David A. Gamson (Ph.D., Stanford University) is Associate Professor of Education in the Department of Education Policy Studies at The Pennsylvania State University. His research focuses on educational policy and school reform, past and present. Gamson has written about the role of school districts in Progressive Era reform and, more recently, has been studying the evolving roles and responsibilities of the school district since World War II, the changes to policies designed to provide equal educational opportunities over the past century, and the use of academic standards before the 1980s. Gamson has been a fellow in the Advanced Studies Fellowship Program at Brown University and a National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellow. His publications have appeared in Educational Researcher; Paedagogica Historica; the Journal of Educational Administration; Mind, Brain, and Education; Intelligence; and the 2007 Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education. His book, The Importance of Being Urban, is forthcoming. During the 2015-2016 academic year, he was a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation.

Emily M. Hodge (Ph.D., The Pennsylvania State University) is Assistant Professor of Educational Leadership at Montclair State University in New Jersey. Her work uses historical and qualitative methods, as well as social network analysis, to understand the changing nature of strategies for educational equity. Recent projects have explored how educational systems, schools, and teachers negotiate the tension between standardization and differentiation in the context of the Common Core State Standards, and the varied strategies state education agencies are using to support standards implementation. Hodge is a recipient of a Small Research Grant from the Spencer Foundation. Her research appears in Educational Policy, English Teaching: Practice and Critique, Education Law and Policy Review, Review of Research in Education, and AERA Open.

Figures and Tables - David A. Gamson and Emily M. Hodge: Preface: Re-examining the American School District - David A. Gamson and Emily M. Hodge: The Relentless Reinvention of the American School District - John L. Rury and Sanae Akaba: The Geo-Spatial Distribution of Educational Attainment: School Districts, Cultural Capital and Inequality in Metropolitan Kansas City, 1960-1980 - Emily M. Hodge: District Consolidation, Detracking, and School Choice: Lessons from the Woodland Hills School District in Western Pennsylvania - Genevieve Siegel-Hawley and Stefani Thachik: Crossing the Line? School District Responses to Demographic Change in the South - Ansley T. Erickson: Fairness, Commitment, and Civic Capacity: The Varied Desegregation Trajectories of Metropolitan School Districts - Emily E. Straus: From the District to the State to the Nation: How a High-needs District became the Testing Ground for Federal High-stakes Accountability Policies - Karen Benjamin: The Limits of Top-Down Versus Bottom-Up Educational Reform During the Great Depression - Norm Fruchter, Toi Sin Arvidsson, Christina Mokhtar, and John Beam: Demographics and Performance in New York City's School Networks: An Initial Inquiry - Tina M. Trujillo, Laura E. Hernández, and René Espinoza Kissell: Enduring Dilemmas in Democratic Urban District Reform: The Oakland Case - Judith Kafka: Institutional Theory and the History of District-level School Reform: A Reintroduction - Contributors.