The Business Agenda and School Reform: A Case Study of Charlotte, North Carolina

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The project examines one community's efforts to reform local education in light of the business critique of public schools. the research draws upon three distinct bodies of scholarship and theory: the nature and process of school reform, the relationship between workforce skills and economic productivity, and student resistance to schooling. Extending the principal investigator's previous NSF funded study of these topics in one community, Charlotte, North Carolina. The study has three main goals: (1) to identify the local labor force needs and to assess to what extent the available workforce, especially noncollege-bound entry-level workers, currently meets these needs; (2) to identify and describe the actual reforms enacted in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school District since the late 1980s and to evaluate the effects of the reforms with particular attention to the business critique of schooling vis-a-vis workforce preparation, any overall improvement in educational quality, and the educational equity effects of the reforms for diverse populations of students in the district; and (3) to assess adolescents' awareness of the labor force opportunities which await them and to model ho these perceptions shape their high school performance. the significance of this research lies in its uniqueness. since the 1980s, the vocal and active business community has articulated its concerns that schools remedy this situation. since then the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools have undergone massive restructuring No other study of business-inspired school reform has holistically examined restructuring, through the reform process, to an assessment of the outcomes of the reforms. Moreover, rarely does any analysis of reforms as to their view of the relationship between schooling and work and the role these perceptions play in their high school performance. thus, Charlotte can serve as a strategic site or a critical case study for an exploration of these issues.