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Exhibitions: Facing Outward, Pointing Inward

Author(s): Joe McDonald Ordering Information

The Exhibitions work at Sullivan and English high schools, briefly described in this article, is more fully explored in Graduation by Exhibition: Assessing Genuine Achievement by Joseph McDonald, Sidney Smith, Dorothy Turner, Marian Finney & Eileen Barton (Alexandria, VA: Association of Supervision & Curriculum Development, 1992).

It is an old American habit to imagine utopia in the abstract, then search for the instrument -the policy, the remedy, the technology -that might yield it up quickly. But it is just as old an American habit to start more concretely -with images of a Black man voting, of an Appalachian child eating, of a woman fire-fighter working -then strive, over the long haul, to connect these images and bring them to life.

When it comes to the utopian prospect of creating new schools for the twenty-first century, we in the Coalition of Essential Schools try hard to stick to the second path. Our reason is as pragmatic as it is principled: in school reform, the first path generally offers a fool's journey (Cohen & Ball, 1990; Elmore & McLaughlin, 1988).1 So, for example, the quick instruments of the 1980s -longer school days and years, more testing of teachers and kids, more course requirements for high schools -seem to have made things worse (Brown, 1991; Timar & Kirp, 1989). Meanwhile, the patient striving of some of the original members of the Coalition of Essential Schools -a creature as well of the 1980s -has turned scanty images of possibility into remarkable schools. These are schools that scout the future -schools like Deborah Meier's Central Park East Secondary School in New York City and Dennis Littky's Thayer High School in Winchester, New Hampshire (Wood, 1992).

Now, at the start of the 1990s, the lure of the quicker path again threatens the capacity of policymakers to focus on the long haul. Thus our schools face a number of proposals that mean to drive instruction. These proposals all involve assessment, and sometimes what is called alternative or authentic assessment. Their proponents suggest that clever instruments might be capable of directing schools toward worthy ends -yielding in a stroke the utopia of excellence and equity that many of us seek. Give schools the right test, so the argument goes, and the other elements of new school design will align like metal filaments to a magnet.

Unfortunately, the argument is more attractive than persuasive. It ignores the fact that schools are exceedingly complex organisms, responsive only in perverse ways to outside driving. This is especially true when the driver aims to enhance accountability (Madaus, 1985; Darling-Hammond and Ascher, 1991). Real accountability depends in the end on the resolution of school people to awaken to the effects of regularities that suppress their own best instincts, to come to terms with what Theodore R. Sizer (1990) has called the "essential dailiness of school" -its numbing habit of self-absorption and its preoccupation with simply churning on. One cannot be driven to such mindfulness; one can only be coached into it. Assessment can play an important role in the effort, but only if it aims to point out continually what schools might otherwise overlook to the detriment of their real mission. What is wanted is an assessment system perched powerfully within the school itself and just above the school's other systems -one that from its perch might direct these other systems toward kids rather than toward their own smooth running. This is what the Coalition of Essential Schools means by exhibitions.

Ted Sizer (1984, 1992) reached all the way back to the eighteenth century in search of an assessment mechanism that might function in this way. He found at least the possibility of it in a ubiquitous feature of the early American academies and of the common schools that shared their era. The exhibition, as practiced then, was an occasion of public inspection when some substantial portion of a school's constituency might show up to hear students recite, declaim, or otherwise perform.2 The constituency might thereby satisfy itself that the year's public funds or tuitions had been well spent and that some cohort of young scholars was now ready to move on or out. There is evidence that this satisfaction came cheap. Arthur Powell, who has studied the matter, once told me that the exhibition as practiced in its own time was frequently little more than public entertainment é the equivalent of Friday night football in Odessa, Texas. Wayne Fuller's (1982, p. 212) account captures the flavor:

"Through the years the rural people responded to these exhibitions with enthusiasm. On cold winter evenings, at Christmas time or at the close of the winter term of school, when the snow still blanketed the schoolyard, they crowded into the little schoolhouse and watched their children perform by the light of the kerosene lamps that cast shadows and an almost eerie orange light about the room. And for the school picnic and exhibition that closed the spring term of school, they brought an abundance of food to the schoolhouse or the grove of trees by the river for the noonday meal and prepared to spend the day talking to their neighbors and watching the exhibition in the afternoon."

