New Schools for a New Century: The Redesign of Urban Education

New Schools for a New Century is a collection of 10 essays that examine educational reform from many different perspectives. There is, for example, the Edison Project, a for-profit venture that now operates in a dozen different locations. Edison Project schools emphasize the school as a community in which students and teachers remain together for several years, and teachers have time for teaching instead of being forced to shoulder administrative burdens. At the opposite end of the spectrum is the Catholic school model. In her essay, Valerie E. Lee discusses why Catholic schools have a greater success rate, even with the poorest, most disadvantaged students, than their public-school counterparts. According to Lee, it comes down to a common vision of education and a definite moral code by which students are expected to live.

New Schools for a New Century suggests that school reform must happen from the outside, not from within. With such powerful insiders as the teachers' unions and local school boards fighting to maintain the status quo, it will take new ideas and determined advocates to affect real change. In examining some of these new ideas, New Changes for a New Century opens up some compelling, if uncomfortable, questions about the state of education today--and in the future.