Returning to an Ideal That Never Existed: Business Management and the Rhetoric of School Reform

The rhetoric of conservative reformers and big business seems to have found favor with a public dissatisfied with the limitations of earlier more liberal approaches to public education. Bennett, Hirsch, and Finn (among others) have capitalized upon the "back to basics" approach to educational reform. As the name suggests, theirs is an approach rooted in the past. Unfortunately, these conservative reformers have too readily forgotten the lessons learned from attempts at reform by their ideological forebears. Their historically shortsighted notion of going "back" to basics suggests an idyllic era that never existed. More specifically, the conservative language of school reform mirrors that of another era: industrialization and its corresponding focus upon social efficiency. Reformers at the turn of the last century followed the model provided them by the management of big business. Today’s trend appears to be a recycling of this tradition sans reflection upon some of the more salient and disturbing outcomes of it. The current trend, led largely by business leaders themselves, establishes a respective identity of "consumers" for students and "managers" for educators while ignoring the need for critical thinkers and critical consumers who truly have power to engender change in themselves and their worlds. Introduction When studying any major aspect of a society over time significant and often predictable patterns emerge. Seldom is historical development truly linear; rather, historical patterns tend to be cyclical—or, more precisely, spiral—in nature. Political, economic, and social trends of the past are repeated, albeit with significant modifications. This pattern holds true for educational trends, especially in the arena of educational change and reform (Wexler, 1998). Very few suggestions for educational reform today are truly unique; rather, they in many ways mirror and/or build upon earlier attempts at bettering America's schools. The modern age has brought with it pleas from all sides of the political spectrum for major changes in the ways in which we school our children. Suggestions for change—whether conservative, progressive, or radical—are usually predicated upon the respective foundations provided for us by earlier educational reformers. At one time or another in the recent past, advocates for each approach have found varying degrees of success in attempts at changing the ways schools operate. Yet, no matter what approach taken, the successful reform of schools has always been partial and limited. Such limitations result in pseudo-paradigm shifts: when any one approach fails to produce dramatic results quickly, it gives way to another approach. This trend is not unique to educational reform. Rather, the failure of or limitation in a conceptual approach is, at its core, the root cause of paradigm shifts; when faced with seemingly unanswerable problems, we seek solutions via new approaches to that problem (Kuhn, 1962). In educational reform, however, the paradigms to which we have a tendency to shift our focus are already established. Today, we argue, the focus of educational reform is shifting towards a vision of education that in many ways parallels that of educators and politicians during the industrial revolution; "good" or "efficient" education is