For his part, Sizer imagined this old design in something more contemporary than kerosene light; still, he prized its history and aimed to use it to help displace more recent historical influences on the design of the American high school. These are especially the ones that have lent the high school its division of knowledge into subjects, time into Carnegie units, and kids into tracks (Sizer, 1984, 1992; Powell, Farrar, & Cohen, 1985; Hampel, 1986). Features of the exhibition, as Sizer projected them, run counter to these powerful norms: a suggestion that high school kids, like doctoral students, might qualify for graduation on the basis of some integrative performance; that they might attempt this performance when they were well enough prepared to attempt it, rather than on some fixed schedule; and that they might all be required to do it well, without regard to someone's perception of their abilities, career prospects, or socio-economic status. Together with a number of imaginative school people -like Meier, Littky, and Samuel Billups (of Walbrook High School, Baltimore, Maryland), to name a few of the pioneers of the mid-1980s -and scholars like Arthur Powell (1986) and Grant Wiggins (1988), Sizer launched a theoretical and practical adventure with exhibitions that continues today in the Coalition of Essential Schools.

Exhibitions and Accountability

The exhibition is a device with two related functions -one facing outward and the other pointing inward. It yields accountability in the terms that Linda Darling-Hammond and Carol Ascher (1991) promote: accountability as the product of commitments, policies, and practices designed to press kids toward meaningful achievement and to feed back whatever information the school needs to ensure the success it intends. So the exhibition at its best aims to answer two complexly intertwined questions: What can these kids do now that I've taught them? What can I learn from what they show me?

Facing Outward

There is no more powerful agent of accountability than kids themselves -performing live more or less as the school intended that they should. But this power of live performance depends on having a local audience to assess the rich information it yields, an audience that consists of more than the individual teacher in the privacy of his or her classroom. When kids must show what they know and what they have learned in face-to-face meetings with those who have not taught them but who share an interest in their success, then a certain pitch of accountability can be reached that otherwise is never possible. Of course, accountability systems must transcribe performance into scores or other notation, so that kids' progress may be followed over time and so that others who cannot attend live performances may be informed of kids' standing. But today, most accountability systems provide the transcription without any access to the performance for which it is supposed to stand. One consequence of this is that some among the public come to suspect that the tran-scription may be groundless.

According to the annual Gallup poll of Americans' attitudes toward schooling (Elam, Rose & Gallup, 1991), most who are suspicious in this way exempt their own school from the suspicion, and so the politics of accountability tend to collect at the state and national levels rather than at the local one. Yet a closer reading of the most recent poll suggests that this exemption is at best an ambivalent one. It is true that 42 percent of respondents assigned the grade of A or B to their local public schools, while only 21 percent assigned these grades to the public schools nationally. Meanwhile, however, a whopping 81 percent would impose national achievement standards and goals on their local schools, 77 percent would require them to use standardized national tests to assess their community's kids, and 68 percent would have their local schools follow a national curriculum. If there is so much local satisfaction, how come these other figures? My answer is that most local communities trust their local educators é urban communities notably excepted -but nonetheless yearn for reassurance in such uncertain times. In the Coalition of Essential Schools, we think this reassurance may best be supplied by means of public access to live performance. Exhibitions can provide such access.3 When they do, we say that they face outward.

Of course, the politics of accountability (including the demands for national testing, national curriculum, and so on) are fueled by more than local concerns. An important factor too is the (well- founded) suspicion on other levels that many local schools and, indeed, many local communities have at best an inchoate sense of twenty-first-century standards. Some schools and communities clearly still care more that their kids spell well or memorize the list of state capitals than that they acquire intellectually powerful habits of mind. This fact -clearly not in the national interest -emboldens some critics, scholars, and policymakers to suggest that real local needs -as contrasted with perceived ones -may indeed be better attended to on some "higher" than local level.

