A supplemental text with a fresh, bold edge, Challenges of Urban Education includes a range of topics from quantitative analyses of student demographics to the description and analysis of urban high school students' creative writing. The book bridges the dualisms of local and global, theory and practice, and structure and agency. It furthers the advancement of "the new sociology of education" by making connections between the social context of urban schooling and the lives of the individuals who are affected by it.