Urban school reform in the United States is characterized by contentious, politicized debate. This course explores a set of critical issues in the education and educational reform space, with a focus on aspects of the field that have sparked controversy and polarized views. We will dig into these debates, situating them within the larger history of public education and school reform, and considering the viewpoints, the evidence, and translation of issues into educational policy. We will consider three broad topics in this course: 1. Federal Strategies in School Reform: How has the federal government legislated and incented public school reform? 2. School Choice: How does school choice aim to improve schools? 3. Accountability: What is the history of accountability in American public schooling? What are the policies and practices associated with accountability? Learning Goals This course will enable participants to: 1. develop an informed historical perspective about public schooling in the United States; 2. understand the unique contextual elements of the American approach to public schooling; 3. analyze and assess divergent viewpoints about American public school history and school reform policy. Teachers may be able to receive continuing education credit for successful completion of this course. To earn continuing education credits students must purchase and earn the Course Certificate, which they can then submit to the credit-issuing agency in their state. Students should also fill out the requisite paperwork stating that the affiliated provider is the Graham School at the University of Chicago, and that average time for certificate-level course completion is 18 hours. Students outside of Illinois should contact their state’s accreditation board to determine whether this course is eligible for continuing education credit. Note that it is up to the schools or districts that employ teachers to decide whether this course meet their requirements.
Public Schooling & Local Control
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From the course by The University of Chicago
Critical Issues in Urban Education
24 ratings
The University of Chicago
Critical Issues in Urban Education
24 ratings
From the lesson
American Public Education: Critical Issues & Historical Context
As we launch the course, we will explore the history of public schooling and school reform in the United States. The approach to public education in the United States is unique, with governance, quality, and approach residing at the state and local level. As a result, efforts to improve and reform public schools in the United States are complex. Together, we will unpack these critical foundational characteristics of American public schooling, and explore the ways in which these contextual factors influence topics explored throughout the course.
Meet the Instructors
Sara Ray StoelingaSara Liston Spurlark Director and Clinical Professor
Urban Education Institute
Welcome to critical issues in urban education. Today, I'm going to be giving you a few lectures that focus on the foundational tenants of American public education. The idea behind this is to tell you a little bit about the history of public education in the United States. And to help you to understand how it's different from education in other parts of the world. It's also to intentionally draw connections between the history of American public education, and the other topics that we will be addressing in the course. And what you will see in that process is that this distinctive approach that the American system takes to education really influences the way that we think and talk about the different course topics. I'm going to start with the unit over view that essentially gives you a summary of what we're going to be focusing on in the next three segments. To begin with, I'm going to talk about the history of public schooling and local control. Local control is a concept of American public education being controlled at the district and the state level rather than being a national system of education.
Secondly, I'm going to talk with you about school funding. This is connected to the first topic in focusing on local control issue. Because education is locally controlled in the United States, it means that school funding is primarily done at the local level. And this has implications for inequities about the way that funding is distributed across the country. And then finally, I'm going to talk with you a little about the history of public school reform in the United States, again as a foundation for some of the other topics that you'll be learning.
So, to begin with, let's focus on public schooling and local control, and the history of the way public schooling came to be in the United States.
And this takes us back to the common school period in the United States. It's a really interesting history. And it's one that I think is a story that's generally untold and that sometimes people forget. And that is that actually in the United States public schooling, this idea of compulsory schooling that's funded through property taxes. The system that we have today is sometimes assumed to have been a foregone conclusion. Like this is something that was meant to happen in the United States. And it actually is the case that wasn't true, that almost it didn't happen that there was compulsory publicly funded education in the United States. And the conversation about this really started with Thomas Jefferson. Thomas Jefferson was among the first to make the argument that an informed citizenry needed a basic education. And that state should pay for this. And he started making this argument really as early as 1785, saying that everyone deserved a basic education, that it should be funded and paid for, not dependent on somebody's background or whether or not they come from a wealthy family. And three times, he tried to take this proposition forward, and three times it was denied.
And so really, this idea of the common school, this idea of locally controlled publicly funded education, didn't come to be until states took it into their own hands, and decided to design systems at the state level. And there's a group of reformers at the state level that started to really activate an argument for this at the state level. As you can imagine in the history of the United States there was generally an idea that the Federal Government shouldn't have heavy control in what happened in localities. And this grew up really in the colonies and came all the way forward when states were established throughout the country. So reformers then said, we're going to demonstrate that we need this system or we're going to build it at the state level. And Horace Mann was really one of the main activists that created this argument for the idea of the common school. And the idea behind it was simple. We're going to increase standardization of the types of schooling that happens, things like textbooks, things like chairs and desks, the ways that classrooms are organized, making the argument that we actually need standardization in the classroom of what we learn and how we learn it. This idea of expanded opportunity, that having a basic education in the common school would lead citizens to be able to be more informed and to participate in the democracy in a more effective way, and that it also establishes this idea of reducing conflict by having a shared history, a shared culture, a shared understanding of the country. And also building shared morals, and values, and history. This was the idea behind the Common School.