In the Coalition of Essential Schools, however, we object to this conclusion on both ethical and political grounds. To us, it seems right to begin the work of ratcheting up expectations on the local level, since expectations are invariably entangled with values, and values legitimately vary somewhat from one American community to another. It may also be politically prudent, since these values often vary in explosively political ways. Moreover, if we are right about the sub-stantial role played in the politics of accountability by local yearning for it -if, indeed, people do want to see their kids' achievement for them-selves, despite their apparent satisfaction with local schools -then they will be no more satisfied by individual profiles from a redesigned National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) or by criterion-based scores on a voluntary national exam or state-scored portfolio than they are satisfied now by report cards and Lake Wobegon statistics.

This is not to deny that parents also want to know how their kids stack up against other kids within the school, in the next town or state, even in other countries. Nor is it to argue against new roles for NAEP or against other national assessment efforts or state monitoring and moderating. Sensible accountability policy for the 1990s and beyond may well require imaginative expansion in each of these areas, and it must come to terms with what I would argue are the extraordinarily comparative concerns of this generation of parents.4 On the other hand, attention to these things can easily diminish accountability rather than enhance it. This will happen especially if attention to individual student assessment displaces all attention to the quality of schools' efforts to press for achievement and if local schools are to be perceived as the mere collectors of accountability data rather than as the heart of the accountability system (Darling- Hammond and Ascher, 1991).

By contrast, in the Coalition of Essential Schools we imagine a nationwide accountability that is rooted in local efforts to press hard and to take stock, supported and monitored by district and state, fed by perspectives on achievement and equity that are developed and refined on the national level. Such a system would require of each school that it open itself to inspection, report annually to its community like a corporation to its stockholders, disclose what all its indicators of achievement reveal. These indicators should include not only common measures like attendance and drop-out rates and comparative achievement data, but uncommon ones like longitudinal indicators of achievement and the living evidence of the school's current candidates for graduation showing their stuff in exhibitions and standing for public examination.

Pointing Inward

Besides helping schools face outward, exhibitions at their best also point inward. Darling-Hammond and Ascher (1991) assert that accountability depends ultimately not only on a school's responsiveness to its constituencies but also on its capacity to generate and act upon information regarding its own inner workings. Some schools within the Coalition of Essential Schools have recently dis-covered the power of exhibitions in this respect. Prominent among these are the schools that approached restructuring from the "end" rather than the "front."

While many member schools have tied their innovations to a pioneer cohort moving ahead grade by grade or to a pilot project designed to get the kinks out of a structural innovation and then expand it, "end-first" schools have often dared to establish exhibition systems right away. These systems vary in design from school to school -creatures of the institutional forces, histories, and personalities that have built them. But in each case, they offer the school more than a showcase for outcomes. They also offer a perspective, previously unavailable, on the systems that produced these outcomes of an innovation. And they offer a means for the school to take stock. One can think of them as a kind of platform -one that serves as a stage for student performance and, in another respect, as a school's lookout on its own systems. By means of such platforms, schools may see the real effects of their current work and also adjust the work's dynamics so as to ensure better effects in the future. The Coalition calls this process "planning backwards," which is to say, orienting a school by the compass of its graduates' performance (McDonald, 1991).

Two Platforms for Planning Backwards

One member of the Coalition, Sullivan High School in Chicago, requires that all its seniors (152 last year) demonstrate their ability to engage thoughtfully with difficult texts by participating successfully in a ninety-minute seminar on several such texts, then writing an acceptable essay on the ideas embedded in the texts. This is the platform. Its construction owes much to the influence on the school of Mortimer Adler's (1982) Paideia Proposal.5 It has a simple design, but one that has had more than an additive impact on the rest of the school's structures. For one thing, the whole faculty is involved in leading the seminars and scoring the seniors' participation, in coaching the seniors during the two weeks they have to grapple with such texts as Freud's "Why War?" and Thucydides' "Melian Dialogue," and in scoring the essays. Thus, the whole faculty feels pressure to understand the scoring rubrics and the pedagogy that underlies them and to practice this pedagogy in their classes regardless of grade and subject.

