Leadership for Student

Learning:
Urban School Leadership
Different in Kind and Degree

An Essay by Larry Cuban

School Leadership for the 21st Century Initiative
September 2001
PROJECT STAFF
Michael Usdan, Project Director
Barbara McCloud, Project Associate Director
Mary Podmostko, Project Associate
Larry Cuban, Senior Project Consultant, Stanford University

FUNDERS
This publication was made possible by grants from the Office of Educational Research and Im-
provement of the United States Department of Education, the Ford Foundation, the UPS Founda-
tion, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, and the MetLife Foundation. The statements made
and views expressed are solely the responsibility of the author.

ABOUT IEL
For more than thirty-five years, the Institute for Educational Leadership (IEL)a non-profit, non-
partisan organization based in Washington, D.C.has worked to help decision-makers achieve
better results for children and youth. At the heart of our effectiveness is our unique ability to bring
people together to identify and resolve issues across policy, program, and sector boundaries. As a
natural outgrowth of our work, we have created and continue to nurture diverse networks across
the country. Today, IEL is working to help individuals and institutions increase their capacity to
work together. We are building and supporting a cadre of diverse leaders, strengthening the capac-
ity of education and related systems, and informing the development and implementation of poli-
cies. Our efforts are focused through four programs of work: Developing Leaders; Strengthening
School-Family-Community Connections; Connecting and Improving Systems that Serve Children and
Youth; and Improving Preparation for Work.

Please visit our Web site at www.iel.org to learn more about IEL.

For more information on the Initiative:

Mary Podmostko, Project Associate
Institute for Educational Leadership
1001 Connecticut Avenue, N.W., Suite 310
Washington, DC 20036
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Fax (202) 872-4050
podmostkomiel.org
www.iel.org

The author would like to express gratitude for the help of Mike Kirst, Craig Peck, Rob Reich,
Dorothy Shipps and Gary Yee in commenting on a draft of this brief.

2001 by the Institute of Educational Leadership, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this docu-
ment may be reproduced in any way without the express written permission of the publisher.

ISBN 0-937846-15-5
 Leadership for
Student Learning:
Urban School Leadership
Different in Kind and Degree

An Essay by Larry Cuban

School Leadership for the 21st Century Initiative
September 2001
Preface
The Institute for Educational Leadership is pleased to publish this thought-provoking piece by
Larry Cuban as a component of its School Leadership for the 21st Century Initiative. Professor
Cuban, who served as a school superintendent and teacher for many years in urban schools, surfaces
some issues that badly need further discussion and debate.
As the standards movement matures, the need to differentiate testing and accountability strate-
gies for very diverse districts is becoming more and more obvious. This paper not only provides valu-
able historical context for this discussion and debate but also documents the special importance and
uniqueness of urban districts. It provides, we believe, valuable perspectives on why advocates of the
long overdue and laudable standards movement must be more nuanced, not in their goal of high
academic achievement for all students, but in their implementation strategies, particularly as they re-
late to the unique political, social, historical, and economic context of large urban school systems.

Michael D. Usdan
Project Director
Senior Fellow, IEL

Note: A portion of this essay appeared in the May 30, 2001, edition of Education Week. In that
commentary, Dr. Cuban raised a few points about the complexities of urban school leadership that
are dealt with here. In addition, he had two recommendations in the article that are incorporated
here. Missing, however, from that Education Week commentary were the elaboration of the history,
contexts, and deeper political issues that appear in this brief.
Urban School Leadership:
Different in Kind and Degree
TABLE OF CONTENTS

