Keeping policy churn off the agenda: Urban education and civic capacity

Building on the conceptual framework developed by the Civic Capacity and Urban Education Project, we investigate why sustained reform is so difficult in urban school systems. Our study addresses two questions: How does the concept of civic capacity relate to the policy change process and how do its various components relate to each other? And to what extent does civic capacity foster agenda consensus in the context of urban education reform? To address these questions we focus on the connection between problems and solutions and deal directly with the question of how mayoral leadership impacts this process. Using the Project's survey of key stakeholders and independent indicators of agenda setting and stakeholder support/opposition culled from media coverage in 11 large U.S. cities, we find considerable variation in levels of civic capacity, particularly low levels of stakeholder agreement on reform solutions, but also convincing evidence that strong mayoral leadership may indeed play an important role in fostering greater agenda consensus.