Excellence for All

Excellence For All: American Education Reform, 1983-2008 examines the history of school reform in the United States over the past quarter-century. Specifically, the work examines an approach to educational change best characterized by the phrase "excellence for all"—an equity-focused policy phenomenon uniquely situated for the policymaking context of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The idea of promoting excellence for all students united a broad enough coalition to pursue a truly national reform effort and captured the imaginations of leaders in state and local government, at philanthropic foundations, in colleges and universities, and in school districts across the country. Led by a corps of self-styled educational entrepreneurs aggressively pursuing reforms that they could take "to scale, " the movement sought to remake the American high school piece by piece. The dissertation examines this reform movement through the nation's three largest districts—New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles—and through three particular change efforts: a physical plant reform (the small schools movement), a personnel reform (Teach For America), and a curricular reform (the Advanced Placement Program). The work aims to establish the ways in which this most recent era of school reform represented a departure from previous reform eras, strives to explain the movement's broad appeal, and ultimately, aims to understand its shortcomings by exploring the assumptions underlying the excellence for all approach and the tradeoffs required by it.