NATIONALIZING EDUCATION REFORM 1

LEARNING FROM THE PAST 3

Copying Successful Businesses
Confusing Setting Standards with Standardization

REFORMING SCHOOLS  THE CURRENT AGENDA 5

Expecting More from Superintendents
Changing Governance Systems

DISPELLING SOME URBAN MYTHS 7

AN INITIAL AGENDA FOR ACTION 10

REFERENCES 11
Nationalizing Education Reform
In 2001, President George W. Bush appointed a big city African American superintendent to
head the Department of Education, proposed an agenda for spending Title I funds that called for
major improvements in urban schools, and asked states to test all children each year between 3rd and
8th grades. Although concentrating on urban schools with high concentrations of poor children, the
President urged state and local leaders to raise academic achievement for all students. In doing so,
Bush took the current accountability-driven, standards-based school programs he had championed
for children in Texas and nationalized the reforms.
From this Republican president the commitment to standards-based reform and urban schools is
ironic, but it surprises few observers familiar with the history of American school reform. For the last
half-century the unrelenting criticism of public schools has been that they fail to teach basic literacy
or develop appropriate moral behavior and character, and they produce graduates with few mar-
ketable skills in the workplace. This has largely been a critique of urban schools in which the ethnic
and racial mix in these communities may change from one decade to the next, where less experienced
and under-qualified staff work in deteriorating physical plants that serve chronically poor neighbor-
hoods coping with drug abuse and crime.
This urban-based critiquerichly amplified in the mediahas been slapped onto all American
schools. Popular culture films and television shows from Blackboard Jungle (1955) with lethal adoles-
cents overwhelming a genial teacher to the television show Boston Public (2001) in which a teacher
disciplines his class with a gun have helped Americans to think that all urban schoolsexcept the
one down the blockare like those portrayed in the media. Few pundits point out that these depic-
tions of urban schools capture only a partial and exaggerated picture of what occurs in these schools.
Nor do these critics say that what is portrayed too often suggests that all schools are like those de-
picted in film or television.
Equating inadequate urban schools with all public schools has encouraged sloppy thinking about
American education. When it comes to criticism of American schools, for the last half-century, the
urban tail has wagged the public school dog.
Pause for a moment and reflect on the flawed logic of those who tar all public schools with the
urban brush. For example, if all American schools are lousy, including ones in cities, how can they
have produced graduates who have entered and succeeded at colleges and universities which are
highly admired by the rest of the world? And, how can the critics also ignore the rise in American
economic productivity, global competitiveness and unrivaled prosperityincreases that have surged
across the nation in the 1990s and that stem from those very same inadequately prepared high school
and college graduates?
Fusing fears over particular urban schools with pervasive criticism of the entire public school sys-
tem badly biases thinking about reform. When the U.S. Secretary of Education, supporting the Pres-
idents No Child Left Behind plan, writes that anyone who opposes annual testing of children is
an apologist for a broken system of education, he equates reaching the hard to teacheducation
shorthand for economically disadvantaged, limited English-proficiency, and special education stu-
dents, or those concentrated in urban schoolswith reaching all suburban and rural children
(Paige, 2001).
Whats wrong with crossing the city line and aiming for all children? First, the merging of criti-
cism of poor, often racially isolated, schools with all schools ignores the substantial achievements of

Urban School Leadership: Different in Kind and Degree 1

 administrators and teachers in tens of thousands of fine schools, including ones in cities. Second, the
diversity among citiesthe major differences between, for example, a San Diego and Philadelphia
are ignored. Third, the blending of urban with suburban and rural schools encourages presidents,
governors, and corporate leaders to design solutions for ailing urban schools that become one-size-
fits-all reforms treating all American schools as interchangeable cogs in a large machine.
Our nations urban schools, particularly those in most need, are poorly matched to current pop-
ular reforms and leadership formulas packaged like brand-name products for schools across the
country. For those who lead urban schools, different expectations, different obligations, and different
city histories require far more moxie, skills, and political finesse than for their colleagues in middle-
and upper-class, racially isolated suburbs. The all-purpose reform solution now treats all schools as
the same while neglecting the vital linkages between cities, their schools, and the countrys economic
and social wellbeing.

