Product Description: Throughout the twentieth century, local control of school districts was one of the most contentious issues in American politics. As state and federal regulation attempted to standardize public schools, conservatives defended local prerogative as a bulwark of democratic values...read more

Product Description: Since the early 1990s, the federal role in education―exemplified by the controversial No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB)―has expanded dramatically. Yet states and localities have retained a central role in education policy, leading to a growing struggle for control over the direction of the nation's schools...read more

When Congress endorsed substantial aid to schools in 1965, the idea that the federal government had any responsibility for public education was controversial. Twenty years later, not only had that controversy dissipated, Washington's role in education had dramatically expanded. Gareth Davies explores how both conservatives and liberals came to embrace the once daring idea of an active federal role in elementary and secondary education and uses that case to probe the persistence-and growth-of big government during a supposedly antigovernment era. By focusing on institutional changes in government that accompanied the civil rights revolution, Davies shows how initially fragile programs put down roots, built a constituency, and became entrenched. He explains why the federal role in schools continued to expand in the post-LBJ years as the reform impulse became increasingly detached from electoral politics, centering instead on the courts and the federal bureaucracy. Meanwhile, southern resistance to school desegregation had discredited the "states rights" argument, making it easier for conservatives as well as liberals to seek federal solutions to social problems. Although LBJ's landmark Elementary and Secondary Education Act deferred to local control, the legislation of the Nixon-Ford years issued directives that posed greater challenges to traditional federalism than Johnson's grand ideals. As Davies shows, the new political climate saw the achievement of such breakthroughs as mandated bilingual education, school finance reform, and the Education for All Handicapped Children Act—measures that, before the seventies, would have been considered unthinkably intrusive by liberals as well as conservatives. And when Ronald Reagan promised to abolish the Department of Education, conservatives worked with liberals to derail his agenda. Davies' surprising study shows that the distancing of American conservatism from its anti-statist traditions helped pave the way for today's "big government conservatism," which enabled a Republican-dominated Congress to pass No Child Left Behind. By revealing the endurance of Great Society values during a period of Republican ascendance, his book opens a window on our political process and offers new insight into what really makes government grow.

Product Description: Education is intimately connected to many of the most important and contentious questions confronting American society, from race to jobs to taxes, and the competitive pressures of the global economy have only enhanced its significance...read more

Education was a critical focus of the "war on poverty" declared by President Johnson in 1964. U.S. policy built on research, and experiments being conducted in the early 1960s produced major programs such as the preschool Head Start and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, 1965. In this major transatlantic study two senior educationalists examine both these developments and similar processes in Britain--notably the Plowden report of 1967. The Silvers examine the shift of attention in Britain from social class and the secondary school to poverty and the primary and preschool stage, and use extensive archive and interview material to analyze in depth transatlantic interactions, similarities, and differences in systems and policies. An Educational War on Poverty makes a substantial contribution to recent social and educational history, of interest both to scholars and policy makers, not least for its two large-scale national bibliographies.

Product Description: Hawaii sugar plantation managers endorsed Japanese language schools but, after witnessing the assertive role of Japanese in the 1920 labor strike, they joined public school educators and the Office of Naval Intelligence in labeling them anti-American and urged their suppression...read more

Product Description: Between World War I and the Great Depression, progressive educational administrators at Teachers College of Columbia University joined hands with the National Education Association (NEA) to establish a federal department of education and a national system of schooling...read more

Product Description: First published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Product Description: An ambitious, comprehensive account of the events and forces that shaped education in America! Those interested in how the patterns and cycles of education have been molded by historical events, as well as some of the people who crafted them, will benefit from this well-written, well-documented text...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Bell, former Secretary of Education, recounts his efforts to strenghten federal leadership in education and offers an inside look at the Reagan administration

Discusses the impact of the Depression on the American public school system

The impact of post-World War II foreign policy on the development of the national and social uses of American education is examined