Forty years ago Bernard Bailyn remarked that American historians of education had carried out their work “in a special atmosphere of professional purpose” and had made the history of the public school the focus of their investigations. Lawrence Cremin seconded that observation and added that, for all intents and purposes, the history of American education had been “the history of the public school realizing itself over time.” In the tradition of Ellwood Patterson Cubberley that self-realization of the American public school was portrayed as a progression from local roots to state-wide systems. It became synonymous with the evolution of school government from local control on the district and ward levels to direction and oversight by state administrators. For many school professionals and historians that progression meant progress. They saw it as overcoming local control which they regarded as a relic of the past denoting an endorsement of inequality, discrimination, and special privilege. It persuaded them to see the solution to the schools' problems in strengthened state and, eventually, federal control.

In the mid nineteenth century Amherst, Massachusetts, amounted to a cluster of farm houses and a collection of public buildings. Its 3,000 inhabitants remained agricultural by trade and localist in orientation. Overlooking the town stood Amherst College, founded in 1821. Its three humble dormitories and decrepit chapel provided a fitting tribute to the evangelical asceticism of its founders. The clothing of its 200 students betrayed their disparate backgrounds. Freshmen stood out. A cringing, submissive manner distinguished them as they scurried to recitation. In contrast, sophomores exuded a haughty demeanor. Others boasted a genteel look, while Amherst's seven professors imparted an air of gravity to the campus. Bearded and dignified, they nodded warmly to pupils who stood aside in deference. Silence typically prevailed at sundown, but attacks by upperclassmen on the freshmen sometimes shattered the quiet. On select evenings, murmured prayers also broke the silence. Kneeling on the chapel floor, students might be found with their hands clasped and eyes shut in meditation. Some broke into tears under the intensity of the prayer meeting, weeping and holding one another with temporary abandon. Professors often knelt beside them. During such revivals, the walls that stood between teacher and pupil crumbled, if only for a moment, in a cathartic surrender.

The conventional historiography describing a strict public-private divide in United States schooling is misleading. The standard story claims that public schooling was a fuzzy concept 200 years ago; the division between public and private education for children thus developed largely over the nineteenth century. In the early nineteenth century, public funds went to many private schools and even large private systems, such as the New York Public School Society. In some instances, public funds went to parochial education, either explicitly or as part of an arrangement to allow for diverse religious instruction using public funds. However, the nineteenth century witnessed growing division between public and private, largely excluding religious education (or at least non-Protestant religious education). By the end of the nineteenth century, the standard educational historiography suggests, public schools meant public in several senses: funded from the public coffers, open to the public in general, and controlled by a public, democratically controlled process. Tacit in that definition was a relatively rigid dividing line between public and private school organizations. Historians know that this implicit definition of “public” omits key facts. First, the governance of public schools became less tied to electoral politics during the Progressive Era. Public schooling in nineteenth-century cities generally meant large school boards, intimately connected with urban political machines. By the 1920s, many city school systems had smaller boards in a more corporate-like structure. The consolidation of small rural school districts in the first half of the twentieth century completed this removal of school governance from more local politics. A second problem with the definition above is unequal access to quality education (however defined). Historically, the acceptance of all students was true only in a limited sense, either in access to schools at all (with the exclusion of many children with disabilities) or, more generally, to the resources and curriculum involved in the best public schooling of the early twentieth century (as with racial segregation).