state, the school, and the family in the gentrification of the American city

• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2047/d20003146

This dissertation examines the extent to which urban education reform affects the ways in which gentrification unfolds. Popular reforms to public elementary and secondary schools, and to entire school districts, have been implemented throughout major American cities over the past several decades. While municipal officials frequently cite strictly educational goals related to student achievement when they champion such reforms, educational improvement is not the only objective at stake for cities pursuing school reform. As school quality has been cited as a prominent concern for middle-class families living within major cities, popular school reforms have increasingly been deployed by cities as part of an economic development strategy designed to attract and retain a stable middle class. To the extent that these school-based efforts to maintain an urban middle-class presence succeed, they have the potential to alter the process of gentrification in contemporary American cities.