Using knowledge of the past to improve education today: US education history and policy-making

Abstract

Early American historians provided the public and policy-makers with information about US history that provided both entertainment and policy suggestions. As American historians became more professionalised in the early twentieth century, they concentrated more on their own scholarly concerns and less on policy-relevant writings. In recent decades, however, there has been a gradual revival of interest among academic historians in policy-making. In the 1950s and 1960s American education history was revitalised from two different directions. Some scholars questioned the highly positive, in-house histories previously written by education professors. Later a group of “revisionist” education historians pointed to the failures of American public schools and the neglect of children living in poverty. During the creation of Head Start and the Elementary and Secondary Education programme in the mid-1960s, there was a lack of historically relevant education policy studies. Education historians now have joined other scholars in analysing these programmes as well as the recent billion-dollar initiative to improve American history teaching.

Keywords:

• academic historians
• compensatory education
• federal initiatives
• history teaching
• policy-making
• pre-school programmes
• research strategies
• revisionists

Notes

This keynote was delivered at the ISCHE “Education and Power: Historical Perspectives” in Riga, August 21–24 2013.

¹ For earlier discussions, see Maris A. Vinovskis, History and Educational Policymaking (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999); Maris A. Vinovskis, “Historians and Education Policy Research in the United States,” in Handbook of Education Policy Research, ed. Gary Sykes, Barbara Schneider and David N. Plank (New York: Routledge, 2009), 17–26. For a useful overview of comparable issues in other countries, see Gary McCulloch, The Struggle for the History of Education (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011).

² Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967).

³ George H. Callcott, History in the United States: Its Practice and Purpose (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970); Peter Charles Hoffer, Past Imperfect: Facts, Fictions, Fraud – American History from Bancroft and Parkman to Ambrose, Bellesies, Ellis, and Goodwin (New York: Public Affairs, 2004).

⁴ James M. Banner, Jr., Being a Historian: An Introduction to the Professional World of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

⁵ Anne-Lise Halvorsen, A History of Elementary Social Studies: Romance and Reality (New York: Peter Lang, 2013).

⁶ George T. Blakely, Historians on the Homefront: American Propagandists for the Great War (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1970); Robin W. Winks, Cloak and Gown: Scholars in the Secret War, 1939–1961, 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996).

⁷ Richard E. Neustadt and Ernest R. May, Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision Makers (New York: Free Press, 1986); Novick, That Noble Dream.

⁸ Hoffer, Past Imperfect; Vinovskis, History and Educational Policymaking, 3–47; Howard Zinn, “What is Radical History?,” in The Vital Past: Writings on the Uses of History,” ed. Stephen Vaughn (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1985), 158–69.

⁹ Jack Dougherty, “Conflicting Questions: Why Historians and Policymakers Miscommunicate on Urban Education,” in Clio at the Table: Using History to Inform and Improve Education Policy, ed. Kenneth K. Wong and Robert Rothman (New York: Peter Lang, 2009), 251–62; Robert C. Wood, Whatever Possessed the President? Academic Experts and Presidential Policy, 1960–1988 (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993).

¹⁰ Hugh Davis Graham, “The Stunted Career of Policy History: A Critique and an Agenda,” Public Historian 15, no. 2 (1993): 15–37.

¹¹ Vinovskis, History and Educational Policymaking, 3–47, 239–56. Analysts often neglect the important role of academically trained public historians who have been working in the federal, state and local governments since the Second World War. Donald A. Ritchie, “Historians in the Federal Government,” in The Organization of American Historians and the Writing and Teaching of American History, ed. Richard S. Kirkendall (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 306–16.

¹² Terrence J. McDonald, ed., The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996); Eric H. Monkkonen, ed., Engaging the Past: The Uses of History across the Social Sciences (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994).

¹³ Milton Gaither, American Educational History Revisited (New York: Teachers College Press, 2003). Similar developments occurred in other countries as well, but often they developed in somewhat different ways and times. McCulloch, The Struggle for the History of Education.

¹⁴ Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life (New York: Basic Books, 1976); Michael Katz, The Irony of Early School Reform: Educational Innovation in Mid-nineteenth Century Massachusetts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968).

¹⁵ Diane Ravitch, The Revisionists Revised: A Critique of the Radical Attack on the Schools (New York: Basic Books, 1978); Maris A. Vinovskis, The Origins of Public High Schools: A Reexamination of the Beverly High School Controversy (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985).

