Standards Reform in High-poverty Schools: Managing Conflict and Building Capacity

This extraordinary view of "reform in action" illustrates what actually happens when school reform encounters a high-poverty, linguistically diverse school, that is, when policy ambitions collide with school realities. Based on two years of observation and interviews, the author shows how professional identities, social resources, and conflicting purposes shaped one elementary school's capacity to understand and implement state-mandated reforms. Like many American schools, Mission Elementary embodies the disputes as well as the challenges that are central concerns of today's educational reforms.