Gelberg, Denise. (1997). The "Business" of Reforming American Schools. Reviewed by Kate Rousmaniere

Gelberg, Denise. (1997). The "Business" of Reforming American Schools. Albany: State University of New York Press. ISBN 0-7914-3505-9 $65.50 (cloth) $21.95 (paper) Reviewed by Kate Rousmaniere Miami University, Ohio April 6, 1998 After teaching elementary school for fourteen years, Denise Gelberg took a leave to study for a Ph.D. at Cornell's School of Industrial and Labor Relations. Two years later, she returned to work "calmed by a new understanding of how and why the school organization operated as it did" (p. xi). But the calm period was short because Gelberg's new understanding made her less tolerant of the inadequacies and contradictions that she now saw in her work place. She noticed that new curricular demands for whole language that had been decided upon by the central office so quickly that on the first day of school her classroom had none of the required books. Nor did her classroom have any furniture due to a clog in the central bureaucracy. Then suddenly she began receiving directives from on high to begin cooperative learning. And she learned that her superintendent was publicly proposing site-based decision making even as he was pushing a revision of the teacher union contract that would strip teachers of the right to consult in curricular decisions. Now that Gelberg understood the way organizations were supposed to work, she was all the more shocked by the ways in which they actually did work—from the top down and with little consistency. What bothered Gelberg most was what she suspected were the rationales behind these reform initiatives. Why had school administrators' concepts of good teaching and learning changed so quickly? This book is Gelberg's investigation of the guiding influence behind American school reform movements. She argues that whether it be scientific management initiatives of the early twentieth century, collective bargaining agreements with teachers unions in the 1970s, or site based decision making reforms in the 1980s and 90s, the guiding impetus behind American educational reform has been the training of children for economic purposes. In each wave of reform in the last one hundred years, the economic interests of employers have been central to the initiatives while teachers have been excluded from real decision-making authority in schools. This is a good book which still has a few problems. Gelberg's use of evidence is inconsistent—at times she draws on research from specific schools and school managers and at other times she makes sweeping generalizations from the statements of a single superintendent or policy maker. In fact the book is not a study of reforms as implemented in American schools, but a study of the rhetoric of educational reformers and, to a lesser extent, the legal and political structures of the school contexts in which reforms are proposed. We see no classrooms in this book, even though Gelberg does take a close-up view of the infamous reforms of Rochester, New York, in the 1980s. We do see a lot of superintendents, business executives, and teacher union leaders, and to the extent that this book is a discussion of their wrestling over terms, rhetoric, and politics, it is a good read that offers some fascinating insights into educational priorities in this country. Another problem is Gelberg's tendency to over-generalize the term "efficiency" and the effect of what she calls "pro-efficiency reforms" in actual schools. It's never exactly clear what she means by the term. Does she mean actual practices of scientific management and cost accounting in school management, or is she implying a business philosophy about the efficient production of good workers? This is especially confusing later in the book when she describes modern reforms like school based management as "new pro-efficiency" reforms, although school based management is hardly the lock-step, top-down efficiency model that Frederick Taylor described. What does a "new pro-efficiency school" look like? Is it by definition one with a business partnership or a school-to-work program? Is it a school with school based management or collective bargaining, both of which Gelberg argues ultimately work in the interests of school managers? Are school managers by definition pro-business? The author suggests all this, but does not explain, thereby often raising more questions than answers. The first part of the book is Gelberg's exploration of the history of business influence on schools. These chapters are to a great extent a modernized version of Raymond Callahan's wonderful study of the same topic published in 1962 and still engaging reading. Here we see our old friends, the pro-efficiency education experts of the early twentieth century who were so influenced by Frederick Taylor's scientific management theories. Here, too, we see the progressive opponents of the efficiency experts in education—Margaret Haley, Francis Parker, George Counts, Jesse Newlon, and John Dewey. Like Callahan, Gelberg tends to paint the efficiency experts as arrogant, controlling bureaucrats and the pedagogical progressives as passionate child savers hoping in vain for a restructured and enlightened management of schools. Gelberg judges the efficiency advocates as experiencing "resounding success" (p. 65). The problem is that it is not so simple. For one thing, as Barbara Berman argued in her 1983 reconsideration of Callahan, educational reformers' interest in business efficiency did not originate with Frederick Taylor's industrial plans of the early 20th century, but was a basic tenet of common school reformers since the mid-19th century. Nor did school efficiency plans result from voters' pressure for cost cutting, or from businessmen's own self-interested projections, but rather they were techniques to alleviate financial and organizational problems caused by the expansion of public schooling in the early twentieth century. Granted, business played a significant role in shaping responses to those problems, but were businessmen the single, most important arbiters of the modern school system as Gelberg suggests? Most historians would say no, and would argue that "pro-efficiency" reforms in curriculum or administration were never as monolithic as Gelberg believes them to be. Even as the National Association of Manufacturers was weighing in on what job related studies should be taught in schools in the early twentieth century, so too were the emerging professional and academic associations effectively promoting social education programs in social studies, psychological guidance, and the arts. In part because it is so much fun to laugh at early-twentieth century school administrators' rhetoric of industrial order—Andrew Draper's metaphoric division of Americans into the military ranks of corporal, colonel and general is a particularly hilarious one—it is tempting to see the business efficiency experts as the all-controlling force of schools, but historians of education have argued that it is simply not so clear cut. Unfortunately, Gelberg