Most of the industrialized world retains an obsolete, tracked, multitiered public education system that prepares some children for university and others for blue-collar jobs. This educational design neglects changes in technology, family structure, and community life, and its bureaucratized management values uniformity and process over initiative and results. Education in the United States lacks clear standards, sound assessments, and effective accountability mechanisms. Various reform efforts over the last 13 years have been generally unproductive. The 1990s, however, seem more receptive to a different paradigm of school reform--reinventing public education. A reinvented public-education system would welcome diverse strategies and dissimilar schools organized and run by teacher cooperatives, parent associations, private corporations, community-based organizations, and religious institutions. Students and families would choose the schools best suited to them in a system that requires little bureaucracy and few regulations. The new "reinvention" paradigm of school reform is not incrementalist, top-down, or uniform. The new paradigm welcomes decentralized control, entrepreneurial management, and grass-roots initiatives, within a framework of publicly defined standards and accountability. (LMI)