The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education / Edition 1

by David B. Tyack

Overview

The One Best System presents 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.

David 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, 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674637825
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	01/01/1974
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	368
Sales rank:	436,781
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

David B. Tyack (1930–2016) was Vida Jacks Professor of Education, Emeritus, and Professor of History, Emeritus, at Stanford University.

Table of Contents

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

Editorial Reviews

This brilliant and readable book opens a variety of new perspectives on the development of public education in this country…Tyack does the most responsible, nonsentimental social history yet seen, and I think it highly likely that readers will find themselves educated, enlarged, and excited by what he says.

Today's Education - Maxine Greene

This brilliant and readable book opens a variety of new perspectives on the development of public education in this country...Tyack does the most responsible, nonsentimental social history yet seen, and I think it highly likely that readers will find themselves educated, enlarged, and excited by what he says.--Maxine Greene "Today's Education"

From the Publisher

This brilliant and readable book opens a variety of new perspectives on the development of public education in this country...Tyack does the most responsible, nonsentimental social history yet seen, and I think it highly likely that readers will find themselves educated, enlarged, and excited by what he says.
— Maxine Greene

Today's Education