A Decade of Urban School Reform

A Decade of Urban School Reform looks at this critical era in the Boston schools and distills valuable insights and lessons for school leaders and reformers everywhere.

In the last decade, the Boston Public Schools has undergone critical reforms that have been of intense interest to school leaders and policymakers throughout the country. Under the leadership of superintendent Thomas Payzant, the Boston schools implemented extensive reform strategies that yielded notable results. Fittingly, at the end of Payzant's superintendency in September 2006, the Boston Public Schools received the Broad Prize for Urban Education for being the most improved urban school district in the country.

With chapters that explore questions pertaining to governance, human resources, instruction, data collection, disabilities, community engagement, and other topics, the book offers a detailed, comprehensive portrait of a school system managing the complex and daunting tasks of system-wide reform. The result is a timely, in-depth contribution to the small group of indispensable writings on urban school reform.
About the Author: Paul Reville, a lecturer on educational policy and politics and director of the Education Policy and Management Program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, is president of the Rennie Center for Education Research and Policy, an independent, policy organization dedicated to the improvement of preK-12 public education. The Rennie Center conducts research, convenes policy leaders, and advocates for solutions to significant educational challenges. Reville is the former executive director of the Pew Forum on Standards-Based Reform, a Harvard-based national education policy think tank that convened the United States' leading researchers, practitioners, and policymakers to shape the national "standards"agenda. He was founding executive director of the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education, an organization that provided key conceptual and political leadership for the Education Reform Act of 1993. From 1991 to 1996 he served on the Massachusetts State Board of Education, where he chaired the Massachusetts Commission on Time and Learning. From 1996 to 2003, Reville chaired the Massachusetts Education Reform Review Commission, a mandated public commission charged with providing research and oversight of the state's role in implementing education reform. In 1985, Reville was founding executive director of the Alliance for Education, a multiservice educational improvement organization serving Worcester and central Massachusetts. He is a former teacher and principal and a frequent writer and speaker on school reform and educational policy issues.