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In Barbara Ferman's collection, The Fight for America's Schools, grassroots resistance to neoliberal education reform holds the spotlight. Her geographic lens is the Pennsylvania/New Jersey region. In this article, the geographic focus shifts to Memphis, Tennessee, and Washington, D.C. Experiences in these two cities show how the neoliberal agenda is protected in the face of disappointing results. The Memphis case centers on a state takeover driven by a market ideology. Its experience underscores that reducing local representation to an inconsequential advisory role also diminishes what education policy leaders believe they need to consider. D.C. offers a more complex narrative, one haunted by the corrupted metrics of Campbell's Law. In both cities, the neoliberal toolbox proved unable to deliver in practice what the drawing board had promised.

A body of recent work shows that the urban political arena and its analysis are undergoing a profound shift. Through a political-order concept inspired by the work of V. O. Key, this essay examines how contextual change and acts of agency combine in forming the governing arrangements that encompass cities. To unpack the change process, the analysis offered here uses a comparison between (1) the prevailing order in the several years following the close of World War II when urban redevelopment and Black mobilization were the dominant struggles and (2) the present time with its seemingly more fluid character but a backdrop of a highly partisan clash of cultures waged intergovernmentally. The comparison between the periods demonstrates the degree to which political orders can vary, with a sturdy order of redevelopment and accommodation giving way to hampered efforts to pursue urban progressivism. Even with a market economy a large presence across time, change follows no master arc but remains configurative.

Urban political study has experienced several critical junctures. Rather than following an incremental path of cumulative development, urban analysis has gone through phases of reframing akin to what Thomas Kuhn called paradigm shifts. The purpose of this article is threefold: (1) to examine paradigmatic frameworks as alterations in urban inquiry, (2) to address the issue of why such shifts come about, and (3) to remind readers that shifts are double-edged, not only bringing new perspective to inquiry but also risking that other significant considerations may be overlooked in the process. Urban paradigms compete for preeminence, and all are in need of ongoing critical reassessment. The hold of any given framework of analysis proves impermanent in part because the underlying urban situation it illuminates is never static. The risk of a lag in analysis is never low.

With hindsight covering a quarter of a century of Regime Politics, this reflection calls for refashioning the concept of an urban regime into a more encompassing idea of a multitiered political order. As an approach to political change, cross-time comparisons suggest that periodization can highlight how forces conjoin in different ways as political development unfolds. From this perspective, there is little reason to expect to find in today's cities a stable and cohesive governing coalition held together around a high-priority agenda. Yet the need for resources to be commensurate with policy goals and the strength of purpose in the face of an established mind-set are key lessons to be retained from the past experiences of Atlanta and other cities. While systemic inequality continues as an overarching reality, mitigating responses can be worked out in the middle ground between structure and agency.

Although "power over" and "power to" are conceptually distinct, in political reality they are intertwined. As forms of "power to," urban regimes are not neutral mechanisms, but are forms of empowerment. Still, they may come less out of a contest of wills around fixed preferences and more out of how preferences are shaped by relationships. Perceived feasibility plays a major part. Given bounded rationality, one alignment of relationships may crowd out others, facilitating the pursuit of some aims while hindering others. Reformers often face the handicap of being inattentive to the reality that some forms of interaction have higher opportunity costs than others and therefore are less sustainable. Reformers frequently see their task mainly in "power over" terms, that is, of ousting defenders of the status quo. But if reformers think about their task in terms of "power to," then they can see that a major obstacle is the difficulty of achieving a settlement with sustainable forms of interaction. Going beyond particular battles to win the war for reform calls for a regime‐building effort that rests on viable forms of cooperation.