Nancy Beadie

Market-Based Policies of School Funding: Lessons from the History of the New York Academy System

This study uses the historical example of the New York academy system to examine the effects of market-based policies of school funding. Under New Yorks Regents system, independently chartered academies were subsidized by per-pupil funds that followed students. Academies had to meet charter criteria to be eligible for funds. In this way, the New York system paralleled current voucher and charter school proposals. Given these parallels, what can be learned from the New York case? In this article, data from the annual reports of academies from 1825 to 1870 are analyzed. During expansion of the system, competition among schools depressed income and led to a declining level of investment in teaching at most schools. These findings are discussed in relation to debates over current school choice and charter school plans.

Female Students and Denominational Affiliation: Sources of Success and Variation among Nineteenth-Century Academies

Academies were the dominant form of schooling beyond the primary level through most of the nineteenth century. They have not received much scholarly attention, however, because their great heterogeneity and eclecticism make them difficult to categorize and describe. This article addresses these problems by making the very heterogeneity of academies a subject of investigation. Using data on overall norms and trends among academies as points of comparison, this article focuses on the most successful academies operating in the New York Regents system of academies during the height of the academy era. It then identifies the institutional characteristics and strategic choices that contributed to that success. In the process the article suggests some frameworks for investigating broader patterns of variation among nineteenth-century academies. It also raises some questions about the implications of this analysis for considering more recent proposals for market-based models of school funding.

Education, social capital and state formation in comparative historical perspective: preliminary investigations

The relationship between education and state formation in the United States differed from that in other countries in ways that have yet to be adequately accounted for in comparative and theoretical literatures. Specifically, in the northern United States, very high levels of mass school attendance and funding were achieved prior to and outside state initiative. Although this distinctive history of educational development in the US has been noted by scholars, existing literatures still leave largely unresolved two salient questions following from this fact: (1) What factors facilitated the earlier and greater expansion of mass education in the northern US in the absence of direct state intervention? and (2) What was the significance of this early expansion for the process of state formation itself? This article addresses these questions by juxtaposing an intensive case study of the relationship between education and state formation in New York State in the early republican era, 1790–1840, against reigning comparative historical accounts of such relationships. In the process, two factors are identified that promoted education expansion in the northern US that so far have received little attention in the comparative literature: access to corporate legal power and the distribution of wealth. Finally, it is suggested that the substantial social, financial and political capital commanded by schools prior to state intervention had a significant impact on the process of state formation in the US.

Toward a History of Education Markets in the United States

The recent shift away from the idea of centrally planned public systems and toward market-based models of schooling opens new territory for scholarship in the history of education. What is the history of education markets? How has the structure of education markets changed over time? This article addresses these questions by surveying existing literature, with an emphasis on the early national and antebellum periods. In the process it brings new perspectives to standard narratives of the history of education in the nineteenth century, particularly regarding the development of state-based educational systems. It then proposes areas for future research and concludes by introducing two examples of new work in this field.

War, education and state formation: problems of territorial and political integration in the United States, 1848–1912

Abstract After the Civil War (1861–1865), the United States faced a problem of “reconstruction” similar to that confronted by other nations at the time and familiar to the US since at least the Mexican–American War (1846–1848). The problem was one of territorial and political (re)integration: how to take territories that had only recently been operating under “foreign” governance and integrate them into an expanded nation-state on common structural terms. This paper considers the significance of education in that process of state (re)formation after the Civil War, with particular attention to its role in federal territories of the US West. Specifically, this paper analyses the role that education-based restrictions on citizenship, voting rights and office-holding played in constructing formal state power in the cases of five western territories: Hawaii, Indian Territory, Oklahoma, Arizona and New Mexico. A focus on the significance of education in these cases both advances and challenges literature on the “hidden” and decentralised structure of national policy-making in the US. It adds to that literature by illuminating how education served as an indirect tool of national policy in the West, effectively shaping the structure of power in other policy domains. At the same time, by focusing on the US West, the present analysis challenges the idea that national governance in the US was particularly “decentralised” or “hidden”. It highlights instead: (1) the role of colonial racialism in shaping national responsibility and authority for education in the US; and (2) the significance of education as both an alternative and a corollary to war in establishing US colonial power.

Tuition Funding for Common Schools

Funding for schools of all kinds was largely market-based until the Civil War. Parents in New York and other northern states continued to pay tuition, or rate bills, in addition to taxes to support common schools. Previous research relied on aggregate state-level data to estimate the amount of funding from public and nonpublic sources for common schools, while existing case studies of local school practices focus exclusively on Massachusetts or on urban locations and thus on exceptions to the rule. This study looks at local practices of school funding for multiple types of schools in one unexceptional rural town in western New York from 1815 to 1850. The results reveal considerable in-state variation in the proportion of public and private funding for common schools that is otherwise obscured by state-level data. The proportion of school funds that came from tuition was much higher for rural areas than for urban areas. The article also compares tuition funding for common schools with that for other types of market-based schooling, including two local venture schools and one local academy. The results show that, although tuition prices for academies and venture schools were predictably higher than for common schools, the overall structure of school funding for rural common schools and academies was more similar than different in New York in the antebellum era.

