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How a City Learned to Improve Its Schools
A comprehensive analysis of the astonishing changes that elevated the Chicago public school system from one of the worst in the nation to one of the most improved.
How a City Learned to Improve Its Schools tells the story of the extraordinary thirty-year school reform effort that changed the landscape of public education in Chicago. Acclaimed educational researcher Anthony S. Bryk joins five coauthors directly involved in Chicago’s education reform efforts, Sharon Greenberg, Albert Bertani, Penny Sebring, Steven E. Tozer, and Timothy Knowles, to illuminate the many factors that led to this transformation of the Chicago Public Schools.
Beginning in 1987, Bryk and colleagues lay out the civic context for reform, outlining the systemic challenges such as segregation, institutional racism, and income and resource disparities that reformers grappled with as well as the social conflicts they faced. Next, they describe how fundamental changes occurred at every level of enhancing classroom instruction; organizing more engaged and effective local school communities; strengthening the preparation, recruitment, and support of teachers and school leaders; and sustaining an ambitious evidence-based campaign to keep the public informed on the progress of key reform initiatives and the challenges still ahead. The power of this capacity building is validated by unprecedented increases in benchmarks such as graduation rates and college matriculation. This riveting account introduces key actors within the schools, city government, and business community, and the partnerships they forged. It also reveals the surprising yet essential role of Chicago's innovative information infrastructure in aligning disparate initiatives.
In making clear how elements such as advocacy, civic capacity, improvement research, and strong democracy contributed to large-scale progress in the system's 600-plus schools, the book highlights the greater lessons that the Chicago story offers for system improvement overall.
How a City Learned to Improve Its Schools tells the story of the extraordinary thirty-year school reform effort that changed the landscape of public education in Chicago. Acclaimed educational researcher Anthony S. Bryk joins five coauthors directly involved in Chicago’s education reform efforts, Sharon Greenberg, Albert Bertani, Penny Sebring, Steven E. Tozer, and Timothy Knowles, to illuminate the many factors that led to this transformation of the Chicago Public Schools.
Beginning in 1987, Bryk and colleagues lay out the civic context for reform, outlining the systemic challenges such as segregation, institutional racism, and income and resource disparities that reformers grappled with as well as the social conflicts they faced. Next, they describe how fundamental changes occurred at every level of enhancing classroom instruction; organizing more engaged and effective local school communities; strengthening the preparation, recruitment, and support of teachers and school leaders; and sustaining an ambitious evidence-based campaign to keep the public informed on the progress of key reform initiatives and the challenges still ahead. The power of this capacity building is validated by unprecedented increases in benchmarks such as graduation rates and college matriculation. This riveting account introduces key actors within the schools, city government, and business community, and the partnerships they forged. It also reveals the surprising yet essential role of Chicago's innovative information infrastructure in aligning disparate initiatives.
In making clear how elements such as advocacy, civic capacity, improvement research, and strong democracy contributed to large-scale progress in the system's 600-plus schools, the book highlights the greater lessons that the Chicago story offers for system improvement overall.
- GenresNonfiction
424 pages, Paperback
Published April 18, 2023
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May 5, 2024
In How a City Learned to Improve its Schools Bryk, Bertani and a team of authors take a candid, well-researched look at Chicago Public Schools' attempts to reform itself after being deemed the worst public school system in America in 1987. The authors admitted that institutionalized racism and disinvestment over the decades put the schools in its shabby state.
They take a helicopter view as they hover over the schools as it decentralizes the main office of big bureaucracy, giving the communities control through local school councils until the mayor took over the schools in the mid- 90's hoping to stabilize the system. Many ‘think tanks’ and organizations aligned with the local universities’ education departments to improve the schools. Though it appears that none who actually worked in the trenches on a daily basis were included in the decision-making process, the schools did get better until the pandemic hit. It set the school system back again with a huge learning loss and there is still a huge number of students who never returned after the pandemic. A well- written and very well-documented piece!
They take a helicopter view as they hover over the schools as it decentralizes the main office of big bureaucracy, giving the communities control through local school councils until the mayor took over the schools in the mid- 90's hoping to stabilize the system. Many ‘think tanks’ and organizations aligned with the local universities’ education departments to improve the schools. Though it appears that none who actually worked in the trenches on a daily basis were included in the decision-making process, the schools did get better until the pandemic hit. It set the school system back again with a huge learning loss and there is still a huge number of students who never returned after the pandemic. A well- written and very well-documented piece!
Displaying 1 of 1 review