TCRE 1012-3

Governing America’s Schools:

The Shifting Playing Field

JOSEPH MURPHY
Vanderbilt University and The Peabody Center for Education Policy

This essay argues that the landscape of educational control is being reshaped in the
post-industrial era. It reviews the current governance problems in education and
details the range of possible governance models for post-industrial schooling. The
analysis begins by describing the problems that governance must address and iden-
tifying the professional-statist domination of school governance and the reliance on
bureaucratic mechanisms to exercise control as the two most serious contemporary
governance problems. The discussion then moves to a description of the various
possiblilities for school governance in the future. Five types of control processes are
considered: state control, citizen control, professional control, community control, and
market control. The paper concludes by outlining the design principles that form the
basis for rethinking school governance in a post-industrial world: localism, direct
democracy, lay control, choice, and democratic professionalism.

I. INTRODUCTION

Since governance is the steering mechanism of the system, the failure

of governance affects all other subsystems in major and negative ways.
Absent reform of the governance function, reforms of other subsys-
tems will have only diminished or no impact on the system’s perfor-
mance. ~Consortium on Productivity in the Schools, 1995, p. 49!

Reform efforts will have only limited impact until the role of gover-
nance is addressed. ~Twentieth Century Fund, 1992, p. 1!

There is a critical need for research into the relationships between

alternative patterns of educational governance and their ability effec-
tively to mobilize human energy and intellect, realizing personal and
social educational aspirations. ~Swanson, 1989, p. 270!

Because governance can be interpreted in different ways—and to prevent

undue spillover into other dimensions of the educational landscape—it is
important to begin with some definitional treatment of the concept at
hand. Governance is about control—who drives the educational bus, if you
will. At its core, governance is thus at least about two issues: ~1! the way

Teachers College Record Volume 102, Number 1, February 2000, pp. 57–84
Copyright © by Teachers College, Columbia University
0161-4681
58 Teachers College Record

control is ~or is not! partitioned among the various stakeholders in the

educational enterprise and ~2! the set of rules and practices developed by
controlling actors that shape the schooling endeavor.
Why should we be concerned with the governance issue? One response,
well developed by the Consortium on Renewing Education ~1998!, posits
the claim that only simultaneous attacks on the entire educational system
will lead to improvements. Certainly, because governance is one major
component of the system, we would be ill-advised to neglect a thoughtful
review of the topic: “We are now questioning the efficacy and attempting to
reform the basic structure of schooling in this country. Governance cannot
be excepted from searching analysis” ~Danzberger, 1992, p. 113!.
A second answer focuses on the neglect of school governance in the
reform equation. According to some analysts, there has been a profound
silence on the issue of educational governance over the last two decades.
Sarason ~1995!, for instance, argues that “with rare exceptions. . . critics
accepted the existing governance structure as a given” ~p. 1!. The Commit-
tee for Economic Development report ~1994! draws a similar conclusion:

Few major reform initiatives of the past ten years have attempted to
define the roles and responsibilities of different levels of governance
or to improve the abilities of the individuals and institutions respon-
sible for making critical educational decisions. ~p. 2!
Others underscore the saliency of the question by attending to problems
with the existing governance system as well as “the stultifying consequences
of educational governance” ~Sarason, 1995, p. 115!. While this line of analy-
sis is developed fully in the body of the paper, an advance organizer would
look something like this: for a variety of reasons the educational gover-
nance system is not working well, it is contributing to the poor perfor-
mance of the educational system—it is “inimical to innovation and meaningful
change” ~p. 115! and “intractable to improvement” ~p. 134!. In short, we
have “governance gridlock that prevents meaningful reform” ~Committee
for Economic Development, 1994, p. 29!.
Still another reply to the relevancy question has been chiseled from the
material on the effects of educational governance on schooling. Reviewers
here hold that “the way authority is structured and exercised shapes the
intellectual and moral character of the school, thereby profoundly influ-
encing student development” ~Snauwaert, 1993, p. 2!.

The real work of learning happens in the classroom, in the interaction

between teacher and student. This interaction is affected by innumer-
able large and small decisions made by principals, school boards,
superintendents, state legislatures, education department officials, and
the federal government. These decisions and their implementation
 Governing America’s Schools 59

can either aid or hinder quality education in the classroom. This is

the heart of education governance. ~Committee for Economic Devel-
opment, 1994, p. 2!

Finally, it is important to attend to educational governance issues because

it is here, analysts aver, that important understandings of and foundations
for a democratic society both take root and play out.
Starting with the analysis above on the importance of the governance
issue—and with a clear understanding that governance both helps define
and is shaped by other pieces of the educational equation—this paper
attempts to map out the shifting governance playing field in education.
Since that is the goal, it follows certain paths but ignores others. For
example, it attends much more to issues of governance at the macro-level
of analysis—Should control be in the hands of the professional class or be
deposited with citizens? Does a statist approach or a market system provide
a more appropriate control structure?—than it does with micro-level con-
trol questions—Should professional control be the province of administra-
tors or teachers?
We begin with an analysis of governance problems in education. We start
with a description of the problem set we believe governance reforms must
address. In the later part of this section, we highlight governance problems
specifically. Here again, we unpack certain issues while neglecting others
entirely. To a certain extent, the spotlight is directed by constraints of
space. More appropriately, it is directed by our understanding of perhaps
the two most serious governance problems afoot today—professional-statist
domination of school governance and reliance by actors in these areas on
bureaucratic mechanisms to actualize their control.
The second section of the paper opens with a description of possibilities
for school governance for tomorrow’s schools. Or more concretely, the raw
material from which designs for new systems of governance can be sculpted
is presented. Five clusters of control mechanisms are examined: the state,
citizens, the profession, the community, and the economy. Specifically, the
third section outlines the design principles that form the foundational
pillars for rethinking governance. These pillars will, we believe, anchor
specific reform ideas in the areas of governance as we move into the
twenty-first century.

II. ROOTS OF THE GOVERNANCE PROBLEM IN EDUCATION

Governance is now perceived as one of the greatest barriers, if not the

primary obstacle to systemic reform of education. ~Danzberger, 1992,
p. 32!
60 Teachers College Record

Mounting concern over the aims and achievements of American pub-

lic schools emphasizes the need for continuing analysis of how the
schools are run and who runs them. ~Rosenthal, 1969, p. 3!
The struggle to recast school governance can be traced to two broad areas:
discontent with educational outcomes and critical reviews of the core gov-
ernance system of schooling. Discontent with outcomes draws strength from
three problems: ~1! the perceived inability of public schooling to deliver a
quality product, ~2! the seeming failure of education to heal itself, and ~3!
a growing disconnect between the public and public education. Critiques of
extant governance systems center on two topics: ~1! frustration with the
government-professional monopoly and ~2! critical analyses of the basic
governance infrastructure—bureaucracy.
The consequence of the above noted forces is a significant reinforce-
ment of the “common and widely reiterated observation of a declining
confidence in public education . . . @and# the mounting criticisms of the
established form and content of publicly-funded educational systems” ~May-
berry, 1991, p. 1!, along with increasing demands for reforms—reforms that
represent an overhaul of current governing arrangements. Whitty ~1984!
reinforces this latter point, noting that “it is important to recognize that . . .
public education fails to serve the majority of its clients and hence makes
them potential supporters of reactionary proposals” ~p. 54!.

