NYU Wagner

Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 2009

Urban and Regional Policy and Its Effects. Edited by Wial, Howard and Hal Wolman, Joseph Cordes, Margery Austin Turner. Urban Institute Press.

Academy of Management Learning and Education.

This paper proposes that power inequities drive dynamics in racially diverse teams, often leading to conflict, withdrawal or assimilation, all of which impede team learning. We suggest several elements to address these dynamics, including identity safety or the belief that one is safe despite one's racial identity; a perspective that values cultural identity as a resource for thinking about work; and a welcoming stance towards new information and differing opinions.

Economics of Education Review, Forthcoming

Education and Urban Society 41(3), 2009:  295-316

The authors use a rich data set on New York City public elementary schools to explore how changes in immigrant representation have played out at the school level, providing a set of stylistic facts about the magnitude and nature of demographic changes in urban schools. They find that while the city experienced an overall increase in its immigrant representation over the 5 years studied, its elementary schools did not. Although the average school experienced little change during this period, a significant minority of schools saw sizable shifts. The change does not mirror the White flight and 'tipping' associated with desegregation but rather suggests a tendency to stabilize, with declines in immigrant enrollments concentrated in schools with larger immigrant populations at the outset. The authors also find that changes in the immigrant shares influence the composition of the school's students, and that overall school demographic changes do not mirror grade-level changes within schools.

Journal of Public Affairs Education (JPAE)  15(4): 445–461

Many schools have experiential learning projects, often termed “capstones,” where
students combine theory and practice for the benefit of an outside agency. New
York University’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service (NYU
Wagner) has devoted a great deal of thought and effort to strengthening and
sustaining its Capstone program from the students’ perspective, and it has seen
significant improvement. But we knew less about whether the project work our
students performed was helpful to participating Capstone client organizations, as well as what factors made certain projects more successful from the clients’ point of view. In an effort to assess and understand this perspective, we undertook a post-project survey of recent Capstone clients. The results indicate very strongly that the services offered and tools created by our Capstone teams are useful to these outside agencies, and the feedback offers indications of how to increase the
value of these projects going forward.

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 95, 1450-1466/ (2008)

Although power is often conceptualized as the capacity to influence others, the current research explores whether power psychologically protects people from influence. In contrast to classic social psychological research demonstrating the strength of the situation in directing attitudes, expressions, and intentions, five experiments (using experiential primes, semantic primes, and role manipulations of power) demonstrate that the powerful (a) generate creative ideas that are less influenced by salient examples, (b) express attitudes that conform less to the expressed opinions of others, (c) are more influenced by their own social value orientation relative to the reputation of a negotiating partner, and (d) perceive greater choice in making counterattitudinal statements. This last experiment illustrates that power is not always psychologically liberating; it can create internal conflict, arousing dissonance, and thereby lead to attitude change. Across the experiments, high-power participants were immune to the typical press of situations, with intrapsychic processes having greater sway than situational or interpersonal ones on their creative and attitudinal expressions.

Handbook of Action Research, 2nd Ed. Sage Publications, 2008.

This chapter tells the story of our decision to introduce participation as a key feature of a qualitative research project about social change leadership. We analyze the context that influenced our choice to create a ‘hybrid' design; discuss the subsequent choices we made about
our ‘positionality' vis-à-vis research participations and the kind of knowledge we produced; and reflect on the tensions these choices created with respect to control over the research process, its action orientation, and whose voice was represented. Embracing participation enriched the research but also provided hard-earned lessons about the trade-offs of taking the action turn.

Teachers College Record, 2008, Volume 110 Number 9.

High school reform is currently at the top of the education policy making agenda after years of stagnant achievement and persistent racial and income test score gaps. Although a number of reforms offer some promise of improving U.S. high schools, small schools have emerged as the favored reform model, especially in urban areas, garnering substantial financial investments from both the private and public sectors. In the decade following 1993, the number of high schools in New York City nearly doubled, as new "small" schools opened and large high schools were reorganized into smaller learning communities. The promise of small schools to improve academic engagement, school culture, and, ultimately, student performance has drawn many supporters. However, educators, policy makers, and researchers have raised concerns about the unintended consequences of these new small schools and the possibility that students "left behind" in large, established high schools are incurring negative impacts.

Using 10 years (1993-2003) of data on New York City high schools, we examine the potential systemic effects of small schools that have been identified by critics and researchers.

Teachers College Record, 2008.

High school reform is currently at the top of the education policy making agenda after years of stagnant achievement and persistent racial and income test score gaps. Although a number of reforms offer some promise of improving U.S. high schools, small schools have emerged as the favored reform model, especially in urban areas, garnering substantial financial investments from both the private and public sectors. In the decade following 1993, the number of high schools in New York City nearly doubled, as new "small" schools opened and large high schools were reorganized into smaller learning communities. The promise of small schools to improve academic engagement, school culture, and, ultimately, student performance has drawn many supporters. However, educators, policy makers, and researchers have raised concerns about the unintended consequences of these new small schools and the possibility that students "left behind" in large, established high schools are incurring negative impacts.

Economics of Education Review Oct 2007, Vol. 26 Issue 5, p532-545, 14p

While the distribution of resources across school districts is well studied, relatively little attention has been paid to how resources are allocated to individual schools inside those districts. This paper explores the determinants of resource allocation across schools in large districts based on factors that reflect differential school costs or factors that may, in practice, be related to the distribution of resources. Using detailed data on school resources and student and school characteristics in New York City, Cleveland and Columbus, Ohio, we find that schools with higher percentages of poor pupils often receive more money and have more teachers per pupil, but the teachers tend to be less educated and less well paid, with a particularly consistent pattern in New York City schools. We conclude with implications for policy and further research.