2 Institute for Educational Leadership

Learning from the Past
What shall we do with our great cities? The whole country is affected, if indeed its character is
not determined by the conditions of its great cities (Cronin, 1973).
The year was 1891. Progressive reformers of the day had hit upon a solution to make cities great:
improve schools so that they can build strong American citizens by assimilating immigrants, increas-
ing literacy to reduce poverty, and preparing workers eager to enter industry and business. To have
schools achieve these purposes, new leadership and major reforms in school governance were needed.
In the years bracketing the turn of the 20th century, progressive reformers yanked schools out of
urban political machines, downsized large appointed city school boards that dispensed patronage,
and ended the bribing of school officials. They recruited civic-minded business and professional gen-
tlemen (with an occasional woman) to serve on boards of education, and urged that these small
boards hire professionally trained administrators to manage the schools. For well over a half-century
after these reforms, university educated superintendents and principals served elected (and some ap-
pointed) school boards that were insulated from partisan politics. Civil-service regulations guided
school boards hiring of school staff, virtually ruling out nepotism and patronage while impartial and
public bids reduced considerably the bribing of school officials in buying textbooks, building
schools, and transporting children.
Beginning in the post-World War II years, however, another generation of reformers blasted
public schools for inadequately dealing with international and domestic threats to the nation. Dur-
ing the 1950s, critics berated public schools for failing to keep pace with the scientific and military
progress of the Soviet Union. The U.S. needed to produce more engineers and scientists to defend
the nation in the Cold War. Educators responded by raising academic standards and increasing the
number of math and science courses. Academic excellence became the beacon for educational leaders
to follow.
The international threat, however, soon gave way to a serious domestic problem that another
group of critics believed school leaders should solve. As the Civil Rights movement spread from the
South to the rest of the nation in the wake of the Brown v. Board of Education decision (1954), at-
tention shifted from the Soviet threat to the inferior schooling black students received in the South
and across the nation. Desegregation, rural and urban poverty, and dreadful conditions in so many
urban schools housing minority students sparked another generation of reformers who sought equal-
ity in education. Civil Rights marches, school boycotts, and the ouster of urban superintendents ric-
ocheted across the nations cities. Federal wallets opened and educational leaders designed urban
school programs to lift those at the bottom of society into the middle classes.
Yet by the mid-1970s, critics charged that the War on Poverty, like the one in Vietnam, had
been lost. Reformers who wanted schools to reduce social injustice and improve the life chances of
poor black and white children had failed, according to faultfinders. To worsen matters, these fault-
finders believed schoolsespecially those in citieshad abandoned their mission of teaching basic
knowledge and skills, respecting authority, and maintaining discipline. Incidents of violence in ur-
ban schools, illiterate high school graduates, and shabby teaching became front-page news and sub-
jects of Hollywood films.
At about the same time, rising inflation, increased unemployment, and U.S. firms losing market
share to Japan and Germany seized the policy-making agenda. The workplace was being transformed
by computerization. From manufacturing to processing insurance claims, a New Economy for an in-
formation-based society emerged. As the revolution in the nature of work swept across the private

Urban School Leadership: Different in Kind and Degree 3

 and public sectors, schools seemed stuck in the past. If schools, especially those in cities and low-
income suburbs where over one-third of all children went, could not produce sufficient graduates to
enter an entirely new workplace, then the nations global competitiveness was endangered.
Copying Successful Businesses
Since the A Nation at Risk report (1983) judged public schools so mediocre as to jeopardize the
economic future of the country, blaming educators has become common fare in the media. In the
past two decades, a broad coalition of corporate executives, public officials, and business groups has
pressed educational leaders to copy successful businesses. School leaders should do what successful
corporate leaders have done: trim bureaucracies, focus on measurable goals, manage through incen-
tives and penalties, and hold employees accountable for reaching desired goals. Presidents, mayors,
business executives, and parents have said (and say again and again) that public schools must focus
on preparing students for jobs.
Responding to scorching and unrelenting criticism, educators in suburbs, rural districts, and
big cities, beginning in the early 1990s, have embraced systemic reform. They have established
standards-based curricula, aligned the curricula to tests, monitored test scores closely, and rewarded
and punished teachers, principals, schools, and students when scores rose and fell.
Confusing Setting Standards with Standardization
The swift spread of this brand of reform has become an early 21st century formula for reforming
American public schools. The theory behind the current reform formula predicts that systemic
school reform will produce graduates who can secure high-paying jobs for themselves while ensuring
that American businesses can compete in the global economy. The theory also contains two assump-
tions: all public schools can profit from this approach and any good leader can put these changes
into place, regardless of location. Both assumptions, embraced by President Bush and many other
political and business leaders in their school reform packages, are flawed.
All public schools are hardly alike. In 50 states, almost 15,000 public school districts with almost
90,000 schools serve almost 50 million students. The social, academic, and cultural diversity among
districts and within districtsthink of New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago with high schools
that send 90 percent of their graduates to college and others where no more than 10 percent con-
tinue their educationis stunning. Generally speaking, however, what now exists in the U.S. is a
three-tiered system of schooling. Across the nation, there is a first tier of schools, about one in ten,
that already exceeds the high academic standards and test score threshold set by the states. Another
four to five of those ten schoolsthe second tiereither already meet or come close to their state
standards and cutoff scores on tests. The rest, the third tier, dont. Most of these latter schools are lo-
cated in urban and rural districts with high concentrations of poor and minority families.
Yet the current reform recipe is to hammer this three-tiered system of schooling into one mold.
Forcing all schools to fit the same mold, however, ignores those students already meeting and ex-
ceeding those standards. Reformers confuse setting standards with standardization.

