In the last fifteen years revisionists have attacked the ascendency of Ellwood P. Cubberly, and his pietistic picture of the public school, with historical perspectives that relegate public education to being one of many educational functions in American culture and with the view that public schools "miseducate" the American people. Neither provides the constructive conceptual framework that modernization -- the accelerated interaction of long term trends such as urbanization, the centralizing power of the nation-state, and racial and ethnic integration -- does. Such a framework might be the first corrective for the revisionism of the 50's and 60's. The second, a re-examination of the role of organized schooling in social change, should focus on the institutional history of education. The third requires a more sedulous view of the history of American education in comparative and international perspective as a phase of the modernization of Western civilization. The fourth corrective must be attention to the role of organized public education in building a political community in the United States, a traditional role for public education, but one long overlooked by educational historians. (JH)