ABSTRACT
Urban schools are widely believed to represent the most vexing problems in American education today. Just the mention of urban education can conjure images of disorder, discipline issues, and low academic achievement. Middle-class urbanites often send their children to private institutions or to magnet or charter schools to avoid the city schools, which are seen as serving students left with no alternatives. In recent years education has become an important focal point of urban revitalization campaigns, aiming to reorganize institutions that customarily have been unresponsive to change. Whereas such reforms offer hope for thousands of children, the historical record does not suggest that great optimism is warranted for most of the nation’s urban schools in the immediate future.