¹⁶ For several of the earlier exchanges on this revisionism, see Walter Feinberg et al., Revisionists Respond to Ravitch (Washington, DC: National Academy of Education, 1980); Maris A. Vinovskis, Education, Society, and Economic Opportunity: A Historical Perspective on Persistent Issues (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 125–41.

¹⁷ Edward Zigler and Susan Muenchow, Head Start: A Legacy of the War on Poverty (New York: Basic Books, 1992); Edward Zigler and Jeanette Valentine, eds., Project Head Start: A Legacy of the War on Poverty (New York: Free Press, 1979).

¹⁸ Carl F. Kaestle and Maris A. Vinovskis, Education and Social Change in Nineteenth-Century Massachusetts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 46–71.

¹⁹ Elizabeth Rose, The Promise of Preschool: From Head Start to Universal Pre-Kindergarten (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Maris A. Vinovskis, The Birth of Head Start: Preschool Education Policies in the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

²⁰ Stephen K. Bailey and Edith K. Mosher, ESEA: The Office of Education Administers a Law (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1968). Julie Jeffrey, a historian, wrote a useful history of ESEA a decade later. Julie Roy Jeffrey, Education for the Children of the Poor: A Study of the Origins and Implementation of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1978).

²¹ Patrick J. McGuinn, No Child Left Behind and the Transformation of Federal Education Policy, 1965–2005 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006); Vinovskis, The Birth of Head Start; Maris A. Vinovskis, From A Nation at Risk to No Child Left Behind: National Education Goals and the Creation of Federal Education Policy (New York: Teachers College Press, 2009).

²² Maris A. Vinovskis, Revitalizing Federal Education Research and Development: Improving the R&D Centers, Regional Educational Laboratories and the “New” OERI (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2001).

²³ Diane Ravitch and Maris A. Vinovskis, eds., Learning from the Past: What History Teaches Us about School Reform (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995).

²⁴ Vinovskis, Revitalizing Federal Education Research and Development.

²⁵ Ibid.

²⁶ M. Suzanne Donovan and John D. Bransford, eds., How Students Learn: History, Mathematics, and Science in the Classroom (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 2005).

²⁷ Keith Robinson and Angel L. Harris, The Broken Compass: Parental Involvement with Children’s Education (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).

²⁸ For a discussion of how education historians might examine these issues using the life-course framework, see Vinovskis, History and Education Policymaking, 203–37.

²⁹ Paula Hamilton and Linda Shopes, eds., Oral History and Public Memories (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2008); Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson, eds., Oral History Reader, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2006); Donald A. Ritchie, Doing Oral History: A Practical Guide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

³⁰ David L. Featherman and Maris A. Vinovskis, eds., Social Science and Policy-making: A Search for Relevance in the Twentieth Century (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2004).

³¹ Charles H. Feinstein and Mark Thomas, Making History Count: A Primer in Quantitative Methods for Historians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Georg G. Iggers, Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1998).

³² Banner, Being a Historian; Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelan, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).

³³ Gary B. Nash, Charlotte Crabtree and Ross E. Dunn, History on Trial: Culture Wars and the Teaching of the Past (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997).

³⁴ Vinovskis, From a Nation at Risk to No Child Left Behind.

³⁵ Linda Symcox, Whose History? The Struggle for National Standards in American Classrooms (New York: Teachers College Press, 2002); Nash et al., History on Trial.

³⁶ Vinovskis, From a Nation at Risk to No Child Left Behind.

³⁷ Maris A. Vinovskis, “No Child Left Behind and Highly Qualified US History Teachers: Some Historical and Policy Perspectives,” in Clio at the Table: Using History to Inform and Improve Education Policy, ed. Kenneth K. Wong and Robert Rothman (New York: Peter Lang, 2009), 221–47.

³⁸ US Department of Education, “Teaching American History Program, Frequently Asked Questions,” http://www.ed.gov/print/programs/teaching history (accessed March 20, 2006).

³⁹ Rachel G. Ragland and Kelly A. Woestman, eds., The Teaching American History Project: Lessons for History Educators and Historians (New York: Routledge, 2009); Vinovskis, “No Child Left Behind and Highly Qualified US History Teachers.”