CONCERNS ABOUT EDUCATIONAL PRODUCTIVITY

The fact that despite all that has been tried in the post–World War II
era to improve our schools, the quality of education, however defined,
remains what it has been or is getting worse. ~Sarason, 1995, p. 15!

Outcome Concerns
The average twenty-five-year-old graduate in the United States has the
eighth-grade academic skills and the virtually nonexistent vocational
skills with which he or she emerged from high school. ~Marshall &
Tucker, 1992, p. 69!

Current performance. Richards, Shore, and Sawicky ~1996! hit the mark
directly when they report that “today the public discourse about American
education tends to be preoccupied with failure” ~p. 15!. The most recent
decade contains a “raft of hopeless narratives on public education” ~Fine,
1993, p. 33!. What analysts see as frustration over the continuing inadequa-
cies of primary and secondary education in the United States is a multi-
faceted phenomenon. Or, stated in an alternate form, the perception that
 Governing America’s Schools 61

the level and quality of education in the United States is less than many
desire is buttressed by data on a wide variety of outcomes. Specifically,
critics argue that data assembled in each of the following performance
dimensions provide a not-very-reassuring snapshot of the current perfor-
mance of the American educational system: ~1! academic achievement in
basic subject areas—compared to student performance in other countries;
~2! functional literacy; ~3! preparation for employment; ~4! the holding
power of schools ~drop-out rates!; ~5! knowledge of specific subject areas
such as geography and economics; ~6! mastery of higher-order skills; and
~7! initiative, responsibility, and citizenship ~Committee for Economic Devel-
opment, 1994; Marshall & Tucker, 1992; Murnane & Levy, 1996!.1 Perhaps
even more important than the data is the fact that “the experience of most
Americans tells them that the nation’s school system is in trouble and that
the problems are getting worse” ~Mathews, 1996, p. 1!.

Needed performance. Two issues in particular ribbon forward-looking analy-

ses of educational outcomes: ~1! the inability of the educational enterprise
to enhance levels of productivity to meet the needs of the changing work-
force and ~2! the failure of schools to successfully educate all of the nation’s
children, especially the poor. While analysts acknowledge that student achieve-
ment has remained fairly stable over the last quarter century, they fault the
education enterprise for its inability to keep pace with the increasing expec-
tations from a changing economy ~Committee for Economic Development,
1994; Consortium on Productivity in the Schools, 1995!: “the requirements
the world was placing on school graduates were dramatically higher, but
performance had stayed the same” ~Marshall & Tucker, 1992, p. 79!.
One side of the problem these critics discuss is the belief that systems
that hold steady in today’s world are actually in decline. While others see
stability, they see “increasing obsolescence of the education provided by
most U.S. schools” ~Murnane and Levy, 1996, p. 6!, and they question “why
schools have remained what they were and are despite the lack of desirable
outcomes” ~Sarason, 1995, p. 110!.
The other side of the productivity issue raised by these reviewers is the
claim that because of the changing nature of the economy outlined earlier,
the level of outcomes needed by students must be significantly increased.
Today’s schools look much like Ford in 1926. The products they
produce—student achievement levels—are not worse than they were
20 years ago; in most respects they are sightly better. But in those 20
years, the job market has changed radically. Just as the Model T that
was good enough in 1921 was not good enough in 1926, the educa-
tion that was adequate for high-wage employers in 1970 is no longer
adequate today. ~Murnane & Levy, 1996, p. 77!
62 Teachers College Record

They find that the schools are not meeting this new standard for produc-
tivity. They argue that “the majority of students fail to leave school with the
skills they need” ~Marshall & Tucker, 1992, p. 67!, that “American schools
are not providing students with the learning that they will need to function
effectively in the 21st Century” ~Consortium on Productivity in the Schools,
1995, p. 3!.
Of special concern to productivity critics is the belief that nearly all the
future gains will need to come in the area of educational quality. The
Committee on Economic Development ~1994! depicts the argument as follows:
In the past, much of the contribution of elementary education to
economic growth has come from increases in the “quantity” of edu-
cation. Although there is still room for improvement ~about 15 per-
cent of twenty-four- to twenty-five-year-olds do not have a high school
diploma!, much of the future contribution will have to come from
increasing the “quality” of students graduating from our high schools.
~p. 8!
Another concern is that the outcome standards themselves are being recast:
The skills that students need are not just more of what the schools
have always taught, such as basic skills in mathematics, but also skills
that the schools have rarely taught—the ability to work with complex
knowledge and to make decisions under conditions of conflicting
inadequate evidence. ~Consortium on Productivity in the Schools,
1995, p. 9!
Complicating all of this is the knowledge that high levels of performance
must be attained by nearly all of society’s children.
Our task is to shift the whole curve of American educational perfor-
mance radically upward, and at the same time to close substantially
the gap between the bottom and the top of the curve. For the first
time in American history, we have to have an education system that
really educates everyone, our poor and our minorities as well as our
most fortunate. ~Marshall & Tucker, 1992, p. 82!
Students who leave school having failed to meet the new performance
standards will face increasingly dismal prospects in the twenty-first-century
workplace.

Inability to Successfully Reform

For well over a decade, policy makers, business leaders, and many
educators have been calling for a major overhaul of our nation’s
stagnating system of public education. Yet, in terms of improved stu-
 Governing America’s Schools 63

dent achievement, we have precious little to show for all the rhetoric,
goal setting, and haphazard experimentation. ~Committee for Eco-
nomic Development, 1994, p. x!

What appears to be especially damaging to public education is the per-

ceived inability of the schooling industry to reform itself. Questions raised
by analysts who take the long-term view on this issue are particularly demor-
alizing. For example, according to Beers and Ellig ~1994!:

@Over the last 40 years,# public school leaders have overseen the imple-
mentation of many of the most persistently called-for proposals for
school reform. The ever-present call for more funding has been met
by tripling real per-pupil expenditures from their 1960 levels. The
demand for greater teacher professionalism has motivated a 50 per-
cent increase in average teacher salaries since 1960, adjusted for infla-
tion. Class sizes have fallen by a third since the mid-1960s, and most
states have continued to raise graduation requirements. ~p. 19!

