ABSTRACT
The urgency of closing the gap between serious social problems and the organization of schools and other social service agencies is so painfully obvious that it has become headline material in the US daily newspapers. Before an effective response to these failures can be developed, however, it is important to diagnose their causes appropriately. The most serious problems are characteristically systemic in character, not a priori the result of personal failures on the part of teachers or other service agency staff workers. Once an organization stops working, it begins to encourage dull, routinized procedures, and individual staff efforts are hampered by the organizational structures within which they work. Problems we know how to treat are ‘slipping between the tracks’ of a system we do not know how to organize and manage.
