Customer Reviews

The Failed Promise of the American High School, 1890-1995 (Reflective History Series)

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I am amazed that this book is so low on the bestselling list (300,000). This was such a brief (200 pages) and informative book on the main trends of American secondary education in this past centure. 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. I bought the book because I was working on a Education Reform plan, and needed to know more about secondary schools' historic developments. 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. 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. That's why the title is "the failed promise". Bad Side: It was written in 1995, kind of out-of-date. I think it did not recognize the benifits of differentiated curriculum. The system was indeed unequal, but was not completely. 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.

I teach the history of education at Boston University and wrote The Myth of the Common School (1988, 2002) and a number of other books; I am just now completing a two-volume history of educational policy in the West. All this by way of saying that I've read a lot of ed history! This book by Angus and Mirel truly stands out, and made a lot of things fall into place for me. I will urge all of my graduate students to read it.

Charles Glenn