So how did Horace Mann do this in Massachusetts? How did he effectively make a state argument that then translated into a national idea of what public education would look like?
In some respects, Horace Mann even though he was a state activist situated in Massachusetts is known as the father of public education, or the public school movement in the United States. And what he argued for was this idea of a common education starting in Massachusetts, and he had this role in Massachusetts essentially as the secretary of the board of education. He was appointed to this role, he had nobody working for him, he had no real authority. But what he did was, he painted a picture of what public schooling looked like in early American society by riding around on horseback throughout the colonies, and looking at the physical state, and the state of education within different places in the country and really capturing that. Capturing that writing reports about it, publishing those in the common school journal, and getting the word out about how education was being enacted in those early days. And this idea of you know public education sprouting out of the state of Massachusetts then led to a set of laws in Massachusetts, then other states, then emulated and copied. And this became then the foundation for public schooling in the country, state based, locally controlled, education system. I should mention that there's a really great video resource on this that is from PBS. It's from the Public Broadcasting System, and it actually summarizes this history quite beautifully if you're interested in learning more.
So shifting quickly then to state and local control. So I've shown you now that the foundation of public schooling starting with activists like Horace Mann. And he was one among many who started this state level public education system in the country. But what I'm going to show you now is the implications of the fact that public education is state and locally controlled. So first of all, we have to understand that this concept of publicly funded compulsory education is simply not written into the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence. It's something that resides in the minds in the legislation at the state level, but it's something that has never existed at the national or federal level in the United States. As I just demonstrated to you, the state control is really at the roots of history in the United States. And so it goes back to Massachusetts and other early adopters that the common schools were established at the state level, and that there is no national or federally controlled public education system.
What does that mean? What do states and localities control? Number one, they control funding. I'm going to spend another segment explaining what that means and what the implications are, but this means that each state controls their own funding, each district controls their own funding, largely speaking. Which means there's lots of differences and inequities across the country. They control districting. Meaning, how many schools are within a district? How you define how schools are situated together whether it's regionally, whether it's across between urban and rural lines. How many schools are in them? How many students are included in the district, that's all locally determined. Governance. So is a school board elected, or is it appointed? Is the head of a school district appointed, or are they selected through elections? These governance issues all vary state to state and locality to locality. Similarly, curriculum, so there is no national system of mathematics at the elementary, or the secondary level. Every state, every local district picks their own curricular approach to teaching students. Certification. This one becomes really important, this is certification of the professionals in the education system. Teachers, principals, early childhood providers that are connected to the school system states determine how to certify them. What does quality mean? All of those things vary from state to state, and finally accountability. Accountability meaning how do we determine what a quality education is. Where is the bar set? How are we measuring whether or not students and teachers are hitting certain performance benchmarks is all locally controlled.
So now what I'm going to do is I'm going to draw just very brief connections between each unit of the course, and the information that I just shared with you about local control. And when we get to the actual course topics I'm going to make these connections backwards to this lecture, but I'm going to just give you a sneak preview of why in the world is this idea of local control so important in the units of study that you're going to be presented with in this course. So starting with the unit one which is going to focus on federal intervention. It really is going to take you into the heart of how the federal government has intervened in public education. And I'm going to talk about that generally. I'm also going to talk about that specifically through the No Child Left Behind Act, and the Common Core State Standards. This local control concept becomes really important when we talk about federal intervention. And the reason is because the federal government doesn't really have a stake, they aren't really allowed to intervene according to the Constitution. They don't really, as you'll see in the funding segment, they don't really have the funding backing to intervene. Because they actually give a relatively small percentage of overall education funding. And so what you'll see is that they use levers around the limited funding that they provide. That's the main leverage point they have for things like implementing something like the No Child Left Behind Act or trying to influence the Common Core State Standards. These approaches use incentives because the federal government can't actually mandate that states and localities adopt certain policies or ways of thinking. They can use heavy sanctions, heavy incentives, but they can't actually mandate, and you'll see that in the creative way that the No Child Left Behind Act and the Common Core State Standards actually tried to motivate states without mandating. So that's the link there between local control and federal intervention. In the second unit we're going to focus on school choice and charter schools, and local control is actually the foundational sort of prerequisite for having something like a charter school. You can imagine if we had a national system of education in the United States, this idea that under guard school choice of innovation of students making choices about where they attend a school based on their needs, based on their parents' desires. That all goes away if everybody's teaching the same thing in the same way. And so, school choice, in and of itself is a result of local control. There wouldn't in some ways be a space for an idea of school choice is everybody was already doing things in the same way. So that's the key link there. And then finally for school accountability, I've already drawn this connection earlier in this segment. About how local control means that where the bar is set. What does quality mean? What does learning mean? What does student growth mean? If that's all defined by localities, and not defined by any kind of a national system or the federal government. Then by definition school accountability is a local thing, and that gets really tricky when you put that side by side with federal intervention, and the federal government through the No Child Left Behind Act, for instance, trying to provide incentives for states to do accountability in a certain way. And yet not really having the constitutional backing or the funding backing to do that, and so there's direct connections here between local control and the arguments that we'll make further on in the course about accountability.
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