Analyzing the Shifting Landscape of the American School District

• In Event: New Perspectives on the History of the American School District: Reforms, Reorganizations, and Innovations, 1935-2014

Abstract

The school district has long been taken for granted as a standard unit of analysis. Generations of historians have written insightful studies on individual cities and school districts, but rarely has the district—as an organizational form itself—been the subject of scrutiny. David Tyack developed one of the most lasting analyses of the “organizational revolution” that took place in early twentieth-century schooling, arguing that an inner circle of policy elites had advocated and implemented a “one best system” of education. It is Tyack’s “one best system” notion that has stood as the touchstone both for historians interested in examining the history of individual school districts and for policymakers seeking to reinvent the roles of the traditional district.

And yet the district is no longer the largely autonomous entity it was at the end of the Progressive Era. In this paper, we argue that a number of historical forces, both within and outside of the district, have altered its core responsibilities over the past three-quarters of a century. Consolidations, reorganizations, state mandates, federal court orders, and Congressional legislation have irrevocably shifted the central mission(s) of the school district, not to mention its size, shape, and legal standing. Historians have a special role in analyzing this unique American political entity, and we can perhaps have the most scholarly influence if we connect our research to the urgent concerns of today’s policymakers.

Through the examination of primary source materials, local archival records, national publications, scholarly monographs on individual districts, and more recent literature reviews, we look at how historians, reformers, and policymakers have understood the district’s innate capacities. The first part of the paper looks at changing interpretations of local control. For example, the school district was once depicted as the embodiment of localized nineteenth-century democracy or as an exemplar of Progressive Era educational reform; but by the 1960s and 70s, the school district became the target of critics who viewed it as overly bureaucratic and pathologically flawed, unresponsive to parental and community demands, and incapable of fostering needed grassroots changes.
In the second part of the paper, we explore the assumptions researchers and practitioners have made about the district at various points in time, and we then link those assumptions to specific policies. In order to correct districts’ perceived failings, reformers began offering new educational initiatives in the 1980s and 90s. Many of these proposals viewed the school district as a barrier to fundamental reform. Some policymakers sought to render the district powerless or obsolete through vouchers or charter schools; others advocated for standards-based reform and identified the state, rather than the district, as the appropriate site to initiate change.

Finally, we ask, what can research tell us about the district role in innovation in practice and policy, this year’s conference theme? Though the district has come back into favor among education researchers, what exactly do these scholars mean when they write about the “district”? Further, how can historical perspectives inform these conversations?

Authors

• David A. Gamson, The Pennsylvania State University

• Emily Hodge, The Pennsylvania State University