Initially, this pedagogy was widely practiced only in the school's Paideia Impact Program - a magnet program within the larger school. In insisting on the establishment of the schoolwide seminar- exhibition, Principal Robert Brazil in effect mandated the extension of this program schoolwide. He entrusted the implementation of the mandate, however, to an influential group of teachers. The consequence was that the mandate stimulated rather than quashed professional esteem. So far, the effort has led to peer-training mechanisms in seminar-based and writing instruc-tion, to scheduling changes that allow weekly double blocks for seminars and team-teaching, to new forums for school governance, to more experimentation with coaching as a method of teaching, and to design efforts aimed at requiring a senior project in math and science to complement the senior seminar.

Another school in the Coalition, Boston's English High School, designed a different platform, the product of what might be called the principal's epiphany. Sid Smith found himself one graduation day handing out diplomas to several kids who he knew could not adequately read and write, but who had nonetheless completed graduation require- ments. The next year, he and the faculty instituted a new graduation requirement: in addition to earning a certain number of course credits, every senior must write a "position paper" that demonstrates a capacity to think through a complex issue, back up an opinion with reasoning and reference, and do it in writing that is persuasive and free of error.

From this simple platform English High has learned to see itself more clearly and to wonder productively about what it sees. Why is it that some kids formerly graduated without being able to do what the position paper demands? How often in ninth-grade courses, for example, are kids required to take positions and defend them orally and in writing? How much classroom time is instead dominated by teachers' talking and kids' one-word responses to their questions?

This seeing and wondering have led to a number of changes, present and prospective: peer-training mechanisms again, greater collaboration across subjects and grades, introduction of coaching mechanisms to supplement direct and whole-class instruction, and exploration of emerging technology to provide students richer and more independent access to information. Another result has been some elaboration of the original platform: the addition of a "defense" to the paper requirement, the addition of earlier paper requirements at each grade level, attempts to introduce quantitative thinking into the papers and the defenses, a design effort aimed at supplementing the paper requirement with various project requirements.

It is important to note that exhibitions worked no magic in either of these cases: these platforms were designed to be instruments of leadership, not salvation. It is also important to note that this leadership originated with the principals in both cases but soon became collective.

What Exhibitions Point To

Exhibitions that sit on such good platforms as the two described above tend to point to or highlight five different dimensions of school life, each of which constitutes a crucial arena for school reform.

Results and Goals

First and fundamentally, exhibitions like the two above point to results, the live results of kids performing -a record more startling in its impact than letters on a transcript or deviations from the norm of a standardized achievement test. The tonic is bracing for an enterprise used to indecipherable effects, one tuned more to process than product. Inattentive to live results, schools adjust easily to the grip of their own running on, where what matters most is to keep moving, where achieve-ment is measured in time served. Confronted by results, schools may reflect on the efficacy of the systems that produce these results.

Next, and also fundamentally, exhibitions point to goals. This is also a bracing tonic. Although talk of goals typically fills many hours of the professional education of teachers, goals in practice are commonly secret and indistinct, as Powell (1986, p. 64) suggests:6

A certain vagueness about desired outcomes has been found useful by teachers for many different reasons. Individual teachers often have their own goals. Working on them privately is one dimension of professional independence. Working on them collaboratively is often regarded as unwanted intrusiveness. Teachers, in addition, often resist too much "outcome specification" because of its reductionist implications. They argue that, in general education as distinct from skill training, the unpredictability of many outcomes is inevit-able and desirable. Moreover, some fear that too much specification might lead either to unacceptable failure rates or unacceptably low minimum standards. Vagueness and individual autonomy regarding assessment prevent these undesirable results.

In the absence of professionally articulated goals, others slip in. These typically apply differentially to kids. The most salient for some may be getting a "4" on the AP English exam and an admission letter to Stanford, while those for peers down the hall may be getting "through" high school with minimal reading skills and no more pregnancy. Because exhibitions by design involve all the school's candidates for graduation and occupy a sphere of school life apart from -though related to -patterns of instruction, they have a power little evident elsewhere in high school to point out the intellectual shallowness of such aims as these, as well as the severe discrepancy between them. They may prompt a school to ask itself what really matters -what all kids should know and be able to do to live well in the American twenty-first century. One benefit of asking such a good question is that it may well direct the questioner to the counsel of interested outsiders. In the best of circumstances, these will include not only parents, partisans of local culture, and the local business community, but also those more remotely outside -scholars in the disciplines, others with articulate views of the economic, cultural, political, and moral national interest.

