HOW GLOBALIZATION CAN CAUSE FUNDAMENTAL

LEONARD J. WAKS

HOW GLOBALIZATION CAN CAUSE FUNDAMENTALCURRICULUM CHANGE: AN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVE

ABSTRACT. Globalization, unlike 20th century social and economic developments, willcause fundamental rather than merely incremental educational change. ‘Globalization’refers to a complex of technological and economic factors including the global spreadof communication technology networks, and the global integration of product and labormarkets.

I argue that (1) there is a powerful new alliance among elites and educational con-sumers for fundamental change; (2) globalization destabilizes the internal processes ofschool organizations that constrain fundamental change, motivating educators to innovate;(3) globalization erodes the institutional categories of public discourse that hold stand-ard school practice in place, allowing a ‘shadow institution’ of non-standard educationalagencies to form; and (4) new synthetic visions of educational institutions in better accordwith models of rational action in networked environments, are being formulated; and (5)these are now guiding a convergence of piecemeal innovations towards a fundamentallytransformed institutional pattern.

I. GLOBALIZATION AND CURRICULUM CHANGE

The field of educational change has until recently concentrated on schoolsand school systems as units of analysis, glossing over macro-forces drivingchange at the institutional level. But scholars in the field now acknowledgethe need to extend their reach. In the Introduction to the “Pushing theBoundaries of Educational Change” section of the International Handbookof Educational Change, editor Andy Hargreaves argues that by “extendingand deepening our understanding of educational change beyond the bound-aries of what is usually addressed in the field (we) can really strengthenhow we think about change and deal with it in action” (p. 283).

In the introduction to the Handbook’s chapter on “Globalization andEducational Change” (Wells et al., 1998) the editors add: “there is nogreater context for educational change than that of globalization, norno grander way of conceptualizing what educational change is about”(p. 322). But in that chapter Wells and her co-authors acknowledge upfront that “few educational researchers or theorists have attempted to makeconnections between the economic, political and cultural dimensions ofglobalization and the policies and practices of education” (p. 343). Thus

Journal of Educational Change 4: 383–418, 2003.© 2003 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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they aim merely to provide a “broad overview” of interpretations of global-ization and their implications for education, leaving it to other scholars tothink “more carefully . . . about ‘globalization’ . . . (and the) various waysit affects the educational change process” (p. 344).

In this paper I discuss the impact of globalization upon curriculumchange, arguing that unlike earlier social and economic developments,globalization will cause fundamental rather than merely incrementalchange. This topic is not as narrow as might initially be thought becausefundamental curriculum change has implications not merely for subjectmatter selection, but also for instructional methods, technology utilization,organization and administration.

As the term ‘globalization’ is vague and contested, it will be usefulin this introduction to situate my argument within the field of competinginterpretations of globalization before considering its fundamental impacton curriculum change.

1. Globalization

I will be using the term ‘globalization’ as a carry-all term referring toan interacting complex of forces including (a) an economic dimension,comprised of a rise in the ratio of cross-border trade and direct foreigninvestment to total economic activity, and global integration of productmarkets increasing competition between providers from different nations,as well as (b) a technological dimension, the spread of global communi-cation technology networks. Globalization in this sense has resulted ina reorganization of trans-national enterprises: large, vertically organizedfirms have been transformed to global business ‘networks’ of downsizedflagship firms, small supplier firms, competitor firms, government agen-cies, and universities.1 To enhance competitiveness, many American firmshave re-engineered their work systems to include worker participation incross-functional teams using knowledge and information in novel waysfor rapid response to global opportunities. Telecommunications networkshave enabled this shift, and have also spread to homes, generating newopportunities for home-based enterprise, learning, and consumption. Thesechanges, I will argue, constitute powerful forces for curriculum change.

There is widespread agreement that globalization in the indicated senseis taking place, though commentators differ about its extent, variability andsocietal consequences. Wells et al. (1998) divide these commentators intofour groups, three of which agree that globalization is a significant drivingforce of change, though they differ on the predictions and evaluationsthey make of its societal effects. For them ‘Neo-liberals’ such as MiltonFreidman see globalization in terms of open markets. Because goods and

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financial assets are sold on an open global market, nation states have lostcontrol of their economies and the power to control the value of theircurrencies. This decreased power of the state will, in their view, removeeconomic inefficiencies, resulting in economic growth and consequently,greater prosperity. They prescribe that public education be privatized viacharter schools, voucher programs, or out-sourcing of educational servicesto private, for-profit firms to take advantage of market efficiencies.

‘Liberal progressives’ such as Robert Reich (1992) agree that globaleconomic liberalization will result in efficiencies in both the public andprivate sectors. But they contend that it will also result in social inequalitiesand environmental destruction unless economic liberalization is accom-panied by international agreements protecting basic social, political andenvironmental rights. They seek to strengthen public education to preserveeducation as a universal right, but they also seek to reform it so that it mayprovide occupational skills relevant in the global economy. Thus they alsosupport charter schools as one way of using market mechanisms to supportthese school reforms.

Neo-marxists such as Stanley Aronowitz, agree that globalizationgenerates social inequalities. But they are skeptical about the efficacy ofaction by the liberal state to ameliorate these, and seek instead to challengethe global capitalist order and its state apparatus through direct actionorganized by trans-national alliances of labor and human rights activists– a ‘Seattle’ approach to resisting globalization. In education some neo-marxists advocate ‘critical pedagogy’ to encourage the resistance of youngpeople and the formation of personal identities specific to their ethnic,gender and class positions. Some also support charter schools, whereworkers and ethnic minorities can gain control over the education of theirchildren and break the pattern of social reproduction through schooling.

A subtle tension in the neo-marxist position is worth noting. On theone hand it rejects the progressive faith in ameliorative social actionby the liberal state. On the other, its educational program (criticalpedagogy, charter schools), like those of neo-liberals and liberal progres-sives, depends on the existence of spaces for ameliorative action withinthe state’s educational machinery. In any event, commentators from right,center, and left all have positive things to say about charter schools.

The fourth group in the framework of Wells et al., the ‘realists’, havepresented a skeptical or carefully qualified view about globalization, eitherdenying that it has significantly expanded in the recent period (Hirst &Thompson, 1996), or emphasizing that it is an uneven process playing outdifferently in different kinds of nation states and regions. Brown, Greenand Lauder (2001), for example, demonstrate how the different histories

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and institutional forms of different societies shape distinct education,training, and labor market responses. They conclude that there is no simpleglobal ‘convergence’ of education and training, or of labor markets, amongdifferent kinds of nation states. They grant, however, that global forces arepressing many other societies to move closer to the ‘liberal society’ modelof the U.S. and U.K. ‘Realists’ are not tied to prescriptions for education;their research studies are conducted on descriptive and theoretical planesdistanced from policy and practice.

The definition of ‘globalization’ embedded in my argument is suffici-ently broad to be shared by neo-liberals, progressives and neo-marxists; Ialso accept the ‘realist’ qualification that globalization, even in this broadsense, is playing out differently in different societies. Consequently, animportant qualification, reflected in the article’s title, is that as my argu-ment is drawn primarily from American materials, it applies most directlyto the American situation and that of other ‘liberal’ societies includingthe United Kingdom. But it retains relevance for those societies whoseeducation and labor market regimes are moving in this ‘liberal’ direction.

2. Curriculum change

My contention is that globalization can cause fundamental, as opposedto merely incremental, curriculum change. ‘Curriculum’ refers in the firstinstance to the knowledge and information content of formal educationand its translation into teachable subject matter. For Smith, Stanley andShores (1957) curriculum represents a “sequence of potential learningexperiences . . . set up in the school for . . . disciplining children andyouth in group ways of thinking and acting.” For Good (1959) it standsfor the “overall plan of content or . . . materials of instruction the schoolshould offer the student by way of qualifying him for graduation orcertification or the entrance into a professional or vocational field.” ForTanner and Tanner (1980) it means the “planned and guided learningexperiences and related learning outcomes . . . under the auspices of theschool”. These standard textbook definitions all point to three logicalcore elements of the curriculum concept: (1) predetermined subject mattercontent, presented in a (2) planned sequence of experiences, leading to (3)certifiable completion.

But the definitions also tie curriculum to features of its institutionalcontext. All refer to (4) the institution of schooling, within whose struc-tures some social actors have the capacity to issue the authoritativeprescriptions of scope of content, the sequence of learning, and criteriaof completion implied in the three core elements. Curriculum thus impliesinstitutionalized and prescribed learning. As Goodson puts it, “the bond


between curriculum and prescription was forged early” (Goodson, 1997,p. 13). Reid goes further, claiming that “regulation, uniformity, hierarchywere there from the start . . . these were the features that gave curriculumits identity as something different from teaching and learning” (Reid,1999, p. 36). Finally, two extrinsic or contextual notions are implied: (5)socialization in the thought and action of a group (usually the nation), and(6) allocation of social benefits: access to favorable social and occupationalpositions upon completion.

