The Blackboard and the Bottom Line

Sharply relevant to our current preoccupations. [The Blackboard and the Bottom Line] is scholarly, well-documented, and shot through with a passion for community-based education. Very readable, and recommended. -- Michael Duffy * Times Educational Supplement * It's hardly a surprise that corporate leaders have spent more than a century trying to remake schools in their own companies' images so that they become more competitive, efficient, and productive. Of course, business has not always lived up to its own standards--think Detroit in the 1970s and Enron in the '90s. But as education historian Larry Cuban reveals in his captivating new book, this hasn't stopped businesspeople from insisting that they know best...Cuban is a former high school teacher and district superintendent who's now a professor emeritus of education at Stanford University, and he, like others of us in the profession, knows that the differences between businesses and schools are immense and often intractable...Cuban, in fact, does not want businesses to stay out of education but rather to show a great deal more humility in their involvement. They should stop asking how schools can be more like them and instead consider--especially in this era of rampant corporate corruption--the ways in which it's OK for schools to be different. -- David Ruenzel * Teacher Magazine *

Larry Cuban is Professor Emeritus of Education at Stanford University and past president of the American Educational Research Association.

Preface Introduction: Business and School Reform 1. The Logic of the Reforms 2. How the Reforms Have Changed Schools 3. Why Schools Have Adopted the Reforms 4. Limits to Business Influence 5. Are Public Schools like Businesses? 6. Has Business Influence Improved Schools? Notes Acknowledgments Index