What has resulted from these efforts, critics argue, has not been an increase
in educational quality but rather a proliferation of professional and bureau-
cratic standards ~Hill, Pierce, & Guthrie, 1997; Whitty, 1984!, the creation
of subsides for bureaucracy ~Beers & Ellig, 1994!, “a deepening antagonism
between professional educators and the public” ~Marshall & Tucker, 1992,
p. 79!, and the strengthening of a centralized educational system in which
“all risks of failure are shifted onto parents, taxpayers, and children” ~Payne,
1995, p. 3!. Beers and Ellig ~1994! make this point in dramatic fashion when
they claim that “in a very real sense we have tried to run the public schools
the same way the Soviets tried to run factories, and now we’re paying the
price” ~p. 20!.2 The effect, critics maintain, is that reform has reinforced
the very dynamics that are promoting self-destruction in public education.
The natural consequence, they hold, must be the emergence of new forms
of educational institutions and new models of school governance.
Also troubling, if not surprising given the analysis just presented, is the
feeling that the very substantial efforts to strengthen education over the last
15 years in particular have not produced much in terms of improvement
across the seven outcome dimensions listed above. As Richards and his
colleagues ~1996! document, public interest in alternative governance arrange-
ments for schools reflects a profound disappointment that the plethora of
school reform initiatives launched over the last 15 years has failed to turn
the tide, that “despite considerable energy, initial bursts of optimism, and
abundant promises, a good many efforts to reform schools, though not all,
are failing in the 1990s” ~Mathews, 1996, p. 16!. There is an expanding
agreement on the need to overhaul school-governance systems as well as an
64 Teachers College Record

emerging belief that conditions in the area of school governance are so

bleak that any change could hardly make matters worse.

Growing Disconnect With the Public

The public is dissatisfied with our schools, and educators are per-
ceived as resistant to change and concerned only with money and
control, and lacking a leadership capable of changing educational
practices, organizational characteristics and the relationships with the
larger community. ~Sarason, 1995, p. 17!
Despite a long tradition of support for public education, Americans
today seem to be halfway out the school house door. ~Mathews, 1996,
p. 2!
Critics aver that at the same time we are discovering that traditional attacks
on our problems not only fail to attack the roots of the nation’s educational
problems but may be actually crippling public education, we are witnessing
a fundamental disconnect between the public and the public schools. A
recent Public Agenda report, for example, asserts that “in the battle over
the future of public education, the public is essentially ‘up for grabs’” ~cited
in Bradley, 1995, p. 1!. As one indicator of this gulf, Public Agenda research-
ers report that the public in general and parents in particular see vouchers
as an unsurpassed vehicle for helping students who are failing in school
~Bradley, 1995!.
An especially thoughtful and detailed description of society’s deepening
loss of confidence in public education has been provided by Mathews
~1996!. Based on his work, Mathews argues that “the public and the public
schools @are# in fact moving apart, that the historical compact between
them @is# in danger of dissolving” ~p. i!. Mathews documents the decline in
public confidence in public schools in a number of ways. He cites data
from the National Opinion Research Center that reveals a 40 percent drop
~from 37 to 15 percent! from 1973 to 1993 in those expressing confidence
in educational institutions. He also cites data showing an increase of 125
percent ~from 8 to 18 percent! during this same time frame in citizens
expressing low confidence in public institutions ~p. 9!. Using a more direct
measure, he marshals information that reveals that citizens prefer private
schools over public ones: “A virtual chorus said that they would take their
children out of public schools if they had that option” ~p. 22!. Kaufman
~1996! adds to this later analysis:
Parents rank private schools higher in 11 of 13 categories, including
preparing students for college, safety and discipline. Public schools
rank higher only in serving students with special needs and teaching
children how to deal with people of diverse backgrounds. ~p. 72!
 Governing America’s Schools 65

QUESTIONS ABOUT EXISTING GOVERNANCE ARRANGEMENTS

CED believes that our education governance system, as currently oper-
ating, is a serious barrier to improving our schools. ~Committee for
Economic Development, 1994, p. 2!
As noted above, critical reviews focusing specifically on governance tend to
cluster into two groups: ~1! critiques of the governmental-professional model
of governance that has dominated education for the past century and ~2!
attacks on the basic infrastructure of school governance—bureaucracy.

General Critiques of Government (State) and Professional Control

The trend toward increasing centralization and inequality signals a
profound need for rethinking our systems of institutional governance.
~Snauwaert, 1993, p. 104!
Citizens are becoming increasingly alienated from government and
politics. They do not trust public officials. ~Hawley, 1995, p. 741!
One strand of an emerging political mosaic is plummeting support for
government. In many ways, Americans “have disengaged psychologically
from politics and governance” ~Putnam, 1995, p. 68!: “The growth of cyn-
icism about democratic government shifts America toward, not away from,
a more generalized norm of disaffection” ~Elshtain, 1995, p. 25!. Or, as
claimed recently in Time, “alienation has joined the mainstream” ~Gibbs,
1997, p. 45!. Not surprisingly, and consistent with the central premise of
this paper, these indicators of dissatisfaction and discontent provide ample
support for the claim that something is happening to traditional approaches
to public governance ~Bauman, 1996!.
Critics maintain that government in the United States is troubled and is
becoming more so. They discern a sense of hopelessness about civic gov-
ernment ~Katz, 1992! and a crisis of confidence in public institutions and
representative government. They point to surveys and opinion polls show-
ing that citizens are distrustful of government agencies and regularly opposed
to government sector programs and policies. These polls reveal that: only
three in ten citizens believe that government is operated for the benefit of
all citizens ~Savas, 1987!; one in two citizens believes that the federal gov-
ernment has become so large and so influential that it represents a real
and immediate danger to the rights and freedoms of citizens ~Urschel,
1995!; only one in three voters expresses trust in government—down from
four in five in the late 1950s ~Savas, 1982!; and, in 1993, only 13 percent of
the citizenry trusted the government to do the right thing most of the time,
compared to 62 percent in 1964 ~Bauman, 1996!. Other chroniclers of this
unrest speak of a mounting sense of skepticism about the public sector in
general ~Fitzgerald, 1988! and “skepticism as to the ability of government to
66 Teachers College Record