The field of curriculum has for the most part conceived curriculummakers as rational actors who organize subject matters in a deliberatesequence to achieve societal goals and objectives; this conception isembedded in the curriculum paradigms advanced by such leaders asFranklin Bobbit and Ralph Tyler. Elements (1)–(3) have thus dominatedattention; curriculum has been understood in terms of technical effi-ciency, the rational adjustment of curricular means to learning ends. In this‘technical’ view curriculum change is a two-stage process: (a) changes inthe goals and objectives of society as perceived by elites are brought tobear upon curriculum makers, who then (b) adopt new means of shapingand sequencing subject matters to adjust them better to the new ends.

But recently the field of curriculum has been influenced by an‘institutional’ trend affecting many social science disciplines. Institutionalapproaches emphasize that social actors are embedded in institutionalenvironments that define the meaning of their situations, establish rules(explicit or tacit) of appropriate action, and thus shape or constrain action.The institutional research program thus involves a tendency to abandonor qualify models of social action in which agents employ unboundedrationality in the technical adjustment of means to ends (see Rowan &Miskel, 1999).2

There is a growing consensus that an adequate understanding of thecurriculum change process will have to draw upon both political-economiccomponents to explain the pressures elites impose upon curriculum makingat the boundary of the educational institution, and institutional compo-nents to explain how the institution’s internal processes respond to thesepressures. The work of Larry Cuban, Ian Westbury, and William Reid hasbeen important in shaping this consensus.3

For Cuban (1992) political actors are responsive to pressures fromeconomic and social elites who are in turn responding to broad changesin economic and social life. To maintain public support and legitimacy,educational leaders must demonstrate responsiveness to the needs ofsociety, as represented by elites and imposed by public opinion andlegislation. To do so they must be perceived as promoting educational

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change. But while they can directly forge a change in what Cuban callsthe ‘intended’ curriculum of a school or system, their directives are onlyloosely coupled with day to day curriculum delivery in classrooms, calledby Cuban the ‘taught’ curriculum. School principals, department chairsand grade leaders depend on the day-to-day support of teachers. Teachersin turn must negotiate day-to-day interactions with students to maintaincontrol and effectiveness; teachers cannot push students beyond the limitsthey establish in striving for their own multiple ends. Thus on Cuban’sinstitutional model, curriculum change does not result from curriculummakers adjusting new means to new ends. Rather, change results as elitesapply pressures at the boundary of the school institution that are bufferedby school leaders, and resisted or transformed by teachers as they negotiatetheir roles with students.

Curriculum is seen here as embedded in an institutional contextconsisting of rules for how physical space is organized, time is allottedto tasks, and subject matters are translated into teachable topics. Theserules constitute what Cuban calls the institutional ‘grammar’ of schooling.This notion sets up his key distinction between ‘incremental’ and ‘funda-mental’ curriculum change. Incremental changes correct deficiencies orimbalances in existing practice, making it more effective without alteringits basic organizational features, its standard grammar. Fundamentalchanges, by contrast, seek to alter the grammar, the standard organizationalways of doing things. Fundamental change is not concerned merely withintroducing new curricular means and ends, however significant, but, asnoted earlier, with introducing new institutional rules that establish neworganizational patterns, new configurations of space and time utilization,new roles and authority relations (Cuban, 1992, p. 218).

Cuban provides support for this distinction by analyzing changeprocesses during the progressive and cold war eras, and his case studiesprovide useful comparisons with our era of globalization. Progressivereformers sought to introduce active, problem-based learning in projectsgrounded in conditions approximating those of ‘real life’. Cold warreformers promoted new science curricula with advanced content andproblem-solving of the sort engaged in by real scientists. Both reformsaimed at fundamental change because they involved significant changes ininstructional content and method that required complementary changes inroles assigned to teachers and pupils.

On Cuban’s account, while economic and social changes were theprimary external factors driving these changes, school practitioners playedthe role in both cases of “softening, selecting and modifying” the larger


changes, “fashioning a fit” between the external changes and the existingcontours of the system of schooling (Cuban, 1992, p. 232). The proposednew forms of learning that required transformed roles for teachers andstudents never took hold. Instead, demands for rational management inthe progressive era and enriched disciplinary content in the cold warera led to a broad adoption of standardized tests that, instead of funda-mentally changing the curriculum, locked in defining features of theschool grammar: discipline-based, text book based teaching of standard-ized curriculum content geared to the test items, and courses linked tocollege admission requirements.

Standard textbooks, achievement tests, and college admission require-ments formed an institutional array surrounding the curriculum thatbecame ever more solid – locked in and inflexible. This solidification ofthe external context, its conversion from a responsive environment to afixed and rigid set of constraints, has been captured in Westbury’s oft-quoted phrase: “curriculum is an idea that becomes a thing.” Reid (1999),drawing on the formulations of Meyer, adds the twist that this ‘thing’ overtime itself becomes a new ‘idea’, a set of shared curriculum ‘categories’or meanings, deeply entrenched in the public mind, that dictate the termswithin which education as a public concern may be discussed. ‘Education’comes to mean the standard curriculum practices: e.g. ‘science education’comes to mean standard school and college courses in science disciplines.4

It is a central insight of institutional theory of curriculum that theenclosure of curriculum within an inflexible institutional environment, andthe generation of fixed terms and meanings for discussion of education,create an ‘institutional exoskeleton’ preventing fundamental change.

For Cuban, the progressive and cold war era reforms achieved merelyincremental, not fundamental change. There were changes in the intendedcurriculum, the official theory of what the curriculum was about. But theactual patterns of curriculum organization and teaching stayed more orless the same. New curriculum content was introduced, enhancing thelegitimacy of the system by demonstrating its capacity for ‘change.’ Butthe ‘changes’ remained superficial – meager modifications of the contentsin the same old bottles (Cuban, 1992). Cuban (1990) argues that thisprocess has been repeated “again and again and again” and will continueto obstruct fundamental change.

Bidwell and Dreeben (1992) offer a parallel analysis of curriculumchange processes from the colonial era to the middle of the nineteenthcentury, when the current institutional pattern took shape, and projectconclusions similar to Cuban’s to the present and foreseeable future:

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Curricular content is revised, new ways to teach are proposed, and different boundariesbetween levels of schools are established. Nevertheless, the basic structure of schools,as organized around interchangeable content-based subjects, has remained remarkablydurable . . . In the United States the results of the processes of institutionalization . . . havebeen in place for more than a century and it is not easy to foresee substantial changes inthem (p. 360).

The question addressed here is whether globalization can unleash changefactors sufficiently powerful to overturn this grammar of interchangeablecontent-based subjects?

II. THE CONDITIONS OF FUNDAMENTAL CURRICULUM CHANGE

I argue that globalization can cause fundamental change. It will be usefulto consider what sort of argument might sustain this sort of claim. It is onething to argue that fundamental changes are necessary to bring curriculumpractice into alignment with new patterns of knowledge production andutilization in the workplace – to make the curriculum technically effi-cient; this would be a forceful argument that fundamental change shouldoccur. But it is quite another thing to argue that fundamental changes canactually occur. Institutional theory has so far emphasized the persistenceof established patterns of schooling despite technical inefficiencies andexternal pressures for change; it has accentuated the factors constrainingfundamental change. But fundamental change sometimes occurs. TheRoman Empire and the Soviet Union both collapsed, and institutionaltheorists must be able to account for such events by specifying conditionsunder which existing institutions are destabilized and new institutions canemerge5 It would be foolish to insist that entrenched curriculum patternssimply cannot disintegrate, or that fundamentally different ones cannotemerge.

Fortunately, identifying the major constraints to fundamental changeis tantamount to specifying the conditions for fundamental change; theremoval of the constraints is equivalent to the establishment of the changeconditions. In the remainder of this section I consider four constraintswhich must be removed for fundamental change to take place. In thefollowing sections I argue that these constraints are in fact being removedin the process of globalization.

Constraint 1. Powerful elites generally support entrenchedpractices and are sustained by them. Fundamental change thusrequires that external elites withdraw this support and join withcritical masses of citizens to form a powerful constituency forchange.


On the one hand, not all reforms call for fundamental change. The‘back to basics’ reforms of the 1970s, for example, demanded merely thestrengthening of features of the entrenched pattern that had been weakenedby progressive reforms. The cold war reforms called for discipline-basedcontent, increased tracking by ability groups, and even more bureaucracyin school organization. Except for changes in teaching-learning methodsin classes for the brightest children, the cold war reforms called for merelyincremental change.

