Who Benefits from Failing Urban School Districts? An Essay on Equity and Justice for Diverse Children in Urban Poverty.

This paper asserts that the growth and maintenance of failed urban school districts that have miseducated minority children in poverty for over 50 years is a predictable, explainable phenomenon. The essay suggests that the extensive resources funneled into these systems are used for increasing district bureaucracies rather than improving education. It notes that the larger society provides institutional and cultural settings that protect, preserve, and enhance these failing urban school systems in order to provide a broad spectrum of constituencies with a set of unearned privileges. The most valuable of these is access to economic and ethnic forms of schooling for middle class Whites that is effective and leads to careers, higher education, and improved life opportunities. Part 1 provides examples of the processes that dysfunctional urban school bureaucracies use to survive and grow despite systematically harming the life opportunities of impoverished children and youth. Part 2 identifies constituencies who derive real benefits from supporting these failed systems. Part 3 analyzes processes employed by failing urban districts to prevent change and maintain the distribution of unearned privilege. Part 4 analyzes the role of teacher education in making urban schools more effective. Part 5 and the appendix propose what states can do to stop the massive miseducation of diverse, impoverished students in dysfunctional urban districts. (Contains 28 references.) (SM)