For today the stakes are higher, the poverty these programs were intended to attack has intensified, and the students involved are even more needy and at-risk. What both urban and low-income rural areas share is an enrollment base challenged by cultural issues of class and income. All young people need high-quality schools to develop to their full potential. It is time to get serious about what these challenges mean. There is a very real issue here.
Urban schools educate disadvantaged students amidst very difficult circumstances.
Defenders of urban schools and educators within them point out the challenges attendant to poverty with which they have to contend. These questions help explain the timidity of much conventional reform thinking. The hard fact is that many educators and policymakers simply don't expect inner-city students to be capable of learning very much. The larger economic system constrains the future of their communities and their communities' capacity to support decent schools. In the face of these massive challenges, this volume insists that it takes a city to educate a child.