More to the point, even calls for fundamental reform are rarelysupported by sufficiently powerful constituencies to forge a new con-sensus. The progressive education reformers’ demands for fundamentalchange were supported by influential intellectuals and social leaders, butwere opposed by corporate and political elites as well as many tradi-tional educators. In the inevitable political end game of negotiation andcompromise, advocates of fundamental change had to yield the morefundamental features of their program and settle for incremental change.Fundamental change cannot occur unless powerful elites withdraw supportfrom the status quo.

Constraint 2. Internal school processes are capable of bufferingexternal pressures by elites for change. Fundamental changethus requires destabilizing the internal processes buffering theschool from external pressures, motivating internal actors toinnovate.

Internal responses to external pressures for change generally bufferpressures for change. Practitioners within the institutions “soften, selectand modify” proposed changes and “fashion a fit” between them andexisting contours of practice. But despite these stabilizing behaviors,internal processes may nonetheless be affected by the very same factors asare exerting pressure at the organizational boundary. For example, teachingmay encounter new levels of student resistance, due to changing studentperceptions of connections between schooling and expected careers.Teachers’ ‘coping’ patterns may become ineffective as student motivationto cooperate wanes. Both students and teachers responding to externalchanges may discover themselves ripe for innovation.

Constraint 3. The entrenched pattern is held in place by bothits forming of tight linkages with other institutions, and itsgeneration of fixed ideas for discussion of appropriate prac-tice in public consciousness. The two processes generate atight institutional exoskeleton that holds the pattern in place.Thus fundamental change requires erosion of this institutional

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exoskeleton – removal of external props and wearing away offixed public ideas that lock in the status quo.

Standard text books, achievement tests and college admission require-ments all prop up standard operating procedures and place a straight-jacket upon the terms of public discourse about education. But over timeinnovations coming from either the grass roots or elites and can loosenthese constraints, creating room for further, more radical, experimenta-tion leading to more enduring change. In a turbulent world, when e.g.,assumptions about cognitive requirements for the workplace are beingturned upside down, teachers and curriculum leaders can experiment, andadministrators can make system adjustments, without arousing as muchopposition from parents and citizens anxious that their kids won’t beprepared for college or won’t be getting a ‘real’ education.

Constraint 4. Visions of change and innovative practices intro-duced by reformers are generally fragmented. Fundamentalchange requires a setting forth of more coherent visions ofcurriculum organization, that are consistent with emergingpopular models of rational action. Such visions can bring previ-ously unconnected innovations together into a cohesive newpattern of standard practice.

A lot of experimentation produces only experimental particles floatingaround the core of established practice. For the particles to converge toform a fundamentally changed practice, a synthetic vision – a mentalmodel linking new conceptions of subject matter units, administrative divi-sions, funding patterns, personnel credentials, lines of authority – must beadvanced by credible leaders.

My argument for fundamental change is that (1) globalization iscreating a powerful external alliance for fundamental change. (2) Itis destabilizing school participation and classroom interaction, and (3)weakening the external props holding the system up, promoting moreroom for legitimate experiments which are now forming a ‘shadow institu-tion’ with its own practices and ideas. Finally, (4) credible leaders areformulating new coherent visions of a new curricular organization towardswhich these ‘shadow’ innovations may converge, one that is in harmonywith the changing social reality. Therefore the conditions for fundamentalcurriculum change are now falling into place.


III. GLOBALIZATION, WORK, KNOWLEDGE, LEARNING AND

EDUCATION

Earlier I distinguished between the globalization of markets and theglobalization of information networks, and noted that these were comple-mentary components of globalization. In this section I trace the linesof force connecting these dimensions of globalization to organizationalrestructuring, the emerging American occupational structure, knowledgeproduction and utilization in the workplace, and finally to learning andeducation.

1. Globalization of markets and global competition amongmulti-national enterprises

The Imperial powers laid the groundwork for a system of global tradein the nineteenth century, but competition for resources and marketsengendered conflicts. The first world war slowed down the globalizationprocess. The current stage of economic globalization began after WorldWar II, when the economies of Europe and Asia were shattered by the warand the United States had surplus capital for investment. In the preceding80 years abundant natural resources, large domestic markets, a stronglegal structure for contracts and patents, and an ideology of progressthrough science and technology had propelled the growth of Americanfirms utilizing mass production methods.

After World War II the world economy was in a state of chronicunder-supply, and American firms faced little competition in internationaltrade. They increased their direct foreign investments, creating subsidiariesthroughout the world making mass produced products for global markets– a process that generated the slogan “America makes and the worldtakes”, and the idea that globalization meant Americanization. Underthese non-competitive conditions American firms could set world pricesfor mass-produced goods, and could secure labor cooperation by passingalong some part of their excess profits to unionized industrial workers aswages and benefits above world levels.

American direct foreign investment grew from $2.9 billion in 1960 to$27 billion by 1990. But by the 1970s European and Asian economies hadrecovered sufficiently to compete with American firms on a global scale.Foreign direct investment in the United States, a meager $364 million in1960, had by 1990 expanded to $48 billion, as foreign-owned companiescompeted for a market share in the large and affluent domestic Amer-ican economy (Milberg, 1994). In 1960 1.3% of American GDP was

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produced by foreign firms, while by 1990 they were producing 8.4% ofGDP (Karier, 1994). European and Asian firms competed successfullywith their American counterparts in global markets on the basis of bothprice and quality.

American firms responded to this competition during the 1970s and1980s by initiating aggressive anti-union practices, by out-sourcing lowskilled manufacturing jobs to reduce wages, and by greatly expanding lowwage service sector industries. The AFL-CIO, which represented 30% ofthose employed in the non-farm sector in 1954, represented fewer than12% by the 1990s. More than 90% of the new jobs in the Americaneconomy in the 1970s and 1980s were in the service sector, while manufac-turing suffered a net loss of almost 1 million jobs (World Book KnowledgeSource). Firms also demanded trade protection measures, governmentloans, and reductions of federal corporate taxes as well as state and localsubsidies.

Despite these measures, they continued to lose domestic and globalmarket share, and productivity remained stagnant (Milberg, 1994); theannual rate of productivity growth, which had exceeded 4% in the post-war period dropped to 1.1% in the 1970s and 1980s (Appelbaum et al.,2000, p. 227). Americans experienced a severe ‘crisis of competitiveness’.

2. The competitiveness crisis and education: Two periods of ‘excellence’reforms

Economic and political elites blamed the crisis on the low skill levelsof American workers, and by implication, on the poor performance ofthe American educational system. A 1980 report showed that Amer-ican students were performing below those of the top group of nations,including such major global competitors as Japan, South Korea, andGermany on tests of math and science achievement. In response, elitespressed for educational change to make Americans competitive with thelow-wage, high skill workers in developing nations.6 The first phase ofwhat came to be known as the ‘excellence’ reform movement, began withthe distribution of the national blue ribbon report, “A Nation at Risk”. Inclear and dramatic language, the report stated:

Our nation is at risk. Our once unchallenged pre-eminence in commerce, industry, science,and technological innovation is being overtaken by competitors around the world . . . Whatwas unimaginable a generation ago has begun to occur . . . other (nations) are matching orsurpassing our educational attainments (p. 5).

The report linked our competitive crisis to the alleged failure of the educa-tional system, lamenting that in international comparisons on 19 academic


tests, American students were never first or second, and in comparison withother industrialized nations, were last seven times (p. 8).

The recommendations of the report were touted as ‘revolutionary’ butin Cuban’s terms they were merely incremental, even conservative. Theyproposed an intensification of the academic curriculum: more requiredcourses in science, mathematics, and computer literacy and impositionof ‘world class standards’ monitored with standardized tests. No changeswere proposed in the basic organizational format of curriculum beyondmaking wider use of computers in instruction.

Many states issued their own excellence reports and adopted the recom-mendations of “A Nation at Risk.” But the results were disappointing.There were changes in the ‘intended’ curriculum, but day to day practicedid not change very much. The reforms had taken place without partici-pation by, and consequent ownership of, the recommendations by teachersand community leaders; they were opposed by many credible public educa-tion leaders (e.g. Ernest Boyer, Harold Howe), by teachers’ groups, and byminority group leaders fearing that ‘higher standards’ would be used toexclude them.

A second phase of the excellence reform movement started in themid-1980s, when reformers responded to the indifference of teachersand community members by granting a degree of professional autonomyand parental influence through site-based management and school choice.The community emphasis brought many educational and minority groupleaders into the alliance for change. At this stage the public policydiscourse continued to stress ‘excellence’, defined largely in terms ofacademic standards and test scores. And new educational technolo-gies were still key ingredients, though in this second phase of reformtechnology was no longer to be imposed in a top-down fashion; teacherswere assigned responsibility for selecting specific uses based on trainingin technology utilization.

