Chapter 9: Creating a Discourse for Restructuring in Detroit: Achievement, Race, and the Northern High School Walkout¹

Not surprisingly, the efforts of educators, parents, policy makers, and others to address problems of low academic achievement, particularly as they occur among children of color in urban schools, not unlike other school reform initiatives, have their starts and stops, cycles, accomplishments, and downright mistakes. There is in fact a distinct lineage to these attempts involving ruptures and continuities among a number of competing lines of descent over time. Most of the elements of this lineage have to do with different classroom strategies for teaching low achieving children. They include the establishment of special classes and schools, the creation of remedial programs apart from special education but outside the regular classroom, the introduction of curriculum modifications within the regular classroom, the reduction in class size, and the development of compensatory and alternative educational programs (Franklin, 1998). More recently a sixth strategy has appeared on the scene that unlike these earlier approaches focuses not on what transpires in the classroom but in the governing of schools. Known as restructuring, it is developing its own lineage involving such patterns as decentralization, community control, recentralization, and various forms of parental choice. It is this last approach, that of restructuring, that I will focus my attention on in this essay.