When nearly everybody agrees on something, it probably isn't so. Nearly everybody agrees: it's going to take a revolution to fix America's public schools. From the great national think tanks to the neighborhood PTA, the call to the barricades is being trumpeted. Louis V. Gerstner Jr., head of RJR Nabisco and one of the business leaders in education reform, proclaims the Noah Principle: "No more prizes for predicting rain. Prizes only for building arks. We've got to change whole schools and the whole school system." But it isn't so; most of that is just rhetoric. In the first place, nobody really wants a revolution. Revolution would mean junking the whole present structure of education overnight and inventing a new one from scratch, in the giddy conviction that anything must be an improvement—no matter what it costs in terms of untaught kids, wrecked careers, and doomed experiments. What these folks really want isn't revolution but major reform, changing the system radically but in an orderly fashion. The changes are supposed to be tested in large-scale pilot programs—Gertner's "arks"—and then installed nationally.

But even that is just a distant gleam in the eye and a dubious proposition too. There's nothing like a consensus even on designing those arks, let alone where they are supposed to come to ground. And anyone who has watched radical reforms in the real world has to be wary of them. Invariably, they take a long time and cost a great deal, and even so they fail more often than they succeed.

In organizations as in organisms, evolution works best a step at a time. The best and most natural changes come not in wholesale gulps, but in small bites. What the think-big reformers fail to acknowledge is that schools all over the country are changing all the time. From head-start programs to after-school big brother/big sister projects to self-esteem workshops, it's precisely these small-scale innovations and demonstration programs that are doing the job, in literally thousands of schools. Some of these efforts are only partly successful; some fail; some work small miracles. They focus varyingly on children, teachers, and parents, on methods of administration and techniques of teaching, on efforts to motivate kids and to teach values and to mobilize community support. Some are relatively expensive; others cost almost nothing. But all of them can be done—and have been done.

The important thing is that local schools aren't waiting for a revolution, or for gurus to decree the new model classroom from sea to shining sea. They are working out their own problems and making their own schools better. And anyone—teachers, parents, principals, school board members—anyone who cares enough and works hard enough can do the same.