implement social goals” ~Hula, 1990a, p. xiii! in particular. They believe

that a “philosophy borne of suspicion for big government may underlie this
@governance# revolution in America” ~Fitzgerald, 1988, p. 20!.
Still other reviewers discern a “deeper . . . and much more dangerous”
~Savas, 1982, p. 1! cynicism toward ~Hula, 1990b!, distaste for ~Donahue,
1989!, or distrust of government and government officials among citizens
~De Hoog, 1984!. They describe a “culture of resistance, bitterness, and
adversariness” ~Bauman, 1996, p. 626!. They paint a picture of “‘political
bankruptcy,’ a vaguely defined state of popular alienation and disaffection
from government which stops short of revolution” ~Hood, 1994, p. 91!.
These analysts portray a growing discontent with activist government
~Hirsch, 1991! and the rise and spread of an antigovernment philosophy in
the 1970s and 1980s, a time during which the “government plumbed new
depths of disfavor” ~Donahue, 1989, p. 3!. They describe a “fundamental
concern that government simply ‘doesn’t work.’ Planning is seen as inade-
quate, bureaucracy as inefficient and outcomes highly problematic” ~Hula,
1990a, p. xiii!. They go on to argue that the consent of the governed is
being withdrawn to a significant degree. In its softest incarnation, this
cynicism leads citizens to argue that government is no longer a reasonable
solution to all problems ~Florestano, 1991! and to question the usefulness
of much government-initiated activity. At worst, it has nurtured the belief
that government is fated to fail at whatever it undertakes ~Starr, 1991!. In
many cases, it has nurtured the development of a variety of antigovernment
political and social movements. There is little question that this widespread
discontent has spilled over into public education ~Katz, 1992!. As Bauman
~1996! notes, “One could argue that people hold a negative view of the
public schools precisely because they are public institutions” ~p. 628!.
Given the cyclical nature of policy development and other value expres-
sions in American society, it should surprise no one to learn that some of
this rising tide of dissatisfaction with public sector initiatives can be char-
acterized as a response to the nearly unbroken growth of government over
the last three quarters of the twentieth century—a counter-reaction to the
Progressive philosophy that has dominated the policy agenda for so long.
According to Hood ~1994!, for example, the growth of the public sector
contained the seeds of its own destruction. The public sector model is, in
many ways, simply aging and wearing out. Once a major economic model
gains ascendancy, “dissatisfaction builds up over time. Unwanted side-
effects of the policy @become# more clearly perceived. . . . At the same time,
the shortcomings of the alternative orientation @—the market, direct democ-
racy, and voluntary association in this case—are# forgotten, because they
have not been recently experienced. Pressure then starts to build for the
policy orientation to go over on the other track” ~p. 15!.
Another piece of the puzzle focuses on the widespread perception that
the state is overinvolved in the life of the citizenry. Critics note that more
 Governing America’s Schools 67

and more citizens are chafing under the weight and scope of government
activity ~Himmelstein, 1983; Meltzer & Scott, 1978!. They characterize a
government that has gone too far ~Hirsch, 1991!—“public ownership that is
more extensive than can be justified in terms of the appropriate role of
public enterprises in mixed economies” ~Hemming & Mansoor, 1988, p. 3!.
They argue that the state has become involved in the production of goods
and services that do not meet the market failure tests ~Pack, 1991! and that
government agencies have pushed “themselves into areas well beyond gov-
ernance. They @have# become involved in the business of business” ~Presi-
dent’s Commission on Privatization, 1988, p. 3!. The results are predictable:
The state, it is claimed, occupies an increasingly large space on the gover-
nance landscape, welfare loss due to collective consumption increases ~Oates,
1972!, and citizens experience an increasing need for more nongovernmen-
tal space ~Florestano, 1991!. Calls for a recalibration of the governance
equation are increasingly heard.
Expanding numbers of citizens begin to experience “some public sector
institutions as controlling rather than enabling, as limiting options rather
than expanding them, as wasting rather than making the best use of resources”
~Martin, 1993, p. 8!. Of particular concern here is the issue of values. On
one front, increasing numbers of individuals and groups have come to
believe that state intrusiveness includes efforts to establish value prefer-
ences ~Cibulka, 1996; Heinz, 1983; Himmelstein, 1983!—values that they
believe often undermine their ways of life. Others argue that, at least in
some cases, through interest group and bureaucratic capture, some public
sector institutions have actually destroyed the values that they were estab-
lished to develop and promote ~Hood, 1994!.
Discontent can also be traced to recent critical analyses of the model of
public sector activity developed to support expanded state control. The
critique here is of three types. First, when examined as they are put into
practice, the assumptions anchoring public sector activity over the last 30
years look much less appealing than they do when viewed in the abstract
~i.e., conceptually!. Indeed, “many of the assumptions and predictions on
which the earlier growth of government was based have proved either to be
false or at least to be subject to much greater doubt” ~President’s Commis-
sion on Privatization, 1988, pp. 249 –250!. Thus, the attack on extensive
state control rests on the way in which its limitations have become visible
~Pirie, 1988!. Foundational propositions such as the nonpolitical nature of
public sector economic activities have come under attack as it has been
determined that “decisions affecting the economy @are often# made on
political grounds instead of economic grounds” ~Savas, 1987, p. 8!. On the
other hand, much of the critique of the market economy upon which
public sector growth has been justified, especially market failure, has been
weakened with the advent of sociotechnical changes associated with a shift
from an industrial to a postindustrial society ~Hood, 1994!.
68 Teachers College Record

Second, “structural weaknesses inherent in the nature of public-sector

supply itself . . . which undermine the whole basis on which it is estab-
lished” ~Pirie, 1988, p. 20! have become more visible—visible to the point
that some advocates claim that state ownership and management are inher-
ently flawed. Concomitantly, both the efficiency and effectiveness of gov-
ernmental activities have begun to be questioned seriously.
Third, it is suggested that the reforms that created the large public
sector “are themselves sorely in need of reform, as mistakes, excess, waste,
and scandals appear@ed# and the inevitable institutional arteriosclerosis set
in” ~Savas, 1982, p. 2!. Reform is increasingly seen in terms of alternatives to
rather than the repair of the existing public sector. Changes in governance
structures are often privileged in these reform strategies.

Attacks on the Bureaucratic Infrastructure of Schooling

Too much bureaucracy . . . is at the heart of educational mediocrity.
~Snauwaert, 1993, p. 92!
The bureaucratic structure is failing in a manner so critical that adap-
tations will not forestall its collapse. ~Clark & Meloy, 1989, p. 293!
“In recent years, critics have argued that the reforms of the Progressive Era
produced bureaucratic arteriosclerosis, insulation from parents and patrons,
and the low productivity of a declining industry protected as a quasi monop-
oly” ~Tyack, 1993, p. 3!. There is growing sentiment that the existing gov-
ernance and management systems are unsustainable ~Rungeling & Glover,
1991!. Behind this basic critique lie several beliefs: that states are attempt-
ing to micro-manage schools and that central office staff are too numerous
and too far removed from local schools to understand the needs of teach-
ers, children, and families—that bureaucracies may be working well for
those that run them but that they are not serving children well. It is
increasingly being concluded that the existing bureaucratic system of school
governance and administration is “incapable of addressing the technical
and structural shortcomings of the public educational system” ~Lawton,
1991, p. 4!.
More finely grained criticism of the bureaucratic infrastructure of school-
ing comes from a variety of quarters. There are those who contend that
schools are so paralyzed by the “bureaucratic arteriosclerosis” noted above
by Tyack ~1993, p. 3! that “professional judgment” ~Hill & Bonan, 1991,
p. 65!, “innovation and creativity” ~Lindelow, 1981, p. 98!, “morale” ~David,
1989, p. 45!, “creative capacity” ~Snauwaert, 1993, p. 5!, and responsibility
have all been paralyzed. Other reformers maintain “that school bureaucra-
cies, as currently constituted could @never# manage to provide high-quality
education” ~Elmore, 1993, p. 37! and, even worse, that bureaucratic gover-
nance and management cause serious disruptions in the educational pro-
 Governing America’s Schools 69

