The Rise And Fall Of American Public Schools

This volume provides a comprehensive and balanced survey of the state of American public education. It examines the trend in the quality of the public schools over the past 100 years, and reviews the possible reasons for a decline in quality. The work focuses on the importance of local control in American public education and how it has been steadily eroded. Franciosi advocates school choice as a way of restoring greater control by parents over their children's schools. This work is distinct among calls of reform in that it takes a skeptical attitude towards the centralized school reform movement that has culminated in the No Child Left Behind Act. It discusses important topics that have been the subject of research including the effect of teachers unions, Tiebout competition and local control, and school finance reform. Franciosi follows the many trajectories taken by America's public schools over the past century. It shows that the United States has been a world education leader in both access for all children and resources spent. Despite this there are still some worrisome trends. While school spending has steadily increased, student achievement has fluctuated, and remains below that of students in other developed nations. Initiatives to close the gap in achievement has fluctuated and remains below that of students in other developed nations. Initiatives to close the gap in achievement and resources among students of various socioeconomic, racial, and ethnic backgrounds have been only partially successful. Past efforts to reform public education have led to increasingly centralized control over public schools. This piece will be important to those who are active on both sides of the school reform debate. It will also be useful to students who are researching education policy, the economics of education, or public policy.

For more than forty years the author has written numerous magazine articles and made countless public speeches citing his three basic principles of education: 1) that public education and the larger society are interdependent - what happens to one affects the other; 2) that when a society decides to provide a certain level of education to all of a given segment of its population, that better educated group soon begins to create so many inventions and so many better ways of doing things that still more education must be provided young people to equip them to deal with this new complexity; and 3) that when education and the larger society get out of sync, unless steps are promptly taken to get them back in sync by providing much MORE education to enable people to cope with the more complex society, then both education and the larger society begin to deteriorate. This writing and lecturing experience showed the author clearly that people resist conceptual change. Someone once said that people, and particularly Americans, resist change until change becomes irresistible. This fact, plus the rapidly deteriorating condition of both public education and American society, has led the author to publish this book in the hope of getting large numbers of people to understand the absolute necessity of almost immediately starting public education at the age of two, operating the public schools year round, and providing higher education to all interested people free of charge.

The updated edition of the difficulties faced by the Detroit public schools and the historical reasons that led to the present situation

The unknown history of American public education. At a time when Americans are debating the future of public education, Johann N. Neem tells the inspiring story of how and why Americans built a robust public school system in the decades between the Revolution and the Civil War. It’s a story in which ordinary people in towns across the country worked together to form districts and build schoolhouses and reformers sought to expand tax support and give every child a liberal education. By the time of the Civil War, most northern states had made common schools free, and many southern states were heading in the same direction. Americans made schooling a public good. Yet back then, like today, Americans disagreed over the kind of education needed, who should pay for it, and how schools should be governed. Neem explores the history and meaning of these disagreements. As Americans debated, teachers and students went about the daily work of teaching and learning. Neem takes us into the classrooms of yore so that we may experience public schools from the perspective of the people whose daily lives were most affected by them. Ultimately, Neem concludes, public schools encouraged a diverse people to see themselves as one nation. By studying the origins of America’s public schools, Neem urges us to focus on the defining features of democratic education: promoting equality, nurturing human beings, preparing citizens, and fostering civic solidarity.

Controls and Choices: The Educational Marketplace and the Failure of School Desegregation provides a detailed examination of the nature of the educational marketplace, supported by historical evidence, to argue that school desegregation failed because it involved monopolistic efforts at redistributing opportunities.

In 1954 the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education; ten years later, Congress enacted the Civil Rights Act. These monumental changes in American law dramatically expanded educational opportunities for racial and ethnic minority children across the country. They also changed the experiences of white children, who have learned in increasingly diverse classrooms. The authors of this commemorative volume include leading scholars in law, education, and public policy, as well as important historical figures. Taken together, the chapters trace the narrative arc of school desegregation in the United States, beginning in California in the 1940s, continuing through Brown v. Board, the Civil Rights Act, and three important Supreme Court decisions about school desegregation and voluntary integration in 1974, 1995, and 2007. The authors also assess the status of racial and ethnic equality in education today and consider the viability of future legal and policy reform in pursuit of the goals of Brown v. Board. This remarkable collection of voices in conversation with one another lays the groundwork for future discussions about the relationship between law and educational equality, and ultimately for the creation of new public policy. A valuable reference for scholars and students alike, this dynamic text is an important contribution to the literature by an outstanding group of authors.

This book articulates a path for a renewed conception of-and commitment to-the public dimensions of schooling. It is an interdisciplinary book of philosophy and politics, written for educational leaders working in or on behalf of public schooling. Publics for Public Schools introduces a fresh view on how educational leaders might view the public ideal. In this conception of public work and leadership, educational leaders do not work with the public but help to achieve publics for public schools. The demos, or "the people" in the case of democratic governance of schools, mobilize around particular problems related to young people and schooling; they are best understood not as "the public" but as multiple publics. This book provides a conception of public life and of public leadership that can enable educational leaders of all types to help achieve publics for their schools.

THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER In an era of safe spaces, trigger warnings, and an unprecedented election, the country's youth are in crisis. Senator Ben Sasse warns the nation about the existential threat to America's future. Raised by well-meaning but overprotective parents and coddled by well-meaning but misbegotten government programs, America's youth are ill-equipped to survive in our highly-competitive global economy. Many of the coming-of-age rituals that have defined the American experience since the Founding: learning the value of working with your hands, leaving home to start a family, becoming economically self-reliant—are being delayed or skipped altogether. The statistics are daunting: 30% of college students drop out after the first year, and only 4 in 10 graduate. One in three 18-to-34 year-olds live with their parents. From these disparate phenomena: Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse who as president of a Midwestern college observed the trials of this generation up close, sees an existential threat to the American way of life. In The Vanishing American Adult, Sasse diagnoses the causes of a generation that can't grow up and offers a path for raising children to become active and engaged citizens. He identifies core formative experiences that all young people should pursue: hard work to appreciate the benefits of labor, travel to understand deprivation and want, the power of reading, the importance of nurturing your body—and explains how parents can encourage them. Our democracy depends on responsible, contributing adults to function properly—without them America falls prey to populist demagogues. A call to arms, The Vanishing American Adult will ignite a much-needed debate about the link between the way we're raising our children and the future of our country.