contests of life. Early reformers also believed that such schooling could mitigate or eliminate poverty, intemperance, crime, and social conflict. At the turn of the century many leading schoolmen recognized that urban-industrial America was highly stratified and concluded that the role of schooling was to sort children and prepare them for their different roles in the economy. At the same time they accepted a much broadened notion of the social functions of schooling to include training for leisure, health, and citizenship, as well as vocational effectiveness. In the last two decades schools have again been asked to assume much of the burden of eradicating poverty and bringing outcast groups into full participation in American life. Equality in schooling was once thought of as similarity of educational input; in recent years many educators have begun to realize that schools serving the poor need more than equal resources to work effectively, and some have even talked of equality of output--of academic achievement--as a goal to pursue. Although we believe that schools need much more money to provide adequate education for the person at the bottom of the social system, we also are convinced that schooling alone cannot work the miracles expected of it. Only a concerted attack on inequality which couples schooling with other changes such as new patterns of employment and income distribution can mitigate the gross disparities of living standards in the Nation. In the meantime, schools should concentrate on what they can do best; equipping children with the basic knowledge and skills they need in order to survive and advance in the larger society. With regard to participation in educational decisionmaking, we believe that it is time to reconsider a long-term trend to give increasing power to the professional by "taking the school out of politics." A little over a decade ago a liberal schoolman could indict local control as the chief cause for "dull parochialism and attenuated totalitarianism" in American education, but recently citizens have become aware of the costs of the inertia and red tape of vast school bureaucracies and the benefits of community participation in school policies. As we have indicated in chapter 3 (Larry Cuban's essay), we advocate experiments in increased involvement of parents and other lay persons in setting educational policies. We turn now to cultural pluralism in educational policy. A result of increased community participation in school governance may well be greater differentiation of instruction to meet the selfdefined needs of various groups. This could produce school systems which reflect the ethnic pluralism of the society rather than ones which largely seek to assimilate children to an Anglo-conformist model. In the past, groups which had power over educational policies consistently tried to affirm their values in the school curriculum: German parents in Cincinnati wanted their children to study their native language in public elementary schools; Protestants wanted teachers to read the King James Bible in class; the 551-373 - 74-3 Irish wanted to remove textbooks which impugned the Emerald Isle. Groups which lacked influence over school policies often saw their cultures and values ignored or scorned. We believe that schools should affirm the value of social diversity and attempt to enhance a sense of identity and pride in ethnic heritage rather than judge all groups by their approximation to a white, middle-class model. This may mean that a particular Chicano school may have a bicultural curriculum; another school may fit instruction to the learning styles of black children and teach about Afro-American culture. At the same time we reiterate that the school should focus primarily on its central task of imparting the knowledge and skills required for successful functioning in the public world of jobs, political expression and power, and other spheres in which citizens of different backgrounds need to intersect with each other. Increased public participation and a new spirit of cultural pluralism will doubtless create alternative forms of public education in place of a "one best system" decreed by experts. Generating these alternative forms of public schooling will demand a new frame of mind on the part of those involved. There are many obstructions in the way of innovation: State codes that restrict freedom; administrators and teachers who sabotage the new because they fear it; alienated students who destroy even what they have helped to create; parents who distrust change. But time and skill can diminish such obstacles when the prime constituencies--the students, parents, and teachers--realize that they can together create meaningful choices. The basic goals of a democratic common school can be reinterpreted for our era, and the institutions of public education once again changed, if Americans have the wisdom and the will. REFERENCES Ayres, Leonard P. Laggards in Our Schools: and Elimination in City School Systems. A Study of Retardation Charities Berg, Ivar E. Education and Jobs: The Great Training Robbery. New Bond, Horace Mann The Education of the Negro in the American Social Order. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1934. Callahan, Raymond E. Education and the Cult of Efficiency. Chicago: Cohen, Sol. Progressives and Urban School Reform. New York: Bureau of Publications, Teachers College, Columbia University, 1964. Counts, George S. The Social Composition of Boards of Education: Cremin, Lawrence A. The American Common School: An Historic The Transformation of the School: A Progressivism in American Education, 1876-1957. New York: Knopf, 1961. The Wonderful World of Ellwood Patterson Cubberley: An Essay on the Historiography of American Education. New York: Bureau of Publications, Teachers College, Columbia University, 1965. Cubberley, Ellwood P. Public Education in the United States: A Study and Interpretation of American Educational History. Rev. ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1934. Curti, Merle. The Social Ideas of American Educators. Paterson, N.J.: Littlefield, Adams, 1959. Dewey, John. The School and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1899. Eliot, Charles W. Review, XVII "Educational Reform and the Social Order." School (April 1909), 217-22. Gittell, Marilyn. "Urban School Reform in the 1970's." Education and Urban Society, I (November 1968). Greer, Colin. The Great School Legend: A Revisionist Interpretation Basic Books, 1972. of American Public Education. New York: Hays, Samuel P. "The Politics of Reform in Municipal Government in the Progressive Era." Pacific Northwest Quarterly, LV (October, 1964). Katz, Michael B. Class, Bureaucracy, and Schools: The Illusion of Educational Change in America. New York: Praeger, 1971. The Irony of Early School Reform: Educational Innovation in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Massachusetts. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1968. Kimball, Solon T., and James E. McClellan, Jr. America. New York: Random House, 1962. Education and the New La Noue, George R. "Political Questions in the Next Decade of Urban Education." The Record, LXIX (March 1968). Lazerson, Marvin. Origins of the Urban School: Public Education in Massachusetts, 1870-1915. Cambridge, Massachusetts: University Press, 1971. Newby, Robert G., and David B. Tyack. Harvard "Victims Without Crimes: Some Journal of Negro Historical Perspectives on Black Education." Philbrick, John D. City School Systems in the United States. Bureau of Education, Circular of Information No. 1. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1885. Sayre, Wallace S. "Additional Observations on the Study of Administration: A Reply to 'Ferment in the Study of Organization. Teachers College Record, LX (October 1958). Strayer, George D. "Progress in City School Administration During the Past Twenty-five Years." School and Society, XXXII Tyack, David B. From Village School to Urban System: A Political and Social History. Final Report, U.S. Office of Education, Project No. 0-0809, September 1, 1972. "The Kingdom of God and the Common School: Ministers and the Educational Awakening in the West." Educational Review, XXXVI (Fall 1966). Protestant Harvard Wirth, Arthur G. Education in the Technological Society: The Vocational-Liberal Studies Controversy in the Early Twentieth Intext Educational Publishers, Century. Scranton, Pennsylvania: Chapter 2 THE SELECTION OF VARIABLES FOR SCHOOL REFORM by Del Schalock Oregon System of Higher Education In The initiation of school reform requires change in the status quo. If a school is unable to bring about the learning outcomes desired in some portion of its pupils, something has to be done. all likelihood trying harder to do better what is already being done will not be enough. Unfortunately, stating the obvious is not particularly helpful. The teaching and administrative staffs of schools that are failing in their responsibility to students know that something needs to be changed, as do school board members, parents, pupils, and everyone else who thinks about the matter. The basic problem does not rest in recognizing the need for change, but in knowing what to change in order to bring about improved learning. Should change be made in the kind of teachers or administrators that are hired, the curriculums that are implemented, the materials purchased, the utilization of staff and student time, or should it be something less directly linked to pupil learning, such as increased community involvement in the governance of the schools, raising teachers' salaries, implementing a voucher system, or decentralizing administration within a district? It is probably fair to say that anything anyone has been able to think of as a means of improving the performance of schools has been tried at least once, either as part of an ongoing school program or as an experiment outside the schools. Despite such widespread and continuing efforts, nothing has emerged that guarantees successful learning for all children in all contexts. As a consequence, even when schools want to change they have few trustworthy guidelines or proven alternatives to help them on their way. With our knowledge and technical base in education as it is, the performance of our schools is probably no better or worse than can be expected. If such is the case a number of implications would seem to follow. The overriding implication is that schools probably will not be able to do much better than they are now doing until our knowledge about school-based learning and our technology for facilitating it are both improved and made generally available. There are two follow-up implications: (1) to achieve these ends massive research, development and diffusion (R, D, & D) efforts must be undertaken at a level of sophistication that exceeds our efforts in these areas in the past; and (2) while schools are waiting for the results of R, D, & D to reach critical mass, they must themselves engage in the pursuit of reform. The first conclusion follows from the fact that man has not yet invented a means of obtaining reliable knowledge other than through |