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Why is education policy so contentious? Do conflicts over specific issues in schooling have anything in common? Are there general principles that can help us resolve these disputes? In this book the authors find the source of many debates over schooling in the multiple goals and internal contradictions of the national ideology we call the American dream. They also propose a framework for helping Americans get past acrimonious debates in order to help all children learn. The American Dream and the Public Schools examines issues that have excited and divided Americans for years, including desegregation, school funding, testing, vouchers, bilingual education, multicultural education, and ability grouping. These seem to be separate problems, but much of the contention over them comes down to the same thing--an apparent conflict, rooted in the American dream, between policies designed to promote each student's ability to pursue success and those designed to insure the good of all students or the nation as a whole. The authors show how policies to promote individual success too often benefit only those already privileged by race or class, and too often conflict, unnecessarily, with policies that are intended to benefit everyone. The book also examines issues such as creationism and Afrocentrism, where the disputes lie between those who attack the validity of the American dream and those who believe that such a challenge has no place in the public schools. At the end of the book, the authors examine the impact of our nation's rapid racial and ethnic transformation on the pursuit of all of these goals, and they propose ways to make public education work better to help all children succeed and become the citizens we need.

Written by eminent education scholar Thomas Neville Bonner, Becoming A Physician is a groundbreaking, comprehensive history of Western medical education. The only work of its kind, it covers the United States, Great Britain, France, and Germany. Comparative in focus, the narrative unfolds within the context of social, political, and intellectual transformations that occurred in Europe and North America between the Enlightenment and Nazi Germany. Viewing the late eighteenth century as a watershed in the development of medical education, Bonner begins by describing how earlier practices evolved in the 1800s with the introduction of clinical practices. He then traces the growth of laboratory teaching in the nineteenth century and the twentieth-century preoccupation with establishing a university standard of medical education. Throughout, Bonner pays particular attention to the students, chronicling their daily lives and discussing changes in the medical school population and the various biases-- class, gender, racial, and religious--students and prospective students faced.

This book examines the dynamic process of black education reform during the Jim Crow era in two southern states, North Carolina and Mississippi. Through extensive archival research that explores the initiatives of foundations and reformers at the top, the impact of that work at the state and local level, and the voices of southerners, including those in rural black communities, the book demonstrate the importance of schooling to political development in the South and challenges us to re-evaluate the relationships among political actors involved in education reform. Foundation leaders were self-conscious state builders and policy entrepreneurs who aimed to promote national ideals through a public system of education, efforts they believed critical in the South, and black education was an important component of this national agenda. Through extensive efforts to create a more centralized and standard system of public education that would bring isolated and rural black schools into the public system, schooling served as an important site for expanding state and local governance capacity. It provided opportunities to reorganize local communities and affect black agency in the process. Because foundations could not unilaterally impose their educational vision on the South, particularly in local black communities, collaboration between foundation agents and local citizens was necessary to education reform and had the potential to open political opportunity structures in rural areas. Unfortunately, that potential was difficult to realize because foundations were less effective at implementing programs consistently in local areas.

Is it possible for conservative Protestant groups to survive in secular institutional settings? Here, Bramadat offers an ethnographic study of the Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship (IVCF) at McMaster University, a group that espouses fundamentalist interpretations of the Bible, women's roles, the age of the earth, alcohol consumption, and sexual ethics. In examining this group, Bramadat demonstrates how this tiny minority thrives within the overwhelmingly secular context of the University.

Why do white students have better test scores than black students in American schools? In this engaging book, Derrick Darby and John L. Rury answer this vexing question with novel historical evidence, and show that we must understand its origins to make further progress in closing the racial achievement gap. Telling the story of what they call the Color of Mind, the pernicious idea that there are racial differences in intelligence, character, and behavior, they show how philosophers such as Immanuel Kant and David Hume helped construct it, how it shaped American schooling, and how voices of dissent such as Frederick Douglass and Anna Julia Cooper debunked the Color of Mind, and worked to undo its adverse impact on black educational achievement and attainment. Rejecting the view that white and black student differences in achievement are a product of the Color of Mind, Darby and Rury argue that the racial achievement gap has been socially constructed. Because the Color of Mind is reinforced in tracking, discipline, and special education practices, school leaders must work to correct this. While we cannot expect them to solve social problems of poverty, inequality, and segregation, which also affect student achievement, a just society demands that they address the systemic school practices that reinforce contemporary manifestations of racist ideas. This is the only way to expel the Color of Mind from schools, and afford all kids the dignity they deserve.

