David Tyack

The “Grammar” of Schooling: Why Has it Been so Hard to Change?:

Why have the established institutional forms of schooling been so stable and why did most challenges fade or become marginalized? We approach these questions by probing a few case studies of reform, some that lasted to become part of the grammar of schooling and some that did not. We begin by exploring the origins of two enduring institutional forms, the graded school and the Carnegie unit. Next we analyze the history of three transient attacks on the grammar of schooling: the Dalton Plan, the Eight-Year Study, and the new model flexible high school of the 1960s. In each case political and institutional perspectives inform our interpretations. Finally, we reflect on what the case studies suggest about the nature of institutional continuity and change and offer some policy implications for reform today.

Silence and Policy Talk: Historical Puzzles About Gender and Education

Three puzzles arise in looking at the history of public education through the lens of gender. Why did some major shifts in gender practices, like the emergence of coeducation in the early 19th century, take place with only minor controversy and in relative silence? Conversely, why did certain kinds of vehement policy talk—for example about the way hard study ruined girls health or about the way women teachers “feminized” boys—affect practice so little? And finally, how did reforms that, on their face, had little to do with gender actually alter the two sexes educational opportunities? This essay focuses on the complexities of silent institutional change and stability, the reasons why conscious gender policies often left checquered results, and the implications of this history for gender policy and practice today.

The High School as a Social Service Agency: Historical Perspectives on Current Policy Issues.

Today, public school leaders nationwide face a set of challenges unparalleled in our history save for the crisis of the depression of the 1930s. They now find unprecedented tax revolts and spending limits, declining pupil enrollments, and a serious erosion of public trust in the system of public education (as measured, for example, by opinion polls [Elam, 1978]). Some have suggested that public schooling might become a declining industry like the railroads, with aging employees clinging to their jobs, deteriorating plants, and slipping performance (Mayhew, 1974). Traditionally, American education has been an expanding, optimistic enterprise, adding new functions and subunits as it grew by accretion. Now there are heavy fiscal pressures to drop some of these functions in order to balance budgets. Growth by accretion rarely challenges basic values or vested interests, but debate over cutbacks often highlights assumptions and choices. Today there is a powerful movement to take the schools back to basics and to strip away what some people regard as extraneous parts of public education. Some service functions of high schools may well be considered expendable. (Rarely are policy-makers well informed about why such programs were added in the first place.) The purpose of this essay is to examine historically the expansion of social services to youth through American public secondary education. Understanding how and why these services grew, what their rationales were, and how they connected with the core functions of schooling should shed light on the difficult choices policy-makers face today.

Monuments Between Covers The Politics of Textbooks

History textbooks have represented state-approved civic truth. They reveal what adults thought children should learn about the past and are probably the best index of what young Americans did learn in class. History texts have given the past a patriotic gloss, varnishing familiar icons and perpetuating familiar interpretations. Like monuments designed to commemorate and re-present emblematic figures and events, textbooks shaped the public culture. But over time, textbooks did change, for many groups insisted that their truths prevail. Conflicts often intensified in periods of stress—hot and cold wars, depression, and sharp demographic shifts—when loyalty police went on alert and social activists recruited allies. The present history wars are a late chapter in a long book.