It is easy to forget that in 1965 young ­African-­American men were slightly more likely than their white peers to hold a job. Over the next two decades, as blue-collar work declined with the rise of the information economy, employment rates among black males plummeted. At the same time, middle-class African Americans moved en masse to the suburbs. Together, these trends helped turn America’s inner cities into centers of concentrated poverty. Today, the task of educating the mostly ­African-­American and Latino students in urban schools is the nation’s toughest educational ­test.

Many states and the federal government have sought a regulatory solution to the problem: setting universal achievement standards and calling out schools that don’t measure up. While this strategy has highlighted the chinks in the nation’s educa­tional ­armor—more than 31,000 of the country’s 97,000 public schools currently are required by the federal No Child Left Behind Act to improve their performance—it hasn’t yet fixed many failing schools, a fact that’s sure to spur debate when the law comes up for renewal this year or ­next.

Over the past decade, a different, grassroots response to the urban education crisis evolved, as social entrepreneurs bankrolled by hundreds of millions of philanthropy dollars established new types of schools and nonprofit organizations. These ventures have attracted glowing atten­tion from 

, Oprah Winfrey, and even Prince Charles and Nelson Mandela. Three recent books offer more probing looks at these efforts to crack the code of successful urban schooling. Though they present sympathetic portraits of promising new strategies, these reports are as sobering as they are heartening on the prospects for many deeply disadvantaged ­students.

, David Whitman, who spent nearly two decades covering social policy for 

, profiles in rich detail half a dozen schools that are educating inner-city students under a model that he calls a “new paternalism,” which attempts to condition students with scant structure at home to the discipline and order required for learning. At KIPP Academy, a middle school in the South Bronx, and Amistad Academy, a New Haven middle school, students must follow a strict code of classroom conduct called SLANT: Sit up, Listen to speakers, Ask and answer ques­tions, Nod to signal that you’re following conver­sation, and Track teachers with your eyes. In a number of the schools Whitman pro­files, kids chant and do rhythmic clapping in class and assemblies. Students wear uniforms, and so little as an untucked shirt is censured. At SEED, a public boarding school for seventh through twelfth graders in Washington, D.C., and Cristo Rey Jesuit High School in Chicago, students must take etiquette classes, where they learn everything from the difference between a salad fork and a dinner fork to how to blow your nose in public ­politely.

Skeptics of “new paternalism” may invoke authoritarian parochial schools of the past or, worse, the public “paternalism” that eroded the cultural heritage of Native American students a century ago by packing them off to government boarding schools. But Amistad and similar schools I’ve visited don’t just make rules. They also give their students a lot of individual help. They are small, with enrollments of 250 to 500, so teachers and principals tend to know every student by name. If discipline is tough, it’s frequently combined with recognition and rewards for high grades and good citizenship. This tough love is designed to give students with few role models a sense that adults care about them, and that hard work will pay big ­dividends.

“Learned optimism,” champions of these schools say, is key to coaxing students to put in the long hours needed to catch up with ­middle-­class kids. Many of the new generation of ­schools—­whose charters don’t bind them to district regulations or teacher union ­contracts—­run two and a half hours longer a day than traditional public schools, teach students in the summer and on Saturdays, test them fre­quently, and tutor them relentlessly. KIPP Academy even provides an “extended warranty,” continuing to tutor and counsel students after they move on to high school.

Behind the flattering headlines, KIPP schools and others like them are fragile institutions, built on relentless work and no small amount of luck.

Whitman argues that paternalism is a better alternative to the educational progressivism he sees pervading public education. Progressive schools, he contends, fail to give students sufficient direction. But the division between paternalism and progressivism is not a bright line. As Jay Mathews makes clear in 

, public schools are hardly dominated by romantics who think students can teach themselves. And the new urban schools Whitman admires embrace a range of progressive priorities, from educating the “whole child” to building field trips into the curriculum.

Launching and sustaining ­high-­per­form­ing schools in tough neighborhoods is exceedingly difficult, as Mathews, a veteran 

 education reporter, reveals in his account of KIPP Academy’s parent organization, the Knowledge Is Power Program, a national network of 66 schools. KIPP was founded by David Levin and Michael Feinberg, Ivy Leaguers who met in 1992 at a summer training program for Teach for America, a nonprofit that recruits top college students for teaching jobs in underserved public schools. Smart, naive, and passionate about educating urban kids, Levin and Feinberg drafted the KIPP model out of frustration with their performance during two years in Teach for America classrooms in Houston, drawing heavily on the ideas of two veteran public school teachers who served as their mentors, Harriett Ball and Rafe ­Esquith.

