The limited value of planning in education: Getting back to the basics isn't all about curriculum

Abstract

In these times of tight budgets and political intolerance for taxation, public schools, particularly urban public schools, will continually have to look for ways in which to spend less while dealing with ever-increasing societal problems. While the ability of schools to improve the overall "product" with less resources is highly suspect, this article addresses one way in which spending less might actually improve school performance.The best planners in the best schools should be the administration, teachers, students, parents, and the community at large, and not outside experts hired to improve a school's "comprehensive" or "strategic" plan. By forcing the segments of the public that have the largest stake in the educational outcomes of schools to work together to plan for the future, schools will improve the efficacy of their staffs, their students, and allow parents the self-satisfaction of playing an important role in their children's education. An important side effect of such a method may be an increasing awareness by the public of the difficulties that schools face, and perhaps a better understanding of the important need for higher expenditures."The truly educated person should understand how ambiguous are the goals of education, and how complex the means to be used to reach those goals" (Reich, 1989, p. 96). Different school districts and even different schools within the same district often have vastly different goals and vastly different personnel. It seems logical, then, that future planning that fairly and accurately understands the needs of a given district should come from within. Nevertheless, despite the ambiguity of the goals and the complexity of the means, many school systems have hired, at no small expense, outside planning organizations and/or individual planners. These outside planners are then expected to present