EDUCATIONAL THEORY Winter 1989, Vol. 39, No. 1 0 1989 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Considerations on Writing the History of Educational Reform in the 1960s

By Robert Lowe and Harvey Kantor

Over the last two decades the historiography of American education has undergone important transformations. Historians have produced major reinterpretations of key chronological periods in the nation's educational past - particularly the common school and progressive eras. They have also become interested in topics long neglected and misunderstood - including the history of childhood and family life, the connection between school and work, and the educational history of blacks and women. What they have largely overlooked, however, is the history of education since World War II, particularly the history of educational reform during the 1960s. Indeed, in most studies the history of the period is appended as an afterthought to the discussion of events that occurred earlier in the century.

One result is that historical studies of education in the 1960s have exhibited neither the interpretive imagination nor the methodological innovation evident in studies of other periods.' With one or two important exceptions, most studies do not attempt to situate the history of the decade within the mainstream of modern educational history; nor do they address the concerns that have transformed the study of the more distant educational past. Instead, the educational histories of the period consist chiefly of traditional political narratives that chronicle the internal workings of governmental institutions, the evolution of legal doctrines, and the implementation of federally mandated educational programs in isolation from the broader patterns that give the era meaning. This essay explores why this is the case and suggests how the history of educational reform in the 1960s and early 1970s might profitably be informed by incorporating recent developments that have invigorated the study of earlier eras and other educational issues.

I.

Why the history of educational reform in the 1960s has elicited so little interest and excitement among educational historians is not easy to understand. No doubt part of the explanation, as Alan Brinkley has recently observed in an essay on dilemmas in writing the history of the twentieth century, is that historians of contemporary America face special difficulties because the past they are attempting to study is relatively recent.2 The historian's special advantage, after all, lies in knowing how things turned out; often people in the past ignored or overlooked changes that historians decades or centuries later considered pivotal, or, conversely, people in the past frequently attributed significance to events that later historians deemed unimportant. Unlike historians of earlier periods, however, historians of the mid-twentieth century cannot view their era from the distance of several decades or centuries. Consequently, it is

Correspondence: Robert Lowe, Department of Educational Foundations, National College of Education, 2840 Sheridan Road, Evanston, IL 60201 ; Harvey Kantor, Department of Educational Studies, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT 841 12.

1. On this point with reference to the study of contemporary American history in general, see Alan Brinkley, "Writing the History of Contemporary America: Problems and Prospects," Daedalus 113 (Summer 1984): 212-41.

2. Ibid.. 124.

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more difficult for them to place the events of their period in historical perspective or to assess their social and political significance.

Historians of contemporary America must also deal with their own memories of the events they are studying. This is not entirely a disadvantage. As Warren Susman has commented, memory can sometimes be the historian's most "potent ally." But, as Susman has also observed, the past called up by memory does not by itself provide a very reliable guide to the reconstruction of past experience. Because memory often serves present personal and social needs, it is often colored, in Susman's words, by "nostalgia or regret" in ways that interfere with the "ordered vision of the past" that the historian seeks to de~e lop .~ This is especially (though not exclusively) the case for times such as the 1960s that aroused intense personal commitments and that continue to evoke strong emotions.

That memory often distorts to suit present concerns does not mean that historians should pretend that they are engaged in a disinterested pursuit of truth or that they should hide their values and commitments. The way we think about the past inevitably reflects the values we hold in the present; that is why historians, in Carl Degler's words, are always "remaking the meaning of the past."4 But because the events of the recent past remain fresh in our historical memories, it is particularly difficult for historians of contemporary America to remain sensitive to the complexities and contradictions of their period. Indeed, much recent educational history of the 1960s seems motivated more by the currently fashionable desire to denounce what some observers now consider to be the excesses of the period than to understand what provoked them.

The relative lack of scholarly attention devoted to contemporary educational history is not, however, due entirely to the particular difficulties involved in studying relatively recent historical events, as perplexing as those difficulties may be. An equally important problem is that the most notable development in recent historical scholarship -the emergence of social history - has been difficult to apply directly to the study of twentieth-century h i~ to ry ,~ including the study of contemporary educational history.