How did Catholic colleges and universities deal with the modernization of education and the rise of research universities? In this book, Philip Gleason offers the first comprehensive study of Catholic higher education in the twentieth century, tracing the evolution of responses to an increasingly secular educational system. At the beginning of the century, Catholics accepted modernization in the organizational sphere while resisting it ideologically. Convinced of the truth of their religious and intellectual position, the restructured Catholic colleges grew rapidly after World War I, committed to educating for a "Catholic Renaissance." This spirit of militance carried over into the post-World War II era, but new currents were also stirring as Catholics began to look more favorably on modernity in its American form. Meanwhile, their colleges and universities were being transformed by continuing growth and professionalization. By the 1960's, changes in church teaching and cultural upheaval in American society reinforced the internal transformation already under way, creating an "identity crisis" which left Catholic educators uncertain of their purpose. Emphasizing the importance to American culture of the growth of education at all levels, Gleason connects the Catholic story with major national trends and historical events. By situating developments in higher education within the context of American Catholic thought, Contending with Modernity provides the fullest account available of the intellectual development of American Catholicism in the twentieth century.

This book tells the story of the sweeping makeover of the 200-year old campus of the University of North Carolina. Six million square feet of new buildings were constructed and a million square feet of historic buildings were renovated during one vibrant ten-year period. To make this massive growth work required bold thinking. A new Master Plan created a vision for combining historic preservation, green building, and long-range development. A statewide bond issue for higher education capital facilities, supplemented with outside support, generated $1.5 billion in capital funding. Previous town-gown tensions were swept aside as university officials and elected leaders collaborated on critical planning and zoning innovations. Award-winning plans and designs inspired new student living and learning communities. University facilities and construction staff doubled and a design review board formed to handle the increased load of new projects. Detailed design guidelines ensured that new development would be compatible with the traditional campus landscape as well as sensitive to environmental conservation. Written by authors who held major planning roles and supplemented with key player interviews, the book describes the politics, planning, and design that shaped the Dynamic Decade. Illustrated with color photographs and maps, this comprehensive account offers lessons to all concerned with sustainable university growth.

In this thoughtful and literate study, Schwehn argues that Max Weber and several of his contemporaries led higher education astray by stressing research--the making and transmitting of knowledge--at the expense of shaping moral character. Schwehn sees an urgent need for a change in orientation and calls for a "spiritually grounded education in and for thoughtfulness." The reforms he endorses would replace individualistic behavior, the "doing my own work" syndrome derived from the Enlightenment, with a communitarian ethic grounded in Judeo-Christian spirituality. Schwehn critiques philosophies of higher education he considers misguided, from Weber and Henry Adams to Derek Bok, Allan Bloom, and William G. Perry Jr. He draws out valid insights, always showing the theological underpinnings of the so-called secular thinkers. He emphasizes the importance of community, drawing on both the secular communitarian theory of Richard Rorty and that of the Christian theorist Parker Palmer. Finally, he outlines his own prescription for a classroom-centered spiritual community of scholars. Schwehn's study will interest all those concerned with higher education in America today: faculty, students, parents, alumni, administrators, trustees, and foundation officers.

Are colleges and universities in a period of unprecedented disruption? Is a bachelor's degree still worth the investment? What, exactly, is higher education good for? This book challenges the rhetoric of America's so-called crisis in higher education by investigating two centuries of college and university history. From the community college to the elite research university—in states from California to Maine—the book engages a fundamental question confronted by higher education institutions ever since the nation's founding: Do colleges and universities contribute to the common good? Tracking changes in the prevailing social ethos between the late eighteenth and early twenty-first centuries, the book illustrates the ways in which civic-mindedness, practicality, commercialism, and affluence influenced higher education's dedication to the public good. Each ethos, long a part of American history and tradition, came to predominate over the others during one of the four chronological periods examined in the book, informing the character of institutional debates and telling the definitive story of its time. The book demonstrates how two hundred years of political, economic, and social change prompted transformation among colleges and universities—including the establishment of entirely new kinds of institutions—and refashioned higher education in the United States over time in essential and often vibrant ways.

