Hidden Motives: the elite nature of school reform in the Houston Independent School District
The best study of school reform in Houston is Donald R. McAdams' Fighting to Save our Schools…and winning: Lessons from Houston about the decade of the 1990's. McAdams and Dr. Rod Paige were the leading reformers and their base of support was the corporate community. Together, these folks represented a Republican takeover of a big city school district.
The main objectives of the nineties reformers were decentralizing management and contacting out-policies that sound good on paper but make little impact in schools and classrooms.
While businessmen, particularly the Texas types, pretend to be down to earth and practical, the reforms they pursued in the nineties were as pie in the sky, and as removed from classroom realities, as anything college professors could have produced.