Schools are the most familiar of all civic institutions. You find them in city slums and posh suburbs, Appalachian valleys and mining towns high in the Rockies. If you fly over the prairies that stretch endlessly across the middle of the United States, you see below the farms and municipalities neatly laid out in townships composed of 36 sections. More than two centuries ago the federal government laid out these civic checkerboards and pledged that the inhabitants of the western territories could use section 16 to support education. The public ("common") schools supported by these land grants, were emblems of a common citizenship across the new nation and even newer western states, but they were also civic centers of their local communities in long-established towns as well as frontier settlements,

It was an article of faith among the founding fathers that a republic could survive only if its citizens were educated. And school has continued to shape the core of our national identity. "The free common school system," Adlai Stevenson once said, is "the most American thing about America."

Early in the nineteenth century, Thomas Jefferson argued that locally controlled public schools were key democratic institutions in two ways. By teaching correct political principles to the young, they could nurture virtuous citizens. Equally important, local control gave adult citizens a chance to exercise self-rule. In the twentieth century, John Dewey had a similar commitment to education in democracy through political socialization and democracy in education in the form of wise collective choices. For these philosophers of democracy education was a common good, not simply an individual consumer good.

But achieving a sense of common purpose has never been easy. For two centuries, public school districts have been political arenas in which citizens have contended with one another. In a society as socially diverse as the United States, controversies about purposes and practices in public schooling are hardly surprising. Such policy debates express both hopes and fears about the nation. When citizens deliberate about the education of the young, they are also debating the shape of the future for the whole nation.

Talk about schooling has been part of a larger attempt to define and mold what historian Thomas Bender calls "the public culture." He says that continuing contests of groups for "legitimacy and justice" have created and recreated this public culture and established " our common life as a people and as a nation." It is essential, he adds, to understand "why have some groups and some values been so much--or so little--represented in public life and in mainstream culture and schooling at any given moment in our history."

To some people, the notion of common values taught in a common school seems outdated or naive at this time in history. Today, some critics deride "government schools" as inefficient, bureaucratic, and coercive. Some say that Americans are so different that shared civic values are impossible. Ethnic and racial groups attack bias in traditional accounts of American history, and debates over what should be a canon of standard knowledge reverberate in the Congress and state capitals as well as the groves of academe.

By many accounts, public schools are in trouble today. Grim stories appear daily in the media about violence, high drop-out rates, and low test scores. Beyond such immediate concerns lies an uneasiness about purpose, a sense that we have lost our way. As the larger purposes that once gave resonance to public education have become muted, constituencies that once supported public education have become splintered and confused about what to do.

There has always been plenty of hype and alarm in policy talk about education--the hellfire and damnation sermon followed by the certain solution. Recent talk may set a record for moving without missing a beat from tales of catastrophe to promises of Nirvana.

SCHOOL does not gloss over the recent crisis of confidence or the array of practical problems in education. But it suggests that the recent maelstrom of criticism and defense of public schooling has left little space for deliberation about what unites as well as divides citizens, what part broad civic goals have played within a pluralistic society, what features of the common school are worth preserving (or not), and how education has (and has not) adapted to the remarkable pluralism of the American population.

Perhaps one reason why many Americans feel that we have lost our way in education is that we have forgotten where we have been. Reformers often say that they don't want to look backwards, arguing that amnesia is a virtue in educational decision-making. The problem with that stance is that it is impossible. Everyone uses some sense of the past in everyday life, and leaders cannot escape thinking in time. The real question is whether the histories we all use in decision making enrich and ground our understanding of the choices we face.

History does not proffer simple lessons. If it did, historians would probably not disagree so much with each other. But study of the past can provide context for decisions and images of possibility and constraint.

The story that School tells is complex and controversial and open-ended, in keeping with the aspirations and fears and achievements and failures of citizens and educators, past and present. It explores how Americans sought to shape their society through public education. It invites readers to step back from today's formulations of problems and solutions, to think about where we have been and where we might go.







Foreign observers of American society during the century following independence often commented on how much U.S. citizens distrusted government at a distance, whether that of King George III or spendthrift state legislatures. Voters wanted to keep legislators on a short leash and kept rewriting their state constitutions to weaken government. Partly because of this deep-rooted distrust of government, Americans have, over the years, been slow to provide social and health services through public agencies (a fact well known to proponents of medical coverage for all citizens today).

