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The economic and environmental significance of school land policy in the United States has yet to be imagined, let alone systematically studied, by scholars. Although the fact that Congress allocated shares of public lands to the support of schools beginning in the 1780s is well known, historians have not adequately assessed the impacts of that policy. No one has seriously posed the question of how such policies figured in the history of resource extraction, capital accumulation, and economic development. What difference did it make that federal policy tied school funding to the sale of billions of acres of public land or to the direct lease of such lands to timber, mining, and livestock interests--historical arrangements that survive today through much of the U.S. West? Drawing on state-by-state accounts of the terms of school land disposition and the record of Congressional debates over school land policies, this article advances an argument about the relationship between nature, education, and political economies of U.S. state formation, laying the groundwork for assessing more fully the consequences of that relationship.

Studies of the rise of social science research in education typically focus on the Progressive Era, from 1890 to 1930, the period in which the American Educational Research Association (AERA) was founded. As central as this story is to the intellectual history of education as a field, however, it obscures an earlier set of events that arguably is even more important to understanding why AERA and the larger progressive education research enterprise of which it was a part developed when and how they did. That episode was the major but ultimately failed effort of the 1870s and 1880s to establish a national education system in the United States. This chapter focuses on the use of social science research in this earlier episode of education reform. It reveals how the rise of education research during the Progressive Era, and ultimately the founding of AERA, responded to the failure of this earlier effort in multiple ways. More precisely, it shows how social science research in education developed historically in relation to the peculiarly decentralized and racialized structure of education authority and policy in the United States.

After the Civil War (1861-1865), the United States faced a problem of "reconstruction" similar to that confronted by other nations at the time and familiar to the US since at least the Mexican-American War (1846-1848). The problem was one of territorial and political (re)integration: how to take territories that had only recently been operating under "foreign" governance and integrate them into an expanded nation-state on common structural terms. This paper considers the significance of education in that process of state (re)formation after the Civil War, with particular attention to its role in federal territories of the US West. Specifically, this paper analyses the role that education-based restrictions on citizenship, voting rights and office-holding played in constructing formal state power in the cases of five western territories: Hawaii, Indian Territory, Oklahoma, Arizona and New Mexico. A focus on the significance of education in these cases both advances and challenges literature on the "hidden" and decentralised structure of national policy-making in the US. It adds to that literature by illuminating how education served as an indirect tool of national policy in the West, effectively shaping the structure of power in other policy domains. At the same time, by focusing on the US West, the present analysis challenges the idea that national governance in the US was particularly "decentralised" or "hidden". It highlights instead: (1) the role of colonial racialism in shaping national responsibility and authority for education in the US; and (2) the significance of education as both an alternative and a corollary to war in establishing US colonial power.

Professor Tamura, in her paper "Narrative History and Theory," poses an issue with which the author has lately wrestled. She reviews some of the challenges to the tradition of narrative history presented by "social-scientifically oriented historians" like Fernand Braudel and "analytic philosophers" like Hayden White in the 1960s and 1970s, and then goes on to note that more recently, a turn to narrative among social scientists and a use of theory by historians suggests the possibility of combining narrative and theory in historical work. Overall, Professor Tamura expresses a sanguine view of the prospects for such integration. While narrative "provides a causal account and allows one to relive events," theory "allows one to analyze more effectively the forces that are beneath the surface." In her efforts to write a history of education in the early Republican era that moves back and forth between telling the stories of ordinary people and using social capital theory to analyze the place of schooling in larger patterns of social, economic, and political change, the author intends to share Professor Tamura's interest in the possibilities, and at the same time to identify some of the challenges, of such work. Like Professor Tamura, the author is drawn to the power of narrative to illuminate the significance or meaning of events from inside history. (Contains 9 footnotes.)

The relationship between education and state formation in the United States differed from that in other countries in ways that have yet to be adequately accounted for in comparative and theoretical literatures. Specifically, in the northern United States, very high levels of mass school attendance and funding were achieved prior to and outside state initiative. Although this distinctive history of educational development in the US has been noted by scholars, existing literatures still leave largely unresolved two salient questions following from this fact: (1) What factors facilitated the earlier and greater expansion of mass education in the northern US in the absence of direct state intervention? and (2) What was the significance of this early expansion for the process of state formation itself? This article addresses these questions by juxtaposing an intensive case study of the relationship between education and state formation in New York State in the early republican era, 1790-1840, against reigning comparative historical accounts of such relationships. In the process, two factors are identified that promoted education expansion in the northern US that so far have received little attention in the comparative literature: access to corporate legal power and the distribution of wealth. Finally, it is suggested that the substantial social, financial and political capital commanded by schools prior to state intervention had a significant impact on the process of state formation in the US. (Contains 55 footnotes.)