4 Institute for Educational Leadership

Reforming SchoolsThe Current Agenda
Current reforms, for example, do little for the thousands of elementary schools that perform far
above the new standards in such places as La Jolla, California, Arlington, Texas, and Newton, Mas-
sachusetts. Nor does systemic reform do much for the hundreds of high schools such as New York
Citys Bronx High School of Science, New Trier High School in Winnetka (Illinois), or San Fran-
ciscos Lowell High School.
These reforms are aimed at the large number of urban schools struggling with students who per-
form in the lowest quartiles of academic achievement and often drop out. Publicly admitting this is
politically risky because the majority of voters who are middle class, white, and live in suburbs might
be distressed to see such targeted use of their tax dollars. Nor do these reforms, with their underlying
aim to make schools an arm of the economy, touch upon the broad and historic purposes of tax-
supported public schools: promoting democratic equality and molding citizens who contribute to
their communities beyond being efficient employees.
Also needing inspection is the second assumption buried in the current reform agenda. In look-
ing back over the last century, each generation of reformers sang one refrain again and again: the na-
tions schools need more and better school leaders.
Expecting More from Superintendents
Amid the rush toward accountability-driven reforms, the refrain has swelled into a loud chorus
demanding every superintendent to manage bureaucracies efficiently, lead principals and teachers in
instructional matters, and mobilize political coalitions of teachers, parents, and students to move
schools from being inadequate and just good-enough to ones that are excellent.
These expectations imply that leading city schools is the same as leading suburban, small town
and rural schools. That is not the case at all. Crucial differences distinguish urban school leaders
from those in other districts.
First, while the early history of suburbs has been one of searching for racial and ethnic homo-
geneity, larger homes, and better schools, cities have been (and are) cauldrons of diversity that have
both enriched and enervated schools. Century old conflicts over assimilating immigrants, using En-
glish as the sole language of instruction, desegregating schools, and reducing poverty have been prox-
ies for dealing with issues of color and class, both mainstays of urban schooling. Leading urban dis-
trictsfrom San Diego to Harrisburg, Pennsylvaniahave demanded from superintendents a
keener sensitivity to inequalities and a well-developed capacity to deal with racial isolation, ethnic
conflict, and economic disparities as they affect academic achievement both in the schools and the
city itself. Yet no urban superintendent can afford to ignore the current wisdom, forged by corporate
executives and public officials, that high academic standards and improved test scores lead directly to
well paying jobs, even when the concentration on tests produces winners and losers in the academic
sweepstakes.
As a result of public demands for improved academic achievement among those students who
have historically done least well in school, persistent issues of race, ethnicity, language and class have
required urban superintendents in small and large districts like Compton (California) or Baltimore
to expand their customary repertoire of political, managerial, and instructional roles to cope with the
abiding conflicts that arise time and again. For many urban superintendents, unequipped or unwill-
ing to deal with these issues, the job is overwhelming. Frequent turnover among school chiefs created
the false image of an impossible job and a turnstile superintendency. Those urban superintendents
who thrive in the post learn to lead by consciously blending the political, managerial, and instruc-