Despite the initial focus of ‘excellence’ reforms on student perfor-mance, test scores have not changed much. Fifteen years after “A Nationat Risk” research showed “essentially flat achievement and long-standingacademic problems in U.S. schools” (Murphy & Adams, 1998, p. 441).

But market competition between schools was now also touted as amajor new engine of change As the consensus for reform grew, diversesocial groups, including ethnic minorities, feminists, environmentalists,Roman Catholics, and high-tech professionals added their support for‘choice.’ Some of these groups were much less committed to ‘excellence’– defined in terms of standards and standardized tests – than the initialreformers. As a result, ‘choice’ became less exclusively tied to enhancing

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academic achievement, and increasingly linked to the theme of promoting‘diversity’.

‘School Choice’ thus became a contradictory policy aimed both atachieving ‘common’ goals and at letting different groups seek their ownquite different goals. This phase of educational reform directed changeefforts away from the mainstream system, with consequences to bediscussed later.

3. The global spread of information networks

What we now refer to as the ‘Internet’ was begun in the late 1960sas the ARPA-net, a U.S. defense network that accepted its first inter-national connection in 1973. Meetings between ARPA and the NationalScience Foundation led in the 1980s to the building of NSF-net, linkingAmerican scientists and academics, in 1986, and the closing of ARPA-net in 1990. In the early 1990s digital information networks began tospread rapidly throughout the globe. The first commercial Internet ServiceProvider opened for business in 1990, and the World-Wide Web was intro-duced at CERN in 1991, the same year in which many foreign countrieswere connected to NSF-net. The next year the World Bank went on-line,followed by the White House and United Nations in 1993 (Howe, 2001).

The growth of the World-Wide Web and its commercial use werephenomenally rapid in the mid 1990s. In June 1993 there were 130 websites, of which only 1.5% had ‘dot.com’ domain names. By the end of1993, 4.6% of the 623 sites were commercial; by the end of 1994 18% ofthe 10,000; by 1995 50% of the 100,000; and by the end of 1996 over 60%of the 650,000 sites (Gray, 1997).

The driving forces of the growth of digital networks included therapid technical advances and price declines in computer chips, satellites,and fiber optic cables which facilitated growth in television, telephony,FAX, and the Internet, turning the information grid into a seamlesslyintegrated resource, “the biggest machine ever made” (Dizard, 1997, p. 1).Electronics replaced automobiles as the world’s largest industry, and tele-communications technologies and their peripherals became the largestshare of the electronics product sector (Dizard, p. 7). Software supplantedhardware as the key to global information convergence, and became thefastest growing sector in the global economy, with the market value ofsoftware firms expanding from $663 billion in 1994 to $1.8 trillion in 1996.

By 1995 digital networks were penetrating American homes. NSF-net once again became a research network, while AOL, Prodigy, andCompuserve offered popular Internet services for families. (Howe, 2001).Since that time the growth of the Internet has continued. At the end of 2001


the Internet was growing in the United States at the rate of two millionusers a month. 143 million Americans were on-line (54% of the popula-tion), an increase of 26 million in 13 months. Schools and colleges wereon-line, and 75% of 14–17 year olds and 65% of 10–13 year olds wereInternet users (NTIA, 2002). The increase in tele-workers and home-basedconsultants enabled more families to consider home schooling.7

4. Economic and technical convergence: Business networks and networkenterprise

By the mid 1980s many American business leaders were realizing that theirmain competitive strategies – cost cutting, trade protection, tax breaks andsubsidies, were not preserving their share of domestic or global marketsor improving productivity. Their customers wanted high quality products,customized features, consistent on-time delivery, and short lead times, andthese could not be provided merely by cutting costs or improving massproduction methods.

The spread of information networks facilitated a further ‘re-engineer-ing’ or organizational restructuring of vertically integrated multi-nationalcorporations in the early 1990s. American and European firms, in competi-tion with Asian counterparts sharing and coordinating strategies, resourcesand competencies in their network structures – Japanese keiretsu, Koreanchaebol, and Chinese family networks – came to realize that they toomust compete as business networks. Rapid product development cycles,technology diffusion, proliferation of quality producers, and diversity ofmarkets, have forced major firms increasingly to collaborate with theirglobal customers, suppliers, and selected competitors (Rugman & D’Cruz,2000). Large, vertically integrated firms were broken apart, and non-coreaspects of their businesses were sold off. Many professionals in the legal,accounting, information services and other departments were either laidoff, or left the firms voluntarily to work as “knowledge workers” in smallpartnership firms or as independent consultants, taking advantage of thewider availability and lower costs of network technologies.8

As early as 1983 Turoff and Hiltz (1983) had observed that theemerging information and communications technologies were makingthe notions of centralization and decentralization largely outmoded, asvertically integrated bureaucratic hierarchies were giving way to struc-tures based on fluid networks by means of which connected workerscould join ad hoc groupings formed around specific projects. Grosse andKujawa (1988) spoke of the new multi-national enterprises as “inter-national contractors”, relying not upon subsidiaries but “joint ventures,licensing or servicing contracts.” These “meta-national” firms, unlike the

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traditional trans-national firms rooted in a distinct ‘home’ country, do nottake knowledge from the corporate center in the U.S., Western Europe,or Japan, incorporate it into a product, and ship it to markets in “lessdeveloped areas.” Rather, they draw upon knowledge (in the form of publictechnical and managerial knowledge, experience and insight, and marketintelligence) from employees and network associates all over the world,via in-person and electronic links, to shape products rapidly for the highlydifferentiated global markets (Doz, Santos & Williamson, 2001).9

5. Globalization and workforce re-organization

The formation of global networks and network enterprises to compete inglobal markets has brought about changes in workforce organization in allsocieties. But as Brown, Green, and Lauder (2001) demonstrate, differentsocieties have employed different competitive strategies.10 The primarycontrast is between nations like the U.S. and U.K. with a bi-polar skilldistribution, able to leverage advantages of both high skilled elite workersand low cost producers, vs. high skill societies like Germany and Japan,seeking to leverage the advantages of their wide skill distribution (p. 144).For the latter, the education and training problem is maintaining cuttingedge skills throughout the work force. For the former, this problem doesnot arise, as large segments of the workforce are excluded from skilled jobs(p. 162). In this section I consider this bi-polar skill and income distribu-tion, consisting of knowledge workers and skilled production workers, vs.routine workers.

Knowledge workersPeter Drucker originated the term ‘knowledge worker’ in the 1960s, torefer to workers holding diplomas from technical institutes and univer-sities. He based this idea on the rapidly growing proportion of diplomaholders in the advanced economies, and the increasing inputs from theseworkers.11 Today, however, the term ‘knowledge worker’ refers more to amind-set adjusted to the ‘smart’ work space of the network enterprise thanto holders of specific diplomas or bearers of discipline-based scientific ortechnical knowledge.

The primary capabilities of such workers are knowing how to access,interpret, and apply new knowledge and information to add value to anorganization. They see themselves as professionals, but are not limitedby narrow professional identities; an intellectual property lawyer, forexample, may define himself as a “problem-solver in the media industry.”They are time-sensitive, oriented to working on specific projects withtime deadlines. In this regard they function, when employed, more like


independent professionals than like salaried employees. They are learning-oriented, because their unique human capital derives from continuouslearning in their professional endeavors. Although each project is time-bound, the knowledge work process does not end with the project, becausethe worker must integrate the lessons learned to enrich and refine histacit knowledge. They apply knowledge to knowledge to create newknowledge and information that can combined and permuted to createnew products or services (Castels, 1996). The knowledge and informa-tion created throughout the process are converted by the processes of theknowledge management system into documents available for knowledgere-use. Even when working for the same employer they play differentroles in different projects, as members of different teams. They identifymore with professionals in the network than with other employees in thefirm. Because network technologies are widely available in work centersand homes, these workers have fewer incentives to remain permanentlyemployed; they are increasingly working as contractors in similar projectsfor different companies rather than as employees.12

Network enterprises depend upon continuous accessing of globallydistributed knowledge and information by such workers. It thus needssystems for sensing this mass of information, selecting what is needed andconverting it into inputs for new products and services. The knowledgework space is frequently a ‘smart’ environment, with ‘smart machines’programmed with expert systems providing immediate inputs for rapidlearning; constantly improved ‘hyper-media’ including on-line data basesand search engines that make needed information immediately available,with continuously expanded and up-graded libraries of real-time network-specific knowledge, provided by members of the network for so-called‘knowledge re-use’. Firms in the network employ ‘digital knowledgemanagement systems’, including software tools for the management ofinformation by individual workers, such as the programs created by IBM’sLotus division and Microsoft’s “Digital Dashboard.”13 Some systems alsoinclude programs that can automatically integrate fax, phone, voice mail,e-mail, graphics, video and audio throughout the system into digital “docu-ments” that can be indexed and analyzed and further operated upon, andeven translated into foreign languages to create yet more documents, adinfinitum. This process known as “integrated messaging” Because of theiruse of such knowledge management systems, network organizations arealso sometimes called ‘alert organizations’.

