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Part 1 ____________________________ Origins of the Public School “System” Today when we talk about the public school “system,” we use the word to describe the interconnected nature of public schools—individual institutions that are part of a larger organizational scheme. Thus parents boast that their local school system is excellent, and politicians and pundits propose “systemwide ” reforms. This meaning of the word “system” dates back to the colonial era, and it seems particularly suited to twentieth- and twenty-first-century schools. Given the weave of regulations and funding schemes that connects individual public schools to each other within districts, and to larger bureaucracies , most public schooling in the United States today does operate in organizational systems.1 Yet alongside this meaning of the word “system,” and indeed as old in usage, stands the idea of a “system” as a method.2 During the American Revolution, for example, debates over systems of government described the “how” of decision making; organizational details served that larger vision. It is this meaning of the word that best describes public schools of the nineteenth century. When most school districts comprised a single school, when state offices of education had almost no connection to local schools, and when bureaucratization—even in the nation’s largest cities—was still in infant form, public schools could hardly be described as pieces of a larger organizational system. They could, however, be described as operating by the same set of rules, rules that governed the process by which local residents operated their schools: a democratic recipe for the nation’s smallest units of government. It is the idea of system-as-method that captures common schools in their formative years. 17 Seeing the common school system as a method rather than an organization allows us to understand critical factors in the relationship between religion and public schooling. A quiet revolution occurred from 1800 to 1830, in which democratic governance supplanted ecclesiastical and private control of community schooling. As we shall see in chapter 2, the common school system, or method, profoundly altered the relationship between religion and schooling. A common school system centered on local, democratic control at the district level held secular, civil ends above religious ones, and did so by design. Religion could, and often did, factor into schools through local governance . But the common school method usually stopped religious encroachments that attempted to establish a particular religious sect and oftentimes resulted in no religious instruction at all. Yet even as common schools spread locally, antebellum school reformers fortified a growing state bureaucracy to systematize common schools in the modern sense, thereby undoing local control with state-level regulation. This tension between growing state regulation and local control is a second critical factor in the relationship between religion and common schools. Chapter 3 examines the workings of this relationship in post-bellum school districts, seeing how the issue of religion played out between state and local levels of school administration. While public schools faced increasing pressure to systematize in the modern sense of the term, the process of local control remained fairly intact. As a result, approaches to religious diversity fit into the pattern of local control, not the dictates, or even necessarily the wishes, of the State Department of Public Instruction. In rare instances when locals invited state intervention, the appeals process itself revealed deep-seated beliefs about the role of the state in the public school system as a court of last resort. 18 Origins of the Public School “System” ...

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