How Two Scholars Wrote “Tinkering toward Utopia”*
Since leaving Arlington (VA) superintendency in 1981, I spent two decades at Stanford University thinking, teaching, and writing about school reform. I had the precious time to pursue policy and practice questions that I could not as a high school teacher and superintendent.
Why, for example, did the high school classrooms in which I sat in the late-1940s seem so similar to the ones I observed in the 1980s as a superintendent? Why do some reforms stick and others disappear like bird-tracks in sand? Why so much drama about getting new technologies in classrooms and so few teachers using devices? Why is it so hard to fundamentally change schools with large numbers of poor children? Why do schools focus on test scores rather than other, larger civic and social goals? These, and many more policy-driven questions, often requiring me to examine the past, were anchored in decades of classroom and administrative experiences.
In returning to Stanford after being superintendent, I easily resumed the connection I had forged with David Tyack