Thus in the middle of the nineteenth century, the advocates of public education realized that they had a job to do. They faced rugged competition from a host of private schools of many varieties. Families with resources had many choices in the educational marketplace: some public, some private, some charitable and some for profit, some sectarian and some secular. The results of this miscellaneous schooling were impressive: well before the majority of children attended public schools, both attendance in school and literacy were quite high. But by 1890, public schools became dominant, and enrolled about nine in ten pupils.

Government-distrusting, tax-pinching, independent Americans might well have chosen to continue to rely on this miscellaneous collection of schools to educate their children. They did not. Instead, they chose, collectively and decisively, to establish and sustain the most universal and popular system of education in the world.

In doing so, they stayed close to their roots and chose to have the most decentralized system of school governance in the world. They controlled and financed schools locally. Public education would not have thrived without this self rule. It enabled citizens to keep a close eye on their schools and to resolve issues by local majority rule. American school board members constituted the largest group of public officials in the world during the late nineteenth century. They outnumbered teachers in a number of rural states.

But local self-rule leads to a second puzzle: why was this grassroots schooling so similar, at least across the North, when there was no central ministry of education to set standards and enforce regulations? Adam Smith claimed that the "invisible hand" of the market worked more effectively than a directive government. In the United States a hidden hand of ideology, a common set of political and social values, helped to produce similar common schools scattered across the nation. Shared beliefs encourage people to build institutions, and over time citizens came to believe that schooling was a public good essential to the health of the nation. Individuals did benefit from schooling, yes, but even more important, civic society depended on instilling common values.

But what were these values to be? An inclination to compete lay deep in the American grain. Throughout the nineteenth century, churches competed enthusiastically with each other for souls and members; how could they agree on common principles? The nineteenth century was also a time of lusty contest between the political parties; they delighted in puncturing the claims and pretenses of the opposition. And raw conflict--red in tooth and claw--marked much of the economic history of the time. So why did Americans hope that they could agree about the moral and civic lessons that schools should teach when they clashed so vigorously in most other arenas?

Horace Mann, the great nineteenth century school reformer, and thousands of other state and local leaders had a plan. Surely, they said, the warring religious groups could call a truce at the door of the common school for the sake of the children and the nation. They developed an argument that they thought was self-evident: the main purpose of public education is to develop good character; character is based on religion; religion is based on the central teachings of the Bible; therefore, moral education should be based on reading the Bible without sectarian comment. This "non-sectarian" religion of consensus appealed to the Protestant mainstream that supplied most of the leadership of public education. Catholics clearly saw that this set of propositions did not match their doctrine. In response, they decided to challenge the common school by creating their own schools.

Paralleling the doctrine of non-sectarian moral teaching was the claim that political education could be non-partisan. In this theory, the common school should teach only those pure republican principles and practices that united Americans. This pedagogy of patriotism is most obvious in American history textbooks that glorified the founding fathers. The compilers of the famous McGuffey Readers promised that they contained no sectarian or partisan accounts and included only those values that everyone (should) subscribe to. There was a huge market for such a political and religious common denominator: the McGuffey Readers racked up sales of over 122,000,000 copies.

The creation of the common school, with its grassroots governance and consensual curriculum, was one of the triumphs of nineteenth century reform. Fueled by a powerful republican ideology and aspiring to create universal education, the common school movement appealed to millennial hope and fear. But by the turn of the twentieth century, reformers grew dissatisfied with local self-rule and a common curriculum.







Once again, the country came to a turning point in the development of its system of education, as leaders redefined democracy in the new urban and industrial society of the early twentieth century. Their vision of democracy in the twentieth century exalted experts and denigrated widespread lay participation.

Local control by elected school committees had set a democratic stamp on public education, but policy elites at the turn of the twentieth century complained that the efforts of rural school trustees fell short. They gave local citizens just what they wanted: schooling that was cheap, that reflected local notions of useful learning, and that gave employment to local teachers who fit in well with the community. One leader denounced local control by district trustees as "democracy gone to seed." How could penny-pinching and provincial rural trustees prepare youth for the twentieth century?

