Histories of American Education

In The Instrumental University, Ethan Schrum provides an illuminating genealogy of the educational environment in which administrators, professors, and students live and work today. After World War II, research universities in the United States underwent a profound mission change. The Instrumental University combines intellectual, institutional, and political history to reinterpret postwar American life through the changes in higher education. Acknowledging but rejecting the prevailing conception of the Cold War university largely dedicated to supporting national security, Schrum provides a more complete and contextualized account of the American research university between 1945 and 1970. Uncovering a pervasive instrumental understanding of higher education during that era, The Instrumental University shows that universities framed their mission around solving social problems and promoting economic development as central institutions in what would soon be called the knowledge economy. In so doing, these institutions took on more capitalistic and managerial tendencies and, as a result, marginalized founding ideals, such as pursuit of knowledge in academic disciplines and freedom of individual investigators. The technocratic turn eroded some practices that made the American university special. Yet, as Schrum suggests, the instrumental university was not yet the neoliberal university of the 1970s and onwards in which market considerations trumped all others. University of California president Clark Kerr and other innovators in higher education were driven by a progressive impulse that drew on an earlier tradition grounded in a concern for the common good and social welfare.

Do business schools actually make good on their promises of "innovative," "outside-the-box" thinking to train business leaders who will put society ahead of money-making? Do they help society by making better business leaders? No, they don't, Steven Conn asserts, and what's more they never have. In throwing down a gauntlet on the business of business schools, Conn's Nothing Succeeds Like Failure examines the frictions, conflicts, and contradictions at the heart of these enterprises and details the way business schools have failed to resolve them. Beginning with founding of the Wharton School in 1881, Conn measures these schools' aspirations against their actual accomplishments and tells the full and disappointing history of missed opportunities, unmet aspirations, and educational mistakes. Conn then poses a set of crucial questions about the role and function of American business schools. The results aren't pretty. Posing a set of crucial questions about the function of American business schools, Nothing Succeeds Like Failure is pugnacious and controversial. Deeply researched and fun to read, Nothing Succeeds Like Failure argues that the impressive façades of business school buildings resemble nothing so much as collegiate versions of Oz. Conn pulls back the curtain to reveal a story of failure to meet the expectations of the public, their missions, their graduates, and their own lofty aspirations of producing moral and ethical business leaders.

The Education Myth questions the idea that education represents the best, if not the only, way for Americans to access economic opportunity. As Jon Shelton shows, linking education to economic well-being was not politically inevitable. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for instance, public education was championed as a way to help citizens learn how to participate in a democracy. By the 1930s, public education, along with union rights and social security, formed an important component of a broad-based fight for social democracy. Shelton demonstrates that beginning in the 1960s, the political power of the education myth choked off powerful social democratic alternatives like A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin's Freedom Budget. The nation's political center was bereft of any realistic ideas to guarantee economic security and social dignity for the majority of Americans, particularly those without college degrees. Embraced first by Democrats like Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton, Republicans like George W. Bush also pushed the education myth. The result, over the past four decades, has been the emergence of a deeply inequitable economy and a drastically divided political system.

In “A Is for Arson”, Campbell F. Scribner sifts through two centuries of debris to uncover the conditions that have prompted school vandalism and to explain why attempts at prevention have inevitably failed. Vandalism costs taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars every year, as students, parents, and even teachers wreak havoc on school buildings. Why do they do it? Can anything stop them? Who should pay for the damage? Underlying these questions are long-standing tensions between freedom and authority, and between wantonness and reason. Property destruction is not simply a moral failing, to be addressed with harsher punishments, nor can the problem be solved through more restrictive architecture or policing. Scribner argues that education itself is a source of intractable struggle, and that vandalism is often the result of an unruly humanity. To understand schooling in the United States, one must first confront the all-too-human emotions that have led to fires, broken windows, and graffiti. “A Is for Arson” captures those emotions through new historical evidence and diverse theoretical perspectives, helping readers understand vandalism variously as a form of political conflict, as self-education, and as sheer chaos. By analyzing physical artifacts as well as archival sources, Scribner offers new perspectives on children's misbehavior and adults' reactions and allows readers to see the complexities of education-the built environment of teaching and learning, evolving approaches to youth psychology and student discipline-through the eyes of its often-resistant subjects.

