Tyack, David. The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974.

Summary
This book examines the “organizational revolution that took place in American school during the last century,” in which schools were transformed from a “village school” to an “urban system” as reformers sought to create a “one best system” to prepare students for the demands of urbanization and industrialization. It examines the politics of education and the transformation of the U.S. into an urban-industrial nation (“modernity”) and how these forces influenced the institutional structure and ideology of education. Schools reflected the changes in society as well as shaped them. Community control gave way to corporate-bureaucratic models under the guise of depoliticizing schools and created new curriculums that reflected the differentiation of economic roles in the larger social order. Seeking a “one best system,” these changes, ironically, marginalized and left out minority students (segregation) or limited their opportunities (tracking). He concludes that the search for a “one best system” has “ill-served the pluralistic character of American society”; that bureaucratization has resulted in the displacement of goals and perpetuation of outworn practices; that schools have rarely taught the poor effectively and in fact have perpetuated social injustices; and the talk of “keeping schools out of politics” have often served to obscure actual power alignments and patterns of privilege.