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I can't remember a time when I didn't think of public schools as the crucible of American democracy, founded to provide all children -- independent of family circumstances -- with a solid education that prepares them for future citizenship.
Yet the ones I attended as a child, the ones I observed as a newspaper reporter, and the ones my children went to did little to sustain that idealistic vision. Until I began actively searching out schools that successfully taught children of color and children from low-income homes, the schools I experienced seemed to be organized around random acts of education, replicating inequity rather than disrupting it.
I have spent more than fifteen years seeking out and learning from what I call unexpected schools -- high performing and rapidly improving schools with large percentages of students of color and students from low-income families, and wrote about them in a series of books culminating in Schools that Succeed: How Educators Marshal the Power of Systems for Improvement (Harvard Education Press, 2017).
They have restored my belief that it is possible for schools to act as crucibles of democracy, providing a solid education and opportunities to students independent of their family circumstances.
But through the years I have noticed that as principals retired or took other jobs, some of their schools fell dramatically in achievement. Successful schools are not perpetual motion machines where you put in a system and a culture and then they can run themselves. They require continual leadership. And that means they need functional school districts. That insight sent me on a journey to identify high performing and improving school districts that serve children of color and children from low-income schools, culminating in my latest book, Districts that Succeed: Breaking the Correlation Between Race, Poverty, and Achievement (Harvard Education Press, 2021).
In it I profile five districts that are very different in their outer characteristics:
* Lane, a teeny district in southeastern Oklahoma
* Seaford, a rural district in lower, or Southern, Delaware
* Valley Stream 30, a suburban district on Long Island, New York
* Steubenville, an economically devastated urban district in Appalachian Ohio
* Chicago, Illinois, the fourth largest school district in the country
Different demographics, different finances, different locales. But at their heart they have leaders who believe in the capacity of all children to learn and the responsibility of adults to figure out how to teach them.
The surprise for many people will be Chicago, which is more known for its political dysfunction and strife than for the improvement of its academic achievement, but over the last two decades more students graduate and go to college and more students are meeting academic standards as measured by state and national assessments. That is quite a turnaround for a district which U.S. Secretary of Education William Bennett called the "worst" district in the country in 1987.
Read about Chicago's improvement--and why you haven't heard about it before now, in Districts that Succeed.
In addition to Districts that Succeed and Schools that Succeed, I am co-author of Getting It Done: Leading Academic Success in Unexpected Schools (Harvard Education Press, 2011), which is a careful study of the leaders of unexpected schools. I am also author of: How It's Being Done: Urgent Lessons from Unexpected Schools (Harvard Education Press, 2009); and It's Being Done: Academic Success in Unexpected Schools (Harvard Education Press, 2007). It's Being Done was named one of the top education books of the decade by Education Next magazine.
I am a long-time reporter and education writer and have written for such publications as American Educator, American Teacher, and Education Week, as well as The Washington Post, where for five years I wrote a weekly column on schools and education. Prior to that I was senior writer and executive editor of Black Issues In Higher Education (now Diverse). Originally from New York and New Jersey, I now live in Silver Spring, Maryland, where I was an active parent volunteer throughout my children's school careers in Montgomery County Public Schools.
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