Yet other critics will see contract schools as devices for segregation. Contract schools will not necessarily affect this one way or the other. The book's title reminds us how profoundly we are stuck even in the way we think about schooling and learning. We assume that formal education will be delivered by professionals working inside rectangular classrooms within buildings that together with similar buildings elsewhere in the community make up a system. We assume that such systems, whatever their size, are an important expression of democracy, reflecting the wishes of their communities.
Many districts are now enormous enterprises, enormously complex and thus rigid.
There are currently more children enrolled in the New York City public schools than there are citizens in Rhode Island. We find ourselves trapped by a conception of schools that is appealingly noble but demonstrably impractical. Hence this book's argument for reinvention. H ILL, Pierce, and Guthrie exhaustively describe how a contract system might work. They deal with the practicalities, knowing full well that to avoid them would allow the book to be dismissed as pie in the sky.