This book challenges common assumptions about the efficacy of teacher collaboration, empowerment, and professional development to improve the educational experiences of low-achieving African American students without engaging the political and ideological contexts in which reforms take place. Written in a clear, engaging style, the book tells the story of two restructuring junior high schools in a single district, and how teachers' ideologies and race, class, and power contradictions in the schools, school district, and city shaped outcomes. Although the book is a critique of restructuring, powerful portraits of teachers who create culturally responsive and empowering educational experiences demonstrate the potential to reform educational practices and policies for African American students and suggest a direction for transforming schools.

Urban education and its contexts have changed in powerful ways. Old paradigms are being eclipsed by global forces of privatization and markets and new articulations of race, class, and urban space. These factors and more set the stage for Pauline Lipman's insightful analysis of the relationship between education policy and the neoliberal economic, political, and ideological processes that are reshaping cities in the United States and around the globe. Using Chicago as a case study of the interconnectedness of neoliberal urban policies on housing, economic development, race, and education, Lipman explores larger implications for equity, justice, and "the right to the city". She draws on scholarship in critical geography, urban sociology and anthropology, education policy, and critical analyses of race. Her synthesis of these lenses gives added weight to her critical appraisal and hope for the future, offering a significant contribution to current arguments about urban schooling and how we think about relations between neoliberal education reforms and the transformation of cities. By examining the cultural politics of why and how these relationships resonate with people's lived experience, Lipman pushes the analysis one step further toward a new educational and social paradigm rooted in radical political and economic democracy.

Contents:
1. Introduction 2. Chicago School Reform and Its Political, Economic, and Cultural Context 3. Accountability, Social Differentiation, and Racialized Social Control 4. "Like a Hammer Just Knocking Them Down" - Regulation African American Schools 5. The Policies and Politics of Cultural Assimilation 6. It's Us Verus the Board - The Enemy - Race, Class and the Power to Oppose 7. Conclusion

This book analyses the ways in which schools in urban areas are shaped and influenced by social, economic and political forces within the social environment. Utilizing research from schools in Chicago, the book shows how schools attempt to respond to external factors that are typically seen as being beyond the control of schools. These external factors include demographic change (i.e. immigration), poverty, drug trafficking, violence and social inequality: issues that confront urban schools throughout the United States. The central argument of the book is that unless strategies are devised to address these external forces, it is unlikely that schools will succeed in serving the academic needs of students.
Increasingly, the term urban is a social and cultural construct, used to describe economically depressed inner-city neighborhoods and the people who live there, rather than a geographic concept. Schools in such communities are typically regarded as some of the worst in the nation, and many have been written off as hopeless academic wastelands. Yet, for poor children and their families, such schools constitute the last remnant of the social safety net; the only public institution that is required by law to serve their needs. The basic contention of this book is that though the obstacles faced by urban schools are formidable, action for improvement is possible when strategies are devised that deliberately seek to address external constraints.
The book consists of six chapters. The first two situate the study within the national debate over school reform and urban poverty. Chapters three through five provide case studies in which efforts undertaken by schools to address larger social and economic issues are explored. The final chapter analyzes the policy implications of the research and the cases that are presented.

Urban education and its contexts have changed in powerful ways. Old paradigms are being eclipsed by global forces of privatization and markets and new articulations of race, class, and urban space. These factors and more set the stage for Pauline Lipman's insightful analysis of the relationship between education policy and the neoliberal economic, political, and ideological processes that are reshaping cities in the United States and around the globe. Using Chicago as a case study of the interconnectedness of neoliberal urban policies on housing, economic development, race, and education, Lipman explores larger implications for equity, justice, and "the right to the city". She draws on scholarship in critical geography, urban sociology and anthropology, education policy, and critical analyses of race. Her synthesis of these lenses gives added weight to her critical appraisal and hope for the future, offering a significant contribution to current arguments about urban schooling and how we think about relations between neoliberal education reforms and the transformation of cities. By examining the cultural politics of why and how these relationships resonate with people's lived experience, Lipman pushes the analysis one step further toward a new educational and social paradigm rooted in radical political and economic democracy.