In her 1992 book, S.O.S.: Sustain Our Schools, educator Patricia Albjerg Graham concludes that American business is in the best position to assume the leadership mantle of advocacy for education. She arrives at this conclusion by noting that families may not be the most effective and powerful advocates for their own children; that children, most certainly, do not have the power to do so; and that government, usually assumed to be the advocate for the people, works best when impelled by advocate groups. It is in the self-interest of business itself, she argues, that children receive the best education possible.
In so framing her book's discussion that it reaches this conclusion, Ms. Graham touches upon one of the mainstream issues of American education, an issue that began with the expressed opinions of Thomas Jefferson to his fellow Founding Fathers and continue to be argued to this day: that is, the basic concept of whether or not there should be public education at all.
Most certainly, Graham's argument for business involvement rests upon the assumption that everyone in the United States has the right to an education; she was, after all, the director of the National Institute of Education during two years of the Carter Administration. Graham's thesis begins with disillusionment in the status quo, citing the need for educational reform and four reasons for the dire contemporary situation:
1) Fundamental changes in attitude and action by many segments of American society are required . . .
2) . . . there have been few positive incentives for schools or school systems as a whole to improve and even fewer sanctions if they did not.
3) Third, the impetus to change languishes because despite the rhetorical exuberance about education, for most people it is their third or fourth priority . . .
4) Fourth, change comes slowly because educators have not been forceful about improving our schools or about building suppo...