Grantham (2000) projects a continuing disintegration of the corpora-tion and growth of the network of flexible small companies and freelanceworkers. He sees an evolution over the next five years toward a ‘team of

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teams’ approach in which workers “come together, blending interdisci-plinary skills focusing on a particular project, completing the project, thendisbanding the team as each of its workers move on to other projects.” Themost important asset in the process is no longer the production capital butthe knowledge that moves with the workers from one project to another.Knowledge workers relate in a new way to the means of production,becoming a ‘knowledge class.’

High skill production workersIn the environment of business networks, innovations in the organizationof production workers have also become “increasingly common” (Appel-baum et al., 2000, pp. 3–4). American managers had been borrowing‘quality circles’ – off-line, after-the fact discussions among workers andmanagers to improve production processes – from the Japanese. But bythe late 1980s the term became unfashionable as this sort of give andtake came to be seen as only one element in a total management system.Quality circles were supplanted by ‘total quality management’ (TQM)systems attending to customer satisfaction, employee input, close linksto suppliers and customers, management by data. TQM was geared toimprove inventory management, just-in-time delivery, statistical qualitycontrol, and systematic problem-solving, including follow-up assessmentand the dissemination of best practices throughout the system.

The late 1980s also saw modest introduction of more substantive formsof worker participation, in the form of self-directing work teams that makeand implement decisions without top down control. The term ‘processre-engineering’ has been used to refer to such innovations. Other termsinclude‘continuous improvement systems’ and ‘high-performance worksystems’. Employee participation of all forms grew but workers in self-directing work teams remained a small minority in 1990, when among6.5 million workers in companies responding to a survey, 1.2 million(20%) were involved in quality circles but only 300,000 (5%) in self-directing teams (Levine, 1995, pp. 3–7). Since then, many firms haveintroduced at least some self-managing teams. Lawler compared Fortune1000 companies in 1987 and 1995, finding that the proportion reportingsome use of these teams increased in that period from 28% to 68% A1995 survey conducted by the Bureau of the Census and the University ofPennsylvania found that 13% of non-managerial workers in their samplewere placed in self-managing teams (Appelbaum et al., 2000, pp. 9–10).Productivity growth, stagnant since the early 1970s, increased to 2%,bolstered by the rapid growth of manufacturing productivity (Appelbaumet al., 2000, p. 228).


The spread of digital information technologies converged in the 1990swith these workplace organization practices. Information technologies arefundamentally different than earlier innovations. Information-based toolsare highly malleable. They are re-programmable; the same equipment canperform a wide variety of functions. They reduce re-tooling time, andcreate opportunities for economies of scope. They have a built-in capacityfor data collection and analysis, to support decision-making (Ducatel,1994, pp. 1–4; Appelbaum et al., 2000, p. 14).

Overall, there has been an increase in skills needed in the workplace as aresult of the adoption of information technologies and worker participationpractices. In firms adopting these techniques skills sets shift from manualand craft skills to higher level cognitive skills including abstract reasoning,because the workers are removed from the physical processes of movingand making. They are system controllers, who must be able to programand maintain their machines, as well as to interpret the data read-outs thatthe machines produce, which often requires some grasp of the conceptsupon which these messages are based. Information technologies fit bestin workplace situations where workers and managers cooperate directly inproduction processes and expertise across multiple functional specialtiesis available, that is, in flatter, multi-functional teams (Ducatel, 1994, p. 4;see also Ostroff, 1999). Workers in these teams require additional ‘soft’skills in communication and group decision making.

Appelbaum et al. (2000) studied the impact of workplace systemscombining worker participation with high skills and training onproductivity and worker earnings. In the ‘high performance work systems’(HPWS) front line workers participate in gathering and analyzing informa-tion, and hence require both information processing and communicationsskills (p. 8); HPWS also require workers to “become familiar with andcarry out a wider range of tasks, to develop better interpersonal andbehavioral skills, to take on supervisory and coordination functions, and tointeract effectively with other workers and managers” (p. 208). Appelbaumet al. found that HPWS had a positive effect on performance in each of theindustries studied (p. 129); HPWS organizations were significantly morelikely to have high value added products, reduced costs, high perceivedquality of products, lower inventory costs and more rapid inventory turn-overs (p. 159). The workers in such organizations earned significantlymore that those in traditional production contexts (p. 223).

But Cappelli and his co-authors (1999) noted that despite the benefitsof such forms of organization in particular market segments, the advan-tages of mass production using low cost labor have remained strong inother segments of American industry. Some successful firms have retained

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lower cost methods, while others have aimed at improved quality, productdiversity, and rapid turn-around time. American producers, in comparisonwith their foreign competitors, have moved more slowly toward high skill,high performance systems, because the larger scale of American produc-tion accommodates mass production, and long-established traditions oftop-down management have been difficult to change.

The bi-polar structure of the American workforceThe overall result has been a widening division between high skillsand low skills segments in the American manufacturing sector. RobertReich (1992) divided future workers into three categories: highly skilled‘symbolic analysts’ who access, combine, and permute knowledge andinformation to create new products and services, and relatively unskilled,low wage routine production workers and in-person service providers. Theabove analysis suggests a somewhat different categorization: elite knowl-edge workers providing professional services, high skill workers organizedin information-rich, high performance workplaces, and providers ofroutine, low skill production and in-person services. The ‘routine worker’category contains a high proportion of women, minorities and recentimmigrants (including illegal aliens). Unlike routine industrial workers ofthe 1950s, a large proportion of today’s routine workers work in temporaryor part time ‘contingent’ work without union protection, job security orhealth and pension benefits.14 From 1970 to 1992 the total payroll oftemporary employees rose an astounding 3000% (Weinbaum, 1999). Ahigh school diploma thus no longer provides American students a ticketto a decent job with benefits. With welfare rolls and transfer paymentsdeclining, and permanent jobs for unskilled unionized workers in themanufacturing sector disappearing, more Americans are now groupedtogether in an expanding ‘working poor class’.

6. Workforce re-organization, learning, and education: Failure of thestandard curriculum

The class situations of ‘knowledge’ and ‘routine’ workers differ from thoseof former managerial-professional and industrial workers, the ‘typical’clients of American schools and colleges in the industrial era. Thosedestined for knowledge work and high skill production work – and theirfuture employers – understand that the established curriculum grammardoes not provide the human capital for knowledge work. To point tothe most obvious contradictions: students remain individuated in schoollearning, but graduates are expected to work in groups. Students learncognitive routines sorted into distinct subject matter disciplines, and are


taught by professionals with discipline-specific credentials, but graduatesare expected to connect and permute materials from multiple disciplines innon-routine ways. Schools present subject matter in an orderly sequence,unconnected to real world applications, but graduates must acquire andprocess information ‘just-in’time’ for immediate use.15

John Dewey (1976/1910) argued that educators must consider how thecontent and mature organization of knowledge grows out of the practicaldemands of social life, and how that content is used, tested, and modi-fied in its actual use. The series of curricular activities gradually mustapproximate mature knowledge-in-use just as the young people them-selves gradually approximate maturity in their life roles and consequentknowledge needs.16 Cole (1990) showed that schooling employing thestandard curriculum grammar is a specific learning environment thatproduces a specific sort of learning in which memory, classification, androutine verbal-logical problem solving plays a large role. Snow and hisassociates17 have shown that the learning associated with the standardcurriculum grammar is linked to ‘crystallized’, not ‘fluid’ knowledge.Students undergoing the standard kind of curricularized learning mayefficiently acquire information and rote cognitive routines, but this issimply not the sort of learning needed by the high skilled workers intoday’s global network economy.

IV. FROM GLOBALIZATION TO FUNDAMENTAL CURRICULUM

CHANGE

This leaves the question whether the American educational institutioncan respond to this technical inefficiency in standard curricular schoolingpractices, by instituting fundamental curriculum change. I argue thatconstraints to fundamental change are being removed, that a powerfulalliance for change, a disruption of mainstream practice, a ‘shadow’ educa-tional institution built from innovations, and a coherent vision of a newsystem, are now forming.

1. There is potentially a powerful alliance for fundamental change

In the late industrial period, despite intellectual critiques and periodicincremental reforms, no constituency for fundamental change existed.Secondary education was the gateway to full participation in society,allocating positions in the workplaces of industrial society. Some graduateswent on to college and professional or managerial careers. Others wentdirectly into the industrial workplace, earning union wages and enjoying

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job security, health insurance, and pension benefits. Even those excludedfrom equal participation viewed the school as the gateway, and fought forequal educational opportunity. Capital, the working class, and even theexcluded poor thus achieved a working consensus on the form and contentof education. The battles were over access.

