The project's focus is the political context of public education rather than the classroom itself. Its primary goals are to identify the coalitions, problem perceptions, and interactions that provide the framework for education policymaking in large cities. All have substantial minority populations, and large numbers of students from poverty households. The field research for this project began in May 1993, and was largely concluded by December 1994. Project personnel also collected and assembled of a body of program and finance data from each city.
Findings support the central proposition.
However, the cities had only varying degrees of civic capacity, and they also fell short of systemic reform to varying degrees. Though the most conspicuous barrier to greater civic capacity is racial and other intergroup tension, the problem of concentrated poverty itself stands as the major obstacle. In addition, elite perceptions of the nature of the urban education problem were fundamentally ambiguous and diffuse, and proposals for reform were primarily incremental even though aspiration levels were high. The data released here consists of the coded interviews with the three groups of community education elites. A codebook is available for each of the datasets.