America's Public Schools: From the Common School to "No Child Left Behind" (review)

During the last fifteen years the subfield of the history of education has experienced the ebbing of a generational tide. With the death of Lawrence Cremin (1990), and the retirements, first, of David Tyack and Maris Vinovskis, and then Carl Kaestle just last year, a once-vibrant field has few figures of stature left to remind US historians of the significance and endurance of schooling as a force in American social, cultural, and institutional life.

A stream of professional historical inquiry that rose and gained momentum with the swelling forces of the "new" social history during the 1960s and 1970s, it has been subject to unusual influence by historians with kindred interests: Bernard Bailyn, Michael Katz, Paula Fass, John Modell, and Reed Ueda in turn, have each written books or essays that churned powerfully within this stream, but their interests as historians were too variegated for an emerging historiography to contain them. At the same time, the number of history departments creating or maintaining slots for historians of education has steadily faded. Schools of education, which have themselves been under fire for their seeming fecklessness at training teachers or visionary policy makers, are under enormous pressure to cure America's present educational ills, and so are less apt than ever to see value in contemplating their own past.

As a consequence, William Reese is one of a handful of historians at the height of his powers still fully engaged in the study of the history of American education. America's Public Schools, as its title announces, is not about education in all its forms—as Bailyn's and Cremin's expansive definitions hoped to engender. Instead, it is about an institution that took root in New England and the MiddleWest by the mid-nineteenth century and flourished after the Civil War with the expansion of industrial cities. Yet it was engulfed by the ever-increasing demands and expectations created by its early successes and foundered, eventually, with the rapid decline of the aging urban-industrial order after World War One.

Reese's study is both a survey of the growth of one of the most critical institutions in American life and a comprehensive interpolation of the primary intellectual and political influences on the course of its history. The result is an elegant synthesis of the social and intellectual history of popular schooling that offers a superb guide to the tone and trends of a still under-appreciated dimension of the American past. The general reader will gain an insightful, sweeping overview of American education from the era of the Common School to the present, while for the specialist, this book's utility will depend less on the acuity of its interpretations perhaps, than on one's own areas of ignorance and interest. Thus, for me, its most useful sections are those that are so far under-represented in the monographic literature, such as the role and shape of formal schooling for African Americans in the aftermath of Reconstruction, or the consequences of the popularization of secondary schooling.

Scholars' lack of attention to the history of African Americans' schooling has forced Reese to rely upon historians of Reconstruction and Jim Crow to fill in the historiographical gaps between the antebellum era when slaves were generally forbidden to learn how to read and write, and the more familiar terrain of urban schooling, when African American children filled the classrooms of indifferent if not forbidding public school teachers. Foner and Litwack, therefore, are as important to his narrative as is James D. Anderson's (1988) narrower, but more exclusively relevant exploration of African American schooling in the postbellum South. (Heather Williams' Self-taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom, issued in the same year as this volume could have been helpful but it had not yet been published by the time Reese's book went to press.) Instructive here is how...