Disciplining Democracy reveals the political consequences for the triumph of "service learning" as the dominant pedagogical model of civic engagement in the modern American university. Volunteer-based civic engagement programs in higher education are popularly understood as curricular opportunities that enable young people to engage as citizens in campus and public life. But, as David S. Busch argues, these civic programs are also emblematic of a new political tradition in American higher education-a culture of "disciplining democracy"-that polices the boundaries of appropriate forms of citizenship both for the student and for the university itself. Looking at seven different universities across two political eras, Busch unearths a common institutional trend: that student activists' demand for "action education" in the 1960s-a demand that many believed would reimagine the political role of the university-was reconstituted as university-sponsored volunteer programs by the 1980s. Disconnected from their political roots and visions, these programs became the source for the promotion of service learning as the primary model of the new civics in American higher education and an integral part of institutional strategies for responding to student activism. Embraced by universities big and small, private and public, the triumph of service learning as the new civics narrowed the political terrain of engaged citizenship and set limits on the modern American university's mission. In excavating the genealogy of the new civics and its institutional legacy, Disciplining Democracy offers a new way to understand the university as a political actor in American life.

Creating the Suburban School Advantage explains how American suburban school districts gained a competitive edge over their urban counterparts. John L. Rury provides a national overview of the process, focusing on the period between 1950 and 1980, and presents a detailed study of metropolitan Kansas City, a region representative of trends elsewhere. While big city districts once were widely seen as superior and attracted families seeking the best educational opportunities for their children, suburban school systems grew rapidly in the post-World War II era as middle class and more affluent families moved to those communities. As Rury relates, at the same time, economically dislocated African Americans migrated from the South to center-city neighborhoods, testing the capacity of urban institutions. As demographic trends drove this urban-suburban divide, a suburban ethos of localism contributed to the socio-economic exclusion that became a hallmark of outlying school systems. School districts located wholly or partly within the municipal boundaries of Kansas City, Missouri offer revealing cases for understanding these national patterns. As Rury demonstrates, struggles to achieve greater educational equity and desegregation contributed to so-called white flight and what Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan termed a crisis of urban education in 1965. Despite often valiant efforts to serve inner city children and bolster urban school districts, the result of this exodus, Rury cogently argues, was the creation of a new metropolitan educational hierarchy-a mirror image of the urban-centric model that prevailed before World War II. The stubborn perception that suburban schools are superior, reflective of test scores and budgets, has persisted into the 21st century and instantiates today's metropolitan landscape of social, economic, and educational inequality.

Over the last sixty years, administrators on US college campuses have responded to black campus activists by making racial inclusion and inequality compatible. This bold argument is at the center of Matthew Johnson's powerful and controversial book. Focusing on the University of Michigan, often a key talking point in national debates over racial justice thanks to the controversial Gratz v. Bollinger decided by the Supreme Court in 2003, Johnson argues that UM leaders incorporated black student dissent selectively into the institution's policies, practices, and values. This strategy was used in order to prevent activism from disrupting the institutional priorities that campus leaders deemed more important than racial justice. Despite knowing that racial disparities would likely continue, Johnson demonstrates that these administrators improbably saw themselves as champions of racial equity. What Johnson contends in Undermining Racial Justice, isn't that good intentions resulted in unforeseen negative consequences, but that the people who created and maintained racial disparities at premier institutions of higher education across the United States firmly believed they had good intentions in spite of all the evidence to the contrary. The case of the University of Michigan fits into a broader pattern at elite institutions of higher education and is a cautionary tale for all in higher education. Inclusion has always been a secondary priority and, as a result, the policies of the late 1970s and 1980s ushered in a new and enduring era of racial retrenchment on campuses across the United States.