Donato, Ruben; Lazerson, Marvin. “New Directions in American Educational History: Problems and Prospects,” Educational Researcher 29 (November 2000), 4-15.

Summary
This article extends Veysey’s historiographical piece from the early 1980s and updates the field including more recent trends in the 1980s and 1990s. The authors 'connect American educational historiography to the education reforms of the 1960s and 1970s'. The educational historians of the 1960s and 1970s articulated a scholarship connected to historically significant "social movements and asked provocative questions about the relationship of democracy to education, the role of schooling in the reproduction of social class, the origins and consequences of the bureaucratic organization of public schooling, the role of schooling in immigrant communities, and the struggles of people of color over education access.” These revisionist historians (Michael Katz, David Tyack, and others) challenged the traditional promotionalist paradigm for research in the history of education.The authors argue that the revisionist history of the 1960s and 1970s  (“golden era”) led to a greater emphasis on people of color, gender, policy, and higher education. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, scholars began to show how marginalized communities were far from passive victims in their educaitonal fates (James D. Anderson). Also, scholarship has brought an important gender focus on the history of educaiton, looking at how schools were often more egalitarian than the rest of society (Mary Kelley). More recent scholarship has also revised the history of higher education (Julie Reuben) challening the legacy of such scholarship by Richard Hofstatder and Metzger, which told a story that defended higher education's need to protect the search for scientific truth against religious and populist movements and the development of disciplinary-based research.

See also: John Rury, "The Curious State"; Lawrence Veysey, "The History of Education"