Drawing on a four-year study of the last 40 years of education reform in Los Angeles, Learning from L.A. captures the sweeping change in American education. It puts forth a provocative argument: while school reformers and education historians have tended to focus on the success or failure of individual initiatives, they have overlooked the fact that, over the past several decades, the institution of public education itself has been transformed. Colorful characters, dramatic encounters, and political skirmishes enliven this rich account of the wrenching transformations that took place in the Los Angeles Unified School District from the 1960s onward. The book focuses particularly on four key ideas that emerged through a succession of reforms beginning in the 1990s-decentralization, standards, school choice, and grassroots participation. Though the particular plans that gave rise to these ideas may have faded, the ideas themselves have taken root and developed in ways that those who inaugurated or participated in these reforms never anticipated.

Incisive and readable, this excellent volume offers an overview of contemporary campaigns and elections and the role parties play in them. Anyone looking to better understand and identify important features of current campaigns and elections, and to place these features in a historical context, will find the book invaluable. Drawing on extensive interviewing and archival research, David Menefee-Libey argues that campaign-centered politics is now the dominant force in American elections with serious implications for representative democracy. Data on campaign activities and finance from the 1998 election is included.

"This work offers a great deal of rich, detailed narrative on the pressures on and responses by party organizations caught up in a vortex of contextual change over the past generations. David Menefee-Libey analyzes the structured interactions among political elites, discussing campaign-dominated politics in the modern era and providing a wealth of compelling detail", according to Walter Dean Burnham of the University of Texas at Austin. "A well-written and well-developed study of national party organizations, political party in government, and the new party paradigm", writes Charles D. Hadley of the University of New Orleans. "It brings together two very important themes of contemporary American politics: the scholarship on critical elections and party decline and that on 'responsible parties' to form the 'new party paradigm' of 'campaign-centered politics.'"