The Politics of School Reform, 1870 1940

Editor/s: 
Paul Peterson
Year of publication: 
1985
Publisher: 
University Of Chicago Press
Pages: 
252 pages

Was school reform in the decades following the Civil War an upper-middle-class effort to maintain control of the schools? Was public education simply a vehicle used by Protestant elites to impose their cultural ideas upon recalcitrant immigrants? This work challenges such standard, revisionist interpretations of American educational history. Urban public schools were created by a politically pluralistic society.