Urban School Leadership: Different in Kind and Degree 5

 tional roles to cope with the conflicts arising from issues of race and class as they affect test scores
and the broader purposes of public schooling.
The second distinguishing characteristic for big city school superintendents is the strong belief
that schools can help restore a citys economic, cultural, and social vitality. The once great American
cities that were taken for granted in the early decades of the 20th century declined dramatically in
post-World War II decades as they lost their appeal (and business) to suburbsparticularly with the
increase in the tendency to cast poverty and crime in racial terms during the 1960s. As Cleveland
Mayor Michael White said, Big cities [became] a code name for a lot of things: for minorities, for
crumbling neighborhoods, for crime, for everything that America moved away from. The mistaken
belief that cities were ungovernable took hold (Siegel, 1997).
Not until the early 1990s with major shifts in work and the economy did some cities begin to see
a reverse migration from suburbs and employers relocating because of lower land and labor costs.
Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco have begun to regain their cachet of greatness while other cities
such as Austin and San Jose have become magnets for technology-based businesses. Like a mighty
engine, former New York City Mayor David Dinkins said, urban America pulls all of America into
the future (Siegel, 1997).
For many urban politicians, the quality of public schools plays a key part in attracting employers
and young families to their neighborhoods and sustaining the vitality of cities. Their reputations as
mayors in large and small cities are deeply affected by the quality of their schools. Some superinten-
dents, unlike their peers elsewhere, have become key players in the revival of urban America and ur-
ban politics. Thus, President Bush appointing the Houston, Texas, superintendent as his Secretary
of Education acknowledges symbolically this current truth.
These differences counter the prevailing assumption buried within standards-based reform that
school leadership is the same across districts. Leading urban schools, unlike leading other districts, is
intimately tied to a unique and complex mission: Through improved schooling, reduce the dire con-
sequences of racial and ethnic isolation and the impact of poverty on academic achievement, while
increasing the life chances of families and their children to succeed economically and to contribute to
their communities. An unfortunate by-product of this distinct mission is the nourishing of the per-
vasive myth that schools alone can improve the life chances of poor children. They cannot.
Changing Governance Systems
Beginning in the mid-1990s, these differences in leadership requirements slowly and openly be-
came acknowledged. Major changes in urban school governance geared to improving academic
achievement have begun to alter urban school districts. In some cities, such as Baltimore, Chicago,
Boston, and Cleveland, mayors have appointed school boards and superintendents; in these places
schools have become another department of the citys administration. In Philadelphia, Detroit, and
New York, mayors exercised substantial influence in picking school board members and exerted in-
creasing control over school matters. In other cities, school boards, losing confidence in the ability of
rise-from-the-ranks superintendents to manage big systems, have chosen non-educators to lead their
districts. A former governor is Los Angeles superintendent; a corporate attorney leads the New York
City schools; former U.S. generals have led Seattle and District of Columbia schools; and an ex-U.S.
Attorney is school chief in San Diego.
These reforms in urban school governance (mostly white, middle and upper-middle class suburbs
and rural districts have not moved in this direction) are further evidence that cities impose broad and
diverse challenges upon those who seek to lead urban districts. The history, demography, governance
structures, and cultures in urban districts matter a great deal. Moreover, even among urban contexts,
differences matter. Running the Los Angeles schools (with almost 750,000 students), for example, is
very different from running the Boston schools 3000 miles away (with over 60,000 students).