Hong Kong's Chinese History Curriculum from 1945: Politics and Identity investigates the ways in which Chinese history has evolved as a subject in Hong Kong secondary schools since 1945, and the various social, political and economic factors that have shaped the curriculum, through an examination of a wide range of primary and secondary source materials and interviews. This book examines how the aims, content, teaching, learning and assessment of the Chinese history curriculum have evolved since 1945. It describes how Chinese history became an independent subject in secondary schools in Hong Kong despite the political sensitivity of the subject, how it consolidated its status during the colonial period, and how it has faced threats to its independence since the return of Hong Kong to China in 1997. An important element of the book is its in-depth analysis of the major socio-political and socio-economic forces that have been involved in the development of Chinese history. This book will be of interest to all who are interested in history education and curriculum development, and readers who are concerned with history education.

The Importance of Being Urban offers several new perspectives on Progressive Era school reform by arguing that educational progressivism manifested itself differently at the local level than at the national level. This distinction can best be seen by examining how local district leaders—termed “district progressives”—embraced a variety of educational reforms considered novel and innovative. District progressives adopted curricula and instructional practices associated with Deweyan notions of pedagogy while they simultaneously implemented intelligence tests and other reforms that epitomized social efficiency and scientific management. During a period of vigorous urban planning, sweeping municipal reorganization, hastened immigration, and a shifting economic and industrial base, urban school districts began to play an increasingly prominent role in urban society, embedding themselves more and more into American urban life and taking responsibility for a much larger slice of the American childhood than ever before. Standard historical narratives tend to divide progressive educators into separate streams of thought, usually distinguishing between pedagogical and administrative progressives, but these divisions mask a more comprehensive understanding of district progressivism and obscure the ways in which districts combined reforms heretofore seen as incongruous and incompatible. By looking across multiple urban school systems, this study demonstrates that district progressivism was a common pattern, not simply representative of an isolated case or two. Moreover, the way local school leaders interpreted democratic education and assessed the potential of non-Anglo children from different national, racial, and socioeconomic backgrounds reveals much about the types of schools they ultimately constructed.

What is the legacy of Brown vs. Board of Education? While it is well known for establishing racial equality as a central commitment of American schools, the case also inspired social movements for equality in education across all lines of difference, including language, gender, disability, immigration status, socio-economic status, religion, and sexual orientation. Yet more than a half century after Brown, American schools are more racially separated than before, and educators, parents and policy makers still debate whether the ruling requires all-inclusive classrooms in terms of race, gender, disability, and other differences. In Brown's Wake examines the reverberations of Brown in American schools, including efforts to promote equal opportunities for all kinds of students. School choice, once a strategy for avoiding Brown, has emerged as a tool to promote integration and opportunities, even as charter schools and private school voucher programs enable new forms of self-separation by language, gender, disability, and ethnicity. Martha Minow, Dean of Harvard Law School, argues that the criteria placed on such initiatives carry serious consequences for both the character of American education and civil society itself. Although the original promise of Brown remains more symbolic than effective, Minow demonstrates the power of its vision in the struggles for equal education regardless of students' social identity, not only in the United States but also in many countries around the world. Further, she urges renewed commitment to the project of social integration even while acknowledging the complex obstacles that must be overcome. An elegant and concise overview of Brown and its aftermath, In Brown's Wake explores the broad-ranging and often surprising impact of one of the century's most important Supreme Court decisions.

Since World War II, the American discourse around children and science has been held in the form of a postmortem: a series of diagnoses pointing to a commitment gap that never seems to be fixed. The formation “Children don’t love science like they used to” points to an imagined past, full of the joy of experimentation and discovery. Although some now argue that we no longer actually face a scientific “manpower shortage,” the popular belief that we do is deeply ingrained, coming, as it does, from this vision of a lost time of utopian explorations. This book, a twentieth-century cultural history of the “science kid,” asks what the stakes of this belief might be. It argues that the nostalgic vision of “a time when American kids loved science” tends to represent these “science kids” as male. If we’re stuck associating the qualities of a potential young scientist—curiosity, mischievousness, a certain free way of thinking that sometimes borders on the antisocial—with masculinity, what effect might this persistent set of associations have on the attempt to recruit women into STEM fields?

This book argues that Clark Kerr, Gaylord P. Harnwell, and other post-World War II academic leaders set the American research university on a new course by creating the instrumental university. With its emphasis on procedural rationality, organized research, and project-based funding by external patrons, the instrumental university would provide technical and managerial knowledge to shape the social order. Its leaders hoped that by solving the nation’s pressing social problems, the research university would become the essential institution of postwar America. On this view, the university’s leading purposes included promoting economic development and coordinating research from many fields in order to attack social problems. Reorienting institutions to prioritize these activities had numerous consequences. One was to inject more capitalistic and managerial tendencies into universities. Today, those who decry universities’ corporatizing and market-driven tendencies often trace them to the rise of neoliberalism in the 1970s. This book suggests that a fuller explanation of these tendencies must highlight their deeper roots in the technocratic progressive tradition that originated in the 1910s, particularly the organizational changes within universities that this tradition spawned from the 1940s onward as part of the instrumental university.