cess and are “paralyzing American education . . . @and# getting in the way of
children’s learning” ~Sizer, 1984, p. 206!. These scholars view bureaucracy
as a governance-management system that deflects attention from the core
tasks of learning and teaching ~Elmore, 1990!:

Since the student is the prime producer of learning and since he is

not part of the bureaucracy, and not subject to bureaucratic account-
ability, bureaucracy and its whole value structure must be seen as
irrelevant at best, and obstructive at worst, to true learning relation-
ships. ~Seeley, 1980, p. 8!

Some analysts also believe that bureaucracy is counterproductive to the

needs and interests of educators within the school—“that it is impractical,
and it does not fit the psychological and personal needs of the workforce”
~Clark & Meloy, 1989, p. 293!, that it weakens the authority of teachers, and
that it is incompatible with the professional organization ~Sackney & Dibski,
1992!. Still other critics suggest that bureaucratic management is inconsis-
tent with the sacred values and purposes of education—they question “fun-
damental ideological issues pertaining to bureaucracy’s meaning in a
democratic society” ~Campbell, Fleming, Newell, & Bennion, 1987, p. 73!
and find that “@i#t is inconsistent to endorse democracy in society but to be
skeptical of shared governance in our schools” ~Glickman, 1990, p. 74!.
Other reform proponents hold that the existing organizational-governance
structure of schools is neither sufficiently flexible nor sufficiently robust to
meet the needs of students in a post-industrial society ~Sizer, 1984!. Finally,
some analysts contend that the rigidities of bureaucracy, by making schools
nearly impenetrable by citizens, impede the ability of parents and citizens
to govern and reform schooling ~Sarason, 1995!.
Not unexpectedly, given this tremendous attack on the basic organiza-
tional and governance infrastructure of schooling, stakeholders at all levels
are arguing that “@a#mbitious, if not radical, reforms are required to rectify
this situation” ~Elmore, 1993, p. 34!, that “the excessively centralized, bureau-
cratic control of . . . schools must end” ~Carnegie Forum, cited in Hanson,
1991, pp. 2–3!. In its place, some reformers are arguing for redesigning
state control of education. Other analysts look to replace government con-
trol with market mechanisms. Still others see hope in systems that are more
professionally controlled. Others appeal to more robust models of demo-
cratic governance.

III. GOVERNANCE FOR TOMORROW’S SCHOOLS:

THE POSSIBILITIES

The question for the state is whom it shall empower to decide what is
best. ~Coons & Sugarman, 1978, p. 45!
70 Teachers College Record

We need, in short, a dialogue that produces thoughtful, well-founded,

and defensible rationales for continuing, modifying, or structurally
changing current education governance and its functions. Without
such a dialogue, we shall find ourselves going down a road without
knowing where we are going, or if we arrive at the desired destination.
~Danzberger, 1992, p. 27!
In the late 1800s and early 1900s, social and economic forces were at play
that were to result in dramatic changes in American society. The nation
witnessed the shift from an agrarian to an industrial society, with the accom-
panying growth of industrial capitalism and the liberal democratic state.
Our understanding of education and schooling was profoundly shaped by
these forces. Scientific views of learning anchored in the newly emerging
discipline of psychology, especially behavioral psychology, and in modern
views of organizations taking root from the rapidly developing field of
management, especially scientific management, became the twin pillars
upon which schooling in the twentieth century was constructed. At the
heart of the modern system of education were new perspectives on and
rules of control. What had heretofore been a relatively democratic gover-
nance process became displaced by centralized, elite, professional control
~Katz, 1992; Tyack, 1974!.
Between 1890 and 1920, every major school system in the industrial
north underwent administrative reform. This reform movement was
designed to produce maximum efficiency and social order. To achieve
these ends, the movement sought to centralize decision-making power
in the hands of powerful superintendents and small, citywide school
boards comprised predominantly of successful business and profes-
sional men. A bureaucratic structure was created that limited popular
representation, insulating policymakers from the demands of working
and lower-middle-class interests. Although premised upon “getting
politics out of the schools,” administrative reform actually exchanged
one political structure for another. An essentially democratic system
was exchanged for an autocratic one. ~Snauwaert, 1993, p. 13!

A central premise of this paper is that as we enter the twenty-first cen-

tury, we are in the midst of another major shift, although this time we find
ourselves moving away from industrial capitalism and the liberal demo-
cratic state. The shift is marked by powerful new economic and social
dynamics. And, as was the case in the past, these forces are exerting con-
siderable influence on our understanding of education and our concep-
tions of schooling.
The question at hand is: What does all of this mean for the control of
education in a postindustrial world? Will the educational bus continue to
be driven by government agents and professional educators? Or will their
 Governing America’s Schools 71

grasp on the wheel of control be loosened? Is it possible that these long-

dominant actors may be thrown off the bus altogether? Perhaps we will be
chauffeured by a collective of relevant stakeholders. In this section of the
paper, we outline some possible answers to these questions. We outline five
distinct governance options for education in a postindustrial world ~Table 1!.

STATE CONTROL

Underlying the administrative progressive’s conception of democracy

is the view that relatively few people possess the intellectual ability or
the education to pass judgment on public policy; expert control and
bureaucratic administration are necessary in a complex world that
demands scientifically informed judgments. In such a world, only
“governments of experts” can manage public affairs. ~Snauwaert, 1993,
p. 21!

Regulation is even more costly to society than the initial resource

misallocations. ~Pack, 1991, p. 282!

