One Best System

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

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.

• 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