ABSTRACT
A DECADE AGO, American education seemed on the verge of a renaissance commensurate to the era of progressivism of the 1920s and 1930s. Practical innovations dotted the landscape; experimentalism from Montessori to free schools, often student controlled, succeeded in forcing a modicum of school reform in the public sector from the outside. At the beginning of the 1970s, education officials in cities and towns throughout the country had decided that it was necessary to create alternative elementary and secondary schools within the established order. The motivating power for starting these programs was by no means altruistic or a far-sightedness by educational professionals. They were simply persuaded, either by the example of successful projects outside the system or the eloquence of educational planners and critics, that certain problems of the schools could at least be ameliorated, if not solved by educational innovations.