Fueled by ambivalence, if not hostility, toward democracy and the emerg-

ing pull of scientific management with its allure of rationality and effi-
ciency, state control had become the core component of educational
governance by the early 1900s. In conjunction with professional adminis-
trators, governments began to construct the bureaucratic infrastructure on
which the modern educational system in the United States was built.
At the heart of this emerging system of state control was, and continues
to be, three central ideas: representative democracy, political and adminis-
trative elites, and bureaucratic machinery. Representative democracy is what
its name implies, a system of governance “in which some of the people,
chosen by all, govern in all public matters all of the time” ~Barber, 1984,
p. xix!. It is a system in which sovereignty is transferred from citizens to a
select few. A rational system of control—bureaucracy—is constructed to
ensure that the enterprise functions effectively. Regulation becomes the
transmission of the new administrative system. Often labeled “elite democ-
racy,” government control is, as Schumpeter ~cited in Snauwaert, 1993!
argues, “@t#he rule of the politician” ~p. 21!—and, we might add, of admin-
istrative agents at key intersections of the bureaucratic infrastructure ~Bu-
chanan, 1977; Niskanen, 1971; Tullock, 1965!.
As discussed earlier, the bureaucratic backbone of state control has come
under considerable scrutiny over the last few decades. Similar, if less visible,
attacks have been leveled against political and administrative elites and
representative democracy ~see, for example, the public choice literature!.
Not surprisingly, assaults on all three pillars of state control attend in detail
to the fact that these core elements negate the legitimate exercise of con-
Table 1. Types of Educational Control

Methods of Control Degree of Participation

Type Source Historical Ground? Elitism a Populism
State Regulation ~king! Administrative Control —
Representative Democracy
Citizen Democracy ~participation! ~citizen! Direct Democracy
Profession Expert Knowledge ~military! Union Control Local Control ~SBM!
Administrative Elites
Community Values ~church! Private Schooling Local Control ~SBM!
Market Market ~economy! — Choice
 Governing America’s Schools 73

trol by citizens—in both the economic and political sense of participation—

and constrain the interests of professionals.
At the same time, many of the attractions that propelled government to
a central role in the school governance drama remain. Rationality and
efficiency have hardly lost their allure. It should come as little surprise then
to discover that many of the reform strategies afoot today rely upon state
control as the appropriate engine for school improvement. The entire
systemic reform movement, for example, is an effort to strengthen educa-
tion through state control mechanisms. Much of the struggle to profession-
alize schooling ~e.g., standards, licensure, accreditation! is rooted in the
traditional state-professional control complex—although in a relationship
tilted more toward the interests of the profession than has been the case in
the past. “New” reform ideas that spotlight state control include: mayoral
control of schools; many of accountability measures, including reconstitu-
tion and bankruptcy actions; and standards raising and assessment move-
ments writ large. On the other hand, as Snauwaert ~1993! notes: “Bureaucracy
and elite control are not inevitable. They have been chosen. Other possi-
bilities exist” ~p. 103!. We turn to some of these alternatives below, although
we will see that they take us in quite different directions.

CITIZEN CONTROL
Whatever the difficulties of obtaining the impossible, and however
inadequate the performance of governmental units, . . . democratic
theory is an appropriate standard by which to judge educational gov-
ernance. ~Zeigler, Jennings, & Peak, 1974, p. 243!
Democracy is essentially coercive. The winners get to use public author-
ity to impose their policies on the losers. ~Chubb & Moe, 1990, p. 28!
Some who have questioned current governance arrangements are calling
for heightened and more direct citizen control of education. Central to this
line of work are critical analyses of government activity and reviews on the
growing disaffection for government felt by citizens, both areas that were
explored in earlier sections of this paper. Behind both is the belief that
representative democracy is failing and that control, or at least more con-
trol, should be vested in the citizenry.
Arguments for citizen control of education are also ribboned with attacks
on professional claims to a privileged position in the control algorithm.
The rationale here is twofold: “substantial portions of the ‘services’ pro-
vided by schools are hardly so precise or value free as to make them
understandable only to experts” ~Zeigler et al., 1974, p. 248! and, more
critically, “experts have not demonstrated they know extraordinarily more
about education than laymen” ~p. 248!. The strong professional grip on the
wheel of the bus called educational governance should be loosened, advo-
74 Teachers College Record

cates of enhanced democracy suggest. More direct control by citizens and

families is needed, they aver. A desire to return to an earlier and “better”
time—when “the teaching profession was weak and the larger society as
represented by the state was relatively inactive” ~Swanson, 1989, p. 280!—
finds its way into much of the discussion in this area.
Finally, whether based on Sarason’s ~1995! political principle, Cronin’s
~1989! conception of direct democracy, Barber’s ~1984! thoughts about
strong democracy, or Snauwaert’s ~1993! views about developmental con-
ceptions of democracy, there is a mushrooming sense that citizen control is
simply the right way to think about governance. This is both a critique of
representative governance ~i.e., state control!—

Strong democracy tries to revitalize citizenship without neglecting the

problems of efficient government by defining democracy as a form of
government in which all of the people govern themselves in at least
some public matters at least some of the time. To legislate and to
implement laws at least some of the time is to keep alive the meaning
and function of citizenship in all of us all of the time; whereas to
delegate the governing power, even if only to representatives who
remain bound to us by the vote, is to give away not power but civic
activity, not accountability but civic responsibility, not our secondary
rights against government but our primary right to govern. ~Barber,
1984, pp. xiv–xv!—

and a belief in the power of participatory democracy—

The strong form of democracy is the only form that is genuinely and
completely democratic. It may also be the only one capable of pre-
serving and advancing the political form of human freedom in a
modern world that grows ever more hostile to traditional liberal democ-
racy. ~Barber, 1984, p. 148!

The formulation of proposals for the restructuring of school gover-

nance in truly democratic directions is a necessary step in the ongoing
struggle for a democratic and just way of life. ~Snauwaert, 1993,
pp. 104 –105!

Given the breakdown of representative democracy and absent the growth of

vital citizen control, critics see the emergence of either ~1! the grubby hand
of the market ~Martin, 1993!—and with it an “eroding @of# the sense of
community in contemporary society and @an# intensifying of the individu-
alistic ethic of our time” ~Kolderie, 1991, p. 257!—or ~2! “dangerous new
variants of neodemocracy—the politics of special interest @and# the politics
of neopopulist fascism” ~Barber, 1984, p. xiii!.
 Governing America’s Schools 75

As Sarason ~1995! and others note, reengineering educational gover-

nance on the basis of citizen control places real constraints on govern-
ment and professionals. For example, while most analysts conveniently
ignore the fact, Snauwaert ~1993! is correct when he asserts that “a school-
based governance system and state-formulated accountability measures are
inherently contradictory” ~p. 98!. And what holds for state accountability
systems holds for professional and state initiatives in the areas of stan-
dards, curriculum, criteria for employment, and so forth. In short, citizen
control throws a noticeable kink in the existing state-professional gover-
nance machinery.

PROFESSIONAL CONTROL

It is exactly this question of competence which produces the dilemma

of the expert in school governance. Dahl argues persuasively about
the value of what he calls the “criterion of competence.” Some deci-
sions should not be made democratically. ~Zeigler et al., 1974, p. 248!