The rise of social history is without question the most striking change in the writing of American history during the last two decades. In place of the traditional emphasis on institutions, rulers, and governments, historians in the 1960s and 1970s turned their attention to an array of new concerns - including family history, mobility studies, and, most notably, the history of ordinary men and women who had virtually been excluded from traditional historical narratives - that revolutionized the study of the American past. As Eric Foner has observed, under the impact of this new interest in doing "history from the bottom up," old fields were transformed, new fields came into existence, and familiar interpretations of the American past based on the experiences of a few prominent individuals were called into question.6

Initially, several of these new social histories portrayed blacks, women, workers, and ethnics as active historical agents, rather than faceless victims of exploitation. But in rejecting the conventional concern with rulers, institutions, and governments, many social historians increasingly tended to avoid questions about inequalities of power and the varying abilities of different groups to shape American society. As a result, the focus on excluded groups, originally an outgrowth of the social protests of the 1960s

3. Warren Susman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth

4. Carl Degler, "Remaking American History," Journa/ of American History 67 (June 1980): 20. 5. See Brinkley, "Writing the History of Contemporary America," 124-25. 6. Eric Foner, "History in Crisis," Commonweal, 18 December 1981, 725. On the rise of social

history, see also the essays cited above by Brinkley and Degler; and Peter Sterns, "Social and Political History," Journal of Social History 16 (Spring 1983): 3-5; Laurence Veysey, "The 'New' Social History in the Context of American Historical Writing," Reviews in American History 7 (March 1979): 1-12; Michael Kamrnen, "The Historian's Vocation and the State of the Discipline in the United States," in The Past before Us: Contemporary Historical Writing in the United States, ed. Michael Kammen (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1980), 19-49; and E. J. Hobsbawm, "From Social History to the History of Society," Daedalus 100 (Winter 1971): 20-45.

Century (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 151, 153.

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EDUCATIONAL REFORM IN THE 1960s 3

and the New Left's concern with the "politics of everyday life," often became, in Foner's words, "a romantic nostalgia for past lower-class cultures."'

In our view, the perspective of social history is indispensable to the study of contemporary educational history, particularly the history of educational reform in the 1960s when groups excluded from the inner workings of government played a central role in shaping public events. At the same time, the growing tendency of social historians to isolate daily life from politics seems particularly inappropriate for an era when, to paraphrase Brinkley, the behavior of the state and national economic institutions has increasingly affected every level of society, including the local context in which schools operate. Indeed, in the twentieth century social and political history are inextricably linked, though few historians of education (or other historical subdisciplines for that matter) have yet successfully managed to find ways to combine the two.'

The effects of this shortcoming are readily apparent in the literature on education in the 1960% particularly in the two most comprehensive accounts of the period, Diane Ravitch's The Troubled Crusade and Joel Spring's The Sorting Machine. Although they differ with one another in important respects, both focus on ideas, events, and institutions in ways that leave much about the experiences of the era unexplained.

In The Troubled Crusade, Diane Ravitch argues that the history of education in the 1960s is chiefly the story of the federal government's well-intended but fundamentally misguided desire to use schools to achieve social eq~a l i t y .~ Threatened by the civil rights movement and prodded by liberal policymakers, Ravitch contends, the federal government during the 1960s launched an unprecedented series of initiatives designed to increase access to schooling and expand opportunities for those previously neglected by the educational system. But the record of those initiatives, she says, has been one of almost unremitting failure and even destructiveness. However worthy, she concludes, the federal effort to end school segregation, make education more relevant to minority children, and provide compensatory services for the poor constituted an unwarranted usurpation of educators' prerogatives that ultimately diluted the curriculum, eroded the ideal of excellence, and made it impossible for the schools to serve their essential functions.

Though cloaked in an air of studied objectivity, Ravitch's account contains a strong ideological message that is open to dispute. Of greater historiographical interest, however, is how she has constructed her argument. Surely one of the most striking developments of the decade was the expansion of federal involvement into areas of educational decision making once considered the exclusive domain of local educators. The problem is that Ravitch treats the evolution of the federal role in education almost exclusively on its own terms, focusing on short-term changes in federal policy in isolation from the larger social and political forces that shaped the history of education in the era.'"

