Katz, Michael. Reconstructing American Education. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989.

Summary
This book is a collection of previous published essays that aim to reconstruct American education in three senses: as history, reform, and historiography. The three central themese are: '''interpreting the present, understanding of history as a choice among alternative possibilities, and the realization of the contingent nature of ideas and institutions'''. In these essays, Katz argues that contemporary concepts such as public education, modern organizational forms, especially bureaucracy, and institutional structures such as the multiversity originated as choices among alterative solutions to problems of public policy, such as paternalist voluntarisma and democratic localism. Bureaucracy and its subsequent structures, for example, are not neutral shells, but “are structural details and operational rules that reflect priorities, limit possibilities, and shape outcomes.”  Katz sees American public education is a product of the forces of capitalism as well as the ideals of democracy; so, too, is bureaucracy, which sits at the juncture between these competing forces. These concepts were historical and contingent on process, not inevitable.

Example:The creation of public school systems originated with: the emergence of democratic politics (male suffrage, party system, local political machines); industrialization, urbanization, and the formation of a working class; the state’s assumption of direct responsibility for some aspects of social welfare (progressivism); the invention of institutions as means for solving social problems and the redefinition of family (separation of home and work). *Key: capitalism

Debate: Boston School Systems, 1850-1854

See also: Lawrence Cremin, David Tyack, David Tyack-Larry Cuban