Business Calls for Educational Improvements

Abstract

Boston business leaders early in the twentieth century won substantial control over the Boston schools for the decade 1906 until 1915. Businessman James Jackson Storrow and Superintendent Stratton Brooks managed the Boston school system like a corporation.¹ But business dominance over Boston ward politics did not survive the decade. For the next sixty years, politicians ran the schools as a public employment “jobs” system. Was it possible for Boston’s business leaders in the 1970s to reverse the tide and make schools respond to the needs of children, parents, and employers? Was the desegregation suit a detriment, or stimulus to corporate participation and voice?