ABSTRACT
But the point about rules, as Wittgenstein recognized and great artists might confirm, is that there are ways of following them which end up transforming them-that it is not just a choice between being inexorably coerced by them on the one hand, or being in a state of permanent anarchy on the other. (Eagleton, 1995)
Introduction
Although there is a voluminous literature on school reform not much of it examines the regulatory aspects. The statutes and regulations, which were essential for many reforms to proceed, have been of peripheral interest to researchers. Most contemporary reform is based on quite distinctive regulatory strategies: the imposition and adoption of new rules, exemption from official rules, or a combination of both. Further, as I have illustrated in Chapter 2, the new statutes that underpin the reforms usually precipitate a landslide of subsidiary rules which somehow have to be meshed with massive collectivities of existing rules. Rule changes are an integral part of reform attempts.
