'Entrepreneurial Spirit' Is the Key To Reviving Schools, Book Argues

By Lynn Olson

Forcing schools to compete for students and money holds the key to unlocking the "bureaucratic gridlock" that hamstrings public education, a new book released last week argues.

Reinventing Government: How the Entrepreneurial Spirit is Transforming the Public Sector maintains that confidence in government has fallen to record lows because top-down, centralized bureaucracies--including those that characterize public education--cannot meet the demands of a rapidly changing information society.

"They accomplished great things in their time," the authors David Osborne and Ted Gaebler write, "but somewhere along the line they got away from us. They...