Rigidity rather than responsiveness has increasingly become the norm.

In a McDonalds-style approach to education, efficiency and speed when serving the customer and demonstrating that the customer is being served through quick and demonstrable statistical results, is most important. A McDonalds-style institution must meet uniform standards, rather than create a shared 'meal' or experience -- this is the goal of the McDonald's enterprise, and sadly, far too many schools and school administrators and legislatures, in terms of how they measure student, classroom, and teacher performance.

As schools can exhibit some of the worst as well as the best qualities of bureaucracy, the McDonaldization or franchise, factory system of quality standardization must not hold sway. Ideally, an educational organization should be not a franchise, even a healthy franchise like Subway, but a learning organization. Learning organizations actively seek input from all involved parties, which in the case of the school, would...
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