In Search of a Grand Narrative: The Turbulent History of Teaching

For this review of research on the history of teaching, I use the instructional triangle as an organizing tool and frame of analysis to explore what we know about who taught, who was taught, and what was taught across space and time. In the first section of this chapter I review historical research on who taught in American classrooms. One overwhelming theme throughout this literature is that policy makers, school leaders, and the general public have historically cared a great deal about who a teacher was, often basing their preferences on the belief that a teacher’s social characteristics would shape his or, more often, her teaching practices. We have little evidence to support the notion that teachers’ use of particular pedagogical strategies has consistently varied according to their gender, race, ethnicity, or class origins, but the historical record does suggest that teachers’ social characteristics at times affected classroom teaching in other ways. Specifically, recent research on the history of teachers from oppressed or marginalized communities makes a fairly strong case that teachers’ personal commitment to and belief about the purposes for their teaching often shaped their relationships with students and the interactions that occurred in their classrooms. In the second section of the chapter I review research on the history of who was taught. We have a strong historical record on the ways in which students’ teaching experiences have varied according to their race, class, and ethnicity, as well as the time and place they attended school. Often these different teaching experiences can be explained by school structures such as segregation and tracking, which functioned to reify social and economic inequities. At the same time, however, recent scholarship reveals that students (and their families) have also played an active role in shaping their teaching experiences—from challenging structural barriers, to contesting curriculum, to influencing teachers’ perceptions of their students and their purposes in teaching them. In the third section of the chapter I review research on the history of what was taught—a somewhat smaller body of literature than the other two, perhaps because it is more directly related to classroom practice. We have a much better record of what education leaders and reformers believed should be taught in school than we have of what actually transpired in classrooms. Nonetheless, what evidence does exist makes clear that teaching students how to behave has historically been a central purpose of education, although the specific means and ends of this behavioral training have varied. Teaching has also involved academic content, and recent subject-specific histories of teaching suggest that teachers’ understanding of that academic content and their purpose in teaching it has often shaped classroom instruction as well

Institutional Theory and the History of District-level School Reform: A Reintroduction

In this chapter I make my case for the utility of institutionalism for historians of education, first by explaining institutional theory and how it has been applied to, and shaped by, the study of schooling, and then by applying new theoretical developments to district-level historical research using examples drawn from earlier chapters in this volume. Ultimately, institutional theory may help us to interrogate Tyack and Cuban’s notion of institutional change in schools, by elaborating on their construction of the change process through specific, embedded, settings, and by rethinking how we determine what “counts” as change in schools and districts

Sitting on a Tinderbox\u27: Racial Conflict, Teacher Discretion and the Centralization of Disciplinary Authority

The centralization of school discipline in the second half of the twentieth century is widely understood to be the inevitable result of court decisions granting students certain civil rights in school. This study examines the process by which school discipline became centralized in the Los Angeles City School District in the late 1960s and early 1970s, however, and finds that the locus of control over student discipline shifted from the school site to the centralized district largely in response to local pressures. Indeed, during a period of large-scale student unrest, and in an environment of widespread racial and cultural tensions, many Los Angeles students, parents, community members, and educators actively promoted the centralization of school discipline—although often for directly conflicting purposes. Ultimately, this article argues that the centralization of school discipline was not inevitable and must be understood in the broader historical context in which it occurred

Racial Integration, White Appropriation, and School Choice: The Demise of the Colored Schools of late Nineteenth Century Brooklyn

This study examines school desegregation in late-nineteenth-century Brooklyn from a spatial perspective, analyzing enrollment data and policy debates within the context of the shifting racial and geographic contours of the city. We argue that “choice” on the part of black families only partially explains the demise of designated-black schools during this period. White interests also played a role in the closing of these institutions, as white families and developers sought, and ultimately acquired, control over formerly black spaces. This study contributes to a growing body of research on school desegregation in northern U.S. cities by exploring the perceived benefits of school desegregation for white families and property owners, and by examining how the end of official school segregation may have helped to shape the racial contours of nineteenth-century urban development

Inequality in Education

This chapter reviews research on the history of inequality in education. Across the globe and since the advent of formal schooling, children from wealthier families have had access to more education, and more costly education, than their less affluent peers. More physically and intellectually advantaged children have also, on average, had greater educational opportunities than their less fortunate peers. Yet within this general historic truth lies considerable variation in terms of how, to what extent, and by what political justification educational inequalities have existed and persisted. Historians have sought to explain variations in inequality in education across time and place and to situate those inequalities within a larger sociohistoric context. One overarching finding from this large and varied body of research is that reform of school systems’ organization and practices is frequently a necessary but insufficient strategy in reducing inequalities in education