After launching KIPP with Feinberg in 1994 with 47 ­fifth ­graders in a single Houston classroom, Levin decamped for New York (he’d grown up rich on the Upper East Side), and in 1995 he started KIPP Academy in the South Bronx. One of his early innovations was an orchestra that incorporates most of the school’s students and has given the institution a powerful identity. The two tiny KIPP charter schools bounced from building to building (and trailers) until 1999, when 

 profiled them. Within a year, Doris and Don Fisher, the billionaire founders of the retailing giant The Gap, were financing KIPP’s national ­expansion.

But even in Mathews’s highly sympathetic telling, it’s clear that behind the flattering headlines, KIPP schools and others like them are fragile institutions, built on relentless work and no small amount of luck. Feinberg, Levin, and their colleagues labor more or less 24/7—knocking on doors in search of new students, battling attrition and reluctant school officials, scavenging space, tracking down donors, finding teachers. The pace often seems unsustainable, the schools never far from the edge of ­collapse.

In any case, Paul Tough argues compellingly in 

that new school models cannot by themselves transform urban education. A writer and editor at 

, Tough tells the story of the Harlem Children’s Zone, a nonprofit agency working with 7,000 kids in 97 square blocks of central Harlem. To Geoffrey Canada, a product of the South Bronx who escaped to Long Island and then to Bowdoin College in Maine before founding the organization, “it wasn’t enough to help out in just one part of a child’s life: [Harlem’s Children’s Zone] would need to combine education, social, and medical services.”

Tough finds support for Canada’s ­flood-­the-­zone strategy in cognitive research. By the time kids start kindergarten, he writes, summarizing several studies, there is “a large and disturbing difference” between the cognitive ability scores of poor kids and their ­middle-­class counterparts. Contrary to the view Charles Murray articulated in his controversial book 

 (1994), Tough concludes that the problems of poverty don’t flow from a lack of innate intelligence. (He points out that students born into poor families and adopted by wealthier ones outscore their impoverished peers.) But neither do these disparities reflect merely an absence of economic opportunities. Rather, the poor are poor in no small part because they lack cognitive skills that can be taught.

A major factor is children’s experience with language. By the age of three, the children of pro­fessional parents have a vocabulary of about 1,100 words, while the children of parents on welfare have mastered fewer than half that number. The children in more affluent families also hear about 500,000 “encouragements” (words of praise and approval) and 80,000 “discouragements” (admonitions such as “stop that”). For welfare children, the scale is weighted heavily the other way: 80,000 encouragements and 200,000 discouragements. Researchers have found that a child’s experience of language has more impact on IQ and achievement than either race or social ­class.

Canada discovered the hard way that poor kids lack cognitive skills when he opened an ­elemen­tary-­middle charter school in 2004 and watched it struggle to satisfactorily improve ­middle-­school test scores. He had run a handful of programs for Harlem kids since 1990—including antiviolence training for ­teenagers—­and when he launched the Harlem Children’s Zone in 1997, he added more: obesity and asthma initiatives; a parenting program called Baby College; ­language-­rich, all-day, 11-month ­pre-­kindergartens. When the charter school stalled, he added yet another link to this “conveyor belt”: a longer and more advanced parenting program covering discipline, brain development strategies, and health for the 200 winners of a kindergarten lottery. And he took steps to ensure that more kids moved through the organization’s entire ­early-­childhood program. Now he’s waiting to see the ­outcome.

A number of the new “no excuses” schools, meanwhile, have produced stellar results. For example, Whitman reports that 87 percent of KIPP Academy students passed the New York State Regents eighth-grade math test in 2005–06, compared with 54 percent of students statewide, and no more than 16 percent in KIPP’s neighboring South Bronx middle schools. Some critics have suggested that stronger students ­self-­select into the schools’ applicant pools, and that there’s more attrition among the schools’ weaker students. Whitman acknowledges that incoming students at KIPP Academy have “significantly stronger” skills than most South Bronx students, but says that “creaming” isn’t commonplace in KIPP schools nationally. High rates of student attrition, Mathews concedes, are a “common occurrence” in KIPP ­schools.

