Detroit's public school system, lauded as a model for the nation in the 1920s and 1930s, has become one of the city's most conspicuous failures. Jeffrey Mirel draws on Detroit's experience to offer a new interpretation of urban educational decline in the twentieth century, suggesting specific answers to what ails America's public schools and how public education can be improved.

Jeffrey Mirel has won two prestigious book awards for The Rise and Fall of an Urban School System. Stanford University and the American Educational Research Association awarded the book the 1994-95...