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The Shifting Landscape of the American School District offers a new perspective on the American school district.

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The Shifting Landscape of the American School District offers a new perspective on the American school district. The educational system of the United States has long been characterized by its tradition of local control, and the district has symbolized community involvement in education. Scholars have written insightful studies on individual city systems and school districts, but rarely has the district-as an organizational form itself-been the subject of scrutiny, and Americans have continued to take the district for granted as the primary unit of local schooling. In recent years reformers have also built many of their innovations upon the belief that it is the traditional, bureaucratic, hierarchical district that requires overhaul. The Shifting Landscape of the American School District seeks to challenge that perception. The editors argue that the pervasive view of district history-the notion that the school district is a holdover from the progressive reforms of the early twentieth century-has shrouded a fascinating story of the ways in which districts have evolved, innovated, and reacted in response to state and federal mandates, national reform movements, demographic shifts, desegregation, structural/organizational changes, and a shifting political climate. The chapters in this volume offer compelling evidence of the many ways that districts have expanded, contracted, integrated, consolidated, reorganized, and been torn apart over the past century. By covering a wide range of time periods, the authors are able to draw fascinating parallels between the past and present.

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Figures and Tables - David A. Gamson and Emily M. Hodge: Preface: Re-examining the American School District - David A. Gamson and Emily M. Hodge: The Relentless Reinvention of the American School District - John L. Rury and Sanae Akaba: The Geo-Spatial Distribution of Educational Attainment: School Districts, Cultural Capital and Inequality in Metropolitan Kansas City, 1960-1980 - Emily M. Hodge: District Consolidation, Detracking, and School Choice: Lessons from the Woodland Hills School District in Western Pennsylvania - Genevieve Siegel-Hawley and Stefani Thachik: Crossing the Line? School District Responses to Demographic Change in the South - Ansley T. Erickson: Fairness, Commitment, and Civic Capacity: The Varied Desegregation Trajectories of Metropolitan School Districts - Emily E. Straus: From the District to the State to the Nation: How a High-needs District became the Testing Ground for Federal High-stakes Accountability Policies - Karen Benjamin: The Limits of Top-Down Versus Bottom-Up Educational Reform During the Great Depression - Norm Fruchter, Toi Sin Arvidsson, Christina Mokhtar, and John Beam: Demographics and Performance in New York City´s School Networks: An Initial Inquiry - Tina M. Trujillo, Laura E. Hernández, and René Espinoza Kissell: Enduring Dilemmas in Democratic Urban District Reform: The Oakland Case - Judith Kafka: Institutional Theory and the History of District-level School Reform: A Reintroduction - Contributors.

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