does not draw on extensive secondary historical sources, and this limits her first chapters to a kind of cartoon-like set-up of "pro-efficiency" reformers as bad, and progressive educators as good. Gelberg's treatment of the modern period allows for more subtleties and more in-depth exploration of the issues at hand. She charts the origins of collective bargaining for teacher unions in the 1960s and 70s and argues that a guiding business ideology focused collective bargaining exclusively on labor aspects of teaching, thus legally minimizing teachers' role in decision-making in broader school issues such as class size, curriculum, and school management. Collective bargaining as it was shaped in the 1970s made teachers "legally and functionally divorced from responsibility for the effectiveness of the school organization" (p 98), and collective bargaining became not a medium of structural reform, but rather a part of the centralized bureaucracy. Gelberg blames school managers and business interests for this development: at this moment of teacher activism that could have led to a major restructuring of public schools' missions, reformers sought only business models in the form of industrial labor law that kept management in control of schools. Reforms following the publication of A Nation at Risk in 1983 were similarly limited in vision, even though to some extent they promised both more teacher participation in schools and more community involvement. Gelberg does a nice job of describing and taking apart Total Quality Management (TQM) as an organizational scheme that promises worker representation but that retains managerial control. She criticizes school business partnerships, the "for profit" ventures of Chris Whittle's Edison Project, and Education Alternatives Incorporated as blatant examples of business agendas that guide educational reform. Gelberg also sees school based management programs and other decentralization plans as flawed because they lack the social vision of democratic schooling that Dewey and Haley promoted years before. Current day "pro-efficiency reformers" promote site based decision making schemes not to empower teachers to change schools but to train students to be more productive workers. In an ironic twist of rhetoric, the modern pro-efficiency reform of school based management promotes teacher participation, while its ancestor promoted a more top-down factory model organization, but both still prioritize student performance and not student learning. Furthermore, managers still resist the loss of their power that a truly democratic workplace could promise, and school based management allows managers to maintain that final control. A chapter on the famous school reforms in Rochester, New York, concludes that while these reform ideas sounded good, they were sabotaged by school managers who feared losing power and by teachers themselves who resisted change. Gelberg does not expand on the role of teachers in school based management. She assumes that teachers want more decision making power in schools, although recent studies suggest that teachers often have good reasons for wanting to focus on their classroom work and not on tasks they feel could be best addressed by a qualified administrator. Gelberg's final take on site based decision making is confusing. Does she believe that TQM and school based management could work, but only if it were organized around a different philosophy that gave teachers real decision making power? Or is she arguing that TQM and school based management are by their very nature administrative ploys to give the image of shared decision making? The book is somewhat uneven and unwieldy. The historical chapters are essentially a consolidation of prior historical work and replicate Callahan's thesis with less of the skillful rhetoric that marked his text. The chapters on the modern period are insightful, but lack clarity of purpose. It is obvious that business interests have influenced American schooling, and Gelberg recognizes that she is not the first to say that. Still, at times she seems to be beating a dead horse, offering little new to the discussion, and laying out an extreme binary opposition between sides. As a school teacher herself, Gelberg must know that schools are more complicated, that many principals and superintendents also care about students and teachers, and that complicated bureaucratic structures also allow for fudging, resisting, adapting, and undermining of the system. The extent to which a school or district is simply "controlled" by anybody or any philosophy is hard to tell. Gelberg's book might have been improved by a continuation of her own personal reflections as a teacher in her study. She believes that education could just as well be organized around other purposes than economic productivity—creativity for example, or community development or child health—but she does not always articulate these alternative visions. At her finer moments, she steps back from her critique to comment with the clear vision of a teacher who wonders how it has happened that schools are the way they are. "Given the host of issues facing educators at the close of the twentieth century—school children compromised prenatally by cocaine, increased childhood poverty, difficulty in attracting and retaining the best young people in teaching, to name just a few—it is not immediately apparent why the nation's attention has been heavily focused on education's contribution to the skill level of the American work force" (p. 132). Gelberg's curiosity about the driving force behind educational structures and her ultimate outrage about what she finds are the driving force of this book and the reason why, in spite of its flaws, it is a good book to help educators critically re-think American style school reform. In the end, Gelberg's study is a nice consolidation of history and contemporary reform material. She is making sense out of what she sees in schools, stepping back from the classroom and reviewing the whole sweep of educational history from the perspective of reformers and administrators. Sadly, she concludes that "democracy in the school house is not the point of the current reform agenda; the point is higher levels of achievement for more students so that America's place as a world economic leader can be maintained" (p. 170). She may not prove this point so much as she passionately persuades us to attend to this theme and to look critically for it in every element of school reform and rhetoric that comes our way. References Berman, B. (1983.) Business efficiency, American schooling and the public school superintendency: A reconsideration of the Callahan thesis. History of Education Quarterly, 23, 297-321. Callahan, R. E. (1962.) Education and the cult of efficiency: A study of the social forces that have shaped the administration of the public schools. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. About the Reviewer Kate Rousmaniere is the author of City Teachers: Teaching and School Reform in Historical Perspective, published by Teachers College Press in 1997.