6 Institute for Educational Leadership

Dispelling Some Urban Myths
Establishing that urban district leadership differs both in kind and degree from leadership of
other districts is less difficult than eliminating the pervasive fictions that distort discussions about
how to lead them. These myths are serviceable, that is, they advance the agendas of those interest
groups that wield them as truths, but fictions are unhelpful in designing and implementing policies.
Three obvious fictions need elaboration.
1. Big city school districts are ungovernable.
2. The superintendency is a revolving door that brings in and tosses out school chiefs one after the
other.
3. Schools alone can improve the life chances of poor children.
Big city school districts are ungovernable. During the social tumult of the 1960s and the fiscal
retrenchment of the post-Vietnam era, escalating crime, swelling welfare rolls, and reduced city ser-
vices were amplified in media stories of whites fleeing to suburbs, uncollected garbage, and random
violence on city streets. Cities were melting down. No mayor or city council, critics claimed, could
grasp the complexities, solve the problems, or even mobilize the necessary resources to arrest the de-
cline of one city after another. The idea that big cities were ungovernable stuck.
These problems inevitably affected schools. The notion that a superintendent, reporting to an
elected school board of five to nine individuals, could govern, say, New York City with over a mil-
lion students, and almost 80,000 teachers in nearly 1200 schools, strained belief. Racial and ethnic
conflicts over desegregation, community control, school violence, high dropout rates, and abysmal
academic performance, again richly documented by journalists, left the strong impression that urban
districts were too large to be manageable. New superintendents entering on the heels of a departing
school chief only to exit a few years later further sealed the impression.
In the early 1990s, however, a slow turnaround occurred in some of these apparently ungovern-
able cities. Candidates for mayor in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Denver, and Seattle took of-
fice after campaigning aggressively on platforms seeking to make their cities livable. Crime decreased.
Investors saw opportunities for building offices and homes on cheap land abandoned by businesses
decades earlier. Younger families and retired couples began moving back into cities. After serving two
or more terms, these mayors trumpeted their victories in making cities attractive to businesses, resi-
dents, and tourists. Cities, they said, were governable again.
And so were schools. Efforts throughout the 1970s and 1980s to break up large urban districts
into decentralized regions and sub-districts made them more manageable. Throughout the 1980s
and early 1990s, while many urban superintendents churned out reform after reform only to depart,
there were superintendents who worked closely with business and civic-led coalitions to engineer
changes and stayed to see that they were implemented. Pittsburgh, San Francisco, and San Diego
had leaders who built teams, delegated authority, and stayed for a decade or longer shepherding re-
forms into schools and consolidating their successes. Since the mid-1990s, school leaders in Chicago,
Philadelphia, Boston, and Seattle have also developed cadres of educators who worked closely with
mayors, business leaders, and parents to weld together broad support for their reform agendas. View-
ing cities and their schools over a longer time span reveals the fiction that big city schools are un-
governable and that the superintendency was merely a turnstile.
The superintendency is a revolving door. Among executives in most private and public institu-

Urban School Leadership: Different in Kind and Degree 7

 tions, the prevailing wisdom is for leaders and their teams to initiate reforms, and to serve as long as
it takes to implement and consolidate the changes amid inevitable conflict. To make the case that re-
forming big city schools is an impossible job, however, many policy makers, writers, and researchers
cite endlessly reports that big-city chiefs serve between two to three years before being ousted or re-
signing. They confuse turnover rates among groups of big-city superintendents with how long indi-
vidual superintendents served in a post (completed tenure). When researchers have looked back at a
century of completed tenures in the nations 25 largest urban school districts, they found that
tenure in these districts had indeed shrunk from an average high of 14 years in 1900 to just under six
years in 1990. But a median of six years served in a big city district is almost three times more than
the two plus years that opinion-makers repeat again and again (Yee & Cuban, 1996).
For every city that has superintendents entering and exiting every few yearsNew York in the
1990s, for examplethere are other cities that have superintendents who have served five to ten
years: Tom Payzant in San Diego and later in Boston, Gerry House in Memphis, CEO Paul Vallas
in Chicago, Walter Amphrey in Baltimore, and David Hornbeck in Philadelphia. (House served
eight years and left the district in 2000, the same year that Hornbeck resigned after serving six years.
Vallas resigned in 2001 after five years.)
The myth of a revolving door urban superintendency is serviceable to professional associations
since it drives salaries up and symbolically reinforces the image of hiring a superhero who welcomes
an incredibly hard job with a high casualty rate. Nonetheless, the often-repeated claim that most ur-
ban superintendents serve a couple of years and depart is, in a word, false. Another equally service-
able fiction is the belief that schools by themselves can overcome the grim effects of poverty, racism
and community neglect.
The schools alone can improve the life chances of poor children. Public officials, corporate
leaders, and media scolds find it useful to hold schools solely responsible for curing ills that are lo-
cated in the larger society. The current concentration on accountability-driven school reform as-
sumes that if students, teachers, and principals in big city schools would work harder than they have
in the past, then test scores would improve, more students would earn diplomas, and jobs in an in-
formation-based economy will await graduates.
Certainly there is some truth in the assumption. Much has been written about the prevailing low
expectations for academic performance urban principals and teachers have held regarding poor and
minority students. Studies have shown again and again how children in large schools easily get lost in
the impersonal throng of students and hectic schedules of over-worked, underpaid staffs. Other stud-
ies reveal that schools that seldom meet academic standards suffer few consequences. This research
gives credibility to the belief that harder work and higher standards will translate into higher student
academic achievement.
What weakens the assumption, however, are other facts that policy makers, business leaders, and
journalists neglect to mention. Anyone who has visited an urban elementary or secondary school for
at least one week (not a drive-by visit) to sit in classes, listen to teachers and students, and observe
lunchrooms, playgrounds, corridors, and offices would begin to appreciate a simple but inescapable
truth: an urban school is deeply influenced by the neighborhoods from which it draws its students.
Also of importance is that tax-supported public schools in a democracy are more than training
grounds for future employees. Schools are expected to instill in students civic and social attitudes and
skills that shape how graduates lead their lives in communities. Schools are expected to build respect
for differences in ideas and cultures. These are historic aims of public schools that have been largely
neglected in the rush to direct schools to be engines for the larger economy.
Yet the present agenda for urban school reform, narrowly concentrating on raising test scores and