Much good work has recently been done on the socioeconomic history of teaching in the United States, particularly in relation to the "feminization" of the profession that occurred over the course of the nineteenth century. This article brings together evidence from disparate local sources in both North Carolina and New York to explore the structure of teacher labor markets during the years from 1800 to 1850. Among the sources examined are hundreds of newspaper advertisements for venture schools and academies in North Carolina and detailed school and teacher employment records for one rural New York town. Considered in conjunction with scattered comparative material from other primary and secondary sources for those states, this evidence leads the authors to challenge several key assumptions and suggest a few new lines of inquiry about regional variations in teacher employment, socioeconomic incentives for teachers, and the gender transformation of teaching in the early nineteenth century. The authors have chosen both New York and North Carolina as subjects of study, not only to compare and contrast women's entry into teaching in both regions but also to analyze some of the factors that motivated women to travel from the North to the South to teach. The authors argue that, in addition to the ideological and cultural factors historians have documented, socioeconomic incentives influenced young women to take up teaching in both the North and the South. The article is organized in three main parts. In the first section, the authors look at women's entry into teaching during the early decades of the nineteenth century in both northern and southern contexts. In the second section, the authors investigate the salaries paid to female teachers in comparison to wages available to women in other forms of paid work. In the third section, the authors hypothesize a model of teacher-labor markets and opportunity structures for women in the early antebellum era by looking at salary trends over time, highlighting comparisons between male and female teachers, and exploring differences between the opportunities available in northern and southern schools and economies. This analysis leads the authors to pose new questions about the interaction of teacher labor markets, the state, and schools. It also illuminates some of the reasons that may have impelled northern women to travel south to teach in the early nineteenth century. (Contains 2 figures, 7 tables and 71 footnotes.)

Reviews David Reynolds'"There Goes the Neighborhood," which examined school consolidation and community based schooling and highlighted Delaware County, Iowa, around 1910-30. Reynolds characterizes school consolidation as expressing the enduring modern tension between what is good for a community and what is good for society. (Contains references.) (SM)

Offers an account of the origins of the Regents examination system in New York providing an assessment of the preliminary examination results from 1866 to 1885 and a description of the development of advanced examinations. Discusses the implications of the New York case for understanding the emergence of credential markets. (CMK)

Studies the institutional characteristics and strategic choices of successful academies operating under the New York Regents system from 1838 to 1850. Identifies single-sex education and denominational affiliation as important for success. Suggests frameworks for investigating variations among the 19th-century academies and discusses implications for market-based models of school funding. (SLD)

Focusing on the middle of the 19th-century, William J. Reese tells how the public high school went from being an embattled institution with an antirepublican image to a dominant educational institution. Tracing the early development of high schools is an important contribution to the history of education. (SLD)

The paper examines how shared decision making can help reframe the purpose of social foundations in teacher education, arguing that it bridges the gap between teacher as decision maker and the content of foundational studies. Four studies that represent different levels of educational decision making are highlighted. (SM)

Describes the role of Emma Willard in encouraging the New York State legislature to provide state support for women's education. Discusses political and social issues in the mid-1800s and Willard's vision of a separate system of higher education for women. Outlines establishment of teacher education programs. (CFR)

An effective method of reframing the purpose of social foundations in teacher education, is to invoke the idea of shared decision making. Shared decision making includes the concepts of site-based management, school restructuring and school-based decision making. Shared decision making helps bridge the gap between the idea of teachers as decision makers, and the moral, civic and social policy content of foundational studies. Empirical case studies point out that in order to describe the purpose of social foundations, the skill to identify and analyze the values at stake in educational issues is imperative.

Whose America: Culture Wars in the Public Schools. By Jonathan Zimmerman. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2002. 228 pp. Abbreviations, notes, and index. $29.95. Whose America gets to the nub [...]

The economic and environmental significance of school land policy in the United States has yet to be imagined, let alone systematically studied, by scholars. Although the fact that Congress allocated shares of public lands to the support of schools beginning in the 1780s is well known, historians have not adequately assessed the impacts of that policy. No one has seriously posed the question of how such policies figured in the history of resource extraction, capital accumulation, and economic development. What difference did it make that federal policy tied school funding to the sale of billions of acres of public land or to the direct lease of such lands to timber, mining, and livestock interests--historical arrangements that survive today through much of the U.S. West? Drawing on state-by-state accounts of the terms of school land disposition and the record of Congressional debates over school land policies, this article advances an argument about the relationship between nature, education, and political economies of U.S. state formation, laying the groundwork for assessing more fully the consequences of that relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]