Powerful Reforms with Shallow Roots.

Why should the nation's 15,000 superintendents care about books that focus on urban schools when only a comparative few of them lead such districts?

The answers are becoming crystal clear: The lackluster achievement of children in many city schools is being used to influence public opinion about public education in general. Unless schools are improved across the board, the search for alternatives will intensify. Also, urban superintendents are struggling to implement many of the same school improvement strategies as suburban and rural superintendents but with mixed success.

Powerful Reforms with Shallow Roots: Improving America's Urban Schools, edited by Larry Cuban and Michael Usdan, reports on the efforts of six cities to improve educational programs through a variety of means: corporate involvement, mayoral takeover, state takeover, appointed school boards and selection of non-educators as superintendents. Cuban, a former superintendent and professor emeritus at Stanford University, and Usdan, former president of the Institute for Educational Leadership, wrote the chapters about Boston and San Diego as well as the book's summary. Other authors described the school reform efforts in Baltimore, Chicago, Philadelphia and Seattle.

Analysis of the curriculum and instructional initiatives in the six cities shows "slight to moderate improvements in elementary school students' scores across the cities, little improvement for secondary school students and the gap (between minority student scores and those of the majority) remains largely as it was prior to initiatives." The authors wisely note that more time may be needed to make conclusive judgments.

The roots of these small successes are shallow, they argue, because the positive relationships with business, civic officials and parents necessary to achieve school improvement (especially in San Diego, Boston and Seattle) seem highly dependent on the political support built and maintained by a single individual, the superintendent.

(Powerful Reforms with Shallow Roots: Improving America's Urban Schools edited by Larry Cuban and Michael Usdan, Teachers College Press, 2003, 180 pp., $23.95 softcover)

William G. Keane

Associate Professor of Educational Leadership, Oakland University, Rochester, Mich.