Today the potential for change exists, in a powerful alliance ofcorporate capital, middle class managerial, professional and industrialknowledge workers, and the working poor. The corporate sector wants asteady supply of knowledge professionals and high skill workers. It has notbeen satisfied with the products of mainstream education. The ‘excellence’reforms have left it skeptical about the possibility of reforming establishedschools through the political process. Instead, it is either imposing its owneducational projects upon the schools through ‘partnerships’ involvinghigh-tech academies, or providing counterpart experiences in its ‘corporateuniversities’.18

Highly skilled production workers and professional knowledge workerswill demand educational opportunities for their children connected withthe new economy. Suburbanites pressure for school change: more Internetconnections and more problem solving in groups. Many appear contentwith the current pace of change, sensing that their communities havethe will and resources to make necessary curriculum adjustments overtime. But few middle class parents remaining in the cities, regardlessof their ethnic group, have much remaining hope for school reform.Some are demanding ‘school choice’, both to avoid having their kidsplaced in schools serving the working poor, and to provide them withknowledge and skills for contemporary workplaces. Some are opting forprivate or parochial schools and they support vouchers; others are choosingcharter schools, hoping that they will attract middle class families andacademically motivated students. A rapidly increasing number among theknowledge professional group are now home-schooling their children.

The working poor no longer believe that the established schools canprovide access even to dignified working class status. The academicachievement of their children is frequently insufficient for subsequenttraining for knowledge or high skill production work. Their childrenappear stuck at the bottom of the social ladder, their life chances deteriorat-ing rather than improving. They are ‘at risk’ for crime, incarceration orself-destruction. There is increasing support among the working poor forcharter schools and voucher programs.19

These groups have yet not forged a consensus on the direction of educa-tional change. But there is movement in this direction. Right now theyare demanding a variety of new schools – from aviation and African-


centered to zoo-based schools – and the charter framework is well adaptedto this diversity. But the social movements motivating some of these firstgeneration charter schools are losing steam, because they have lackedcoherent programs for economic and social renewal. An inner city African-American child, for example, may feel better in an African-centeredschool, but the African curriculum content will not supply the knowledgeand skills needed for entry into high skill or knowledge work.

These skills – in information technology, but also in ill-structuredproblem-solving and decision-making, communications and group rela-tions – provide the common denominator amidst today’s curriculumdiversity, and hence the predictable convergence point for durable curricu-lum content innovations.

2. Globalization destabilizes the internal processes of schoolorganizations that constrain fundamental change, motivatingeducators to innovate

Here I focus on tensions in classroom relations between teachers andstudents, and on school participation rates, to demonstrate the existence ofnew internal stresses motivating mainstream teachers and administratorsto embrace innovation.

Children from all social groups are becoming less docile in the networksociety. Students in the late industrial period, between World War II and the1970s, did what was needed to maintain their school statuses, as these wereseen as the only pathways to expected adult statuses. Through the diffusesocialization processes of the school, community, and home, studentslearned about the entitlements and penalties associated with conforming toor deviating from student roles. The vast majority of young people in thelate industrial era conformed to the expectations of society and completedsecondary school. School credentials were a major determinant of futurelife chances, but they bore only a loose relationship to actual learning.20

The ‘taught’ curriculum was a negotiated compromise: teachers main-tained a professional self-image by moving learners through appropriatesubject matter, while students completed enough assignments to maintaintheir student statuses.

Tracking by ability groups provided future managerial and professionalworkers a curriculum track for college preparation skills and academicorientations. It gave future industrial workers a general diploma demon-strating that they had completed an academically undemanding but sociallyand emotionally laborious course of study marketed as vocationally appro-priate. The diploma showed that they could be punctual and persevering,and could adjust to their expected class status. Their grades and test

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scores did not greatly affect access to industrial jobs but their diploma did.Although social class accounted for different school attitudes and perform-ances of middle and working class kids, both groups had motivations tocooperate sufficiently to complete high school.

Schools and colleges play a different role in today’s allocation ofoccupational opportunities. One can increasingly succeed in the neweconomy without any diploma, and one can also fail even with plenty offormal education of the wrong kind. Formal education remains a pathwayto knowledge work, but only one – and it comes without guarantees. BillGates and Steve Jobs (without college diplomas) are poster boys of knowl-edge work. Hanging out with other geeks, teaching yourself soft-wareprograms, taking a certificate course sponsored by a corporation, obtaininga high-tech job or apprenticeship all provide better social and technicalskills than the school curriculum.

This fact changes the relationship between the curriculum and theknowledge acquisition of future high skill workers. There is a reportedshortage of adult workers with cutting edge skills (Ewing, 1999) butan abundance of high school kids with them. Corporations and govern-ment agencies are now hiring them. The Department of Defense recentlychanged its recruitment policies to enable its vendors to recruit teen-agers without diplomas (Dunn, 1999). Cisco Systems sponsors systemsengineering certificate programs in over a thousand secondary schools(and conducts parallel programs all over the world). The four semester,280 hour “network academies” are now found in all fifty states.21 Defensecontractors get many systems engineers directly from such programs.Future high skill workers are now forced to consider the ‘opportunitycosts’ of even secondary education. Even high school drop outs willgain further educational and work opportunities as ‘corporate university’programs expand.

Jon Katz (2000) reports that many of the brightest school students arenow ‘profoundly contemptuous“ of formal education. Katz refers to thediscovery by tech savvy kids that their skills can lead to high-wage jobs,as “the Geek Ascension.” Kids with technical know-how grasp that thecorporations need them and will hire them – even if they have to lurethem to leave high school. So these kids want to learn – very much – butthey want high tech skills and will not subject themselves to empty schoolroutines. Teachers constrained by the established curriculum may proveincapable of coping with their demands. And more of these young peopleare simply dropping out to take advantage of the growing opportunities forhome-based learning, a point I discuss below.


Future routine workers see no path from school completion to satisfyingadult roles. The educational system has failed most of them. Some enter-tain hopes of bright futures as high tech engineers or physicians, but mostsense that such futures are closed. ‘Vocational’ education must become –like the Cisco academies – a daunting academic challenge or it will onlyprovide a path to dead-end jobs. Young people in de-industrialized regionsknow this – they are increasingly hopeless and prone to self-destructiveactivity. Their school peers are other disadvantaged kids, and they are notin general a positive influence upon one another. There is a new genre ofbooks about such youngsters, from Cold New World (Finnegan, 1998) toEight Ball Chicks (Sikes, 1997).

We haven’t figured out how to do much for them. Many districtshave established ‘alternative’ programs for difficult kids. The Clintonteam pushed ‘boot camps’ for the hard core cases. Supt. Hornbeck ofPhiladelphia considered outsourcing them to computer-monitored facili-ties managed by for-profit corporations, with a curriculum deliveredentirely through computer-assisted instruction. Such panopticon schoolsmay provide the control to protect society from these kids and to protectthem from one another and themselves. But it would appear to preparethem only for life in high tech prisons.

Until we have a plausible story to tell these youngsters about howschooling can secure their futures, we can hardly expect them to participateand cooperate. Teachers will have an even harder time coping with them.They will act out – often violently – before they drop out or fail theirstandards-based graduation exams. Their parents have withdrawn theirfaith in public schools; hence the support for charter schools and voucherprograms among the working poor.

3. Globalization is eroding the institutional exoskeleton – the props andrigid categories of public discourse holding standard school practicein place. A ‘shadow institution’ is taking shape alongside of themainstream institution

The first phase of excellence reforms aimed to intensify the standardacademic curriculum and raise test scores. District leaders embraced thesereforms to demonstrate their openness to change. But far from promotingfundamental change, they locked in the standardized tests and other propsthat constrained change (Cuban, 1992). The second phase gave rise toa variety of schools with different curricula and instructional methods.Because of their very diversity, charter schools have weakened the holdof standard curriculum ideas, and have been difficult to square with the

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external props such as textbooks, standardized tests and college entrancerequirements keeping the standard curriculum in place.

Now, in the networked learning innovations of the 1990s, technologyand diversity have been combined and permuted into a dizzying arrayof new curricular and organizational forms. In the process, reform hasbecome more and more at odds with the established curriculum pattern.The Internet connected the classroom and individual learners to vastlibraries of materials. Teachers are now able to form new ‘hyper-learning’units and adjust them to each learner or learning group. They canlink auxiliary materials and access to information providers for use bystudents in unpredicted ways. Corporations are making complete certifi-cate programs available on-line in schools. Tech savvy students canconstruct their own ‘curricula units’ from ‘just-in-time’ elements, placingnew limits on teacher control. More significantly, parents can download avariety of curriculum materials from CD-ROMS or the World-Wide Weband by-pass the schools entirely.