Professional Development

In pointing to results and goals, exhibitions implicitly alert us to the prevalence of the "fudge factor" in schooling, the tendency not to worry about results and goals. The fudge factor is a predictable effect of the uncertainties that fill a teaching life and of a chronic habit within the discourse about schooling to discount these uncertainties (Cohen, 1988; McDonald, 1992). Many speak about teaching as if teachers could and should work like technicians é diagnosing problems, applying solutions. But this way of working is really impossible in teaching, where so much depends upon the volatility of interpersonal relations and the complexity of human understanding.

On the other hand, setting schoolwide goals, taking collective responsibility to reach them, and honestly facing results are powerful means for coping with uncertainty. But they are aspects of craft rather than of technology. They invite teachers to value teaching as something more than the application of other people's inventions é indeed, to appreciate it as the workshop of their own inventions. In an important sense, exhibitions may be said, therefore, to point to the responsibility of every school to pursue the professional development of its faculty within the fabric of school life rather than outside it. An exhibition platform may be said to work well to the extent that its features provide teachers with opportunities, for example, to collaborate with colleagues as well as outsiders in the design of prompts and scoring rubrics and other materials, to collaborate also in the establishment and maintenance of standards, and to tinker as needed with the operating systems of the school. As every teacher knows who has ever enjoyed such oppor-tunities at work, these constitute the best professional development available.

Standards and New Ways of Teaching

Schools that dare to set up platforms for exhibitions commit themselves to prepare all their students to perform upon these platforms in some manner that exceeds the ordinarily minimalist focus of the high school -where persistence alone counts most heavily. In fact, people associated with the Coalition of Essential Schools often speak of exhibitions as "demonstrations of mastery." But what is mastery, after all? When is a particular performance good enough, and when is it not? And how can a school reliably equate "good enough" across the performances of many kids engaging many different tasks over the course of many years? These are questions of standards, and exhibitions invariably point them out.

Schools that wrestle with standards typically begin by building internal mechanisms for teachers to talk with each other about the quality of student work. This is a crucial first step, though it is not enough by itself. The maintenance of high standards in school also depends on teachers' access and openness to outside exper-tise. Because many exhibition platforms insist that the student-exhibitors forage for information and insight beyond school walls, the faculty that judges their work must be willing also to distrust the sufficiency of inside resources -including the resources available from their own previous learning. So exhibitions may be said to point to a different conception of teaching than that represented in the prevalent metaphor of teaching as the delivery-of-instruction.

People in the Coalition often use the alternative metaphor of teaching as coaching, but the word may be too familiar to do justice to the sense I mean. Teachers who prepare kids to write position papers, for example, and who support them in the writing, must be themselves prepared to function as orienteers to territories of knowledge they know little or nothing about, as advisors to students whose chief intellectual mentors on particular projects are outsiders the teacher does not even know, as experts on the process of knowing rather than on its sub-stance. Teachers who prepare students to undertake senior projects of significant scope and depth must learn to teach more frequently in ways that give even their youngest students practice in staking out and managing their own learning initia-tives and in planning and performing whole routines. Trained and socialized in the pedagogy of the dole, teachers can have a hard time figuring out how to teach under these new circumstances -how to let go enough while still providing safe boun-daries, how to help without directing, how to distinguish a timely intervention from a controlling one, and so on.

Nature of Knowledge and Learning

Exhibitions also tend to point to new conceptions of what knowledge is and of how minds may grasp it. Because exhibitions are integrative acts, often calling upon a candidate for graduation to synthesize what he or she has learned in more than one domain and put it to use, they highlight a view of knowledge as integrated perception, cognition, and use. This view happens to coincide with that of contemporary learning theorists as to how knowledge may best be acquired; that is, by active contact with it in context and use. Resnick (1987), for example, argues that the legacy of early twentieth-century psychology in decomposing and decontextualizing knowledge for better delivery has handicapped teachers and learners alike.

