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The Rise and Centralization of American Public Schools in the 19th Century

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Page : pages

File Size : 12,1 MB

Release : 2009

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Three factors help to explain why school enrollments in the Northern United States were higher than those in the South and in most of Europe by 1850. One was affordability: the northern schools had lower direct costs relative to income. The second was the greater autonomy of local governments. The third was the greater diffusion of voting power among the citizenry in much of the North, especially in rural communities. The distribution of local political voice appears to be a robust predictor of tax support and enrollments, both within and between regions. Extra local voice raised tax support without crowding out private support for education. Mass public schooling is indispensible to modern economic growth. This paper explores the emergence and consequences of free schooling in the USA in the nineteenth century, focusing on voters' self interests rather than ideology or the role of great men, as emphasized in the existing literature. Using a political economy model I show that increases in both average property values and inequality in property holding were key to the emergence of free public education. These variables predict well the timing of free schooling introductions by states and districts. The consequences of universal free public schooling were immediate. Children's education became less dependent on parents' wealth, and geographical inequality in enrollment rates declined. The consolidation of basic school tax units from school districts into a municipality was popular in American cities in the late 19th century. Political economy theory predicts that consolidation as a federation of school districts would raise overall investment in public schooling and related minimum requirements for public schools such as a grade system. This view gains support from regression results using city level data collected from the 1880 census and the U.S. Office of Education Reports. Consolidation, measured by the rise of the share of school tax revenue from municipal taxation, encouraged the development of city school systems, especially by promoting the expansion of higher-grade schooling.



America's Public Schools

Author : William J. Reese

Publisher : JHU Press

Page : 366 pages

File Size : 24,36 MB

Release : 2005-08-10

Category : Education

ISBN : 9780801881954

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William J. Reese's history of public schools in America examines why citizens have repeatedly turned to the schools to improve society and how successive generations of reformers have tried to alter the curriculum and teaching practice to achieve their goals. Organized around two themes—education as the means for reforming American society and ongoing reform within the schools themselves—this study examines two centuries of American public education. It explores school and society in the nineteenth century, including public school growth in the antebellum and postbellum eras; competing visions of education and reform during the first half of the twentieth century; and social change and reform from the 1950s through the 1980s. Reese emphasizes the centrality of schools in the history of reform and their persistent allegiance to traditional practices and pedagogy despite two centuries of complaint by romantics and progressives. He describes tradition as a reliable friend of public schools, despite the enormous changes that have occurred over time: the centralization of authority, professionalization of teaching staff, and the expansion of curricular offerings. Reese's clear and accessible book is an original interpretation of the history of public elementary and secondary schools in America. It should become a standard text for future teachers as well as scholars of education.



Democracy's Schools

Author : Johann N. Neem

Publisher : JHU Press

Page : 257 pages

File Size : 20,12 MB

Release : 2017-08

Category : Education

ISBN : 1421423219

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The unknown history of American public education. At a time when Americans are debating the future of public education, Johann N. Neem tells the inspiring story of how and why Americans built a robust public school system in the decades between the Revolution and the Civil War. It’s a story in which ordinary people in towns across the country worked together to form districts and build schoolhouses and reformers sought to expand tax support and give every child a liberal education. By the time of the Civil War, most northern states had made common schools free, and many southern states were heading in the same direction. Americans made schooling a public good. Yet back then, like today, Americans disagreed over the kind of education needed, who should pay for it, and how schools should be governed. Neem explores the history and meaning of these disagreements. As Americans debated, teachers and students went about the daily work of teaching and learning. Neem takes us into the classrooms of yore so that we may experience public schools from the perspective of the people whose daily lives were most affected by them. Ultimately, Neem concludes, public schools encouraged a diverse people to see themselves as one nation. By studying the origins of America’s public schools, Neem urges us to focus on the defining features of democratic education: promoting equality, nurturing human beings, preparing citizens, and fostering civic solidarity.



