Urban School Reform: Lessons from San Diego.

Urban School Reform: Lessons from San Diego, edited by Frederick M. Hess (Harvard Education Press).

This ambitious, probing, and often insightful 16-chapter volume unexpectedly turned into a retrospective appraisal of Alan Bersin's seven years as superintendent of the San Diego City Schools. A highly successful litigator and U.S. attorney, Bersin was recruited by the San Diego school board in 1998 to turn around its big, troubled school system. He brought in former New York City schools chancellor Anthony Alvarado to help and they embarked on a complex, far-reaching strategy. So serious was Bersin about his multifaceted reform plan, known as the "Blueprint for Student Success," that he sought out the American Enterprise Institute's Frederick Hess to appraise the plan's progress. No doubt the hard-charging superintendent saw the Hess project as a "formative" evaluation that would help him make midcourse corrections. But just a few months after the conference at which the chapters of this volume were aired in draft form, a new school board grew hesitant about Bersin's tough medicine, especially for schools flagged as persistent low-performers. They swiftly signaled to Bersin that his services would no longer be needed. This volume, then, is something of a eulogy; but it is much more a fascinating "case study" about the effort to reform public education in urban America. San Diego made gains in some areas, but not others. Hess writes that the crucial ingredients are "transparency, accountability and continuity." San Diego now lacks the third of these--but it's hard to think of a single other large urban school system that has a full measure of any of the three.

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