The challenge of undoing this legacy, however, is daunting. At issue is not just the organization of teaching into rational surveys and stepwise experience, but also the division of the curriculum into mutually exclusive subjects and the ten-dency of schools to ignore habits and skills that transcend this division. At their best, exhibitions point all this out. To address the question "How pure is Baltimore's water?" (as one exhibitor at Walbrook High School recently did), one may reason-ably explore chemistry, engineering, biology, geology, politics, public health, public policy in general, and even history, literature, philosophy, and the arts. And to address the question well, one will have to know how to do some things that are the province of none of these subjects alone -for example, how to use a question like a searchlight and like a knife, how to keep track of emerging insight, how to find out what you need from people and books that go way over your head, how to work your way out of intellectual and emotional cul-de-sacs, and so on.

Incentives and Means

Having managed to pull together a vision of what it wishes its students to become, the school that dares to plan backwards from exhibitions must also consider how it can help these students make that vision their own. In effect, the exhibition is a kind of compact by which school and student agree to work toward this vision. It points the way. The way can hardly be found, however, unless the student shares the vision, sees what is pointed out. So the school must confront some questions that most schools never confront: How should the school portray for kids what it hopes they will become? How can they ensure that such images will be compelling and empowering rather than threatening? How much student voice will the school admit to the process of inventing and discussing these images? How can the school ensure that the images honor rather than stigmatize difference? What benchmarks for growth should the school provide, and how can they be provided so that kids will take them as encouraging rather than discouraging?

Such questions arise outside the ordinary conception of school as a processing machine. They suggest an alternative conception in which schools and kids collaborate on the terms of their engagement with each other. They also provoke healthy skepticism about the traditional means of instruction. If what is wanted is kids who think things through, write well, speak persuasively, act with confidence, work well with others, trust their intuitions, and so on, how much practice with these things can they gain by sitting silently in large groups most of their days? So exhibitions point to other means é projects, advisory groups, coaching groups, seminars, studios, workshops, school governance mechanisms, mentorships and apprenticeships outside the walls of the school, and so on.

It just so happens that most of these other means implicitly require that the school invent better custodial arrangements than the one prevalent now -the one that requires that kids sit continuously in small desks with a teacher's eye on them. Thus, exhibitions ultimately point schools toward a reconsideration of what Seymour Sarason (1982) calls the "constitution" of schooling. This is perhaps the most important pointing, the one that may, if we're lucky, give us genuine school reform in the 1990s rather than some other false image of it. As Sarason (1982, 1990) suggests, our persistent failure to restructure the power relations of schooling foretells our failure to achieve any other kind of meaningful restructuring. What we need are schools that are genuine communities where the authority to maintain norms of personal and intellectual respect is diffusely shared and where habits of decency run deep.

References

Adler, M. (1982). The Paideia Proposal. New York: Macmillan.

Brazil, R. D. (1988). The Engineering of the Paideia Proposal: The First Year, 1984-1985. Champaign, IL: School Design Group.

Brown, R. G. (1991). Schools of Thought. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Cohen, D. K. (1988). "Teaching Practice: Plus Que ca Change." In Contributing to Educational Change, P. W. Jackson (Ed.), pp. 27þ84. Berkeley, CA: McCutchan.

Cohen, D. K. & Ball, D. L. (1990). "Policy and practice: An overview," Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis 12, 233-239.

Darling-Hammond, L. & Ascher, C. (1991). Creating Accountability in Big City School Systems. New York: Teachers College, Columbia; ERIC Clearinghouse on Urban Education.

Elam, S. M., Rose, L. C., & Gallup, A. M. (1991). "The 23rd Annual Gallup Poll of the Public's Attitudes toward the Public Schools," Phi Delta Kappan 73 (1), 41þ56.

Elmore, R. F. & McLaughlin, M. W. (1988). Steady Work: Policy, Practice, and the Reform of American Education. Santa Monica, CA: Rand.