8 Institute for Educational Leadership

getting jobs, largely ignores the pervasive influence upon the school of the communitys particular
racial, ethnic, and social class strengths and limitations. In middle class and wealthy neighborhoods,
focusing only on what the school can do is reasonable since these families have the money and net-
works to provide help for their children with academic, health, or emotional problems and to live in
communities where civic institutions thrive. That is not the case in poor communities. Families lack
personal and institutional resources. They depend upon the school and other public agencies. In
short, in cities, schools cant do it alone. This fundamental fact is ignored in the popular account-
ability-driven reforms.
A reform agenda focusing on pressing students, teachers, and principals to work harder is ratio-
nal in the sense that these are precisely the ones who work in schools. There is also a political calcu-
lus that restricts the reform agenda to schools. To pledge school improvements by including families
and neighborhoods would entail major expenditures by cities such as reconceptualizing schools as
youth-serving agencies rather than places where the single most important job is to produce higher
test scores. It would mean reorganizing existing city cultural, civic, and social services. Reformers
stammer when faced with the scale of such changes.
Of course, broadening the urban agenda to encompass a community-based strategy to school im-
provement does not mean that students, teachers, and principals should be held less responsible for
working hard to achieve their goals. Nor does this recognition of a school being nested in the larger
community suggest that there should be different standards for those who are well off and those who
are poor. The obvious fact that schools are entangled in their communities only makes clear the tasks
that face urban school leaders. They need to mobilize civic and corporate elites and educate these
opinion setters to the plain fact that raising academic achievement in big city schools involves far
more than designing merit pay plans, threatening teachers and principals, or withholding diplomas
for students who failed a graduation test. Few suburban or rural superintendents face such tasks.

