American School Reform

Dissecting twenty years of educational politics in our nation's largest cities, American School Reform offers one of the clearest assessments of school reform as it has played out in our recent history. Joseph P. McDonald and his colleagues evaluate the half-billion-dollar Annenberg Challenge-launched in 1994-alongside other large-scale reform efforts that have taken place in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and the San Francisco Bay Area. They look deeply at what school reform really is, how it works, how it fails, and what differences it can make nonetheless.

McDonald and his colleagues lay out several interrelated ideas in what they call a theory of action space. Frequently education policy gets so ambitious that implementing it becomes a near impossibility. Action space, however, is what takes shape when talented educators, leaders, and reformers guide the social capital of civic leaders and the financial capital of governments, foundations, corporations, and other backers toward true results. Exploring these extraordinary collaborations through their lifespans and their influences on future efforts, the authors provide political hope-that reform efforts can work, and that our schools can be made better.

“"Urban school districts have been the focal points for intensive reform efforts over the past two decades. All of these efforts have been highly contentious, and they have produced mixed results. The more that is known about what makes reform successful and unsuccessful in these contexts, the greater the likelihood for success in the future. American School Reform makes a significant contribution to this knowledge. It tells important stories about significant reforms in four cities and provides a new way of looking at reform that can be useful moving forward."”

"McDonald and colleagues make a valuable theoretical contribution to the field of district-level school reform through their integrative framework and nuanced cross-case analysis of diverse school reform efforts."
-- "Teachers College Record"

Joseph P. McDonald is professor of teaching and learning at the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development at New York University. He is the author or coauthor of many books, including, most recently Going Online with Protocols and Going to Scale with New School Designs. The Cities and Schools Research Group consists of Jolley Bruce Christman, Thomas B. Corcoran, Norm Fruchter, Milbrey W. McLaughlin, Gordon Pradl, Gabriel Reich, Mark Smylie, and Joan Talbert.

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