School, Society, and State

School, Society, and State
Author: Tracy L. Steffes
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2017-10-05
Genre: Education
ISBN: 022643530X

“Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife,” wrote John Dewey in his classic work The School and Society. In School, Society, and State, Tracy Steffes places that idea at the center of her exploration of the connections between public school reform in the early twentieth century and American political development from 1890 to 1940. American public schooling, Steffes shows, was not merely another reform project of the Progressive Era, but a central one. She addresses why Americans invested in public education and explains how an array of reformers subtly transformed schooling into a tool of social governance to address the consequences of industrialization and urbanization. By extending the reach of schools, broadening their mandate, and expanding their authority over the well-being of children, the state assumed a defining role in the education—and in the lives—of American families. In School, Society, and State, Steffes returns the state to the study of the history of education and brings the schools back into our discussion of state power during a pivotal moment in American political development.

Between Church and State

Between Church and State
Author: James W. Fraser
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2016-09-15
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1421420589

Looking at the difficult question of how private issues of faith can be reconciled with the very public nature of schooling, Fraser’s classic book paints a complex picture of how a multicultural society struggles to take the deep commitments of people of faith into account—including people of many different faiths and no faith. In this fully updated second edition, Fraser tackles the culture wars, adding fresh material on current battles over public funding for private religious schools. He also addresses the development of the long-simmering evolution-creationism debate and explores the tensions surrounding a discussion of religion and the accommodation of an increasingly religiously diverse American student body. Between Church and State includes new scholarship on the role of Roger Williams and William Penn in developing early American conceptions of religious liberty.

The Other School Reformers

The Other School Reformers
Author: Adam Laats
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 324
Release: 2015-02-09
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0674967267

The idea that American education has been steered by progressive values is celebrated by liberals and deplored by conservatives, but both sides accept it as fact. Adam Laats shows that this widely held belief is simply wrong. Upending the standard narrative of American education as the product of courageous progressive reformers, he calls to center stage the conservative activists who decisively shaped America’s classrooms in the twentieth century. The Other School Reformers makes clear that, in the long march of American public education, progressive reform has more often been a beleaguered dream than an insuperable force. Laats takes an in-depth look at four landmark school battles: the 1925 Scopes Trial, the 1939 Rugg textbook controversy, the 1950 ouster of Pasadena Public Schools Superintendent Willard Goslin, and the 1974 Kanawha County school boycott. Focused on issues ranging from evolution to the role of religion in education to the correct interpretation of American history, these four highly publicized controversies forced conservatives to articulate their vision of public schooling—a vision that would keep traditional Protestant beliefs in America’s classrooms and push out subversive subjects like Darwinism, socialism, multiculturalism, and feminism. As Laats makes clear in case after case, activists such as Hiram Evans and Norma Gabler, Homer Chaillaux and Louise Padelford were fiercely committed to a view of the curriculum that inculcated love of country, reinforced traditional gender roles and family structures, allowed no alternatives to capitalism, and granted religion a central role in civic life.

When Good Government Meant Big Government

When Good Government Meant Big Government
Author: Jesse Tarbert
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 163
Release: 2022-02-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 0231548486

The years after World War I have often been seen as an era when Republican presidents and business leaders brought the growth of government in the United States to a sudden and emphatic halt. In When Good Government Meant Big Government, the historian Jesse Tarbert inverts the traditional story by revealing a forgotten effort by business-allied reformers to expand federal power—and how that effort was foiled by Southern Democrats and their political allies. Tarbert traces how a loose-knit coalition of corporate lawyers, bankers, executives, genteel reformers, and philanthropists emerged as the leading proponents of central control and national authority in government during the 1910s and 1920s. Motivated by principles of “good government” and using large national corporations as a model, these elite reformers sought to transform the federal government’s ineffectual executive branch into a modern organization with the capacity to solve national problems. They achieved some success during the presidency of Warren G. Harding, but the elite reformers’ support for federal antilynching legislation confirmed the worries of white Southerners who feared that federal power would pose a threat to white supremacy. Working with others who shared their preference for local control of public administration, Southern Democrats led a backlash that blocked enactment of the elite reformers’ broader vision for a responsive and responsible national government. Offering a novel perspective on politics and policy in the years before the New Deal, this book sheds new light on the roots of the modern American state and uncovers a crucial episode in the long history of racist and antigovernment forces in American life.

