ANTIPOLITICS, EDUCATION, AND INSTITUTIONAL CHOICE - THE FLIGHT FROM DEMOCRACY

Schools are expected to accomplish a variety of goals in modern societ ies, ranging from enhancing economic competitiveness to ensuring equal ity of opportunity to protecting students from AIDS. Increasing number s of education policy analysts of divergent political and scholarly pe rsuasions agree that under present arrangements for educational govern ance schools have failed to achieve crucial public purposes. Agreement that present arrangements have failed is inevitably accompanied by in tense disagreement about how schools should be governed, and it is the refore in the antipolitics of institutional choice that the main confl icts now emerge in the politics of education. Antipolitics is often as sociated with a willingness to dispense with democratic governance, in order to accomplish one or another of the public purposes to which sc hools are dedicated.