The Federal Role in Education and the Rise of Social Science Research: Historical and Comparative Perspectives

Studies of the rise of social science research in education typically focus on the Progressive Era, from 1890 to 1930, the period in which the American Educational Research Association (AERA) was founded. As central as this story is to the intellectual history of education as a field, however, it obscures an earlier set of events that arguably is even more important to understanding why AERA and the larger progressive education research enterprise of which it was a part developed when and how they did. That episode was the major but ultimately failed effort of the 1870s and 1880s to establish a national education system in the United States. This chapter focuses on the use of social science research in this earlier episode of education reform. It reveals how the rise of education research during the Progressive Era, and ultimately the founding of AERA, responded to the failure of this earlier effort in multiple ways. More precisely, it shows how social science research in education developed historically in relation to the peculiarly decentralized and racialized structure of education authority and policy in the United States.

The Promise and Perils of Community-Based Schooling

Embedded in David Reynoldss There Goes the Neighborhood is a story with all the dramatic potential of a great tragic novel. John Steinbecks The Grapes of Wrath and David Gutersons Snow Falling on Cedars come to mind as literary models. Unlikely as it may seem, this drama centers on the issue of school consolidation. By painstakingly reconstructing the dynamics of school and community at the local level and simultaneously placing them in the context of historical events of broader significance, Reynolds reveals new and deeper dimensions of a story we thought we already knew-the story of rural school consolidation in the early twentieth century. In the process he teaches us much about the meaning of community. At a time when the trend of school reform seems to be toward promoting deconsolidation-toward smaller schools with closer ties to local communities-Reynoldss account has much to teach us about both the promise and the perils of community-based schooling. The promotion of school consolidation by education leaders at the state and national levels is a familiar fact of the story of education in the United States. School reformers from the earliest days of the common school movement in the 1830s favored the consolidation of one-room

Encouraging Useful Knowledge in the Early Republic: The Roles of State Governments and Voluntary Organizations

Perhaps no phrase better captures the enlightenment educational project than that of “encouraging useful knowledge.” With its implied reference to the agency of the learner, its apparent favoring of active trades and professions, its unspoken contrast with the purely theological, and its veiled critique of mere markers of social status, the phrase seems to suggest a world in which new learning and innovative practices were breaking out everywhere, including government itself, which in many ways they were. Some version of the phrase appeared in virtually every educational essay and manifesto of the late colonial and early republican eras, including the statement of purpose for the American Philosophical Society, which defined its mission as “promoting useful knowledge.” And no person or place better represented the notion of encouraging useful knowledge than Benjamin Franklin, the city of Philadelphia, and the state of Pennsylvania, where Franklin used the language to promote the founding not only of the APS but also of the institution that became the University of Pennsylvania, both in the 1740s.

The struggle for the history of education

narrowly and misleadingly conflated consumer capitalistic choice with political and social democracy. This part of the chapter illustrated that Fielding and Moss most definitely are not ‘pie-in-the-sky’, unrealistic wishers for a better tomorrow – the fact that they confront head-on these very intense questions and critiques and show their own misgivings about their proposals proved to me that they have deeply considered their ideas from many angles. As a major proponent and researcher of more democratic forms of education around the world, I was at first excited to come across this book; however, at times, I found it to be too theoretically dense for my liking. While I appreciate the value of grounding the ideas in theory and deep philosophical thinking, I still wish the authors had provided more practical examples of how various schools around the world have worked in the direction of the longed-for utopia. Reggio Emilia (in Italy) and the St George-in-the-East schools are the foremost examples brought out in this work, but I consistently hoped for thicker descriptions of these and other schools to truly help me see that alternatives are desirable, viable, and achievable. While Chapter 3 did provide a satisfying number of concrete descriptions of the schools they envision, I frequently found the theoretical overlay to be too dense and unengaging. Chapter 4 on the transformation process was also a disappointment for this reason, as well as for the fact that I found it repetitive of the previous chapters’ ideas. Overall, I am reluctant to say, I simply did not find too much new in the work in terms of the deep ideas discussed. Other progressive/critical democratic authors over the past 40 years (Svi Shapiro, David Purpel, Deborah Meier, Henry Giroux, Maxine Greene, Nel Noddings, and others) have articulated many of the same views; however, this is not to say that the ideas have no merit or inherent value, for I believe they most definitely do. Thus, I am ultimately happy to see any widespread dissemination of such a work as this.