Educational Free Agency

By Henry F. Cotton

We trained hard . . . but every time we were beginning to form up into teams, we would be reorganized. I was to learn later in life that we try to meet any new situation by reorganizing...and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing inefficiency and demoralization.

--Petronius, A.D. 66

Absent the author and the date, it would be easy to read the above quotation from the Roman satirist Petronius as a commentary on the past half-century of American public education. Team teaching, block scheduling, modular scheduling, site-based management, cooperative learning, year-round schooling, smaller classes, schools-within-a-school, "classrooms without walls," authentic assessment, state standards, no standards, and a plethora of other reforms promoted by the field's alphabet organizations have all managed to create the "illusion of progress" at one time or another. The consistent failure of these attempts at "reorganizing" by educators has resulted in school boards in both large and small systems across the nation beginning to look outside the profession for leadership. Prosecutors, generals, business managers, and academics are now being selected to run districts on the misguided assumption that it is the person occupying the superintendent's chair that can bring about better educational results.

Here is where a lesson from professional...