School-Based Reforms.

New programs are developing to improve schools by decentralizing decision making so that it takes place at the level of the individual school. Principals and teachers are allowed more autonomy and independence, and teachers are given greater freedom to develop innovative programs for students in and outside the classroom. For example, in Florida's Dade County, twenty elementary, middle, and secondary schools and nine "magnet" schools—which draw students from a broad region into one school on a competitive basis—are participating in a new four-year project in decentralized, school-based management. This experiment features a curriculum geared to individual student needs, budget decentralization, and an enlarged role for collegial teacher decision making at the local school level.

Some communities are making teachers more accountable for their performance and connecting performance to career ladders. These new approaches try to break away from the top-down, bureaucratic control of large public school systems. It is important to chip away at the stifling rigidity and inertia of many school systems. It is equally important to reassert the once controversial but increasingly accepted notion that there are good schools and bad schools. Parents and officials need to pressure the bad schools to improve, and to reward that improvement when it occurs.

Collaborations Between Schools and Businesses

There are also encouraging signs that the business community is taking a more active interest in the quality of public schools. Schools and businesses share an interest in preparing young adults to hold jobs in today's economy. In recent years, their common concerns about the quality of schools and the quality of new workers have led to a wave of collaborative endeavors. A United States Department of Education survey of 9,000 school districts in 1984 showed that 22 percent had one or more active school-business partnerships. Most of these are "adopt-a-school" activities undertaken by local businesses, but some involvements are much more extensive.

School-business collaborations alone cannot revitalize depressed schools and school systems. Change must be anchored in the educational system itself—broadly defined to include teachers, administrators, community leaders, and concerned parents. However, the business community can become a powerful catalyst for improvement. The number of systematic, sustained efforts by business is growing, although much more needs to be done to focus school-business partnerships on serving the most at-risk, disadvantaged youths.