10.1177/0013161X03257298 ARTICLE Educational Administration Quarterly Rice & Malen / COSTS OF EDUCATION REFORM The Human Costs of Education Reform: The Case of School Reconstitution Jennifer King Rice Betty Malen School reconstitution has become a prevalent but underexamined policy option. Al- though the stated aim of school reconstitution is to enhance the human capital available in low-performing schools, this aim may not be realized. Instead, reconstitution reform may impose substantial human costs, which undermine its ability to achieve its primary aim. This article draws on 2 years of case study data to examine the nature, distribution, and consequences of the human costs associated with this reform. This case study can be empirically instructive, because it exposes a category of costs—namely, human costs— that were largely unanticipated and/or underestimated by the policy makers but were highly consequentialfor the fate of the reform. This discovery is significant, theoretically, because it reaffirms the recognition that human costs exist, and it contributes to the un- derstanding of how these costs might be operationalized and linked to the efficacy of per- sonnel-dependent reforms. Keywords: cost; accountability; school reconstitution Although school reconstitution can take a variety of forms, generally speaking, this strategy involves removing a school’s incumbent administra- tors and teachers (or large percentages of them) and replacing them with edu- cators who, presumably, are more capable and committed (Malen, Croninger, Redmond, & Muncey, 1999). At heart, reconstitution is a human capital reform grounded in the assumption that upgrading the human capital in low-performing schools will improve the performance of those schools. Although the aim of reconstitution is to enhance the human capital in a 635 Educational Administration Quarterly Vol. 39, No. 5 (December 2003) 635-666 DOI: 10.1177/0013161X03257298 © 2003 The University Council for Educational Administration Authors’Note: The order of authorship does not connote level of contribution; the authors shared equally in the development and composition of this article. The study reported here is part of a broader research effort supported by a partnership between the local district and a university- based interdisciplinary study team. The partnership was initiated and developed by Barbara