One Hundred Percent American

One Hundred Percent American
Author: Thomas R. Pegram
Publisher: Ivan R. Dee
Total Pages: 299
Release: 2011-10-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 1566639220

In the 1920s, a revived Ku Klux Klan burst into prominence as a self-styled defender of American values, a magnet for white Protestant community formation, and a would-be force in state and national politics. But the hooded bubble burst at mid-decade, and the social movement that had attracted several million members and additional millions of sympathizers collapsed into insignificance. Since the 1990s, intensive community-based historical studies have reinterpreted the 1920s Klan. Rather than the violent, racist extremists of popular lore and current observation, 1920s Klansmen appear in these works as more mainstream figures. Sharing a restrictive American identity with most native-born white Protestants after World War I, hooded knights pursued fraternal fellowship, community activism, local reforms, and paid close attention to public education, law enforcement (especially Prohibition), and moral/sexual orthodoxy. No recent general history of the 1920s Klan movement reflects these new perspectives on the Klan. One Hundred Percent American incorporates them while also highlighting the racial and religious intolerance, violent outbursts, and political ambition that aroused widespread opposition to the Invisible Empire. Balanced and comprehensive, One Hundred Percent American explains the Klan's appeal, its limitations, and the reasons for its rapid decline in a society confronting the reality of cultural and religious pluralism.

American Catholic Schools in the Twentieth Century

American Catholic Schools in the Twentieth Century
Author: Ann Marie Ryan
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 195
Release: 2022-02-21
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1475866623

This book examines how Catholic educators grappled with public educational policies and reforms like standardization and accreditation, educational measurement and testing, and federal funding for schools during the early to mid-twentieth century. These issues elicited an array of reactions including resistance, cooperation, and co-optation. American Catholics had established one of the largest private educational organizations in the United States by the twentieth century. It rivaled only that of the public school system. At mid-century Catholic schools enrolled some 12 percent of the American school-age population and their enrollments grew in number through the 1960s. The Catholic Church’s lobbying arm, the National Catholic Welfare Conference (NCWC), used its well-earned stature to push for federal funds for students attending their schools. The NCWC succeeded in securing funds with the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 for students needing special education services and students living in poverty attending Catholic schools. This signified a major shift in American education policy. Despite this radical change, Catholic schools lost significant enrollment over the next several decades to public, private, and newly minted public charter schools. Catholic schools faced an increasingly competitive landscape in an ever-expanding school-choice environment that they helped create.

Public Vs. Private

Public Vs. Private
Author: Robert N. Gross
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2018
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0190644575

Americans choose from a dizzying array of schools, loosely categorized as "public" and "private." How did these distinctions emerge, and what do they tell us about the relationship in the United States between public authority and private enterprise? Challenged by the rise of Catholic and other parochial schools in the nineteenth century, states sought to protect the public school monopoly through regulation. Ultimately, however, Robert N. Gross shows how the public policies that resulted produced a stable educational marketplace, where choice flourished.

The Praeger Handbook of Religion and Education in the United States

The Praeger Handbook of Religion and Education in the United States
Author: James C. Carper
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 587
Release: 2009-03-05
Genre: Reference
ISBN: 0313084556

Ten Commandments displays, prayer at football games, Bible in the curriculum, vouchers for tuition at religious schools, Pledge of Allegiance, wall of separation between church and state, among other hot button issues at the intersection of religion and education, generate a great deal of heat, but often light is sorely lacking. The Praeger Handbook of Religion and Education in the United States provides a unique source of light to educators, religious leaders, journalists, policy-makers, parents, and the general public as well as a useful resource for scholars interested in the impact of religion on the origins, development, and current shape of the American educational landscape. Following an introductory essay that surveys the relationship of religion to elementary and secondary education from the 1600s to the present, this set offers 175 entries written by more than 40 scholars with national reputations that cover a wide range of topics related to religion and education, both in the past and the present. These jargon-free entries are cross-referenced and provide suggestions for further reading. Readers who want to know what is behind the heat in current debates will find entries on: United States Supreme Court decisions on religion and education, current controversies regarding religion in the public schools, religious, legal, and educational associations involved in these controversies, religion and the curriculum, religious schools, individuals and movements that have affected the role of religion in education, and religion and education developments in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This one of a kind set also includes a convenient table summarizing all of the religious liberty decisions of the Supreme Court from 1815 to the present.