Fuller, Wayne E. (1982). The Old Country School: The Story of Rural Education in the Middle West. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Hampel, R. (1986). The Last Little Citadel. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Kraushoar, O. F. (1976). Private Schools: From the Puritans to the Present. Bloomington, IN: Phi Delta Kappa Educational Foundation.

Madaus, G. F. (1985). "Test Scores as Administrative Mechanisms in Educational Policy," Phi Delta Kappan 66, 611-617.

McDonald, J. P. (1991). "Dilemmas of Planning Backwards," Studies in Exhibitions, No. 3. Coalition of Essential Schools, Brown University, Providence, RI. (published in Teachers College Record, Fall 1992).

McDonald, J. P. (1992). Teaching: Making Sense of an Uncertain Craft. New York: Teachers College Press.

Powell, A. (1986). "Exhibitions of Mastery: Some Preliminary Considerations." Research paper prepared for the Coalition of Essential Schools, Brown University, Providence RI.

Powell, A., Farrar, E. & Cohen, D. (1985). The Shopping Mall High School. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Resnick, L. B. (1987). "Learning In School and Out," Educational Researcher 16 (9), 13-20.

Sarason, S. (1982). The Culture of School and the Problem of Change, 2nd ed. Boston: Allyn & Bacon.

Sarason, S. (1990). The Predictable Failure of Educational Reform. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Sizer, T. (1964). The Age of the Academies. New York: Teachers College Press.

Sizer, T. (1990). "Assessment: A Cautionary Meditation from the Schools." Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Boston.

Sizer, T. (1984). Horace's Compromise: The Dilemma of the American High School. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Sizer, T. (1992). Horace's School: Redesigning the American High School. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Timar, T. & Kirp, D. (1989). "Education Reform in the 1980's: Lessons from the States." Phi Delta Kappan 70 (6), 505-511.

Wiggins, G. (1988). "The 'Exhibitions' Project." Research paper prepared for the Coalition of Essential Schools, Brown University, Providence RI.

Wood, G. (1992). Schools That Work. New York: Dutton.

Footnotes

1. One may distinguish these paths by saying that the first is for those who think the end of the revolution is near at hand, while the second is for those who want to start a revolution. Cohen (1988, pp. 53-54) suggests how such a difference in perspective may account for the difference in approach: The early work calls for exploration of alternatives, invention of many forms knowing that only a few may succeed, experimentation, and creation of examples that suggest the possibilities of change. . . . But at the end of a long revolution there is little time for exploration, experimentation, and invention. The top priorities are to take possession of disputed institutions, to consolidate power and ideology, and to dispose of old enemies.
2. The heyday of the academies and their exhibitions was the mid- nineteenth century, just before the rise of the high school. Thereafter, many disappeared, though some were transformed into colleges (Mt. Holyoke, Washington and Lee) or normal schools, and some lived on (the Phillips Academies, Emma Willard School). The academies overall had some of the characteristics current radical choice advocates desire: a mingling of private and public funding, great varieties of aim and form, grassroots responsiveness to the "market" of their time, and a diverse clientele. On the other hand, they also had some of the characteristics that opponents of radical choice plans fear: transience of all sorts, an abundance of poorly qualified teachers, and highly uneven programs (Sizer, 1964; Kraushoar, 1976).
3. There are certainly other mechanisms that might also provide the needed access. One, for example, might involve an American variation on Her Majesty's Inspectorate, the 150-year-old British institution that renders independent and thoughtful accounts of life in schools for the benefit of policymakers and the public.
4. My argument is that this parental generation, the baby-boom bulge, is projecting its own experience of intense competition in all spheres of life -schooling, employment opportunity, real estate, etc. -onto a generation that is demographically quite different and unlikely to experience anything like the competition their parents face.
5. Sullivan's principal, Robert Brazil, who is director of the Paedeia Institute of Chicago, has written a book that explores the application of Adler's concepts to a city high school. See Brazil (1988).
6. This section is indebted to Powell's essay, which, as he put it, mapped the territory of exhibitions. My sense of that territory, six years later, is only a little different from his.

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