The One Best System

A History of American Urban Education

David Tyack

    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

  • Cover: The One Best System

David Tyack is Vida Jacks Professor of Education and Professor of History Emeritus, Stanford University.