Urban School Leadership: Different in Kind and Degree 9

 An Initial Agenda for Action
This essay argues that the key assumptions driving standards-based school reform and accountabil-
ity testing (all schools are basically alike and a one-size-fits-all leadership can solve Americas school
problems) are inapplicable to urban schools. The tasks facing urban school leaders differ both in magni-
tude and kind from guiding other school districts. Moreover, the web of fictions surrounding urban
school reform mires ongoing efforts to improve schooling.
This, then, is a brief for spotlighting the importance and singularity of urban leaders in pursuing
school reform. It also offers a glimpse of the tough tasks ahead for those who believe in the civic and
moral obligations that accompany making both cities and schools far better than they are for those who
have been so ill-served in the past.
For those who ask what comes next, following is an initial agenda for civic, business, and educa-
tional leaders committed to urban school improvement:
1. More (and wisely spent) resources need to be plowed into urban schools. There is simply no way
around the fact that to achieve the mission of tax-supported public schooling in a democracy, edu-
cating urban children will cost far more than is spent now. Critics who cite Washington, DC, or
Newark, NJ, as examples proving that the problem is not money, per se, but how it is spent by
clogged bureaucracies, need to stay a few weeks in schools and classrooms in Boston and San Diego,
and other reasonably well-managed urban districts. There, they would see clearly that insufficient re-
sources are allocated to teaching and learning in urban schools.
2. Press the public schools to go beyond vocational preparation. Urban schools do more than crank
out graduates to fill entry-level posts in the old and new economies. They equip students with the
civic, moral, and personal skills and behaviors to live in a multicultural society. Civic, business, and
educational leaders need to openly endorse and progammatically strengthen these larger purposes in
urban schools.
3. Provide special programs. Urban schools struggling with large percentages of low-performing poor
and minority students require unique in-school and out-of-school strategies that address the com-
plexities of teaching and learning in cities. What works in middle and upper class suburbs cannot be
cloned for urban classrooms.
4. Reframe urban school reform as a civic project. Incorporate an array of city-, neighborhood-, and
community-provided social, medical, library, cultural, and recreational services in and out of school
that are rooted in principles of youth development and that seek broader goals for youth beyond
raising test scores.
5. Concentrate on recruiting large numbers of urban teachers and principals. Train these new leaders
within urban schools through year-long paid supervised internships and intensive summer programs
in cooperation with local colleges and universities. Pay premium salaries to those teachers and prin-
cipals who complete the program and stay at least five years in the district.
Such an action agenda is only a beginning, of course. It sets a direction rather than offering a
blueprint. Very few policy makers, researchers, practitioners, or business and civic leaders can spell out
clearly what exactly has to be done to improve urban schools. Combining experimentation and practi-
tioner street smarts will help school leaders chart a course. And it is the direction that matters. Profes-
sional educators and lay leaders know in their hearts that for the sake of the next generation, the vitality
of cities, and the health of society, urban schools must do far more than raise test scores and prepare
workers. They must prepare students to live in a multicultural society where individual character, com-
munity involvement, and civic competence are as essential as job skills and academic degrees.
10 Institute for Educational Leadership
References
Cronin, J. (1973). The control of urban schools. New York, NY: Free Press.
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Henig, J. (1998). The color of school reform: Race, politics, and the challenge of urban education.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Hess, F. (1999). Spinning wheels: The politics of urban school reform. Washington, DC: Brookings In-
stitution Press.
National Commission on Excellence in Education. (1983). A nation at risk: The imperative for edu-
cational reform. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.
Paige, R. (2001, May 13). Why we must have testing. The Washington Post.
Shipps, D. (2000). Echoes of corporate influence: Managing away urban school troubles. In L.
Cuban & D. Shipps (Eds.) Reconstructing the common good in education: Coping with intractable
American dilemmas. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Siegel, F. (1997). The future once happened here. San Francisco, CA: Encounter Books.
Stone, C. (1998). Changing urban education. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas.
Tyack, D. & Hansot, E. (1982). Managers of virtue. New York, NY: Basic Books.
Yee, G. & Cuban, L. (1996). When is tenure long enough? A historical analysis of superintendent
turnover and tenure in urban school districts. Educational Administration Quarterly 32,
supplemental.

Urban School Leadership: Different in Kind and Degree 11

IEL BOARD OF DIRECTORS
Buzz Bartlett John May, Treasurer
Director, Corporate Affairs Partner
Lockheed Martin Corporation New Vantage Partners, LLC

Bert Berkley Arvin Mueller

Chairman of the Board Retired Vice President and Group Executive
Tension Envelope Corporation General Motors Power Train

Badi Foster Neal R. Peirce

President Contributing Editor
Phelps Stokes Fund The National Journal

Mary Hatwood Futrell James J. Renier, Chair

Dean Retired Chairman and CEO
Graduate School of Education Honeywell
and Human Development
The George Washington University Ted Sanders
President
James A. Kelly Education Commission of the States
Founding President
National Board for Professional P. Michael Timpane
Teaching Standards Senior Advisor for Education Policy
RAND Corporation
Floretta Dukes McKenzie
Founder and Chairwoman Elizabeth L. Hale
The McKenzie Group, Inc. President
The Institute for Educational Leadership

IEL PROGRAMS OF WORK

Developing Leaders
Strengthening School-Family-Community Connections
Connecting and Improving the Systems that Support Children and Youth
Improving Preparation for Work
Leadership for Student Learning
A Report Series published by the Institute for Educational Leadership on:
Principal Leadership
District Leadership
Teacher Leadership
State Leadership
Urban School Leadership

This publication was made possible by grants from:

The Office of Educational Research and Improvement of the United States
Department of Education
The Ford Foundation
The UPS Foundation
The Carnegie Corporation of New York
The MetLife Foundation

The statements made and views expressed are solely the responsibility of the author.

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