The Teacher Wars
The Teacher Wars

Author: Dana Goldstein

Publisher: Anchor

Published: 2015-08-04

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 0345803620

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A groundbreaking history of 175 years of American education that brings the lessons of the past to bear on the dilemmas we face today—and brilliantly illuminates the path forward for public schools. “[A] lively account." —New York Times Book Review In The Teacher Wars, a rich, lively, and unprecedented history of public school teaching, Dana Goldstein reveals that teachers have been embattled for nearly two centuries. She uncovers the surprising roots of hot button issues, from teacher tenure to charter schools, and finds that recent popular ideas to improve schools—instituting merit pay, evaluating teachers by student test scores, ranking and firing veteran teachers, and recruiting “elite” graduates to teach—are all approaches that have been tried in the past without producing widespread change.

The American Nation
The American Nation

Author: Bruce Frohnen

Publisher:

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 620

ISBN-13:

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The American Nation makes available, in one volume, many of the most crucial documents necessary for understanding the variety of policies and viewpoints driving American public life during an important, substantive part of American history. The primary sources in The American Nation are relevant to the Civil War, Reconstruction, the rise of a national capitalist system and culture, the waves of reform-minded thought and policy that moved the nation toward formation of the national administrative and welfare states, and Americaʹs emergence as a major power on the world stage. This period was a watershed in the history of the nation -- the time of establishing and consolidating national power and laying the foundations of a national government committed to promoting the material well-being of Americans. It was an era that witnessed the development of the nation-state and the establishment of the New Deal regime, which set the stage for the radical social movements of the 1960s and beyond.

Schoolhouse Burning
Schoolhouse Burning

Author: Derek W. Black

Publisher: PublicAffairs

Published: 2020-09-22

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13: 1541774388

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The full-scale assault on public education threatens not just public education but American democracy itself. Public education as we know it is in trouble. Derek W. Black, a legal scholar and tenacious advocate, shows how major democratic and constitutional developments are intimately linked to the expansion of public education throughout American history. Schoolhouse Burningis grounded in pathbreaking, original research into how the nation, in its infancy, built itself around public education and, following the Civil War, enshrined education as a constitutional right that forever changed the trajectory of our democracy. Public education, alongside the right to vote, was the cornerstone of the recovery of the war-torn nation. Today's current schooling trends -- the declining commitment to properly fund public education and the well-financed political agenda to expand vouchers and charter schools -- present a major assault on the democratic norms that public education represents and risk undermining one of the unique accomplishments of American society.

Words Made Flesh
Words Made Flesh

Author: R. A. R. Edwards

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 0814724035

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During the early nineteenth century, schools for the deaf appeared in the United States for the first time. These schools were committed to the use of the sign language to educate deaf students. Manual education made the growth of the deaf community possible, for it gathered deaf people together in sizable numbers for the first time in American history. It also fueled the emergence of Deaf culture, as the schools became agents of cultural transformations. Just as the Deaf community began to be recognized as a minority culture, in the 1850s, a powerful movement arose to undo it, namely oral education. Advocates of oral education, deeply influenced by the writings of public school pioneer Horace Mann, argued that deaf students should stop signing and should start speaking in the hope that the Deaf community would be abandoned, and its language and culture would vanish. In this revisionist history, Words Made Flesh explores the educational battles of the nineteenth century from both hearing and deaf points of view. It places the growth of the Deaf community at the heart of the story of deaf education and explains how the unexpected emergence of Deafness provoked the pedagogical battles that dominated the field of deaf education in the nineteenth century, and still reverberate today.

The Common School Awakening
The Common School Awakening

Author: David Komline

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 0190085150

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"A statue of Horace Mann, erected in front of the Boston State House in 1863, declares him the "Father of the American Public School System." For over a century and a half, most narratives about early American education have proceeded as if this epithet were true. It has been etched into the general American consciousness as surely as it has been etched into the stone pedestal on which Mann stands. As Mann looms over the Boston Common, so he has loomed over discussions of early American schooling. The Common School Awakening offers a new narrative about the rise of public schools in America. The story begins before Horace Mann ever entered the scene as the first Secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education. In the first half of the nineteenth century a broad and distinctly American religious consensus emerged, allowing people from across the religious spectrum to cooperate in systematizing and professionalizing America's schools, all in an effort to Christianize the country. At the height of this movement, several states introduced state-sponsored teacher training colleges and concentrated government oversight of schools in offices such as the one held by Mann. Shortly thereafter, the religious consensus that had served as the foundation for this common school system disintegrated. But the system itself remained, the legacy not just of one man, but of a whole network of reformers who put into motion a transatlantic and transdenominational religious movement - the "Common School Awakening.""--