And the evidence is by now abundant that urban students are not learning what they need to know and that student learning and achieve- ment are not improving in response to the reform efforts that have been mounted. It is time to get serious about what these challenges mean. The Limits of Any School-Based Strategy Many community leaders also know they must get serious about other factors that affect students' learning poverty, limited English skills, immigrant status, illness or disability, unstable homes, transiency within neighborhoods and among members of the extended family, periods of migrancy, and the emotional turmoil invariably accompanying many of these problems. It is clear that since ESEA was enacted more than thirty years ago, the incidence of child poverty, single parenthood, and child abuse and neglect has increased, while basic services for children and families in poverty have not matched the growing need and may even have been neglected. There is a very real problem here.
Urban schools educate disadvan- taged students amidst very difficult circumstances.
Defenders of urban schools and the educators there point out the challenges attendant on the poverty with which they have to contend. But the question is asked in many different ways. These questions help explain the timidity of much conventional re- form thinking. The larger economic system constrains the future of their communities and their communi- ties' capacity to support decent schools. In the face of these massive challenges, this volume insists that it takes a city to educate a child.