Technocracies, bureaucracies, or responsive polities? Urban school systems and the politics of school violence prevention. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association

Objective. Two tacks are implicit in the seminal Chubb and Moe (1990) argument that education bureaucracies tend to be rigidified by democratic conflict. One emphasizes the vulnerability of urban systems to organized interests and community pressures; the other argues that urban systems are unresponsive and ossified bureaucracies. This debate contrasts with traditional assumptions of apolitical ‘‘professionalism.’ ’ The predictive power of these theses is examined for the case of school violence prevention policy. Methods. Ordinary least squares regression analysis is conducted on the 1995 Council of Urban Boards of Education survey, encompassing 74 urban school districts. Results. Districts with greater levels of racial violence and violence against teachers had more school violence prevention measures. Levels of general school violence and district perceptions of school violence were not statistically significant. Conclusions. Urban systems are quite responsive to interest group pressure as well as to high SES communities. The professionalism thesis is not supported. The Politics of Urban Education After nearly two decades of virtual absence from the research literature,1 political scientists have recently developed renewed interest in urban education politics and governance. Given that K–12 education consumes more money than any other U.S. governmental activity, that education is consistently found to be the public’s most pressing domestic policy concern, and that urban schools are continually described as being in crisis, this would appear to be an overdue development. Nonetheless, the term ‘‘political institution’ ’ is more likely to call to mind legislatures or executiv