The big question is whether the new models can be scaled up to reach the many students who need help. The answer is, not easily. In a decade, education entrepreneurs have created at most a couple hundred very strongly ­performing schools, serving perhaps 55,000 of the nation’s more than eight million urban students. Among the major obstacles to a broader effort: Talented teachers and principals are hard to find and burn out quickly; the schools’ longer calendar and other features that are key to their success are expensive; and most of the schools have to pay for their own buildings and often receive less than their full share of state and local education aid. Lacking large infusions of philanthropy, many of the schools would founder financially, and the economic downturn has made the schools’ plight even more precarious. The Harlem Children’s Zone recently cut staff in the face of diminishing ­donations.

The challenge, then, is clear: Creating intensive educational environments without philanthropy would require more public funding, in many states and school systems, than charter schools—or many traditional public schools—currently receive. Impoverished students are most likely to climb the achievement ladder if they are given the kind of comprehensive help the Harlem Children’s Zone supplies. But in bleak economic times, it’s hard to be hopeful about funding. Then again, President Barack Obama has pledged to launch federally spon­sored children’s zones in 20 neighbor­hoods nationwide.

 is codirector of Education Sector, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, and is the author of 

High Schools on a Human Scale: How Small Schools Can Transform American Education (2003).

Sweating the Small Stuff: Inner-City Schools and the New Paternalism

 by David Whitman, Fordham Institute, 365 pp, 2008.

Work Hard. Be Nice.: How Two Inspired Teachers Created the Most Promising ­Schools in America

 by Jay Mathews, Algonquin, 328 pp, 2009.

Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada's Quest to Change Harlem and America

 by Paul Tough, Houghton Mifflin, 296 pp, 2009.

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Educating Urban America

EDUCATION REFORM HAS TAKEN ON THE DIMENSIONS OF AN EPIC 

over the past 30 years. Americans are collectively writing the script, and its high drama is the struggle for authority. Schools have fought to preserve their independence amid ever-louder demands for accountability. Teacher unions have struggled to solidify and then sustain their primacy over their profession. Charter school advocates have battled entrenched education bureaucracies, and reformers have grappled with establishment academics for intellectual dominance. The fundamental conflict, however, has been all but subterranean, though now it is emerging into the open. It pits local school boards against the national drive for modernization.

America’s modern school reform saga began in 1983, with a loud warning shot fired by the National Commission on Excellence in Education. “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today,” the federally funded commission declared, “we might well have viewed it as an act of war.”

At the time, public education was the province of some 16,000 local school boards. The states were minimally involved in school policies. The U.S. Department of Education had been created only three years earlier, during the Carter administration, and until the commission’s battle-stations warning transformed school reform into a winning political issue, Ronald Reagan had spent more than two years in the White House urging that the new department be abolished.

The release of the commission’s 1983 report, 

, marked high tide for local public school boards. Ever since, their dominance of American education has been under attack on many fronts, and their grip has been loosening. They no longer seem to be the icon of American democracy they once were. The commission did not want simply to patch up the nation’s schools. Public education’s tradition of stressing low-level academics and vocational training for many students, it said, was no longer sufficient. Together with other champions of reform, the commissioners pressed a far tougher assignment on America’s school systems: Deliver a much more demanding academic curriculum to a much wider range of students. The rise of the postindustrial economy—with its requirement for brains over brawn—and the nation’s recently forged commitment to racial equality required that the kind of rigorous academic curriculum traditionally reserved for the few now be taught to the many.

Entrusting that work to local school boards, it became clear by the late 1980s, was not going to yield the results the nation needed. Since then, national and state leaders have increasingly imposed the new expectations directly, holding schools responsible for their students’ performance, introducing national standards, and devising uniform tests—each step further distancing the country from its long tradition of local control. In 2008, commentator Matt Miller aptly characterized the idea of relying on local school boards to meet today’s educational challenges: “It’s as if after Pearl Harbor, FDR had suggested we prepare for war through the uncoordinated efforts of thousands of small factories.” With the nation’s pursuit of equality of educational opportunity far from fulfilled and with workers increasingly competing for jobs with their counterparts around the world, a compelling case can be made for defining public education’s aspirations nationally rather than locally.

AMERICAN PUBLIC EDUCTION TRACES ITS ORIGINS TO 1647

, Gene Maeroff of Teachers College, Columbia University, writes in 

 (2010). That year, the Massachusetts Bay Colony mandated that every town within its jurisdiction establish a public school. Committees sprang up to run the institutions. In the 1820s, the state of Massachusetts made the committees independent of local governments, establishing the model for the autonomous school districts that exist throughout the country today.