This failure to link society and politics has at least two consequences that badly distort what Ravitch considers significant about the decade's history. First, it tends to center her attention on relatively secondary issues such as the proper extent of federal involvement in education rather than on more fundamental questions about which groups exercised more or less power in shaping educational policy and how the

7. Foner, "History in Crisis," 725. On this point, also see Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene Genovese, "The Political Crisis of Social History: A Marxian Perspective," Journal of Social History 14 (Winter 1976): 205-20; Tony Judt, "A Clown in Regal Purple: Social History and the Historians," History Workshop (Spring 1979): 66-94; William Leuchtenberg, "The Pertinence of Political History: Reflections on the Significance of the State of America," Journal of American History 73 (December 1986): 585-600; and Michael Kazin, "The Historian as Populist," The New York Review of Books 35 (12 May 1988): 48-50.

8. On this point, see Brinkley, "Writing the History of Contemporary America" 124-25. 9. Diane Ravitch, The Troubled Crusade: American Education, 7945-7980 (New York: Basic

Books, 1983).

and the Decline of the Democratic ldeal (New York: Basic Books, 1985), 21 0. 10. On this point, see also Ira Katznelson and Margaret Weir, Schooling for A//: Class, Race,

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implementation of those policies affected the educational opportunities open to different groups in American society. Second, it also focuses her attention on political and intellectual elites at the expense of those outside governmental institutions. She pays virtually no attention to the voice of the black community or other historically disen- franchised groups (even though they were the objects of federal policy), and when she does address their concerns, she dismisses their demand for greater control over education as ill founded and destructive to the educational system.

Joel Spring's The Sorting Machine also argues that federal involvement was the most important change in the period, though Spring evaluates the enlarged federal role differently." In his view, federal involvement in education during the 1960s did not stem from a misguided desire to use schools to achieve equality, as Ravitch maintains; rather, it was part of an elite-sponsored effort that began after World War II to subordinate schools to the needs of national economic and foreign policy interests. Concerned about social disorder, he says, officials in the federal government looked to education to ameliorate the social conflict caused by racial discrimination and poverty. The result, in his account, was a host of new federal education programs that shaped schools in the interest of corporate elites at the expense of teaching students to protect and defend their individual political and economic rights.

Spring's argument shows greater sensitivity to the political context in which policy emerged and developed. Questions of power are foremost in his mind. Yet, like Ravitch, he focuses almost exclusively on the ideas, interests, and motivations of policymakers. The connections between education, politics, and social structure are neglected; the voices of those outside government are muted; and the effects of federal involvement on the capacities of different groups to influence educational policy are ignored. Consequently, even though he interprets the federal role differently, the story he tells is not only remarkably similar to Ravitch's but is marred by many of the same difficulties as well.

Writing the history of education in the 1960s to surmount these difficulties is no easy task. Over the course of the twentieth century, education has become so inextricably entwined with politics and society that a complete account would need to address many of the most important social developments in modern American life. But without a more socially informed approach to the political history of the era the sources and meaning of the conflicts over education that first emerged during the late 1950s and intensified in the 1960s and early 1970s will remain obscured.

II.

What might such an educational history look like? Probably no account can be fully comprehensive. But in our view the key theme is the interaction between the black struggle for equal education and the ways the structure of the state and the enactment of state-sponsored reforms shaped patterns of popular protest. Here we simply wish briefly to illustrate this theme and to explain how an understanding of the connection between black protest and the role of the state might usefully inform the way the history of the period is written.

The 1960s was a decade of intense conflict in American education, particularly in urban school systems. What distinguished the decade from those that preceded it, however, was not just that it was a period of turmoil. After all, the 1940s and 1950s both were periods of ferment for American schools. But the controversies of the 1940s (over how to accommodate rising enrollments) and the 1950s (over the organization and content of the secondary school curriculum) remained well within patterns of school politics established at the turn of the century. By contrast, the ferment of the 1960s called into question long-standing features of school governance, organization, and ideology. By the end of the 1960s, assumptions first institutionalized during the

11. Joel Spring, The Sorting Machine: National Education Policy Since 1945 (New York: Longman, 1976).

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EDUCATIONAL REFORM IN THE 1960s 5

progressive era about modes of educational decision making, the prerogatives of professional educators, and the relationship between schooling, race, and equal opportunity had all come under sharp attack.’’