In the 1970s home schooling was a fringe practice, and those whoengaged in it had to suspend their faith in the deeply entrenched collectivefaith in schooling. Today that faith is rapidly eroding, as home schoolinghas become legal in every state. According to the best available esti-mates, about 15,000 school aged children participated in home schoolingin 1972, 300,000 in 1988, and between 1 million and 1.2 million in1997, a 400% increase in the last decade. Surveys paint this portraitof home school families: they are 98% white, 97% married. The maleparents are disproportionately drawn from the professional/technical andmanagerial/administrative categories, which have experienced much of thetransition to the network form of enterprise.22

Learning experiences in the networked home fit surprisingly wellwith the knowledge and skill needs of those in the more advantagedworking groups. Nancy Lande’s (1996) children, Kathie (age 11) and Brian(age 13), for example, participate in the math olympiads, the NationalGeographic Geography Bee, Global Challenge (a current events contest),and the National Student Research Center’s annual science journal, takeart lessons at the art museum, and run a family mid-day dog walking busi-ness (Lande, 1996). When they first heard about the National GeographicGeography Bee, the children had only four days to prepare. Kathie bootedup the “Geosafari” software program and started to memorize countries,capitals, resources and cultures (Lande, p. 11). But her father, a home-based professional who serves as the “computer consultant” for the family(p. 14), prompted the kids to go on-line to find geography materials. Briankept a notebook of research, a binder of materials culled from on-line


bulletin boards, web pages and email, that permitted him to synthesizethe skills he has learned at home computer communications, note taking,research, media, and reference materials (p. 20). The children have wonthe Geography Bee, published their short stories in national publications,had their science research project accepted for publication in the NationalResearch Center journal, and sold art work through a children’s art broker:perfect training in the skills needed by today’s knowledge workers.23

Home schooling, like charter schooling, is wearing away the collectiveAmerican faith in standardized curricular learning. In a comprehensivesociological study of home-schooling, Stevens (2001) has recentlyconcluded that the fact that so many “sensible parents share this utterlack of faith in the public schools and their keepers signals an educationallegitimacy crisis whose breadth and depth have yet to be fully measured.”24

In sum, charter schools, network academies, corporate universities, andhome schooling have been bolstered by the spread of both network enter-prises and computer networks. They now constitute a ‘shadow institution’alongside the mainstream educational institution, providing legitimacyfor alternative ways of organizing learning and allocating occupationalopportunities.

The mainstream institution, under severe pressure from political leadersof both parties, has responded by initiating a new round of ‘excellence’reforms, based on national educational standards, standards-based instruc-tion, and standardized tests. The national standards respond to the longingsof conservatives for tradition and order. They can be used by politicians ofall stripes to demonstrate the ineffectiveness of mainstream public schools,in order further to undermine their legitimacy, and provide indirect supportfor charter schools, which have been touted by politicians, if not by theirdiverse clients, as means of improving test scores. This support furtherweakens the mainstream system.

The standards movement is certainly visible today, but my argumentsuggests that it, like earlier reforms, tends to lock the current practice inplace, and thus cannot respond to the diverse contemporary needs fuelingthe growth of the education ‘shadow institution’. Although an evaluationof Arizona’s charter schools, for example, showed that these alternativeschools performed no better than mainstream schools on standardizedtests, state leaders declared the charter reform a ‘success’ because of itswide popularity among citizens across the political spectrum.25 Regardlessof their academic performance as measured by tests, charter schools arevalued by diverse constituencies, and politicians who try to close them willpay a price. The indirect and paradoxical support for charter schooling

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provided by the standards-based education movement may be its mostlasting legacy.

4. Globalization is now generating new synthetic visions of education inaccord with current ideas about rational action. These visions arenow guiding a convergence of recent innovations towards a newinstitutional pattern

Reid (1999) offers a model of the curriculum change process involving fivephases: (1) external social change, forging (2) new groupings of interestedpublics with new needs, who (3) place new pressures on the educationalinstitution, leading to (4) experimentation with various innovations linkedrhetorically to the constituencies, providing means whereby (5) viableinventions and the constituencies served by them can form stable andcoherent identities. So far I have traced the first four phases.26 We arenow entering stage (5), a ‘social construction’ process in which educatorspromoting the innovations, and their new constituencies (corporate andgovernment leaders, knowledge and high skill workers, the workingpoor), are negotiating new developments in both the innovations and thecategories within which they are discussed as topics of public concern. Inthis process the innovations are being reconstituted to fit a new mainstreameducational institution to replace the old one.

Until now the innovations mentioned have merely offered alternativesat the margins of the mainstream system. They do not in themselvesconstitute fundamental change. But they are tailor-made for the externaland internal pressures educators now face. Networked hypertext curriculafit expectations of future knowledge and high skill workers. Networksof deregulated schools parallel business networks with ‘partners’ thatcan adapt rapidly to change. In the 1990s credible spokesmen haveescalated ‘fundamental’ denunciations of schooling and the prospects foreducational reform.

Chubb and Moe (1990) argued in a Brookings report that the publicschool system had proven ‘unreformable’. The very means of publiccontrol – legislation, governance by elected boards, civil service employ-ment of teachers – were ‘fundamentally incompatible’ with effectiveeducation. Bimber (1994) spoke in a RAND report of a ‘decentralizationmirage’. He argued that relaxing a few regulations and mandates cannotlead to fundamental change because various elements of policy – funding,staff credentialing, staff development and allocation – are highly inter-dependent and none can change significantly if others are held constant.Bimber concluded that reform will require “far more sweeping changes inschool governance than school boards, teachers unions, or superintendents


have been willing to contemplate.” Murphy and Adams (1998), afterreviewing the failed ‘excellence’ reforms, asked pointedly “at what pointwill continuing need (for change) and available technology encourage trulyradical system redesign, where educational reform may no longer revolvearound schools” (p. 441). Bickman (1998) complained that Cuban wasstuck in “a ‘grammar of schooling that has remained constant for the pastcentury . . . the only way out is to . . . completely rewrite the grammar ofschooling” (p. 75).27

Talk of the system being ‘un-reformable,’ needing ‘sweeping changes’and ‘radical system redesign,’ is now a commonplace of public discourse.Leaders speak openly about making ‘end runs’ around the system. SteveMcCallion, a director of research and design in Portland, Oregon, says

One of the biggest challenges we face is to break up the lock of the existing interestgroups that tie up existing systems. Whether they’re teachers, school administrators, orother groups, powerful established interests spend billions of dollars to deliver the kind ofeducation system we currently have. We’ve got to find a way to end run those groups and. . . reach the critical masses. Until we do both, changing the system is any fundamentalway is going to be very difficult.28

McCallion depicts the battle for educational change as raging between‘society’ represented by an alliance of business leaders and the masses,against a powerful ‘establishment’ of school teachers and administrators.This is a far cry from George Counts’ image of teachers and administratorsdaring to ally themselves with the masses to fight the business ‘establish-ment’ and build a new social order. But the plausible ring of this line pointsto new alliances forming new visions.

Hill (1997) recently proposed a design for school organization thatparallels the new corporate network model: a network of ‘partner’ educa-tional service providers around a down-sized ‘flagship’ district coordinat-ing center. In Hill’s plan the individual schools will no longer be unitswithin a bureaucracy but distinct organizations, with their own missions,core technologies, budget and spending authority (p. 498). The centralschool authorities will not run schools, but only perform irreduciblypublic functions: e.g., providing authority for taxation, distributing funds,informing parents of available choices and facilitating transfer betweenschools.

This multi-provider model makes generous room for educationalinnovations. It establishes a mechanism for public accountability absentfrom voucher plans. It provides a local control mechanism to coordinatethe diverse schools available to community members. With a littletinkering around the edges it could permit the public authority to runschools, if they could compete against other providers. Hill offers his

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proposal for ‘metropolitan’ schools. Many districts may wish to retaintheir district schools as ‘flagship’ providers supported by a range of other‘partner’ providers offering niche educational services. Aspects of thispattern had already been consolidated in Congress and State legislatures bythe late 1990s, and it now provides a convergence point for contemporaryinnovation, a lodestar of a new curriculum organization.

