This course has two major strands. One strand is simply an examination of national thinking about urban schooling over the past 40 years, from the Coleman Report to today's accountability-driven reforms. We will be particularly concerned with how educational policy has been shaped and with the problematics of translating policy into practice. The second strand is theoretical; we will be trying to understand these very contemporary problems through the lens of classical theory; that is, functionalism, Max Weber's theory of bureaucracy and Marx's theory of class conflict.