"This is the best case study I have seen to date on school responses to comprehensive reform. It mixes human stories into the wicked brew of ideas and ideals, policies, and politics that make up the American way of educational improvement. An elegantly written, compelling analysis."
—Gary Sykes, College of Education, Michigan State University

This extraordinary view of "reform in action" illustrates what actually happens when school reform encounters a high-poverty, linguistically diverse school, that is, when policy ambitions collide with school realities. Based on two years of observation and interviews, the author shows how professional identities, social resources, and conflicting purposes shaped one elementary school’s capacity to understand and implement state-mandated reforms. Like many American schools, Mission Elementary embodies the disputes as well as the challenges that are central concerns of today’s educational reforms.

Featuring vivid portraits of teachers and administrators, this extremely timely book:

• Helps us to understand the processes involved in improving the performances of teachers, school leaders, and students in high-poverty settings–especially the pedagogical aspects of policy and program implementation and the complex issues of social and individual change.
• Brings together the ideas of conflict and capacity in ways no other book has, exploring what the staff brought to the task of school renewal in terms of understanding, experience, and belief; what they were able to learn; what conventional resources they had; and how they used those resources.
• Sheds much-needed light on the implementation of one of the most ambitious education reform attempts in recent history, the standards reforms in California.