Focus - American Education, Federalism, and the Unfulfilled Dream of Liberal Neutrality

On this episode of Focus, Harry explores the history of American education and considers some crucial lessons for today's debates over critical race theory.

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Further Reading:

An Education in Politics, by Jesse Rhodes.

This is a nice history of education policy in the second half of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first, very much an academic text but a useful one nonetheless. I drew on Rhodes’ analysis of how institutional fragmentation produced disparate outcomes among different groups for my own argument.

Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic.

There’s a lot of polemicism and misinformation being spread right now about Critical Race Theory, so I picked this introductory text by one of its founding theorists, Richard Delgado, to get a better sense of what CRT really has to say about race in America.

Intelligently Designed: How Creationists Built the Campaign Against Evolution, by Edward Caudill.

This is a well-written, well-researched, and easy-to-read book on the history of battles over the teaching of evolution in schools in the United States. I used it for my discussion of the Scopes trial.

“Schooling the State: ESEA and the Evolution of the U.S. Department of Education,” by Patrick McGuinn.

This article is a useful reference point for understanding some of the history of education policy in the United States, particularly the federal government’s role.

“The Struggle Over Public Education in Early America,” by Amy Smekar, David A. Moss, and Gregory DiBella, in Democracy: A Case Study, by David A. Moss.

Moss wrote this remarkably accessible text in 2017, which utilizes the Harvard Business School’s case study method for analyzing American democracy. I drew on it for the historical information on education in the early republic.