The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education

The One Best System a major new interpretation of what actually happened in the development of one of America's most influential institutions. At the same time it is a narrative in which the participants themselves speak out: farm children and factory workers, frontier teachers and city superintendents, black parents and elite reformers. And it encompasses both the achievements and the failures of the system: the successful assimilation of immigrants, racism and class bias; the opportunities offered to some, the injustices perpetuated for others.

Mr. Tyack has placed his colorful, wide-ranging view of history within a broad new framework drawn from the most recent work in history, sociology, and political science. He looks at the politics and inertia, the ideologies and power struggles that formed the basis of our present educational system. Using a variety of social perspectives and methods of analysis, David Tyack illuminates for all readers the change from village to urban ways of thinking and acting over the course of more than one hundred years.

David Tyack is Vida Jacks Professor of Education and Professor of History Emeritus, Stanford University.

PROLOGUE

PART I: THE ONE BEST SYSTEM IN MICROCOSM: COMMUNITY AND CONSOLIDATION IN RURAL EDUCATION
The School as a Community and the Community as a School
'The Rural School Problem' and Power to the Professional

PART II: FROM VILLAGE SCHOOL TO URBAN SYSTEM: BUREAUCRATIZATION IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
Swollen Villages and the Need for Coordination
Creating the One Best System
Teachers and the Male Mystique
Attendance, Voluntary and Coerced
Some Functions of Schooling

PART III: THE POLITICS OF PLURALISM: NINETEENTH-CENTURY PATTERNS
Critics and Dissenters
Configurations of Control
Lives Routinized yet Insecure: Teachers and School Politics
Cultural Conflicts: Religion and Ethnicity
A Struggle Lonely and Unequal: The Burden of Race

PART IV: CENTRALIZATION AND THE CORPORATE MODEL: CONTESTS FOR CONTROL OF URBAN SCHOOLS, 1890-1940
An Interlocking Directorate and Its Blueprint for Reform
Conflicts of Power and Values: Case Studies of Centralization
Political Structure and Political Behavior

PART V: INSIDE THE SYSTEM: THE CHARACTER OF URBAN SCHOOLS, 1890-1940
Success Story: The Administrative Progressives
Science
Victims without "Crimes": Black Americans
Americanization: Match and Mismatch
Lady Labor Sluggers" and the Professional Proletariat

EPILOGUE: THE ONE BEST SYSTEM UNDER FIRE, 1940-1973

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX