Education and urban politics

Over the past four decades, the study of education politics has been largely influenced by the field of urban politics. Urban politics scholars have produced scholarship that has helped inform how we understand education in the U.S. Moreover, as the study of education became increasingly dominated by economics perspectives, which emphasized test scores and other academic achievement measures as the primary measures of interest, urban scholars have shown how questions of power, race, representation, federalism, institutions, and participation are also critical to the understanding of education in the U.S. This chapter will summarize the trajectory of urban education politics research over the past four decades, including the power debates and urban regimes theory, and how limitations within these debates and frameworks have led to new areas of inquiry within urban education politics. Finally, the chapter concludes with some considerations about the future of urban education politics scholarship.