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Replication data for: Spinning Wheels: The Politics of Urban School Reform

Harvard Dataverse (Africa Rice Center, Bioversity International, CCAFS, CIAT, IFPRI, IRRI and WorldFish)

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Title Replication data for: Spinning Wheels: The Politics of Urban School Reform
 
Identifier https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/BU4U4T
 
Creator Frederick Michael Hess
 
Publisher Harvard Dataverse
 
Description Despite extensive efforts to reform urban school districts in recent decades, there has been little significant change. This is because urban school reform is more a political than an educational exercise. In fact, the problem has not been too little attempted change, but the fact that districts are swamped by too many fragmented reform efforts. Change is the status quo in urban districts. Political and professional pressures compel urban superintendents to pursue aggressive reform agendas, with support from pressed school boards. Several factors make it difficult to hold these policymakers accountable for outcomes, encouraging them to emphasize inputs--particularly reform. The limited impact of policymakers on short-term outcomes and the visibility of schools in the community accentuate these pressures. Urban superintendents are judged, by their professional and their local communities, primarily on input--on how hard they appear to be working to improve the schools. Because policymakers ha
ve little short-term impact on school performance, those who do not opt for visible measures that promise to bring improvement are often weeded out in favor of more pro-active leadership. Aggressive reform efforts demonstrate commitment, reassure the community, and enhance the superintendent's professional reputation. There are few disincentives to innovate. Reform is consistent with the training of administrators as problem-solvers, and with the interests of the wider professional community of researchers, consultants, and academics who promote school reforms.


Policymakers favor visible and popular reforms which produce less disruption and discomfort, but which also produce little meaningful change. The focus on initiating, rather than implementing reform, means that successive administrations enact partially implemented measures one after another. This process continually imposes the costs of transition on districts, while ensuring that few measures are ever fully implemented and refined. This a series of short-term fixes produces a long-
term spinning of wheels. A reliance on proxy measures of performance causes observers to overestimate the performance of individual reforms, and system insiders evaluate reforms through rose-tinted glasses. These biased evaluations help to explain why the spotty record produced by frenetic reform has not slowed reform efforts. States and teachers' unions played a surprisingly limited role in urban school reform. The analysis is based on 325 interviews the author conducted with fixed-position respondents in 57 urban school districts during a nine-month period in 1995. The interviews focused on the fate of five "Third Wave" school reform efforts during the 1992-1995 period.
 
Subject Political Science
School Administration
Urban Schools
Educational Reform
 
Date 1997
 
Type interviews