comed the Racial Imbalance Act passed by the state legislature in 1965 as an opportunity to modernize the city's school system. Businessmen and their allies dominated the Citywide Coordinating Council, appointed by Judge Arthur Garrity in 1975 as the "eyes and ears of the court," when his ambitious plan for desegregation began to run into fierce popular opposition. ^* The Globe described the Coordinating Council as a "mixture of community people, clergy, educators and businessmen," which promised to provide the kind of "positive, representative, credible" leadership the city had lacked in the recent past. A prominent member of the Coordinating Council, President Kenneth Ryder of Northeastern University, said that it stood for "intelligence, professionalism, absence of political considerations."

From the beginning, the civic elite took the position that good schools would bring professionals back into the city, generate tax revenues, and train the skilled work force required by the new high-tech economy. According to a report issued by the Ford Foundation in 1965, improvement of public education was a "prerequisite for holding the middle class in the city." James M. Howell, a senior vice-president of the First National Bank, spelled out the familiar rationale for school reform: a new emphasis on "marketable skills"; "innovative pilot projects" designed to link "education to job markets"; increased attention to "skills that reflect the technical orientation of area business firms." Robert Wood, president of the University of Massachusetts and chairman of the Coordinating Council, endorsed the goal of "programs that fit the market place." When he became superintendent of schools in 1978, he made "career-occupation education" his "first priority." In practice, this boiled down to the introduction of programs in "computer literacy" and the purchase of expensive equipment from the electronics industry.

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The members of the council included Arthur Gartland of Scituate, an insurance and real estate man and vice-president of the chamber of commerce; Vernon Alden of Brookline, a high-ranking officer of the Boston Safe Deposit and Trust Company; Ted Philips of Weston, president of the New England Mutual Life Insurance Company; Thomas A. Sampson of Needham, president of the chamber of commerce; John Silber of Brookline, president of Boston University; and Robert Wood of Lincoln, president of the University of Massachusetts. Note that every one of these men lived in the suburbs.

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