⁴⁰ Carl F. Kaestle, ed., To Educate a Nation: Federal and National Strategies of School Reform (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2007); Tracy L. Steffes, “Lessons from the Past: A Challenge and a Caution for Policy-Relevant History,” in Clio at the Table: Using History to Inform and Improve Education Policy, ed. Kenneth K. Wong and Robert Rothman (New York: Peter Lang, 2009), 263–89; Stephen Vaughn, ed., The Vital Past: Writings on the Uses of History (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1985); Kenneth K. Wong and Robert Rothman, eds., Clio at the Table: Using History to Inform and Improve Education Policy (New York: Peter Lang, 2009).

⁴¹ Maris A. Vinovskis, “A History of Efforts to Improve the Quality of Federal Education Research: From Gardner’s Task Force to the Institute of Education Sciences,” in Education Research on Trial: Policy Reform and the Call for Scientific Rigor, ed. Pamela Barnhouse Walters, Annette Lareau and Sheri H. Ranis (New York: Routledge, 2009), 51–79.

⁴² Alice Rivlin and P. Michael Timpane, eds., Planned Variation in Education: Should We Give Up or Try Harder? (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1975).

⁴³ Vinovskis, Revitalizing Federal Education Research and Development.

⁴⁴ Audrey Singer, “Contemporary Immigrant Gateways in Historical Perspective,” Daedalus 142, no. 3 (2013): 76–91.

⁴⁵ Douglas S. Massey, Jorge Durand and Nolan J. Malone, Beyond Smoke and Mirrors: Mexican Immigration in an Era of Economic Integration (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2002).

⁴⁶ Jeffrey Mirel, Patriotic Pluralism: Americanization Education and European Immigrants (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).

⁴⁷ Maris A. Vinovskis, “The Past is Prologue? Federal Efforts to Promote Equity and Excellence,” in Carrots, Sticks, and the Bully Pulpit: Lessons from a Half-century of Federal Efforts to Improve America’s Schools, ed. Frederick M. Hess and Andrew P. Kelly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Educational Press, 2011), 15–36.

⁴⁸ Greg J. Duncan and Richard J. Murnane, eds., Whither Opportunity? Rising Inequality, Schools, and Children’s Life Chances (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2011).

⁴⁹ Arthur Schlesinger, Jr, “The Historian as a Participant,” Daedalus 100, no. 2 (1971): 339–58. On some of the challenges of doing contemporary history, see Claire Bond Potter and Renee C. Romano, eds., Doing Recent History: On Privacy, Copyright, Video Games, Institutional Review Boards, Activist Scholarship, and History that Talks Back (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2012).

⁵⁰ Carl F. Kaestle, “The Awful Reputation of Education Research,” Educational Researcher 22, no. 1 (1993): 23–31.

⁵¹ Frederick M. Hess, The Same Thing Over and Over: How School Reformers Get Stuck in Yesterday’s Ideas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).

⁵² David Phillips and Michelle Schweisfurth, Comparative and International Education: An Introduction to Theory, Method, and Practice (London: Continuum, 2007); Pasi Sahlberg, Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland? (New York: Teachers College Press, 2011).

⁵³ A group of Baltic education historians, for example, are beginning a coordinated effort to document and analyse the education developments historically in their countries. Aida Kruze et al., eds., History of Education and Pedagogical Thought in the Baltic Countries up to 1940: An Overview (Riga: Raka, 2009); Iveta Kestere, Aida Kruze and Aija Abens, eds., History of Pedagogy and Educational Sciences in the Baltic Countries from 1940 to 1990: An Overview (Riga: Raka, 2013).

⁵⁴ Claudia Golden and Lawrence F. Katz, The Race Between Education and Technology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).

⁵⁵ Dougherty, “Conflicting Questions.”

⁵⁶ There is an ongoing debate on how objective historians (or anyone else) can and should be objective in their work and policy suggestions. Novick, That Noble Dream; Thomas L. Haskell, Objectivity is Not Neutrality: Explanatory Schemes in History (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998).

⁵⁷ Vinovskis, History and Education Policymaking, 203–37.

⁵⁸ Vinovskis, History and Educational Policymaking, 3–47, 239–56.

⁵⁹ For several short autobiographical accounts of prominent education historians who have been involved in Washington policy-making, see Wayne J. Urban, ed., Leaders in the Historical Study of American Education (Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2011), 117–27, 231–40, 287–98.