Weber and Durkheim, some of its weaker theoretical formulations could have been avoided.