Trends and Issues in Urban Education, 1998.

Overview & Synopsis

This report examines several important trends and issues in urban education and minority education. It reviews major principles for rethinking urban schooling so that students from diverse racial, ethnic, linguistic, and gender groups will be able to receive a more equal education, and it considers specific issues in their education. The focus is on practice and policy, on implementation rather than theory. The racial, ethnic, and social class characteristics of the majority of students attending urban schools are examined. Then two powerful trends in urban education and minority education are explored. The first is multicultural education. The aim of multicultural education is to increase equal educational opportunities for students from diverse racial, ethnic, social class, and cultural groups so that they can function effectively in a pluralistic democratic society. The second trend is systemic school reform aimed at changing the structure and governance of schooling, the roles of teachers and school personnel, curricula, teaching methods, accountability mechanisms, and relations with other institutions in the community. The aim of multicultural education is to make the students, schools, and society functionally different, while the aim of systemic reform is to make the schools more efficient structurally. The following specific issues related to urban education are addressed in detail: (1) school choice; (2) charter schools; (3) smaller schools; (4) schools with a focus; (5) school desegregation; (6) after-school programs for urban youth; (7) parent involvement strategies and research about parent involvement; (8) the educational needs of language minority children; and (9) violence prevention. Seventeen publications from the Educational Resources Information Center Clearinghouse on Urban Education on which this report is based are listed. (Contains 156 references.) (SLD)