Examines why there have been periods when new historical accounts of education excite attention and challenge dominant ideas and practices, noting that what is new can differ significantly. Discusses whether historians have anything to contribute to educational policy and looks at the influence of diversity on the interpretation of educational…

Reviews the history of reform movements in secondary education in the context of the overall development of secondary education since the 19th century. Suggests treating reports advocating reform as position papers helping make broad social changes intelligible by revealing the shifting relationships between changing concepts of education and…

Traces developments in American education from its inception in colonial days when the public schools were intended to be "above politics, free of contamination produced by political controversy, disagreement, and discord." Discusses the current state of education, with stress on the loss of consensus. Journal available from American Academy of…

Includes four symposium papers: "Was There Ever a Golden Age in Teaching?" (David Tyack); "Schooling More and Liking It Less" (David Cohen); "Understanding Teacher Attrition" (Richard Murnane); and "Attracting Talented Students to Teaching" (Jerome Murphy). (CH)

Reviews Carl F. Kaestle's 1983 book, "Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools and American Society, 1780-1860." Maintains that this work synthesizes and refocuses both old and new interpretations of the political and institutional history of the common school before 1860 in the United States. (JDH)

Warns against haphazard "decrementalism" as a result of retrenchment. Suggest three different stages of development in U.S. public education. Argues that a community of commitment is possible if educational leaders reformulate the purposes of public education in a tough-minded and coherent way. (Author/WD)

This paper examines the history of school governance in the U.S. It discusses four major shifts in education governance that have occurred over the past 150 years, describing how control was firmly anchored in local communities throughout most of the 19th century. By the end of the century, Americans decided that schooling should serve public…

Examines ideological and economic preconditions that brought about the feminization of teaching in the nineteenth century. Emphasizes urban/rural differences and the links between education and other sectors of the labor market and economy. (GC)

Despite contrary predictions, men have retained their near-monopoly of top positions in educational administration and have even replaced women where they had gained a toehold, as in elementary principalships. The pattern in education follows that in many complex white-collar organizations; horizontal and vertical segregation of male and female…

Presents a historical perspective on school restructuring, looking at New York City's unique reform; policy discourse and trends in practice; late nineteenth-century diversity; reorganization from 1900-50; challenging basic assumptions in the 1960s; back to basics in the 1980s; long-term structural trends in public schools; and education reform…

This exploratory essay suggests the contours of a social history of law and public education. The essay departs from two traditional approaches to educational law: the study of landmark cases, and textbooks that delimit legally approved practice. Instead the changing dialectic between statutory and court-decided law is analyzed, stressing how…

Using data from the 1800s, this article demonstrates how the study of state government actions vis-a-vis education can reveal a variety of useful insights on the politics of schooling and the ideology and structure of public education in the United States. (JDH)

Proposes that (1) during most of the nineteenth century leadership in public education primarily took the form of guiding a decentralized social movement; and (2) at the turn of the twentieth century much of the direction of the educational system devolved upon university experts and professional managers. (Author/DB)

Why established institutional forms of schooling have been so stable and why most challenges do not succeed is studied through case studies of reform that include the Dalton Plan; the Eight-Year Study, a secondary school reform plan; and the new model flexible high school of the 1960s. (SLD)

For a short period after the Civil War, Southern Blacks used their newfound political influence first to build schools and then to establish free and universal public education. Though White supremacists eventually overthrew Reconstruction governments, the Blacks' brief political involvement left an educational legacy vital to the survival and…