The Dismantling of an Urban School System: Detroit, 1980-2014.

urban education policy;school governance;Detroit schools;education history;urban regime analysis;Education;Social Sciences;Educational Studies

Kang, LeanneSpain, Angeline ;

University of Michigan

关键词: urban education policy;    school governance;    Detroit schools;    education history;    urban regime analysis;    Education;    Social Sciences;    Educational Studies;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/113328/leannek_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

In the last thirty years we have seen a flurry of school reforms (e.g., charters, school choice, vouchers, NCLB, Race to the Top, mayoral control, emergency management, statewide recovery school districts, etc.). However, most researchers have studied such reforms in isolation from the other rather than as symptoms of broader change, especially in the way that we govern schools. A historical analysis, this study seeks to understand school governance change by examining the Detroit Public Schools (DPS) since 1980, a single urban school district in which most of the school reforms mentioned above have been implemented. I situate the study within the overall history of public schooling in the United States and use urban regime analysis to highlight how politics – especially informal political arrangements – influences and sustains governance change. Analyses reveal that there are five key school reforms that have culminated in the dismantling of Detroit’s traditional school governance system and the emergence of a possible third wave of school governance change in U.S. history. Case studies of mayoral takeover (1999-2004) and the Education Achievement Authority (2012-present) tell the story of how policies gradually eroded local control and weakened the traditional governance regime, enabling the rise of new educational actors to support governance change. I argue Detroit is a case study of Jeffrey Henig’s idea of ;;the end of exceptionalism,” the notion that public schooling is losing its special status as a closed system of government and being reabsorbed into general-purpose government. The shifting of who controls schools has also resulted in school battles that occur within the racial resonances of postwar Detroit. I conclude the study with a discussion on neoliberalism as a possible framework for further understanding the logic behind contemporary school reform and the lessons drawn from this study: a stern warning about the structural crisis that has developed under such policies and a call for a better politics around education if we are to have any success in improving urban schools in the twenty-first century.