City Schools

Teachers and educators who seek to make a difference in the lives of students face huge obstacles working in urban schools that are under funded and overcrowded. In response, he charts out his vision of hope in his book entitled City Schools and the American Dream. Building on his experiences as a former teacher, school board member, parent, activist, researcher, and Executive Assistant to a former mayor of Berkeley, CA, his book provides an study of how social forces challenge the quality of urban schools and the achievement of it students. He declares that to meet the promise and end the crisis in urban schools, we must precisely address the social framework of urban education. However, unlike others who have written on this topic, his call for schools to create alliances that help provide social services that t deal with urban conditions is only the top of his argument.

City Schools is committed to showing how poverty, low social status, racial stereotypes, and other racial disparities not only affect children's needs and the resources available to them in their communities, but also transforms into low political and social clout. He illustrates how this means some parents have the skill to control the quality of their child's education and others don't. Whether its due to stereotypes about which families care more or care less about education, to the ability to choose a private school when you aren’t satisfied with your child’s public school, to the privilege to hire a lawyer in a debate regarding your child, or to the power to pressure the district into keeping your school from getting shut down, more affluent families use what he refers to as "social capital" which means that they have greater control over their local schools. Noguera emphasizes the need to find ways to ensure that all families are able to hold schools accountable for dedicated quality teachers. According to his book, addressing the social framework involves remaking relationships of liability to empower current marginalized families and communities.

Through his analysis of the Bay Area, Noguera illustrates how cities and districts don't hold social power and wealth proportionately. He views this is a primary obstacle to school reform and suggests that all acts of reform, however big or small, "must be based on a willingness to engage in a process of change that aims at transforming relationships between those who have power and those who do not. Unless this transformation occurs, it is unlikely that even ambitious reforms will lead to lasting change." This idea is one of the critical contributions his book makes to the conversations on school reform.

A few might call Noguera's agenda a radical one. But he goes to great efforts to define himself as a "pragmatic optimist." And his book directs an argument at progressives within the educational arena. Our efforts to approaching the social context of schooling must be realistic, not ideological, directed toward whatever ultimately will work for the children. In his choice of words "we must figure out how to work within the limits of what is possible at this historical moment... the challenge is to figure out