by Tracy Kidder
Butts, R. Freeman. A Cultural History of Education: Reassessing Our Educational Traditions. McGraw-Hill, New York, 1947.
———.Public Education in the United States: From Revolution to Re-form. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York, 1978.
———, and Lawrence A. Cremin. A History of Education in American Culture. Henry Holt, New York, 1953.
Cremin, Lawrence A. Public Education. Basic Books, New York, 1976.
———. The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education, 1876–1957. Knopf, New York, 1961.
Hampel, Robert L. The Last Little Citadel: American High Schools Since 1940. Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1986.
Katz, Michael B. Class, Bureaucracy and Schools: The Illusion of Educational Change in America, expanded ed. Praeger, New York, 1975.
———. The Irony of Early School Reform: Educational Innovation in
Mid-Nineteenth Century Massachusetts. Beacon Press, Boston, 1968.
Ravitch, Diane. The Troubled Crusade: American Education, 1945–1980. Basic Books, New York, 1983.
Tyack, David B., ed. Turning Points in American Educational History. Xerox College Publishing, Lexington, Mass., 1967.
———, Robert Lowe, and Elisabeth Hansot. Public Schools in Hard Times: The Great Depression and Recent Years. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1984.
Warren, Donald R. To Enforce Education: A History of the Founding Years of the United States Office of Education. Wayne State University Press, Detroit, 1974.
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For statistics on education I drew from:
Snyder, Thomas D. Digest of Education Statistics, 1987. Office of Educational Research and Improvement, Washington, D.C., 1987.
The Statistical Yearbook, 1987. UNESCO, Paris, 1987.
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Many books have something to say about women in teaching. Here are some that deal with the subject in detail:
Donovan, Frances R. The Schoolma'am. Arno Press, New York, 1974.
Hoffman, Nancy. Woman's "True" Profession: Voices from the History of Teaching. Feminist Press, Old Westbury, New York, 1981.
Sugg, Redding'S., Jr. Motherteacher: The Feminization of American Education. University of Virginia, Charlottesville, 1978.
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I found several sociological studies of teaching to be engaging. I relied especially on Schoolteacher, by Dan C. Lortie, and on the following:
Jackson, Philip W. Life in Classrooms. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York, 1968.
Lipsky, Michael. Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Services. Russell Sage Foundation, New York, 1980.
Rist, Ray C. The Urban School, A Factory for Failure: A Study of Education in American Society. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1973.
Waller, Willard. The Sociology of Teaching. John Wiley and Sons, New York, 1932.
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I read several books about high school. Two good ones are:
Powell, Arthur G., Eleanor Farrar, and David K. Cohen. The Shopping Mall High School: Winners and Losers in the Educational Marketplace. Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1985.
Sizer, Theodore. Horace's Compromise: The Dilemma of the American High School. Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1984.
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For guidance in how to observe in a classroom, I used Looking in Classrooms by Jere E. Brophy and Thomas L. Good (Harper and Row, New York, 1984).
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For information about tracking, I relied mainly on Keeping Track: How Schools Structure Inequality by Jennie Oakes (Yale University Press, New Haven, 1985).
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Harry'S. Broudy's The Real World of the Public Schools (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York, 1972) provides a wonderful and mordant critique of public education and of critics of public education.
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The following are a few of the well-known critiques of education from the late 1960s and early 1970s:
Dennison, George. The Lives of Children. Vintage, New York, 1969. Illich, Ivan. Deschooling Society. Harper and Row, New York, 1970. Kohl, Herbert. 36 Children. New American Library, New York, 1967.
Kozol, Jonathan. Death at an Early Age. New American Library, New York, 1967.
Silberman, Charles. Crisis in the Classroom: The Remaking of American Education. Random House, New York, 1970.
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The brief observations and quotations that begin the last section of this book are taken from:
Conant, James Bryant. Introduction to General Education in a Free Society (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1945). I also perused Conant's Shaping Educational Policy (McGraw-Hill, New York, 1964); and Conant's The Child, the Parent and the State (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1959). Hampel's Last Little Citadel contains fascinating revelations about Conant. Oakes's Keeping Track describes Conant's contribution to tracking.
Dewey, John. The School and Society. Excerpts reprinted in Dewey on Education: Selections by Martin Dworkin (Teachers College Press, Columbia University, New York, 1959). I also read in Dewey's Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education (Macmillan, New York, 1916); and Dewey's The Sources of a Science of Education (Horace Liveright, New York, 1929). Nearly every educational history I read has something to say about Dewey. Richard Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (Knopf, New York, 1963) is especially lucid. About Dewey, I also read: John Dewey in Perspective by George R. Geiger (Oxford University Press, New York, 1958); John Dewey: An Intellectual Portrait by Sidney Hook (John Day, New York, 1939); and John Dewey, Philosopher of Science and Freedom: A Symposium, edited by Sidney Hook (Dial Press, New York, 1950).
Du Bois, W. E. B. The Education of Black People. Edited by Herbert Aptheker. University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, 1973.
Jefferson, Thomas. Quoted in Butts, Public Education in the United States.
Mann, Horace. Quoted in Button et al., History of Education. Mann, like Dewey and Jefferson, is discussed in practically every educational history I read.
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The reports from the reform movement of the 1980s are too numerous to cite. One useful analysis of the movement is contained in Policies for America's Public Schools: Teachers, Equity, and Indicators by Ron Haskins and Duncan Macrae (Ablex Publishing, Norwood, N.J., 1988).
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I am indebted to Sally Carlton for putting me in touch with Maria Brassard of the University of Massachusetts. I am indebted to Dr. Brassard for the observations I make about abused children in the last section of this book. Dr. Brassard also sent me several papers and put me in touch with Joan M. Featherman, who described her unpublished doctoral dissertation, Factors Relating to the Quality of Adult Adjustment in Female Victims of Child Sexual Abuse (University of Massachusetts, 1989). This study, of women who were sexually abused as girls, finds that most of the subjects who recovered best from the horrors of their childhoods remember adults, both from within and outside their families and very often teachers, who took an interest in them and in the process changed their lives. One fine book on the question of why some children recover well from abuse is The Invulnerable Child, edited by E. James Anthony and Bertram J. Cohler (Guilford Press, New York, 1987).
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