From gap gazing to promising cases: Moving toward equity in urban education reform

A case analysis of the Miami-Dade Urban Systemic Initiative is presented in this article, citing this initiative as one of the sites with the greatest promise for affecting equity issues. Using a grounded-theory methodologica l approach, a general framework for systemic reform was developed as a tool to examine the particulars of systemic reform initiatives and their potent ial to impact the teaching and learning of science and mathematics in diver se school contexts. It was found that to better understand the effectivenes s of systemic reform initiatives requires answering two basic questions: Wh at is the (pedagogical and ideological) systemic conceptual clarity guiding the reform efforts? And, what is the operational approach? Once answers to these questions are found, it becomes easier to explore how key officials are implementing or not implementing other aspects of systemic reform. The article also explains why less attention should be given to student outcome s (based on standardized tests) as the main indicator of success in systemi c reform. Instead, it is proposed that insights gained from, studying the p articulars of promising initiatives can help others stimulate systemic refo rm in their own contexts, especially in urban contexts, which usually have few resources and a large population of students who are traditionally unde rserved. (C) 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.