How Do Schools Evolve?

This chapter starts by discussing how organizations and individual human thinking evolve, looking at some of the forces in such evolutions. It then turns to the history of public education In the US, making the important point that any notion of universally successful public education is quite recent, and that major forces, both current and historical, act against major substantive change. The chapter ends with a discussion of the positive and negative aspects of charter schools when considered as possible elements of a strategy for dramatic change, either in what students learn or in how many of them master the curriculum.