Core 2. The Historical Context of Urban Education

(3 credits; 30 hours plus conferences; 15-20 students per offering)

Tentative Course Outline⁽¹⁾

1. The Origins of Public Schooling in Urban America (The Ante-bellum Period)

• Origins of schooling in America
• The emergence of mass education in the early 19th century
• Public responsibility for the education of children
• The changing nature of religious and moral instruction in public education
• The changing nature of secular instruction in public education
  

2. Institutionalizing Education (Post-bellum Era)

• Urbanization, industrialization and class formation
• The place of race
• Immigration
• Gender and education
• Creating a teaching force
• Models of teaching and learning
• Political control of urban education
  

3. The Progressive Era

• Progressivism as a philosophical/political movement in government, race relations, and education
• The impact of ideological and political movements on urban education (e.g., suffrage, labor, and good government movements, radical political philosophies of the left and right)
• Urban reform and educational reform
• Arriving at "the one best system": bureaucratic organization of public education
• Ideology, curriculum and textbooks
• Models of teaching and learning
• Immigration and Americanization
  

4. Urban Education in Hard Times (The Great Depression)

• The economics of schooling
• Schooling and the replication/transformation of social class
• Ideology, curriculum and textbooks
• Models of teaching and learning
• Relationship of schools to social and economic changes
• Changing urban demographics
  

5. Education in the Post-World War II era

• Urban schools' responses to race, ethnicity and language, and children with special needs
• Educational policy-making as crisis management: Sputnik, declining literacy rates, dropouts, and declining standards
• Gender and schooling
• Models of teaching and learning
• Ideology, curriculum and textbooks
• Public/private space in the field of education: rethinking public responsibility for the education of children
• Recruiting, training, and retaining teachers and administrators
• Changing technologies of education
• The end of "the one best system" and the rise of alternative models of urban schooling

Preliminary Bibliography

Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams: An Autobiography. NY: The Heritage Press, 1942.

Anderson, James D. The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988.

Bailyn, Bernard. Education in the Forming of American Society: Needs and Opportunities for Study. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1960.

Banks, James A., ed. Multicultural Education, Transformative Knowledge and Action: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives. NY: Teachers College Press, 1996.

Beatty, Barbara. Preschool Education in America: The Culture of Young Children from the Colonial Era to the Present. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995.

Best, John Hardin, ed. Historical Inquiry in Education: A Research Agenda. Washington, D.C.: The American Educational Research Association, 1983.

Bowles, Samuel and Herbert Gintis. Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life. NY: Basic Books, 1976.

Boylan, Anne M. Sunday School: the Formation of an American Institution, 1790-1880. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988.

Brumberg, Stephan F. Going to America, Going to School: The Jewish Immigrant Public School Encounter in Turn-of-the-Century New York City. NY: Praeger, 1986.

Callahan, Raymond E. Education and the Cult of Efficiency: A Study of the Social Forces that Have Shaped the Administration of the Public Schools. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962.

Carnoy, Martin. Education as Cultural Imperialism. NY: David McKay, 1974.

Cook, Ann, Marilyn Gittell, and Herb Mack, eds. City life, 1865-1900: Views of Urban America. New York: Praeger, 1973.

Cremin, Lawrence A. American Education: the Colonial Experience, 1607-1783. NY: Harper & Row, 1970.

Cremin, Lawrence A. American Education: The Metropolitan Experience, 1876-1980. NY: Harper & Row, 1988.

Cremin, Lawrence A. American Education: The National Experience, 1783-1876. NY: Harper & Row, 1980.

Cremin, Lawrence A. The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education, 1876-1957. NY: Vintage Books, 1961.

DuBois, W.E.B. Souls of Black Folk. NY: Vintage Books, 1990 [1903].

Foster, Michele. Black Teachers on Teaching. NY: New Press, 1997.

Goodenow, Ronald K. and Diane Ravitch, eds. Schools in Cities. NY: Holmes & Meier, 1983.

Hammack, David C. Power And Society: Greater New York at the Turn of the Century. NY: Russell Sage Foundation, 1982.

Harlan, Lewis. Booker T. Washington: The Making of a Black Leader, 1856-1901. NY: Oxford University Press, 1972.

Haymes, Stephen Nathan. Race, Culture and the City. A Pedagogy for Black Urban Struggle. Albany: SUNY Press, 1995.

Hiner, Ray N. and Joseph M. Hawes, eds. Growing Up in America: Children in Historical Perspective. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985.

Kaestle, Carl. The Evolution of an Urban School System: New York City, 1750-1850. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973.