POSTSCRIPT, 2002

In 2002 control of the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania schools was trans-ferred to the School Reform Commission by the state’s Republicangovernor, acting under legislative authority. In mid-April, the Commissionassigned 42 schools to a diverse group of organizations, including twolocal universities and a large number of private sector educational serviceproviders. The Commission announced its commitment to a “multipleprovider model” based on the principles of charterization, privatization,and management by educational service corporations. The New YorkTimes called the Commission’s initiative the largest reorganization inAmerican educational history.29

NOTES

1 The ‘flagship – five partners’ model is developed in Rugman & D’Cruz (2000).2 Seminal articles of Meyer (1977, 1978) and Meyer & Rowan (1978) are viewed assetting forth a new institutional ‘paradigm’ in educational studies.3 See Cuban, 1984, 1990, 1992; Tyack & Cuban, 1995; McKinnon & Westbury, 1975;Westbury, 1973; Reid, 1999.4 This idea parallels Ivan Illich’s notion of institutionalized schooling obtaining a ‘radicalmonopoly’ over socialy legitimate learning (see Illich, 1971).5 For further discussion see Rowan & Miskel, 1999, p. 380.6 For a discussion of American performance on international comparisons of science andmath achievement, see Baker, 1997.7 See Qvortrup (1998), for a recent review of home-based tele-workers.8 Karen Vander Linde, partner in charge of learning services at Price WaterhouseCoopers’ business process outsourcing group, one of the fastest growing units at PriceWaterhouse, claims that firms are outsourcing their knowledge professionals so that whenthey work on projects as ‘partners’ they can compel the employees to adopt appropriateknowledge work attitudes and alleviate the transition to a networked, e-learning environ-ment (PR NewsWire, 2001). Albert & Bradley (1997, p. 10) however, claim that knowledgeprofessionals are more frequently leaving employment in large firms voluntarily, to takeadvantage of the greater discretion, flexibility, productivity and enhanced income derivedfrom operating as a consulting professional. The terms ‘necessity entrepreneurs’ and‘opportunity entrepreneurs’ are used to distinguish those who start their own firms after


being laid off from those who initiate their firms voluntarily to take advantage of entre-preneurial opportunities.9 In March 2000 both the New York Times and USA Today ran cover stories spotlightingFast Company, the trendy new magazine that has captured the spirit of network enterprise.10 According to Brown, Green and Lauder (2001), the United States and United Kingdomhave adopted ‘high skill–low skill’ strategies, with high skilled professional elite ‘knowl-edge workers’ and a wide spread of skill levels and incomes in the working population.Germany has maintained a ‘high skill’ strategy, with relative income and skill equality fordomestic workers; low skill jobs are confined to foreign guest workers and high levels ofunemployment are accepted. Japan has combined a ‘high skill’ workforce strategy withlong working hours and labor discipline.11 Drucker’s insight has been verified by the growing number of college graduates inskilled production jobs (Holusha, 1995) making the distinction I am suggesting betweenknowledge professionals and skilled production workers fuzzy.12 These characteristics of contemporary knowledge workers are reported by Disney(2001); Seang (2001); and Seebach (2001).13 Microsoft unveiled its vision to “enable the knowledge worker” in 1999, reorganiz-ing its operations into four customer groups: IT managers, knowledge workers, softwaredevelopers, and consumers. Bob Maglia, previously in charge of applications software,was re-assigned to the division targeting knowledge workers (Taft & Glascok, 1999).Lotus introduced products for its Domino Notes platform incorporating such concepts as‘locating appropriate people and resources through directory services’ and ‘aggregatinginformation from diverse sources.’ The management literature at the turn of the century hasidentified ‘knowledge sharing’ as among the major issues facing the global corporation,and has begun to explore ‘best practices’ for knowledge sharing (Verespej, 1999, p. 10;Comedu-Kirschner, 2000, p. 8). ‘Knowledge management’ has entered a new phase inthe late 1990s, in which instead of merely training existing workers to use knowledgeassets, jobs are re-designed from scratch to assume knowledge work processes. A detailedchronicle of knowledge work in many sectors is chronicled in Cortada (ed.) (1998).14 See Sassen (1994), for a more detailed account of the jobs in the service economy andtheir role in the workforce of today’s ‘global’ cities.15 Shukor (2001) maintains that the standard curriculum (in Malaysia) is based around“spoon feeding” and “an exam-oriented school environment,” and adds that the “entiresystem needs major tweakings if not a complete overhaul” (p. 17) to produce knowledgeworkers. Commenting on the Malaysian government’s ‘smart school initiative’, Shukorcomments that “computers are just tools,” and the real problem is freeing students to thinkand make decisions.16 Dewey is worth quoting at length on this point. He says “there is all the difference inthe world whether the acquisition of information is treated as an end in itself, or is madean integral portion of the training of thought. The assumption that information that hasbeen accumulated apart from use in the recognition and solution of a problem may later onbe, at will, freely employed by thought is quite false. The skill at the ready command ofintelligence is the skill acquired with the aid of intelligence” (HWT, p. 163).17 Cited in Rowan & Miskel, 1999, p. 377.18 On the rapid growth and operating principles of corporate universities, see Meister(1998). Their threat to the mainsteam tertiary sector is discussed by Nurden (1999).Authers (1999), discusses their crucial role in creating a corporate culture that spans theflagship corporation and its ‘partners.’ Prestoungrange (2000) provides a detailed accountof the role of problem based action learning in corporate university programs.

414 LEONARD J. WAKS

19 Fine and Weis (1998) in a study of de-industrialized workers in Buffalo New Yorkand Jersey City New Jersey, provide useful case examples. Jersey City’s poor broke withthe public schools, supported the state takeover of the district, and were sympathetic toa voucher initiative (p. 10). Black males in particular rejected public schools. ‘Eddie’dissented from a “system that has failed aa generation of people.” ‘Lawrence’ complainedabout an outdated curriculum that “doesn’t mean nothin’ to nobody” and added “ourconcepts of schools are antiquated . . . they need to be transformed.” Julius said “its notabout degrees anymore . . .” (pp. 230–232).20 Meyer (1977) summarizes the evidence that schooling is primarily a means of cognitivesocialization and finds it lacking. He argues that schooling is an occupational allocationsystem, and that the surface connections between the symbolic curriculum and the knowl-edge used in occupations serves to legitimize the allocations.21 The Cisco program began in October 1997 as the company realized that its globalgrowth depended upon a steadily growing supply of IT workers at affordable wages. Incooperation with the World Bank and such trans-national corporations as Time-Warner andKellogg, Cisco provides the entire curriculum and teacher-training to participating schoolsthroughout the world, and sells them the internet routers and other necessary equipment ata nominal cost (see McGee & Mateyaschuk, 1999; Murray, 2000).22 See Mitchell Stevens (2001), for a comprehensive look inside the home schoolingmovement.23 Lande (1996), provides a useful collection of memoirs of home schooling families.24 Stevens, p. 71.25 The Arizona situation is discussed in Toch, 1998. In the same month (April 1998) theNational Educational Association issued a report about the weak accountability for charterschools nationally. Because of the popularity of charter schools, and their support bycommentators and political groups on the right, center, and left, political leaders are under-standably cautious about holding these schools to the performance standards announcedfor them.26 Reid (1999) provides an example fitting this model in his case study of England’s ‘sixthform’ in the 19th century. Industrialization shifted the attention of elites from localities tothe national stage, as they focused on arenas and organizations that could assist in securinga national consensus. By the 1830s the elite needed to recruit beyond the landed aristocracyfor public administrators, creating a need for consensus-building between aristocracy andan emerging middle class. The sixth form was changed to connect its new topics with thenew national statuses; new organizational forms emerged in parallel with new institutionalcategories shared by the new mixed-class constituency. Such schools as Arnold’s Rugbytried out new inventions linking sixth form experiences and ‘leadership’: the sixth becamea ‘rite of passage’; there was a new emphasis on mimetic forms of teaching with theheadmaster as sixth form teacher providing an appropriate example of leadership.27 Bickman’s review is unimpressive because he offers no steps for ‘rewriting’ this‘grammar’ except more ‘hard thinking’, as though what Dewey and Cuban lacked wasspunk. What is striking is that this call for a new grammar of curriculum appears withoutfanfare in that arbiter of mainstream educational taste, The Kappan.28 “Fastpack 2000” in Fast Company, March 2000, pp. 234–254.29 The author wishes to thank Ian Westbury, William Reid, Larry Cuban, Robert White,and the anonymous reviewers for the Journal of Educational Change for commentson earlier drafts of this paper. Westbury, in particular, has assisted me in appreciatingthe institutional perspective, and John Meyer’s contribution to curriculum studies. The


paper was initially presented at the 2000 annual meeting of the American EducationalResearch Association, in a Division B symposium on the topic“Will Globalization CauseFundamental Curriculum Change?” The other panelists were Westbury, Reid, and Cuban.

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LEONARD J. WAKS

Temple UniversityRitter Hall 264Philadelphia, PA 19122-6091USAE-mail: [email protected]

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