Critics of choice argue that it will allow alert and aggressive parents to get the best of everything for their children, leaving poor and minority children concentrated in the worst schools. (Note 1) But choice is not the only mechanism whereby this occurs. Alert and aggressive parents work the bureaucracy to get the best for their children. Thus, choice programs should be compared against the real performance of the current public education system, not its idealized aspirations.

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Frontline professionals (classroom teachers and health and social services professionals) are faced with growing responsibility for implementing an increasing array of reform initiatives. These reforms often require significant changes in (a) governance and decision making; (b) curriculum, instruction, and assessment; and (c) health and social services. At the present time, this phenomenon has received little attention and is poorly understood. This article investigates what is known about the impact of each of these reforms on the working lives of frontline professionals, speculates about how these reforms might interact with each other as they converge on the school, and describes potential responses by frontline professionals. In conclusion, the authors propose three lines of inquiry that could inform policy makers as they respond to the needs of frontline professionals.