Teaching at the crossroads of school reform: A case study in an urban middle school

This study was designed to understand the challenges and obstacles teachers encounter in an urban public middle school that initially was designed to implement democratic principles in both governance and curricula and then forced to implement outcome-based school reform. The widely reported poor teaching and learning conditions in U.S. urban schools reflect the struggles to actualize the ideal of education for democracy. However, when issues of public school reform are highlighted in the political arena, the single criterion available for Americans to judge the success or failure of schools has become state mandated test scores. While democratic education is urgently needed, it is primarily attempted on the basis of extensive theorization of education for democracy. Therefore, studies that fill the gap between theory and practice in actualizing democratic education in urban education are urgently needed. However, when reports on the success of implementing democratic principles in school curriculum and governance in predominantly white communities have been published, a crucial question remains unanswered: whether democratic education is possible in resource-limited schools that serve a majority of students coming from lower socioeconomic, racial, and language minority families. More bluntly put, is democratic education only for rich kids in this capitalist society? Do children of color and children from lower-socioeconomic families get to be educated for first class citizenship in this society?; Qualitative research methods were utilized in order to gather data on particular reforms and to trace the life histories of teachers and children in particular classrooms in one urban middle schools.; One major finding of this study was that progressive teaching was highly labor-intensive and therefore potentially unstable in this under resourced school. Without support within the educational system, innovative reform, even when based on early success, could not sustain democratic conditions after the political and economic climate turned conservative with the standards and accountability movement. With careful documentation of how progressive school reform has suffered from the breakdown between theory and practice in urban school settings, this research intends to contribute to the existing literature on the challenges of progressive school reform in both theory and practices.