These attacks came from several groups. But the chief catalyst was the black demand for equal education. Stimulated by the civil rights movement, black school movements in the 1960s mounted a major challenge that threatened to disrupt traditional ways of making educational decisions and that brought blacks into conflict with working- class whites, politicians, and school officials wedded to established ideas and practices about the organization and governance of education. Indeed, what made the politics of education in the 1960s so distinctive, as Ira Katznelson and Margaret Weir have pointed out, is that the black demand for equal education, whether through integration or community control, entailed changes difficult to accommodate within the normal patterns of school po l i t ic~. ’~

Few historians of education dispute the historical significance of the black movement for equal education in the 1960s. But rarely have they paid much attention to the movement itself. Most accounts reserve center stage for educational policymakers and political leaders and portray the movement through their eyes, not the eyes of its own leaders and participants. Even when accounts acknowledge the importance of black protest, they ignore the perspective of the black movement. Consequently, they fail to understand what blacks were trying to achieve or why they adopted the strategies they did, and, as a result, they cannot satisfactorily explain why school politics in the 1960s became so contenti~us.’~

Perhaps the best example of this failure to understand how blacks sought to make sense of their reality and acted to transform it is the way most accounts deal with the issue of desegregation and community control. Drawing on an assimilationist model, they appear to explain fairly well the universal demand for desegregated schools in the early 1960s. But they do not account very well for the lack of interest in desegregating churches or the very strong interest in acquiring black control over political and economic resources long before Stokely Carmichael popularized the slogan “Black Power.” Neither can they explain why many of those who supported integration simultaneously supported community control or, conversely, why many proponents of community control continued to push for interdistrict busing and other desegregated options for black students. Nor, finally, do they explain why advocates of black studies also pushed for greater access to conventional academic courses.

Most historians of education ignore these seemingly incompatible pursuits or dismiss them as irrational. Some also condemn blacks for disrupting orderly political processes through their confrontational behavior, for violating egalitarian ideals by pursuing group rights over individual rights, and for weakening the common purposes of schooling by demanding courses that reflected their interests.’’ But by listening to black voices and observing black actions, at the local level especially, it becomes possible to recast the meaning of these events. Viewed from this perspective, the controversies that characterized the 1960s were not conflicts between order and anarchy, between excellence and equity, or between individual rights and ethnocentrism. They appear rather as part of a many-faceted struggle for black empowerment in which, to paraphrase Clayborne Carson, the demand for desegregation evolved into a

12. On the significance of the 1960s for the history of schooling, see David Tyack, The One

13. Katznelson and Weir, School for All, chap. 7. 14. For the importance of looking at subordinate groups on their own terms, see Herbert

Gutman’s critique of Eugene Genovese’s Roll Jordan Roll in MAHRO, Visions of History (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 209. See also Clayborne Carson, “The Civil Rights Movement and the Transformation of American Racial Thought” (Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians, 5 April 1984).

Best System (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974), 272.

15. See especially Ravitch, Troubled Crusade, 174.

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movement for greater community control to accomplish the unachieved goals of the earlier movement.'6

The patterns of school politics in the 1960s were not of course defined entirely by the black movement. They were also shaped in decisive ways by the state. How this occurred is extraordinarily complex because various state institutions did not always respond to black protest in a uniform fa~hion. '~ What is most striking to us, however, is how the state - through court action and the enactment of legislation - appeared both to legitimate black claims for freedom and to remain remote from what many blacks wanted most, at times channeling black protest in ways that minimally disrupted existing institutional arrangements.

This dialectic between legitimation and recalcitrance is particularly evident with respect to the role of the courts, especially the Supreme Court. Without question the 1954 Brown decision oxygenated the black movement." By giving legitimacy to the movement's claims of legal rights, Brown gave civil rights activists the feeling that at least one branch of the federal government supported their cause and, by doing so, encouraged further protest. At the same time, however, court action was not always responsive to black interests. Not only did the Court remain silent for more than a decade after Brown, but by the time it took affirmative stands to dismantle school desegregation in the South in 1968 and in the North in 1973, frustration with the failure of schools to desegregate had prompted many to support efforts for community control. For others a taste of desegregation had soured in response to tracking and insensitive teachers, as well as to discrimination in both extracurricular activities and disciplinary action.1g Thus, the Court's increasing willingness to engineer racial balance - often by making blacks the numerical minority in schools and placing on them the disproportionate burden of busing - worked at cross-purposes with those who advocated greater community control and those who supported desegregated schools but wanted them to be substantially black.