As a result of tremendous social, legal, and political movements after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, the South led the nation in school desegregation from the late 1960s through the beginning of the twenty-first century. However, following a series of court cases in the past two decades—including a 2007 U.S. Supreme Court decision that raised potentially strong barriers for districts wishing to pursue integration—public schools in the South and across the nation are now resegregating faster than ever. In this comprehensive volume, a roster of leading scholars in educational policy and related fields offer eighteen essays seeking to illuminate new ways for American public education to counter persistent racial and socioeconomic inequality in American society. Drawing on extensive research, the contributors reinforce the key benefits of racially integrated schools, examine remaining options to pursue multiracial integration, and discuss case examples that suggest how to build support for those efforts. Framed by the editors' introduction and a conclusion by Gary Orfield, these essays engage the heated debates over school reform and advance new arguments about the dangers of resegregation while offering practical, research-grounded solutions to one of the most pressing issues in American education.

Making Harvard Modern is a candid, richly detailed portrait of America's most prominent university from 1933 to the present: seven decades of dramatic change. Early twentieth century Harvard was the country's oldest and richest university, but not necessarily its outstanding one. By the century's end it was widely regarded as the nation's, and the world's, leading institution of higher education. With verve, humor, and insight, Morton and Phyllis Keller tell the story of that rise: a tale of compelling personalities, notable achievement and no less notable academic pratfalls. Their book is based on rich and revealing archival materials, interviews, and personal experience. Young, humbly born James Bryant Conant succeeded Boston Brahmin A. Lawrence Lowell as Harvard's president in 1933, and set out to change a Brahmin-dominated university into a meritocratic one. He hoped to recruit the nation's finest scholars and an outstanding national student body. But the lack of new money during the Depression and the distractions of World War Two kept Conant, and Harvard, from achieving this goal. In the 1950s and 1960s, during the presidency of Conant's successor Nathan Marsh Pusey, Harvard raised the money, recruited the faculty, and attracted the students that made it a great meritocratic institution: America's university. The authors provide the fullest account yet of this transformation, and of the wrenching campus crisis of the late 'sixties. During the last thirty years of the twentieth century, a new academic culture arose: meritocratic Harvard morphed into worldly Harvard. During the presidencies of Derek Bok and Neil Rudenstine the university opened its doors to growing numbers of foreign students, women, African- and Asian-Americans, and Hispanics. Its administration, faculty, and students became more deeply engaged in social issues; its scientists and professional schools were more ready to enter into shared commercial ventures. But worldliness brought its own conflicts: over affirmative action and political correctness, over commercialization, over the ever higher costs of higher education. This fascinating account, the first comprehensive history of a modern American university, is essential reading for anyone with an interest in the present state and future course of higher education.

From World War II through the late 1960s in Nashville, Tennessee, policy choices linking segregation in housing, labor markets, and schooling created educational inequality and privileged white students over their black counterparts. Beginning in 1971, Nashville achieved significant desegregation in its schools via court-ordered busing across the consolidated metropolitan school district. But old pressures for inequality, operating in the new context of metropolitan desegregation and economic growth agendas, remade inequality through the later decades of the twentieth century. Schooling the Metropolis locates the causal roots of educational inequality in the interactions between schools, and the basic political and economic structures of the city and the metropolis. These forces shaped three modes of making and remaking educational inequality: the spatial organization of schooling (where students attended school, and which communities had schools), the curricular organization of schooling (which students enjoyed what academic opportunities in school), and the popular and legal narratives through which people explained inequality. Schooling the Metropolis departs from previous views in key ways: it situates schooling as a force in the making of the city and metropolis rather than as a passive recipient of urban and metropolitan dynamics; and it redirects attention from popular white resistance to policy choices that gave desegregation its specific form and meaning. By examining one of the more sweeping and statistically successful desegregation plans, it recognizes obstacles to educational inequality operating even within metropolitan city-county jurisdictions, and it appreciates the multiple and contradictory ways in which local, state, and federal power constructing and challenged educational inequality.