Blog Assignment #4 (2/19)

Management is still taught in most business schools as a bundle of techniques, such as budgeting and personnel relations. To be sure, management, like any other work, has it's own tools and it's own techniques. But just as the essence of medicine is not urinalysis - important though that is - the essence of management is not techniques and procedures. The essence of management is to make knowledge productive. Management, in other words, is a social function. And in it's practice, management is truly a liberal art.
The old communities - family, village, parish, and so one - have all but disappeared in the knowledge society. Their place has largely been taken by the new unit of social integration: the organization. Where community was fate, organization is voluntary membership. Where community claimed the entire person, organization is a means to a person's ends; a tool. For 200 years a hot debate has been raging, especially in the West; are communities organic or are they simply extensions of the people of which they are made? Nobody would claim that the new organization is organic. It is clearly an artifact, a creation of man, a social technology.

The charter school movement is not yet big. Just 11 states, beginning with Minnesota in 1991, have passed laws permitting the creation of autonomous public schools like Northland; a dozen more have similar laws in the works. Most states have restricted the number of these schools - 100 in California, 25 in Massachusetts - in an attempt to appease teacher's unions and other opponents. Nevertheless, the charter movement is being heralded as the latest and best hope for a public education system that has failed to delivery for too many children and cannot compete internationally.
A handful of other places - notably Baltimore, Maryland and Hartford, Connecticut - are experimenting with a far more radical way to circumvent bureaucracy: hiring a for-profit company to run the schools.