From the 1920s on progressive movements including that of the influential John Dewey, jostled each other to get away from the "classical education" models of the "Committee of Ten", formed in the late 19th Century under the leadership of Harvard president Charles Eliot. However, the authors don't really get to the core of the problem as my family experience and independent research revealed what occurred in the 1960s. It avoids much of the jargon-loaded analyses of complex theories and peripheral trends that are found in most contemporary scholarly studies. I give five stars because this book is one of the few solid treatments about one of the greatest and yet poorly understood catastrophes for American society in the 20th Century it offers hard data including revealing chronological graphs of statistical trends for secondary school performance (see figure). It was better than the total focus on College-prep before the 10s, and at least did not force everybody to study useless knowledges when most people didn't have to go to colleges. The system was indeed unequal, but was not completely. I think it did not recognize the benifits of differentiated curriculum. Bad Side: It was written in 1995, kind of out-of-date.
That's why the title is "the failed promise". It has the real national and regional Data! The book's conclusion about this past century is that differentiation in curriculum is undemocratic, and has been the source of American Secondary education's problem. Reading this book has achieved this goal for me, and I would suggest you to read the book if you want to know history told inpartially. I bought the book because I was working on a Education Reform plan, and needed to know more about secondary schools' historic developments. The best thing is, the book did not just discuss the major national events, and the ever-varying goals of education, but also used actual data from reasearches done in different times on different cities to evaluate the what really happened in students course taking patterns and course offering after and amid the chaos of all the national debates. This was such a brief (200 pages) and informative book on the main trends of American secondary education in this past centure. I am amazed that this book is so low on the bestselling list (300,000).
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