The U.S. Constitution left authority over education in the hands of the states under the Tenth Amendment, which reserved to them all powers not explicitly given to the federal government, and the states passed that authority on to local school boards, reflecting both the localistic tenor of American life and the nation’s skepticism of centralized authority. For more than a century, local boards were solely responsible for public education’s funding, standards, instruction, and results. At their height in the 1930s, during the heyday of small-town America, there were as many as 127,500 boards. Some sparsely populated states had more school board members than teachers.

For much of their history, the boards presided over school systems serving agrarian and industrial economies that required most workers to use their hands more than their heads. Schools were mostly concerned with teaching basic literacy and numeracy, and for most Americans education ended after the eighth grade. At the turn of the 20th century, only six percent of young people earned high school diplomas. It was not until the 1920s that attending high school became the norm, and as late as 1950 only half of white students and a quarter of African-American students completed 12 years of schooling.

Only with the passage of the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, a weapon in the War on Poverty and the first major federal foray into public education, did federal and state authorities begin to impinge on the influence of local school boards, and then only modestly. The 1965 law, for example, required studies of the impact of the federal money that began flowing in small amounts to local communities. A federally funded snapshot of student performance debuted in 1969.

State governments, meanwhile, began requiring tests to ensure that students were achieving “minimum competency” in core subjects. Michigan launched the first statewide standardized testing program in 1969. But there were no state achievement standards, and no explicit consequences for educators if their students performed poorly.

As late as 1950, only half of white students and a quarter of African-American students completed 12 years of schooling.

Not surprisingly, local boards did not respond well when the reformers of the 1980s proposed a new, far more academically ambitious role for public education. Many local leaders rejected the notion that large numbers of students could or should be taught a demanding academic curriculum through high school. When states began setting more rigorous graduation requirements, many school districts subverted them by creating a myriad of watered-down courses to fulfill them, such as “Fundamentals of General Science” and “Informal Geometry.” In many school systems, students could complete a four-year curriculum in “Fundamentals of Math” without ever studying anything but arithmetic—and consequently missing algebra, geometry, and other essential elements of a meaningful mathematics curriculum. Often students could fulfill their science requirement by taking classes in subjects such as commercial food preparation and auto body repair.

By the end of the 1980s, with large percentages of students continuing to perform at low levels, state and federal policymakers, including President George H. W. Bush (and later President Bill Clinton), began putting pressure on public school systems. State education standards and national goals were followed by requirements for more student testing and efforts to hold individual schools and school systems responsible for the results. This accountability campaign culminated in President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, passed with bipartisan support.

Now state and federal officials are pushing further. With the strong support of the Obama administration, the National Governors Association, along with the Council of Chief State School Officers, is developing a program called the Common Core State Standards Initiative, with comprehensive curricula for all grade levels that the vast majority of states have pledged to begin implementing in the next few years. States are also working, with the support of federal money, to develop a set of standardized tests that states may voluntarily adopt. It would have been hard to predict back when A Nation at Risk raised its alarm that in less than three decades every student in many states would be taking what are in effect national examinations.

Not by accident, the emergence of common standards and tests, along with other centralizing forces, is making America’s public education system more like those of Singapore, Japan, and other countries that post superior results on international tests of academic achievement. American policymakers have looked to those nations with a combination of admiration and envy.

THE RECORD OF THE PAST THREE DECADES DOES NOT INSPIRE GREAT CONFIDENCE 

in the capacity of school boards to lead public education. The number of boards has declined to about 13,600 through consolidations, but there are still 6,300 of them that serve fewer than 1,000 students. Districts of that size rarely operate efficiently and almost always lack sufficient resources to help educators improve teaching and learning.

Amid the challenges of the 21st century, the local school board looks less like a democratic utopia and more like a bastion of leadership dyspepsia. In many districts, constant infighting slows reforms and contributes to the notoriously rapid turnover among the school superintendents who must lead the way toward change. More than 95 percent of the nation’s school board members are elected to office, but balloting rarely draws more than 20 percent of eligible voters, leaving the elections vulnerable to single-issue candidates and special interests. While school board seats once attracted civic leaders, today more than one in six school board members are past or present teacher union members. Others are single-minded advocates of pet causes, from varsity sports to creationism. Conflicts of interest are also a problem. Maeroff reports that a number of the jobs in a New Jersey school system on whose board he served were occupied by the spouses and children of other board members.

