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A number of people have recommended Charles Payne's So Much Reform, So Little Change: The Persistence of Failure in Urban Schools. Tom Hoffman sealed the deal for me when he offered the following quotation from page 190:

...I am not in principle against the idea of freeing certain schools from bureaucratic oversight under certain conditions, but I don't see any Big Magic in autonomy itself as opposed to the way it is implemented. To the extent that we keep implementing reforms with the idea that there is some one program that is going to make all the difference; to the extent that we keep implementing reform without adequate support or without a spirit of persistence, a determination that we are going to give the work a fair chance to take root; to the extent that we keep implementing good ideas in a spirit of contempt for the practitioners who have to make them work; to the extent that we keep implementing reforms without any capacity for mid-course corrections, without any understanding of the relevant historical context; to that extent we can expect to get implementations that miss the point. How we do this may be as important as what we do, arguably more so. One of the foundational studies of the current discussion of urban school districts (Snipes, Doolittle, and Herilhy 2002) found that successful districts and unsuccessful districts say they are doing the same things; the difference appears to be in the way that they do what they do.

Debates on school reform seem to suffer from two related problems:

• The assumption that a simple change of governance or incentives will set you free;
• The tendency to pantomime--rather than truly implement--good reform ideas and then abandon them as ineffective when they don't work.

Payne's book has rocketed to the top of my reading list.