social, and academic elite. Leonard Covello (with D’Agostino, 1958), an Italian immigrant who
later became a high school principal, wrote in his memoir how working-class and immigrant
youth who could not fit into this system dropped out of school and entered the workforce at
the lowest end of the wage and skill scale.
In the second half of the 20th century, this system received a series of shocks that forced
it to adapt, but not to fundamentally change. The Cold War between the United States and
the Soviet Union, especially the Soviet’s launching of a Sputnik satellite in 1957, increased
the urgency for upgrading technical and scientific education and extending it to a larger
number of students. As a result of the African American civil rights movement of the 1950s
and 1960s, and the post–World War II women’s rights movement, entire groups of people
were no longer systematically relegated to second-class status and denied the right to a
quality education. Technological change and the deindustrialization of the United States
since the 1960s has meant an end to many factory jobs and pressure to keep students in
school longer.
However, despite the powerful socioeconomic forces at work in the past 50 years, most
secondary schools in the United States continue to be organized on the old fashioned busi-
ness-industrial model. They have a rigid hierarchical chain of command, administrators are
middle managers who enforce directives rather than team leaders who model successful
teaching, teachers are required to achieve clearly operationalized and discrete outputs, and
students are continuously tested to maintain quality control. Those who fail to meet stan-
dards are discarded.
Because of legal concerns, tracking has become more subtle, but it continues. The wealth-
iest families send their children to elite and expensive private schools. Affluent suburban
districts provide a level of services parents, students, and teachers in other areas can barely
imagine. Cities offer the select few special magnet programs. The more academically able of
those who do not qualify frequently end up in parochial schools. The vast majority of inner-
city youth and a large proportion of students in rural areas are still controlled, processed,
assimilated, and sorted.
I recently visited a large urban high school that reminded me of the movie,Demolition
Man(1993), starring Sylvester Stallone, Sandra Bullock, and Wesley Snipes. It was two
schools in one: One school was clean, shiny, and above ground; the other was seething with
activity, received little in the way of resources, and was hidden away. At a meeting with the
principal of these “schools,” he told a group of teacher education students about the approx-
imately 200 students in the Scholar’s Institute, the college scholarships they have earned,
their advanced placement courses, and the number of awards the school has received be-
cause of this program. He distributed issues of the school’s newspaper that recorded every
one of their achievements. Yet the school had an official population of more than 2,500 stu-
dents. Outside the window of his office we could see hundreds of students lined up, late for
school, waiting to pass through metal detectors and be patted down by security guards.
None of them was in the newspaper and the principal spoke as if they did not even exist.
There are some hopeful signs that these situations will change in the future, especially if
teachers and their representatives have more of a say in school organization.
·An important force for changing the way schools are organized are legal campaigns be-
ing waged in state courts to require equalized school funding. In 1990, the New Jersey Su-
preme Court ruled that the funding of public schools primarily through local property taxes
had produced a system in which “the poorer the district and the greater its need, the less the
money available, and the worse the education.” By 1994, 28 states were involved in cases deal-
ORGANIZATION 125