Public vs. Private

Author : Robert N. Gross

Publisher : Oxford University Press

Page : 225 pages

File Size : 21,53 MB

Release : 2017-12-01

Category : History

ISBN : 0190644591

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Americans today choose from a dizzying array of schools, loosely lumped into categories of "public" and "private." How did these distinctions emerge in the first place, and what do they tell us about the more general relationship in the United States between public authority and private enterprise? In Public vs. Private, Robert N. Gross describes how, more than a century ago, public policies fostered the rise of modern school choice. In the late nineteenth century, American Catholics began constructing rival, urban parochial school systems, an enormous and dramatic undertaking that challenged public school systems' near-monopoly of education. In a nation deeply committed to public education, mass attendance in Catholic schools produced immense conflict. States quickly sought ways to regulate this burgeoning private sector and the competition it produced, even attempting to abolish private education altogether in the 1920s. Ultimately, however, Gross shows how the public policies that resulted produced a stable educational marketplace, where choice flourished. The creation of the educational marketplace that we have inherited today--with systematic alternatives to public schools--was as much a product of public power as of private initiative. Gross also demonstrates that schools have been key sites in the development of the American legal conceptions of "public" and "private". Landmark Supreme Court cases about the state's role in regulating private schools, such as the 1819 Dartmouth v. Woodward decision, helped define and redefine the scope of government power over private enterprise. Judges and public officials gradually blurred the meaning of "public" and "private," contributing to the broader shift in how American governments have used private entities to accomplish public aims. As ever more policies today seek to unleash market forces in education, Americans would do well to learn from the historical relationship between government, markets, and schools.



American Public Schools

Author : John Swett

Publisher :

Page : 332 pages

File Size : 11,18 MB

Release : 1900

Category : Public schools

ISBN :

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Democracy's Schools

Author : Johann N. Neem

Publisher : JHU Press

Page : 374 pages

File Size : 28,81 MB

Release : 2017-08-01

Category : Education

ISBN : 1421423227

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Book Description

The unknown history of American public education. At a time when Americans are debating the future of public education, Johann N. Neem tells the inspiring story of how and why Americans built a robust public school system in the decades between the Revolution and the Civil War. It’s a story in which ordinary people in towns across the country worked together to form districts and build schoolhouses and reformers sought to expand tax support and give every child a liberal education. By the time of the Civil War, most northern states had made common schools free, and many southern states were heading in the same direction. Americans made schooling a public good. Yet back then, like today, Americans disagreed over the kind of education needed, who should pay for it, and how schools should be governed. Neem explores the history and meaning of these disagreements. As Americans debated, teachers and students went about the daily work of teaching and learning. Neem takes us into the classrooms of yore so that we may experience public schools from the perspective of the people whose daily lives were most affected by them. Ultimately, Neem concludes, public schools encouraged a diverse people to see themselves as one nation. By studying the origins of America’s public schools, Neem urges us to focus on the defining features of democratic education: promoting equality, nurturing human beings, preparing citizens, and fostering civic solidarity.





Reinventing America's Schools

Author : David Osborne

Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Page : 433 pages

File Size : 46,37 MB

Release : 2017-09-05

Category : Education

ISBN : 1632869918

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From David Osborne, the author of Reinventing Government--a biting analysis of the failure of America's public schools and a comprehensive plan for revitalizing American education. In Reinventing America's Schools, David Osborne, one of the world's foremost experts on public sector reform, offers a comprehensive analysis of the charter school movements and presents a theory that will do for American schools what his New York Times bestseller Reinventing Government did for public governance in 1992. In 2005, when Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, the city got an unexpected opportunity to recreate their school system from scratch. The state's Recovery School District (RSD), created to turn around failing schools, gradually transformed all of its New Orleans schools into charter schools, and the results are shaking the very foundations of American education. Test scores, school performance scores, graduation and dropout rates, ACT scores, college-going rates, and independent studies all tell the same story: the city's RSD schools have tripled their effectiveness in eight years. Now other cities are following suit, with state governments reinventing failing schools in Newark, Camden, Memphis, Denver, Indianapolis, Cleveland, and Oakland. In this book, Osborne uses compelling stories from cities like New Orleans and lays out the history and possible future of public education. Ultimately, he uses his extensive research to argue that in today's world, we should treat every public school like a charter school and grant them autonomy, accountability, diversity of school designs, and parental choice.