School Reform in Perspective

Paper Summary:

The first part of the paper deals in depth with two of Tyack's arguments on school reform prior to the establishment of a centralized educational system in the United States: The social evolution argument and the balance-of-power argument. It goes through them in four distinct ways: by showing that educational policy is in turmoil, by questioning the need for reform, by concentrating on differentiating policy implications, and by examining varied policy outcomes. The second part of the paper follows the guidelines established by the first, but focuses on modern educational problems, rather than the problematics of the centralized educational system. The paper concludes that the educational crisis in the U.S. is not so much the result of bad public school education as it is the result of the inability to reach a compromise on the mode of education; that social and economic factors require diverse models of teaching; that societal value shifts bring about school policy changes.

From the Paper:

"In The One Best System , David Tyack focuses on the origins of schooling in America and the emergence of mass education. He starts with an analysis of the problems of rural education during the 19th century and presents his readers with an explanation of how the changing nature of religious, moral, and secular institutions in urban areas affected the institutionalization of educational practices. From there on, he traces the development of the idea of the one best system , and how differing political interests came together to form a consensus on future educational policies. The main questions he answers include: which were the forces that wanted to centralize the control of public schools and why, what were the arguments of the opposition, how school structure changed as the result of centralization, and why the system ultimately failed to address the needs of the masses."

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