Last week Bill Bowen discussed the fact that the topic of K-12 education in low-income urban areas is almost never addressed by researchers who identify themselves as urban studies scholars.  Even though the field of urban studies is broadly conceived and interdisciplinary, when he and several colleagues conducted in-depth interviews several years ago with leading urban researchers and examined the content of the most frequently used urban studies textbooks, they found little overlap with the topic of urban education.

So why have urban studies scholars paid so little attention to low-income K-12 education?  Bill Bowen argues that two reasons provide at least some of the explanation:  competing priorities and funding constraints. 

When urban studies programs were new 50 years ago, the burst of new funding for urban research topics encouraged eager researchers to jump into topics from urban sociology, geography, economics, the environment, housing and neighborhood studies, governance, politics, administration, planning, design, and architecture.  Urban education perhaps was simply overlooked among a crowded field of exciting possibilities. 

In more recent years, as funding for urban research has become scarce, few incentives exist for urban researchers to broaden their research into heretofore neglected topics.  Scarce resources are conserved to keep research alive on established topics.

I agree these reasons provide some of the explanation.  But Bill's essay alludes to an additional reason that may be more fundamental because it touches the chord of an important foundational component of the intellectual framework from which urban studies first emerged. 

Urban studies programs were founded in the late 1960s and early 1970s as part of a much broader effort that had begun in the 1950s to integrate systems thinking into the social sciences to break down disciplinary boundaries.  Too many important social problems were being ignored by social science research, it was argued, because the problems were too complex to fit neatly into the sharply defined boundaries of the various social sciences. 

This movement also sought to reform various types of graduate professional education by using new systems-influenced, interdisciplinary approaches to the social sciences to inspire a new generation of interdisciplinary graduate professional education programs to equip new leaders to deal with social complexity. 

The rise of urban studies was the part of that broader initiative that aimed to reform graduate training programs in the fields of city management, public administration, and government.  The goal was to encourage these fields to become more broadly conceived professional education programs based on system-inspired theoretical and applied scholarship to better equip a new generation of publicly spirited professionals to deal with increasingly complex economic, political, and social policy problems related to America's so-called urban crisis.

Getting back to Bill Bowen's argument, he argues that most problems in low-income K-12 urban schooling today are measured as poor outcomes such as low levels of student learning, poor test scores, inadequate employment skills, low teacher salaries, high teacher turnover, outdated facilities, and obsolete equipment.  All these poor conditions today, he argues, are generally tied to the overarching problem of inadequate funding. 

Yet the systems-thinking tradition within urban studies would not suggest that the causes of and solutions to inadequate funding would be discovered by examining what goes on inside the school.  Urban education, therefore, would not be the field to explore because most of urban education relates to what goes on inside the school.  Rather, the research questions to ask from the point of view of urban studies would focus attention on broader issues of social analysis, which he does by suggesting his own hypothesis. 

Specifically, he suggests that the persistence of inadequate funding is best explained by asking why those who have the social authority needed to solve the problem (i.e. social elites, elected officials, etc.) do not define inadequate funding for inner-city low-income K-12 schooling as a problem that is worth solving.  He also asks why those who experience the worst consequences don't fight harder.  These are among the broader systems questions that are the purview of most urban studies scholars.

Early urban studies researchers in the 1970s would have followed a similar intellectual path if they considered examining the topic of low-income K-12 urban education.  The deplorable conditions inside most inner-city schools in the early 1970s were well known examples of the urban crisis.  And the prospect of examining the systematic social dynamics that created and perpetuated those deplorable conditions would have been very fertile ground for ambitious urban studies scholars looking to help establish their new field.

But part of the goal to establish the newly emerging field of urban studies involved taking on urban research topics that were not being addressed by other parts of American universities.  Problems driven by the social dynamics of race and poverty and specific policy areas such as public housing, policing, criminal justice, neighborhood decline, community activism, community development and others all seemed to lack any intellectual home within prevailing university structures at the time.  New urban studies programs embraced most of them eagerly, and with little push-back from academic colleagues elsewhere on campus.

That was not the case in regard to urban education.  Schools of education were widespread within American universities.  Indeed, many (perhaps even most) well-established and highly regarded public universities throughout the U.S. in the 1970s were founded in the nineteenth century as Normal Schools that were entirely devoted to training teachers for primary schools, rural as well as urban.  Although they had evolved into broad universities, they never abandoned their commitments to teacher training.

In addition, many universities had established graduate-level professional programs in all aspects of the educational profession, including education policy.  The finest of these graduate schools of education were already devoted to at least some part of the broader intellectual agenda of seeing schools as part of the broader social systems that comprise American culture. 

Perhaps the best example was (and still is) Columbia University's Teachers College.  In 1887 one of the richest men in the U.S., William Vanderbilt Jr., put up the funding and convinced Nicholas Murry Butler, who would later become Columbia's President and a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, to create a new school to train teachers to improve the education of poor children in New York City's schools.  The New York School for the Training of Teachers evolved into the Teachers College and by 1898 it became affiliated with Columbia University as the first Graduate School of Education.

Throughout its history, Teachers College continued to evolve its mission of training teachers for urban schools by sponsoring its own in-house research programs and graduate-level degree programs in a wide range of social science fields that could help teachers understand the broad social context in which urban schools operated as well as the latest social science-based insights on how to help urban students learn.  Examples of faculty included John Dewey as well as the social anthropologists Margaret Mead and Solon Kimball.

Because of schools like Teachers College, the problems of low-income inner-city K-12 schooling were not considered abandoned within American universities.  Indeed, the early 1970s was when the President of Teachers College at the time, the historian Lawrence Cremin, was writing the second volume of his seminal 3-volume history of American education, which transformed the history of American schooling by placing schools within the broad network of educational institutions that comprise the social, political, and economic systems within American culture.

So, Bill Bowen's accurate conclusion that urban studies researchers have not paid much attention to urban education reveals a profound irony.  There is a long history of social science research that has tried to incorporate knowledge about the social context of urban schools into the training of urban teachers and the development of urban educational policy.  And yet the deplorable conditions that hamper the educational outcomes of low-income students in inner-city schools across the U.S. persists from decade to decade.

Perhaps there is untapped value by creating new ways to infuse the social sciences that are already engaged with the problems of urban education with the systems thinking point of view, and other components, that have helped the field of urban studies invigorate policy debates in so many other topics related to the dynamics of American cities.

The intersection of these two fields today is thin.  As Bill Bowen points out, only the intrepid dare venture into the space. 

Bob Gleeson

Source: Substack