Less than three-quarters of school board members have bachelor’s degrees. Maeroff writes that many school board members have scant grounding in effective board practices, much less the complexities of education policy. Many just don’t buy the idea of pushing students academically. Only eight percent told researchers commissioned by the National School Boards Association last year that public education’s first priority should be to prepare students for college. Four times as many indicated that they believed it was most important merely to “help students fulfill their potential.”

Nor are local school districts the economic engines of public education they once were. Until the late 1970s, most public school dollars came from local property taxes. Today, states pay the largest share—48 percent—of the more than $600 billion cost of educating the nation’s 49 million public school students. Local revenues cover 44 percent, and Washington contributes the rest.

What is to be the future of school boards? Reducing the number of boards and consolidating school systems, some have argued, would streamline leadership and eliminate redundancy. But it would not necessarily produce better students. Florida and New York State educate about the same number of students, for example, but even though New York has 10 times as many school systems (697 versus 67), Florida’s test scores are no higher than New York’s. Some states have resorted to taking direct control of schools in districts with consistently bad records, mostly in poor urban neighborhoods, but the results, Maeroff reports, have been mixed.

In the nation’s big cities, another trend has gained momentum, as mayors have been granted direct authority over public schools, displacing school boards. This strategy has shown more promise, with mayors moving faster and with greater enthusiasm for reform. Kenneth Wong, chairman of the Department of Education at Brown University and coauthor of 

 (2007), studied 104 cities and found that in those where mayors governed education, good things happened. School superintendents pursued longer-term reform agendas that produced higher test scores, more funding flowed to public schools, and public confidence in school systems increased. Chicago, Boston, New York City, and Washington, D.C., are among the big cities whose school systems have moved to mayoral control in recent years.

The charter school movement, meanwhile, has made it possible for some 5,000 (out of 99,000) publicly funded schools to govern themselves, outside the authority of school boards. (Charter schools must still meet state standards and administer statewide standardized tests.) Some charter schools have used this independence to build tight-knit school communities and shake things up in the classroom. But they have not had a free pass from governance challenges. Under state laws, they must have nonprofit boards of directors. And though the directors are appointed rather than elected, many of the schools have struggled because of the uneven quality of their boards—the same problem plaguing traditional school systems.

Some of the most successful charter school networks, such as Achievement First, headquartered in New Haven, Connecticut, and Philadelphia-based Mastery Charter Schools, have responded by going beyond local governance. They have sought to have boards govern multiple schools, and have imposed uniformity of standards, curriculum materials, and instructional strategies throughout their networks.

of public education is under attack from many quarters. Though it was a Republican president, George W. Bush, who launched a nationwide school accountability system by signing No Child Left Behind into law, and prominent conservatives such as William Bennett have endorsed national achievement standards, Republican presidential candidates Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry have attacked the Bush-era reforms. Early in her political career, Bachmann ran unsuccessfully for a Minnesota school board seat, campaigning against state achievement standards. Under Governor Perry, Texas has been one of only a handful of states that haven’t joined the Common Core State Standards Initiative, even though it is being led by the National Governors Association rather than the federal government.

The Left is as unhappy as the Right. This summer, leading liberal education activists including Jonathan Kozol and Diane Ravitch (who was once a prominent supporter of national education standards) spent three days in Washington rallying against accountability, No Child Left Behind, testing, and other elements of what they derided as “corporate reform,” concluding their activities with a march on the White House.

The states themselves have begun aggressively pushing back against No Child Left Behind, the primary vehicle for holding local schools and school systems accountable for their performance. This year, several states declared that they will stop raising minimum test score requirements as the law demands. (The law unrealistically requires that the vast majority of students be “proficient” by 2014, and large numbers of schools have failed to meet the states’ generally modest standards, exposing them to penalties that critics view as unfair and sending state policymakers scrambling to distance themselves from the embarrassing performances.)

The backlash offers another reason to wonder how vigorously states will implement the new common core curriculum in the next several years. Both the standards and the examinations linked to them are expected to be more demanding than those that most states are using today.

Schools are complex social enterprises. They can be only as good as the people in them and the culture in which those people work. Improvement, therefore, cannot merely be imposed from the outside. Ultimately, reform has to come from the inside. But the next necessary step toward change is to establish a new governance structure—one that acknowledges roles for players and policy at every level of government—that is capable of supporting our national needs and aspirations.

 is a Washington, D.C., writer and the author, most recently, of 

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The national drive for education reform has touched off many power struggles, but one has emerged as fundamental.

Thomas Toch