Reforms which propose to “empower teachers” or “replace hierarchi-

cal structures with peer group control” or accord “professional auton-
omy” to teachers are ludicrous intellectually but devastating in their
political and policy consequences. Such proposals are tantamount to
prescribing the germs to cure the disease. ~Lieberman, 1988, p. 9!

Professional control is predicated upon the belief that the governance bus
should be directed and driven by those with expertise in education, a
“thoroughly defensible position” according to Eliot ~1969, p. 7!. As various
analysts have noted, professional control spotlights the technical dimen-
sions of schooling and, as seen in Table 1, posits expert knowledge as the
major source of influence. Zeigler and his colleagues ~1974! remind us that
“the notion of expertise, the relegation of as many questions as possible to
the level of a technical problem, is a very pervasive political philosophy”
~pp. 247–248! in society in general and in education in particular.
Over the last century, there has been a bounty of scholarship exposing
the inequitable distribution of control in schooling, with professional edu-
cators ~along with state actors! firmly ensconced at the wheel. As Sarason
~1995! has concluded, while educators have always acknowledged the legit-
imate rights of parents in some generalized form, that has never meant to
educators that:

@Parents’# interest should be formally accompanied by the power to

influence how schools and classrooms are structured and run, the
choice of curriculum, selection of teachers and other personnel, and
76 Teachers College Record

so forth. Those matters were off-limits; they were the concern and
responsibility of the professional educators. ~p. 20!

Eliot ~1969! captures the essence of the idea in its most unalluring form
when he concludes that for many educators, “schools are the special prov-
ince of the professionals, the voters being a necessary evil who must be
reckoned with because they provide the money” ~pp. 4 –5!.
We reported earlier that state control of education is not inevitable.
Neither is professional expertise sacrosanct. Indeed, a number of critics
have concluded that “expertise cannot be legitimately used as the overrid-
ing criteria for deciding broad policy issues that affect one’s children”
~Snauwaert, 1993, p. 95!—nor, we might add, more basic decisions about
the core technology of schools.

COMMUNITY CONTROL

As noted in Table 1, community control is grounded in perspectives from

religion. It is based on neither regulation nor expert knowledge but on
shared values. In Barber’s ~1984! terms, “involvement, commitment, obli-
gation, and service—common deliberation, common decision, and com-
mon work—are its hallmarks” ~p. 133!. The “principle of community”
~Snauwaert, 1993, p. 70! is dominant. While schools remain nested in the
larger structure of society and the legitimacy of external interests is acknowl-
edged, the basic understanding of public education is radically altered
under community control.
Goods and services can be provided by any of three mechanisms—
government, markets, or voluntary associations. The analysis to this point
has featured the first mechanism. Community control on the other hand is
anchored in voluntary association. Since voluntary association is the least
emphasized of the three delivery mechanisms, our knowledge of this type
of control is not particularly well-developed. What seems to be critical to
voluntary mechanisms are a tight consensus on dominant values and mis-
sion and the willingness of communities “to exercise political clout to
extract political concessions and to declare, by steps and degrees, indepen-
dence from traditional forms of government” ~Fitzgerald, 1988, p. 51!.
In the noneducational world, neighborhood development organizations
~NDOs! are the best example of community control. Fitzgerald ~1988!,
Gormley ~1991!, and Savas ~1987! all have chronicled initiatives in which
functions provided by government, such as caring for public lands and
managing public housing projects, have been taken over by NDOs. In
education, associations of home-schooled families represent a particularly
good example of voluntary associations. Also, while most reviewers see
 Governing America’s Schools 77

charter schools positioned on a market fulcrum, our own analysis leads us

to conclude that control in many of these institutions has more to do with
community than with the market.

MARKET CONTROL

That regulation which the market imposes in economic activity is

superior to any regulation that rulers can devise and operate by law.
~Pirie, 1988, p. 10!

Idealization of the market’s invisible hand has served to conceal the

grubbier ones directing it. ~Martin, 1993, p. 6!

All of the control strategies described herein, even efforts to redefine state
control, draw strength from stinging reviews of existing governance struc-
tures. In particular, they rely on devastating attacks on the bureaucratic
model of control. Where they part company is in the solution strategies that
they craft to address existing problems. One of the most controversial lines
of governance redesign builds its reform platform on the foundation of
consumer control. Solutions are rooted not in the political sphere but in
the economic domain. Free-market dynamics are highlighted. As with some
of the other control strategies, proponents stress direct participation—but
not by individuals acting as citizens or members of communities, but as
consumers. While alternately lambasted by critics and praised by support-
ers, it is clear that advocates of market control mechanisms have made it
onto the governance bus. Comprehensive efforts to rebuild the control
infrastructure of twenty-first-century schools will need to address this fact.
In an earlier section, we spent considerable space exploring criticism of
existing governance arrangements, especially broadsides on the public deliv-
ery of goods and services. While it is unnecessary to retell that story here,
we should reemphasize that appeals to market control owe much to critical
reviews of nonmarket sources of influence. The luster of markets is also
brightened by claims of benefits accruing from this form of control. While
these claims are heavily contested, comprehensive analysis supports the
position that markets are likely to increase efficiency while enhancing quality.3
One set of initiatives around economic control focuses on introducing
“market-like” forces into a system. School choice within the public sector
fits nicely here. Real market control requires shifting either funding or
provision of services—or both—from the public to the private domain. The
most popular market-control strategies are those such as contracting out
and vouchers that maintain public financing but take delivery out of the
hands of public employees.
78 Teachers College Record

IV. IDEOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS OF AN EMERGING

GOVERNANCE STRUCTURE
Many astute observers of education governance as it is currently prac-
ticed believe that radical change in public education governance is
imperative. ~Danzberger, 1992, p. 89!
New bundles of ideas are emerging to challenge governance perspectives
that have dominated education for the last 75 years. One of the key ele-
ments involves a recalibration of the locus of control based on what Ross
~1988! describes as “a review and reconsideration of the division of existing
responsibilities and functions” ~p. 2! among levels of government. Origi-
nally called “democratic localism” ~p. 305! by Katz ~1971!, it has more
recently come to be known simply as localization or, more commonly,
decentralization. However it is labeled, it represents a backlash against “the
thorough triumph of a centralized and bureaucratic form of educational
organization” ~p. 305! and governance and an antidote for the feeling that
“America has lost its way in education because America has disenfranchised
individual local schools” ~Guthrie, 1997, p. 34!.
A second ideological foundation can best be thought of as a recasting of
democracy, a replacement of representative governance with more populist
conceptions, especially what Cronin ~1989! describes as direct democracy.
While we use the term more broadly than does Cronin, our conception
shares with his a grounding in: ~1! the falling fortunes of representative
democracy, ~2! a “growing distrust of legislative bodies . . . @and# a growing
suspicion that privileged interests exert far greater influence on the typical
politician than does the common voter” ~p. 4!, and ~3! recognition of the
claims of its advocates that greater direct voice will produce important
benefits for society—that it “could enrich citizenship and replace distrust
of government with respect and healthy participation” ~p. 48!.
A third foundation encompasses a rebalancing of the governance equa-
tion in favor of lay citizens while diminishing the power of the state and ~in
some ways! educational professionals. This line of ideas emphasizes paren-
tal empowerment by recognizing the “historic rights of parents in the edu-
cation of their children” ~Gottfried, 1993, p. 109!. It is, at times, buttressed
by a strong strand of anti-professionalism that subordinates “both efficiency
and organizational rationality to an emphasis on responsiveness, close pub-
lic @citizen# control, and local involvement” ~Katz, 1971, p. 306!.
The ideology of choice is a fourth pillar that will likely support the
rebuilt edifice of school governance ~Bauman, 1996!. Sharing a good deal
of space with the concepts of localism, direct democracy, and lay control,
choice is designed to “deregulate the demand side of the education mar-
ket” ~Beers & Ellig, 1994, p. 35! and to “enable parents to become more
 Governing America’s Schools 79

