This study examined the effectiveness of an intervention designed to reduce rates of chronic student absenteeism in New York City public schools. The study authors reported that schools participating in the intervention experienced greater reductions in rates of student chronic absenteeism than the comparison schools. Students who attended the…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to investigate workplace learning among municipal officers in the high-learning-demanding organizational context of their work practice in the first year of mandate. Design/methodology/approach: A before-and-after quasi-experimental design was used to assess the effect of time of work practice on learning work…

While heads were spinning, policy watchers seemed genuinely perplexed by New York City's Mayor de Blasio's education opinions. De Blasio opposed many of Bloomberg's reform efforts despite the achievement gains realized by the nation's largest school district during the last 12 years. Yet on close reading, de Blasio's nine-page education plan…

In this article, the authors suggest that current notions of advocacy in early childhood education should be expanded to include a view of young children as citizens. The authors ground their discussion in a how-to book project in Providence, Rhode Island, consider different concepts of children and citizenship, share commentary from City Hall and…

Recent research has explored the connections between universities and the cities/places in which they are located. Increasingly, emphasis is placed on the economic role of the university and on universities as urban stabilizers that can mobilize investment and advance development goals. This article explores a different charge for the university:…

In this first 2014 issue of "Voices in Urban Education," Oona Chatterjee, the Annenberg Institute's associate director for New York City organizing, interviews Pedro Noguera, the Peter L. Agnew Professor of Education at New York University, a noted researcher and national commentator on topics such as urban school reform, conditions that…

Purpose: This paper aims to provide useful insights into educational under-achievement among Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel (PAI), investigating the perceptions of local educational administrators (LEAs) towards the education system and its "modus vivendi", to uncover difficulties and suggest directions to improve the processes and…

This article ethnographically examines the paradoxical situation in which one high-achieving New York City public school is "constructed" as failing when No Child Left Behind (NCLB) assessments are miscalculated. Drawing upon actor-network theory (ANT)--a perspective that aims to explain how people, their ideas, and the material objects…

Mayoral control and accountability is one of very few major education reforms that aim at governance coherence in this nation's highly fragmented urban school systems. A primary feature of mayoral governance is that it holds the office of the mayor accountable for school performance. As an institutional redesign, mayoral governance integrates…

A level of consistency between community college leaders and community leaders is necessary to demonstrate behaviors, actions, and beliefs that shape, represent, and support expected community values. Likewise, communities, which are collectives of suborganizations, play an important role in aiding individual development, especially related to…

The following offers an overview of what it means for cities to be "smart." It draws the supporting definitions and critical insights into smart cities from a series of papers presented at the 2009 Trans-national Conference on Creating Smart(er) Cities. What the papers all have in common is their desire to overcome the all too often…

In New York City, as in many places across the country, there is much discussion about strengthening career and technical education (CTE). New York City's approach to Career and Technical Education (CTE) is held up as a model for getting this type of education right. A recent conference highlighted six schools that represented only a fraction of…

Finland's education system is regarded as one of the most effective in the world. Shared values of the Finnish welfare society continue to influence national education policies that determine how education is organized, governed, and led. Findings from a national study of the superintendency, however, suggest recent demographic and financial…

In the United States (US), an increase in standardization, quantification, competition, and large-scale comparison--cornerstones of neoliberal accountability--have been accompanied by devices of transparency, through which various forms of school data are made available to the public. Such public reporting, we are told by politicians and education…

This article explores some of the specificities, transformations and continuities in the role of the state in education in Mexico (New Spain) over a long period of time (1788-1848) before and after independence, by focusing on the ritual of public examinations in elementary schools. In addition to a review of the laws and regulations that led to a…