Kaestle, Carl. Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools and American Society, 1780-1860. NY: Hill and Wang, 1983.

Kaestle, Carl F., Helen Damon-Moore, Lawrence C. Stedman, Katherine Tinsley and William V. Trollinger, Jr. Literacy in the United States: Readers and Reading since 1880. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991.

Karrier, Clarence J., ed. Shaping the American Education State: 1900 to the present. NY: The Free Press, 1975.

Katz, Michael B. Class, Bureaucracy, and Schools: The Illusion of Educational Change in America. NY: Praeger Publishers, 1971.

Katz, Michael B, ed. Education in American History: Readings on the Social Issues. NY: Praeger Publishers, 1973.

Katz, Michael B. Improving Poor People: The Welfare State, the "Underclass," and Urban Schools as History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995.

Kliebard, Herbert. Struggle for the American Curriculum: 1893-1958. Boston: Routledge Kagan Paul, 1986.

Kluger, Richard. Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black Americas Struggle for Equality. NY: Vintage Books, 1977.

Labaree, David F. The Making of an American High School: The Credentials Market and the Central High School of Philadelphia, 1838-1939. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988.

Leloudis, James L. Schooling the New South. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1996.

Lerner, Gerda, ed. Black Women in White America. NY: Vintage Books, 1992 [1972].

Levine, Lawrence W. Black Culture and Black Consciousness: African American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom: NY: Oxford University Press, 1977.

Lewis, David Lemring. W.E.B. DuBois, Biography of a Race, 1868-1910. NY: Henry Holt, 1993.

Litwack, Leon F. Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow. NY: Knopf, 1998.

Marable, Manning. Race Reform and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction in Black America (1945-1990). Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1991.

McCarthy, Cameron and Warren Crichlow, eds. Race Identity and Representation in Education. NY: Routledge, 1993.

Mirel, Jeffrey. The Rise and Fall of an Urban School System. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993.

Monaghan, E. Jennifer. A Common Heritage: Noah Websters Blue-Back Speller. Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1983.

Nasaw, David. Schooled to Order: A Social History of Public Schooling in the United States. NY: Oxford University Press, 1979.

Orfeld, Garry, Susan E. Eaton and the Harvard Project on School Desegregation. Dismantling Segregation: The Quiet Reversal of Brown vs. the Board of Education. NY: The New Press, 1996.

Palmer, Archie Emerson. The New York Public School; Being a History of Free Education in the City of New York. Intro by Seth Low. NY: MacMillan, 1905.

Pearlmann, Joel. Ethnic Differences: Schooling and Social Structure Among the Irish, Italians, Jews and Blacks in an American City, 1880-1935. NY: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Peterson, Paul E. The Politics of School Reform, 1870-1940. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985.

Ravitch, Diane. The Great School Wars: New York City, 1805-1973. A History of the Public Schools as Battlefield of Social Change. NY: Basic Books, 1974.

Ravitch, Diane and Maris A Vinovskis, eds. Learning from the Past: What History Teaches Us About School Reform. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995.

Ravitch, Diane, and Ronald K Goodenow, eds. Educating and Urban People: The New York City Experience. NY: Teachers College Press, 1981.

Reese, William J. The Origins of the American High School. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995.

Rousmaniere, Kate. "City Teachers: Teaching in New York City Schools in the 1920s." Ph.D. Dissertation, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Columbia University, 1992.

Rury, John L. Education and Womens Work: Female Schooling and the Division of Labor in Urban America, 1870-1930. Albany: SUNY Press, 1991.

Sizer, T.R., ed. Religion and Public Education. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967.

Tyack, David and Larry Cuban. Tinkering Toward Utopia: A Century of Public School Reform. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995.

Tyack, David, Robert Lowe and Elisabeth Hansot. Public Schools in Hard Times: The Great Depression and Recent Years. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984.

Tyack, David and Elisabeth Hansot. Learning Together: A History of Coeducation in American Public Schools. NY: Yale University Press & Russell Sage Foundation, 1990.

Tyack, David. The One Best System: A History of American Education. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974.

Weis, Lois and Michelle Fine, eds. Beyond Silenced Voices: Class, Race and Gender in United States Schools. Albany: SUNY Press, 1993.

Williams, Patricia. The Alchemy of Race and Rights. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991.

Woodson, Carter G. The Mis-Education of the Negro. Washington, D.C.: Associated Publishers, 1969 [1933].

1. Issues of historiography will be infused throughout the course. Each topic will explore issues of race, class, gender, ethnicity, and religion, and how these variables have interact with each other. The course also will examine how each era answers the questions and problems it confronts. These questions and their proposed solutions will be compared across historic periods.