Books
Book Review
A Decade of Urban School Reform: Persistence and Progress in the Boston Public Schools
Edited by Paul Reville with Celine Coggins
(Harvard Education Press, 2007, 269 pages)
Urban School Reform: Lessons from San Diego
Edited by Frederick Hess, Ed.M.’90
(Harvard Education Press, 2005, 300 pages)
Reviewed by Bob Schwartz, C.A.S.’68
When future historians examine the current era in American education, one thing they will note is the emergence of some urban school districts, after decades of being maligned, as centers of innovation and reform. For scholars interested in studying efforts to bring about large-scale improvements in teaching and learning, the action is now in the big cities, hence these two volumes analyzing the implementation of comprehensive and ambitious reform programs in San Diego and Boston.
Despite the very different political environments in which these reform programs played out, there is substantial overlap in these two volumes. In each case a respected independent analyst was asked to assemble a panel of scholars to examine key facets of the reform strategies. The Boston volume draws heavily on HGSE-related faculty and doctoral students; Assistant Professor Nonie Lesaux is the one HGSE contributor to the San Diego collection. Each volume has key chapters on the infrastructure to support instructional improvement, high school reform, special education, human resource development, governance, and the political context. Both end with thoughtful reflections from the district’s superintendent.
Alan Bersin, hired as superintendent in San Diego in 1998, was brought in as an outside change agent. His first act was to hire as chancellor for instruction Tony Alvarado, longtime superintendent of Community District 2 in New York City. Bersin and Alvarado moved quickly to develop a program for San Diego, the “Blueprint for Student Success,” which called for a massive reallocation of resources to support teaching and learning in the classroom, with heavy investments in literacy and mathematics coaches, intensive professional development, and the development of principals as instructional leaders. These reforms were met with resistance from the teachers union. By the end of Bersin’s second year, the battle lines were so sharply drawn that it became clear that if one of his three supporters on the board were to be replaced by a critic, implementation of the blueprint would likely be reversed. The papers in the Hess volume, commissioned in early 2004, provide a balanced assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of an implementation strategy summarized by one author as: “(1) Do it fast. (2) Do it deep. (3) Take no prisoners.”
The political context and reform implementation strategy in Boston could not have been more different. First, after a long and contentious history of divided authority over the schools, the Massachusetts legislature in 1991 approved a measure to replace the elected school committee in Boston with a mayorappointed committee. In 1995, Mayor Thomas Menino worked closely with his committee to select as superintendent Tom Payzant, M.A.T.’63, C.A.S.’66, Ed.D.’68, former superintendent in four other communities (most notably San Diego). For the next 11 years, Payzant enjoyed the support of the mayor and school committee as he methodically implemented two successive versions of “Focus on Children.” Payzant articulated a common framework to guide “whole school reform” in each of Boston’s 145 schools, with six essentials, including substantial investments in coaching and other professional development to drive instructional improvement down into each classroom.
Although the specifics of each city’s reform program were customized, the underlying philosophy and core content were not all that different. The biggest difference was in the intensity and pace of implementation. The criticism that emerges in San Diego is that implementation was too top-down, with too little attempt to generate real teacher buy-in. In Boston critics express the opposite concern: Was the pace of reform fast enough, given the persistence of troubling racial achievement gaps amidst the overall progress of the system?
For students of urban education reform, both books provide a detailed and nuanced portrait of two districts engaged in ambitious, thoughtful, systemic efforts to transform teaching and learning across their schools. Both districts have experienced substantial gains in student performance during the tenure of these two extraordinary leaders, but much work remains. Can these reforms be sustained and deepened? Here’s hoping Hess and Reville revisit these districts in 2010.
— Bob Schwartz is a professor and academic dean at HGSE.
About the Article
A version of this article originally appeared in the Fall 2007 issue of Ed., the magazine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
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