The Challenges in Urban Education

not reaching their overarching goal of high student achievement. These are all problems urban schools in particular often face.

Author and coach Cassandra Washington (n.d.) breaks down urban schools into three categories:

» Large—An urbanized area and principal city with a population of 250,000 or more » Medium—An urbanized area and principal city with a population of 250,000 or less » Small—An urbanized area and principal city with a population of 100,000 or less

Researchers and educators H. Richard Milner IV, Heather B. Cunningham, Lori Delale-O’Connor, and Erika Gold Kestenberg (2018) describe three categories of urban schools. • Urban intensive: These schools are in large cities. • Urban emergent: These schools are in major cities that are not as large. They have the same challenges as the urban intensive schools. • Urban characteristics: These schools are not located in big cities but are starting to experience the same characteristics as urban schools.

Urban schools, for the purposes of this book, are public schools located in a city that need immediate support for challenges they are facing. Coauthors Roey Ahram, Adeyemi Stembridge, Edward Fergus, and Pedro Noguera (n.d.) note that urban challenges include operating in densely populated areas, poverty, greater racial and ethnic diversity, and more frequent rates of student mobility. These challenges also speak to structural challenges: low student achievement, lack of instructional coherence, inexperienced teaching staff, poorly functioning data systems, and low teacher expectations of students (Ahram et al., n.d.). Washington (n.d.) describes social problems as another challenge facing urban educators because what happens outside the school affects what happens inside the school: violence, drugs, homelessness, joblessness, and mental health issues. Author and associate professor of leadership in education at the University of Massachusetts Lowell Jake Schneider (2017) states, “The average low-income student in the United States attends a school where two-thirds of the student body is low income—a 28 percent increase from just a quarter century ago.”

One study that examined students in fifty cities in the United States finds that in urban education:

» [Students in] less than a third of the cities examined made gains in math or reading proficiency over a three-year study span relative to their state’s performance. . . . » One in 4 students in ninth grade . . . did not graduate from high school in four years. » Less than 10 percent of all high school students enrolled in advanced-math classes each year in 29 of the 50 cities. . . . » Low-income students and students of color were less likely to enroll in high-scoring elementary and middle schools than those who were more affluent or were white. . . .