The More Things Change, the More Things Stay the Same?

Abstract

The articles included in this volume of Education and Urban Society inform the special issue theme that poses the question “Are We There Yet?” An examination of educational equity in the era of school reform and accountability. The research by Harris, Diamond, and Finnigan raises important issues regarding the role of teacher expectations, teacher capacity, and principal leadership play in improving the quality of teaching and learning in urban, low-performing schools. The article in this special issue give me deja vu because the highlighted themes, such as the expectations that teachers have for students as discussed by Harris (in this volume), reflect earlier work (see Rist, 1970; Sandholtz, Ogawa, & Scribner, 2004). However, the enduring issues highlighted here have been pressed on by the recent policy shifts. At the same time, despite two decades of dramatic shifts in educational reform and policy among states and local school districts pre– and post–No Child Left Behind (NCLB), we see that the more things have changed, the more things seem to have stayed the same. The very rich accounts from teachers in urban schools settings with low to average achievement illustrates that pedagogical practices have remained very much the same at the level of the classroom. As Diamond suggests (in this volume), content may have changed in classrooms but teacher practice has not necessarily evolved. Finnigan’s work (in this volume) shows the important role principals have on teacher motivation to improve student learning. These manuscripts highlight the fact that we operate in an educational system that is impoverished when it comes to working with the practice. A consistent

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