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To Educate a Nation

Federal and National Strategies of School Reform

Edited by Carl F. Kaestle and Alyssa E. Lodewick

Foreword by Jeffrey R. Henig

September 2007
368 pages, 6 x 9
Studies in Government and Public Policy
Cloth ISBN 978-0-7006-1542-1, $40.00
Paper ISBN 978-0-7006-1543-8, $19.95

book cover imageTo Educate a Nation brings together the work of some of the most notable young scholars in the field of national education policy studies, focusing on the growing federal role in reform efforts; programs to provide equal educational opportunity; the changing relationships among federal, state, and local agencies; and the shifting boundaries between public and private sectors.

Collectively, these essays provide a new and penetrating look at how education policymaking has changed over the past fifty years. Individually, they address such issues as desegregation, education choice, Title I, the National Defense Education Act, the politics of pre-K education, and Supreme Court decisions on equal opportunity—as well as how No Child Left Behind fits into the larger framework of debates over the standards-based reform movement.

Developed over three years of seminars at Brown University, To Educate a Nation brings thematic and analytical coherence to the subject. Bridging historical and social science analyses, the contributors examine the interactions of federal initiatives with state and local practices as they highlight the complications inherent in American education today and provide a framework for grappling with its problems. Their insights expand our understanding of federal policy, national reform movements, and the changing nature of the polity in education—the institutions, traditions, and power relationships that define who has a voice in education policymaking and how they participate in it.

For citizens and scholars alike, To Educate a Nation provides new ways to think about educational decision making in a federal system of governance, about unintended consequences of top-down policies, and about the continued resilience of state and local variation, clarifying how education policy is made in our unusual American system of shared governance and supplying an effective framework for understanding today’s complex policymaking context.

“A rich and illuminating book on various aspects of national educational policy and politics from a stellar cast of promising young historians and social scientists, deftly organized into a coherent volume by Kaestle.”—Robert Schwartz, Dean, Harvard Graduate School of Education

“A must-read for those who are either enamored or skeptical of further concentrating state and federal authority over schooling in the U.S.”—Larry Cuban, coauthor of Tinkering toward Utopia: A Century of Public School Reform

“An exceptional book.”—Gordon Ambach, former New York State Education Commissioner

CARL F. KAESTLE is University Professor of Education, History, and Public Policy at Brown University whose books include Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools in American Society, 1780–1860 and Literacy in the United States: Readers and Reading since 1880. ALYSSA E. LODEWICK, formerly assistant director of the Advanced Studies Fellowship program at Brown, is a consultant for educational and nonprofit institutions.

CONTRIBUTORS: Marguerite Clarke, Elizabeth DeBray-Pelot, Kimberley Edelin Freeman, David Gamson, Nora Gordon, Carl F. Kaestle, Alyssa E. Lodewick, Christopher Lubienski, Kathryn A. McDermott, Adam R. Nelson, Douglas S. Reed, Elizabeth Rose