Understanding and improving urban secondary schools: the role of individual and collective agency
| Date | 06 August 2018 |
| Pages | 446-454 |
| Published date | 06 August 2018 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/JEA-08-2018-174 |
| Author | Karen Seashore Louis,Muhammad Khalifa |
| Subject Matter | Education,Administration & policy in education,School administration/policy,Educational administration,Leadership in education |
Guest editorial
Understanding and improving urban secondary schools: the role of individual
and collective agency
Introduction
Urban education has deteriorated badly over the last twenty years. Facilities are decaying, dropout
rates have increased, achievement is down, and student employment and further education are at a
lower level. (Louis and Miles, 1990, p. 3)
If predictions about the deterioration of US urban schools were bleak in the 1990s, research was
optimistic. Practitioners and scholars “discovered”that some urban schools could be very
effective working with less advantaged children (Edmonds, 1979, Hallinger and Murphy, 1986),
and developers were busy turning the research into programs to support improvement in
underperforming schools. In the 1990s, philanthropic foundations and the federal government
invested heavily in comprehensive school reform models to radically change high schools,
particularly those served less advantaged youth (Tirozzi and Uro, 1997; Wang et al., 1997) and
there was accumulating evidence that these models worked (Borman et al., 2003). Weak results
in secondary schools were attributed to issues of school organization and curriculum (Lee and
Smith, 1995, Lee et al., 1991; Marzano and Arredondo, 1986), which resulted in programs
to support college and career readiness through more rigorous curriculumand teaching in urban
secondary schools (Roderick et al., 2009). Advocates for smaller and more personalized high
schools and schools-within-schools provided impetus and funding to develop individualized
student support (Raywid, 1998; Vander Ark, 2002), and some states augmented basic
graduation standards with more authentic project-based requirements (Avery et al., 2003).
Effective leadership and modest resources were, it was assumed, essential –but the task seemed
within reach (Corcoran and Goertz, 1995; Louis and Miles, 1990).
Researcher optimism was not well founded. Over the last decade, federal and state
governments have provided pressure and resources to “close the gap”but by 2014, the
disparity between the performance of African–American and white students increased
(Heitin, 2014). Others pointed to increases in hyper-segregated schools, where students of
color are increasingly concentrated in low-performing settings (Balfanz and Legters, 2004;
Orfield and Frankenberg, 2014). The problems facing secondary schools seem intractable:
academic performance of elementary students from less advantaged families has improved
since the 1970s, but the US secondary school system has not made the same progress.
As younger students’performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress
increased in all tested subjects, the results for students who enrolled in Grade 12 stagnated
or declined[1]. Of course, this bleak picture does not include the adolescents who left school
before graduating, most of whom are likely to underperform the average[2].
International data confirm that US education continues to be weak in upper secondary
schools. The Trends in International Math and Science Study 2007 and 2015 data show that
fourth grade US students had above average scores in mathematics and science, but
that scores dropped significantly for older students[3]. Recent OECD PISA results confirm
that the secondary school performance is below the OECD average (OECD, 2014). Research
also suggests that the achievement gap between more and less advantaged students in the
USA becomes wider the longer they are in school, although explanations for this finding are
unclear (Alexander et al., 2007). The known weaknesses for all US secondary schools
understates the issues in the urban core and high poverty inner ring suburbs, where
students come to school faced more obstacles to success.
Journal of Educational
Administration
Vol. 56 No. 5, 2018
pp. 446-454
© Emerald PublishingLimited
0957-8234
DOI 10.1108/JEA-08-2018-174
446
JEA
56,5
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