Content area
Full Text
DISSATISFIED WITH THE QUALITY OF THE WORKERS that they have been hiring, many CEOs of major corporations believe that it is necessary to improve the quality of American public education. They also believe that it is possible to do so. After all, following decades of apparent success during which they were organized as immense bureaucratic structures, American corporations have had to alter their assumptions and their practices in quite radical ways. The most successful enterprises have been chronicled by Peter Senge, Peter Drucker, and Tom Peters; the least successful survive only as case studies to be used by business school students.
Analogies between business and education are risky. Still, there is certainly a consensus among the knowledgeable--of both progressive and traditionalist stripes--that American schools can no longer continue to operate as they have in the past. Why, then, does meaningful education reform seem almost as remote in 1995 as it did in 1983, the year when the nation was first alerted to the risks lurking in its current educational system
I submit that significant reform can come about only if two conditions are met: 1) The broad public must be persuaded that reform is needed; 2) teachers (as well as administrators and parents) must favor certain core proposals for reform and be capable of implementing them.
Unfortunately, neither of these conditions is close to being met on a wide scale. While Americans are quick to condemn schools for "other students" in "other communities," polls indicate that most parents continue to be satisfied with their own children's schools and teachers. Even those who are unhappy with schooling rarely become enmeshed in discussions about school bonds or school boards; they prefer more individualistic solutions, like switching schools or teachers, or even home schooling.
Further, when one probes public attitudes toward schools, a yawning gap emerges between the issues stressed by school reformers and those stressed by the public. As chronicled by pollsters, the public's chief concerns about the schools revolve around the safety of children and the incidence of drugs and violence in the schools. Surely, no one would question the importance of these concerns, but one searches in vain for mention of those topics that have energized school reformers in the last decade: more individualized settings;...