Elite reformers also believed that the leadership in urban districts was poor. They felt that the central urban school committees were far too large and delegated decisions to sub-committees of trustees rather than to the experts. They felt that too many of the wrong people ran things, and they pointed especially to corrupt machine politicians and to immigrants who wanted the schools to respect their cultures and to hire their daughters. How could urban schools become efficient and professional, how could they "Americanize" immigrants, with all these foxes in the chicken coops? Worse, many cities still retained ward boards that were relics of the old decentralized district system.

"Take the schools out of politics!" In the early twentieth century, that was the call to battle of advocates of a new concept of democracy in public education. These policy elites decided that the older concepts of common school governance and curriculum were antediluvian. Democracy, they insisted, did not mean lay people running the schools, as trustees did all over the country. Democracy at its best meant administration of the public's schools by specially trained experts (superintendents and their staffs). A school system resembled a public hospital: a lay board might provide general oversight, but professionals should be in charge.

The reformers wanted to consolidate small rural districts and assert more control of country schools by counties and states. Taking city schools out of politics meant radically reducing the size of city school boards and abolishing ward boards, relics of the old decentralized district system.

As they sought to centralize and standardize education, they rejected the old idea that democracy demanded a common curriculum for all students. The intelligence and future destiny of pupils clearly differed, and thus the curriculum should be differentiated to match their abilities and needs. Democratic schools provided opportunities to all students to find niches suited to their different talents. Equality meant difference, not sameness, of treatment.

The public school, then, became an "instrument of democracy" run by a-political experts, with authority "in the hands of those who will really represent the interests of the children." Such leaders would be able to educate all children according to their abilities and destiny in life. The people owned the schools, but experts ran them, just as corporate CEOs managed their firms. That was the new version of democracy in governance: a socially and economically efficient system that adapted schooling to different kinds of students, thereby guaranteeing equality of opportunity.

The redefinition of democracy and reorganization of schools became the conventional wisdom of educators for the next decades. Big districts and big schools, they said, were better than small ones. A centralized and specialized administrative structure was more efficient and accountable than a decentralized and simple one. Differentiation of the curriculum into several tracks and hundreds of electives generated greater equality of opportunity for students of varied ability and for the different ethnic and "racial" groups.







Beginning in the 1960s, in an effort once again to change the course of history, reformers challenge the redefinition of democracy and the organizational changes introduced in the first half of the twentieth century. They argue that small schools are better, that big districts should be decentralized, that all students should be helped to meet the same high academic standards, that academic segregation of students into tracks limits their learning, and that schools can benefit from strong involvement of parents in educational reform.

Reformers today recognize that no amount of wishful thinking can transform politics of education into neutral administration, for schooling is and always has been intrinsically value-laden. The question is not whether politics but whose politics. In the last fifty years the history of school governance is in large part the story of efforts to breach the buffers erected around schools during the first half of the twentieth century to protect them from participatory democracy.

Groups that were excluded or unfairly treated__for example, African Americans, Latinos, the handicapped, women__have organized in social movements and have sought access and influence in public education. Besides employing traditional democratic beliefs and political strategies, these new voices have also expanded notions of democracy; they speak, for example, of cultural democracy, of equal respect and equal rights for all cultural groups, and of economic democracy to close the gap between rich and poor school districts.

The politics of education has never been more fluid and complicated than today. As in earlier periods of contentiousness, some critics--especially some advocates of vouchers and choice--have put a new spin on the concept of democracy. The challenge this time is even more fundamental than the earlier attempt to rely on experts. They do not seek to replace politics with professional administration. Indeed, they think public education already too bureaucratic, too constrained by government regulations inflicted by special interest groups.

The solution, they say, is to replace politics with markets. Treating schooling as a consumer good and giving parents vouchers for the education of their children solves the problem of quality and decision_making: parents choose the schools that will best suit their children. The collective choices produced by democratic institutions produced bureaucracy and gridlock; the invisible hand of the market will lead the individual to the best personal choice. The market in education will satisfy and liberate families through competition.

But wait. Is education primarily a consumer good or a common good? School provides a context for answering that question. If Thomas Jefferson, Horace Mann, or John Dewey were now to enter policy discussions on public education, they might well ask if Americans have lost their way. Democracy is about making wise collective choices, not individual consumer choices. Democracy in education and education in democracy are not quaint legacies from a distant and happier time. They have never been more essential to wise self-rule than they are today.