The "Elementary and Secondary Education Act" ("ESEA"), as amended by the "Every Student Succeeds Act" ("ESSA") has transformed federal support for low-performing schools by moving away from prescriptive models of school turnaround toward supporting state innovation. State approaches to implementing…

Policymakers and practitioners at the local, state, and federal levels have invested considerable time and energy into solving the problem of turning around chronically low-performing schools. As the U.S. Department of Education (the Department) has refined the federal effort to support states and districts to turn schools around, it has adopted…

Once upon a time, the relationship of Boston universities to the city's school system was simply to accept worthy candidates into the freshman class and produce a few dozen new teachers each year to fill staff vacancies. For many decades, universities stayed away from Boston schools. Boston trained its elementary teachers at its own normal school,…

The conditions that students, parents, teachers, and administrators experienced are a product of economic, political, and social influences that impact the day-to-day operation of urban schools. One cannot understand the context of urban schools in the United States without considering the economic, political, and social influences that have made…