Reports/Articles

Student-Led Solutions to the Nation's Dropout Crisis. Voices of Youth in Chicago Education (VOYCE), November 2008. (PDF, 31pgs.)
Culminating from a year-long youth-led participatory action research project, VOYCE released a student-led research report, which outlines key findings and policy recommendations that VOYCE student leaders believe will impact the dropout rate. This report represents an analysis of 1,325 student surveys, interviews with 208 students, 110 teachers and 65 parents, and documents the VOYCE student researchers exploration of the reasons why students drop out, the creation of a positive learning environment and the role that a challenging curriculum that is relevant to students lives can play in motivating students to succeed.

Organized Communities, Stronger Schools: a Preview of Research Findings. Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University, March 2008. (PDF, 41pgs.)
The Annenberg Institute for School Reform has released a preview of findings from a six-year study that show the positive impact of effective community organizing on education reform in seven urban communities. The study demonstrates that community organizing contributes to an improved learning environment and improved educational outcomes for students and stimulates important changes in policy, practices, and resource distribution that expand equity and capacity at the system level, especially in historically underserved communities.

How Community Groups Use Data. Voices in Urban Education, vol. 18, Winter 2008. (PDF, 8pgs.)
Using a case study of community groups and the school district in Los Angeles, the article shows that collaboration by these desinct entities can promote a spirit of mutual accountability, ideally leading to better informed education practice and policy.

Our Children Can't Wait: A Proposal to Close the Middle-Grades Achievement Gap. NYC Coalition for Educational Justice, January 2008. (PDF, 32pgs.)
The report examines how New York City's middle-grade schools are continuing to fail to prepare thousands of Black and Latino students for success in high school and college and gives recommendations for how to improve this crisis.

Costing Out the Resources Needed to Meet Pennsylvania's Public Education Goals. Augenblick, Palaich and Associates, Inc., December 2007. (PDF, 91pgs.)
On November 14, 2007, the Pennsylvania General Assembly through the State Board of Education released a costing out study on education funding in Pennsylvania. The study was designed to understand what it costs for all students in Pennsylvania public schools to receive a quality education that meets state academic standards.

Narrow and Unlovely: How a Market-Based Educational Experiment is Failing New Orleans Children. Rethinking Schools, vol. 21.4, Summer 2007. (PDF, 7pgs.)
The article looks at the long-term impact of the rapid rise of charter schools in New Orleans following the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

Teaching Matters: How State and Local Policymakers Can Improve the Quality of Teachers and Teaching. Consortium for Policy Research in Education, February 2007. (PDF, 16pgs.)
This article examines the state of research on various policy strategies for improving teacher quality.

Expectations: Can the Students Who Became a Symbol of Failed Reform Be Rescued? The New Yorker, January 2007. (PDF, 20 pgs.)
The article chonicles Denver Public Schools' Superintendent, Michael Bennet as he attempts to improve the academic performance of students at Manual High School, most of whom are Mexican-American. In the end, the notion of high expectations for poor children is converted from the rhetorical to the specific and pragmatic, and a rescue effort that once seemed a sink-hole of time and effort began to look like a prototype.

Small Schools as Multiple Pathways to College, Career, and Civic Participation: Can they Balance the Individual and Collective Aims of Schooling? UCLA's Institute for Democracy, Education, & Access, 2007. (PDF, 28pgs.)
The paper analyzes the enduring tension between individual freedom and civic virtue relative to the current reform movement to create new small high schools. It suggests that different small schools represent different pathways, each with their own local approach to rigorous and relevant education.

Youth as Important Civic Actors: From the Margins to the Center. National Civic Review, Spring 2006. (PDF, 4pgs.)
The article examines the convergence of the development of the mid and late twentieth-century's major social movements, and the maturation of the positive youth development approach -- youth are coming off the margins and injecting themselves into the very core of the democratic enterprise.

The Shame of Schools. New York Review of Books, September 2005. (PDF, 11pgs.)
A former teacher/school board member analyzes a wide range of effective and ineffective school curriculum on a wide range of issues.

Constituents of Change: Community Organizations and Public Education Reform. Institute for Education and Social Policy, September 2004. (PDF, 76pgs.)
The paper offers a descriptive analysis of the education work of eight highly developed community organizing groups, and develops and articulates a dynamic mixed method research design to specify the relationships that link organizing efforts to changes in schooling outcomes.

Transforming Schools Through Community Organizing: A Research Review. Harvard Family Research Project, December 2003. (PDF, 12pgs.)
The report examines community organizing as one pathway toward school reform and a means toward individual and community empowerment. Because school reform is a political issue, organizing builds the political will to ensure that poor schools gain access to the resources they need to improve the quality of education.

African American Achievement in America. The Education Trust, 2003. (PDF, 2pgs.)
A handout that analyzes the statistics behind the educational gap between African American students and their white peers.

Latino Achievement in America. The Education Trust, 2003. (PDF, 2pgs.)
A handout that analyzes the statistics behind the educational gap between Latino students and their white peers.

Strong Neighborhoods, Strong Schools: Successful Community Organizing for School Reform. Research for Action, March 2002. (PDF, 60pgs.)
The report presents a process for documenting the contributions of community organizing to improving schools through an Indicators Framework for Education Organizing. It describes a theory of change, based on analysis of selected education organizing campaigns from the case study groups, which links accomplishments in the indicator areas to school improvement.

So Much Reform, So Little Change Article: Building-level Obstacles to Urban School Reform. Journal of Negro Education, vol. 2, February 2001. (PDF, 16pgs.)
The article addresses the disappointing results of most attempts to reform urban schools, especially bottom-tier urban schools. Based on observations of schools in Chicago, it develops a typology of impediments to change and then suggests that reformers ordinarily underestimate the salience of social, political and organizational factors in the change process.