Book Review

Schooling America: How the Public Schools Meet the Nation's Changing Needs
By Patricia Albjerg Graham
(Oxford University Press, 273 pages, $27)

Reviewed by Kate Tuttle

In 1954, when the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its unanimous ruling on Brown v. Board of Education, the decision read in part that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." But overturning state-sanctioned racial segregation is one thing, and enforcing it is another--and even then, what can be done for the other entrenched inequalities that consign the nation's schoolchildren to learning experiences so diff erent that they could be taking place on diff erent planets? Without equality--among races, genders, religions, and social classes--how can there ever be quality?

Such questions, as unanswerable as they are crucial, lie at the heart of Patricia Albjerg Graham's Schooling America. As the former dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education and director of the National Institute of Education (she's currently Charles Warren Research Professor of the History of American Education at HGSE), Graham is well qualified to plumb this topic. Nominally a history of American public education in the 20th century, the book recounts a centurylong dialogue about the purposes a public education should serve, who should control its direction and priorities, and how best to measure its success or failure.

Along the way, Graham chronicles the people (John Dewey, Lucy Sprague Mitchell, Harold "Doc" Howe), places (Teachers College, HGSE, Deep Creek High School--Graham's own first teaching post--in Virginia), and things (IQ testing, the Brown decision, No Child Left Behind) that influenced or illustrated the trends shaping our public schools. Graham organizes her tale chronologically, dividing the century into four periods: Assimilation (1900–1920), Adjustment (1920–1954), Access (1954–1983), and Achievement (1983–present). Though each of the eras is distinguished by its own historical context, societal preoccupations, and educational fashions, the same questions of equality and quality arise again and again.

At the dawn of the 20th century, only six percent of students graduated from high school, and many communities provided primary education on a schedule designed not to interfere with farm work and other realities in the lives of America's children. But a massive in- flux of immigrants, mostly non-English speaking and poor, sparked the growth of a widespread system of public schools, designed to teach English literacy, basic academic skills, and American virtues (often conveyed through folklore about early American heroes). In urban centers, schools off ered English-language lessons to adults as well, adding to their importance as centers of assimilation. A standard curriculum aimed at "Americanization" gradually changed as more and more students entered the schools, and stayed for more and more years. By high school, differences in ability and a new emphasis on education as preparation for work, not citizenship, led most schools to begin sorting students into diff erent curricula. The newly developed IQ test further aided a process advocated by then Harvard president Charles William Eliot--that schools should "sort their children by their evident or probable destiny."

A student's "evident or probable destiny," judged mostly by his or her race and social class (aided and abetted by tests that favored those from the privileged classes), was again the decisive factor during the Adjustment era. Although the educational trends between 1920 and 1940 claimed to focus on the needs of children, Graham charges that the "child-centered" schools of that period simply passed along the inequality already present in American life. This new educational philosophy, which replaced rote memorization and drills with activities children could enjoy, did at times yield wonderful results, especially in affl uent communities where the children came from well-educated homes and the teachers from well-regarded universities. But for kids from less academically rich backgrounds, and in the hands of teachers themselves less well-equipped, the lowering of standards, framed as a boon to help all students "fit in," instead penalized those who lacked the home training to outperform the low standards to which they were held.

By the middle of the century, many schools had abandoned a traditional academic curriculum to focus on the "Seven Cardinal Principles," which stressed personality development and a watereddown version of the national virtues popular during the Assimilation period. But growing pressures from a population newly interested in education--and a government newly worried about international competition--were soon to spark changes in the way the country sought to educate its children. What Graham dubs the Access era, born of Brown and Sputnik, was characterized by a flood of research and literature (including scores of books like Why Johnny Can't Read and Education: A National Failure), a slew of policy recommendations (including education for the gifted and mainstreaming of the disabled), and a welcome influx of federal funding (which brought with it the unwelcome intrusion of regulations and bureaucracy).

As Graham winds up her tale with the Reagan-era turn toward "excellence," whether by privatization, vouchers, or standards, she continues her often-scathing critique of how these schooling trends play out--in particular the reliance on self-appointed experts who often lack any hands-on teaching experience. But she doesn't spare teachers, either, in particular taking aim at the rise in schools that soft-pedal academic rigor. Mostly, though, she off ers her bracingly honest assessment of the problems that continue to face our schools--the deeply ingrained social and economic inequalities-- and at those who would blame schools alone for their inability to solve them. In the end, she writes that America's schools today are better than they were at the dawn of the 20th century. But reading Patricia Albjerg Graham, it's impossible not to think that they could, and should, be even better.

About the Article

A version of this article originally appeared in the Summer 2006 issue of Ed., the magazine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.