effectively involved in the way the school is run” ~Hakim, Seidenstat, &
Bowman, 1994, p. 13!. It means that “schools would be forced to attend to
student needs and parent preferences rather than to the requirements of a
centralized bureaucracy” ~Hill, 1994, p. 76!.
Finally, it seems likely that something that might best be thought of as
democratic professionalism will form a central part of the infrastructure of
school governance in the post-industrial world. What this means is the
gradual decline of control by elite professionals—by professional managers
and more recently by teacher unions—that characterized governance in the
industrial era of schooling. While schools in the industrial era have been
heavily controlled by professionals, they have not provided a role for the
average teacher in governance. Indeed, under elite democracy and mana-
gerial centralization that defined school governance for the past century,
teachers were explicitly denied influence. As Snauwaert ~1993! notes:
In accordance with the managerial and social philosophy of scientific
management and elite democracy, decision-making power was central-
ized in the hands of an “expert” planner, the superintendent. Educa-
tional policy would be determined by the superintendent and his
assistants, and the teachers would become mechanized implementors
with no decision-making power. ~p. 26!
This view of front line workers is inconsistent with both human capitalism
and emerging portraits of post-industrial schooling. Not surprisingly, there-
fore, the call for an enhanced voice for teachers is a central element in
much of the current reform debate. It is also likely to become a key pillar
in school governance for tomorrow’s schools.

V. CONCLUSION
Determining a satisfactory pattern of authority allocation is a continu-
ing problem, changing along with priorities placed on fundamental
social values. ~Swanson, 1989, p. 277!
In regard to school governance the seeds of revolutionary actions are
beginning to sprout. ~Sarason, 1995, p. 122!
The central thesis of this work on school governance is that the landscape
of educational control is being reshaped. For nearly 100 years, governance
has been the province primarily of government agents and professional
educators, often working together. In this paper, we argued that, similar to
major shifts underway in the core technology of the educational industry
and in the organizational arrangements that shape schooling, the institu-
tional dimension of schooling is also undergoing important alterations. In
80 Teachers College Record

particular, we showed that the bedrock that has supported the pillars of
state-professional control is softening and has exposed some of the cracks
that are appearing in the columns themselves. We argued that with lessen-
ing interest in the democratic welfare state, notions of government and
professional control—and appeals to regulation and expert knowledge—
have less saliency than they enjoyed in the past. Buttressed by critiques of
extant systems of control and appeals to putative benefits of alternative
systems, especially market-grounded and citizen-anchored models, we claimed
that a new governance algorithm may be emerging—one that privileges an
array of control mechanisms and pushes an alternative bundle of ideas
about governance onto center stage.
Our purpose was not to classify or evaluate the array of reform initiatives
beginning to appear on the recontoured landscape of educational gover-
nance. Rather, our objective was to help shape understanding of the forces
at play in the reshaping process. In the end, our aim was to provide infor-
mation to help ground discussions about changing vistas in this area and to
provide some clues about important influences that will be at play as gov-
ernance takes shape in the schools of the twenty-first century.

Notes

1 It is important to acknowledge that claims of unsatisfactory levels of current perfor-

mance are contested. Important work over the decade of the 1990s from Berliner and Biddle
~1995!, Bracey ~1992, 1993!, and Rothstein ~1998!, for example, holds that the “alarms about
dismal school performance are mostly unfounded” ~Rothstein, 1998, p. 113!. Specifically these
authors marshall considerable evidence to suggest that: ~1! schools are performing much
better than critics maintain—that “the average American school is a lot more successful”
~Berliner & Biddle, 1995, p. 344! than critics would have us believe and that “in aggregate the
public schools of America look pretty good” ~p. 127!; ~2! performance of American schools has
not decreased over time—in fact they suggest that the “evidence seems to be that they are
doing better” ~Rothstein, 1998, p. 111!; and ~3! achievement of students in the United States
compares favorably with that of youngsters in other industrialized nations—indeed “when we
analyze the evidence responsibly and think carefully about its implications, we discover that
the American schools stack up very well” ~Berliner & Biddle, 1995, p. 63!.
For these scholars and many others who attack the perceived failure of schools, the “dismal
picture of American schools is based more on ideology than facts” ~Bracey, 1992, p. 18!: The
storyline of failure is a “Big Lie” ~Berliner & Biddle, 1995, p. 9! that has been “led by
identifiable critics whose political goals could be furthered by scapegoating educators” ~p. 4!.
Thus a number of analysts maintain that, at least in some quarters, performance data are
being deliberately distorted to influence the reconfiguration of the governance equation in
education.
2 As with most discussions of this type, there is more than one side to the story. Indeed,
as we note in subsequent sections, some of the more damaging critique about school reform
efforts is illuminated by a market spotlight. Using a market calculus to assess the success of
government provision can lead to distortions, however. In particular, such efforts generally fail
to acknowledge the fact that “public enterprises are assigned multiple objectives” ~Hemming
 Governing America’s Schools 81

& Mansoor, 1988, p. 4!, especially redistributional and other expensive social goals ~Martin,
1993!.
3 The literature on the benefits of market control is highly contested. For a comprehen-
sive review, see Murphy ~1996!.

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JOSEPH MURPHY is a Professor at Peabody College of Vanderbilt Univer-

sity. He is also the Chair of the Interstate School Leaders Licensure Con-
sortium. Recent books include The Privatization of Schooling: Problems and
Possibilities ~1996!, The Handbook of Research of Educational Administration ~1999,
edited with Karen Seashore Louis!, and School-Based Management as School
Reform: Taking Stock ~1995, with Lynn G. Beck!.