The personal computer is the latest educational technology to fall short of its original promise. Although U.S. public schools now possess 5.8 million computers, roughly one for every nine students, they are not widely used in classroom instruction. Why not? This article argues that the most popular explanations mistakenly fix blame on recalcitrant bureaucracies and stubborn teachers. By enlisting technology in the cause of educational reform, computer advocates overlook some of the real obstacles to the use of computers in classrooms, obstacles rooted in organizational constraints of the school system and the nature of teachers' and students' work.

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Recent studies indicate that Americans have lost faith in public schools. Polls trace a steady decline of confidence in the educational system, a decline extending over the past two decades. The general trend masks two anomalies, howevez. First,

Charter schools are publicly funded schools of choice operating free of state regulation and independent of local school districts. Twenty-nine states have enacted laws establishing charter schools since 1991. Nationwide, an estimated 700 charter schools have opened their doors and hundreds more are planned This study examines the organizational and political obstacles encountered by "start-from-scratch" charter schools. We analyze what these challenges mean for individual charter schools, the charter school experiment in general, and the state's policy role in governing these new institutions.

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