Even less responsive than judicial decisions was the enactment of federal programs like Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. Prior to the act's passage, black protests in the North and in the South focused almost exclusively on the demand for school desegregation; rarely did they ask for compensatory education. ESEA did of course provide badly needed funding for some urban schools and produced some measurable gains in achievement for minority students. But no black constituency demanded compensatory education. Nor did any organized black group participate in the formulation of the federal legislation.'"

Indeed, the relationship between federal education legislation and black insurgency is an obscure one. As Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward have pointed out, it is

16. See Clayborne Carson, "Civil Rights Reform and the Black Freedom Struggle," in The Civil Rights Movement in America, ed. Charles W. Eagles (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986), 19-32. For a recent study that adopts this perspective, see David N. Planck and Marcia Turner, "Changing Patterns in Black School Politics: Atlanta, 1872-1 973," American Journal of Education 95 (August 1987): 584-608.

17. On the contradictory nature of the state's response to racial protest, see Michael Om1 and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, From the 7960s to the 7980s (New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986), 77.

18. See, for instance, Richard Kluger, Simple Justice (New York: Vintage, 1977); Henry M. Levin, "Education and Earnings of Blacks and the Brown Decision," in Have We Overcome? Race Relations since Brown, ed. Michael V. Namorato (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1979); Charles Hamilton, "Federal Law and the Courts in the Civil Rights Movement," in Civil Rights Movement, 97-126.

19. See, for example, Mario Fantini, Marilyn Gittell, and Richard Magat, Community Control and the Urban School (New York: Praeger, 1970); and Kenneth Haskins, "The Case for Local Control," Saturday Review, 11 January 1969.

20. On the absence of black participation in the development of federal education policy, see Harold L. Wolman and Norman C. Thomas, "Black Interests, Black Groups, and Black Influence in the Federal Policy Process: The Cases of Housing and Education," Journal of Politics 32 (1970): 875-97.

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EDUCATIONAL REFORM IN THE 1960s 7

next to impossible to account for the avalanche of Great Society legislation in education and in other areas of social policy without reference to the rise of black protest. It is difficult to determine, however, whether federal education legislation was intentionally designed to co-opt black insurgency, as Piven and Cloward have suggested." Certainly, ESEA provided a politically feasible alternative to school desegregation (particularly for northern Democrats fearful of white backlash but dependent on black votes) and proposed no fundamental change in the principles on which the schools are based. But most accounts of the act's origins suggest that it was initiated by political leaders and specialized groups in the policy community to institutionalize a more expansive understanding of the federal role in defining and making educational policy.22

On the other hand, ESEA did mobilize parents in some communities to pressure local school officials to make certain that federal monies were targeted on those for whom the program was intended. In Providence, Rhode Island, and San Jose, California, parents protested against the school system's allocation of Title I monies for general aid, and with the assistance of other advocacy groups they sought to gain greater control over how federal funds were utilized. With the support of the courts (and eventually the federal bureaucracy), these groups forced local school districts to establish guidelines for parental participation in Title I projects. But because school officials ultimately retained control over the organization and operation of the newly formed parent councils, increased participation was only marginally effe~tive.'~

The passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act appears at first glance to have been more responsive to black demands for equal education. But on closer inspection the history of federal efforts to enforce Title VI of the act (forbidding the payment of federal funds to school districts that discriminated) also reveals the limits of federal action. In the North, these limits became evident as early as 1965 when the Office of Education retreated from its attempt to suspend payment of Title I funds to Chicago because of the city's failure to comply with the department's desegregation guideline~.'~ In the South, federal officials successfully used the threat of fund cutoffs under Title VI to secure school desegregation plans from nearly every school district by 1965. But the Office of Education was reluctant to withhold Title I funds, and by 1967 most districts in the South realized that the federal threat was a hollow Although most observers credit federal action for pushing the South from intransigent defiance to token accep- tance of school desegregation, not until 1968, when the Supreme Court unanimously struck down a freedom-of-choice plan in New Kent County, Virginia, was substantial desegregation achieved. And by then, as indicated above, many blacks had become ambivalent about the value of desegregation unless accompanied by other changes in the organization and practice of schooling.

Since the courts and the federal government were unwilling to transform schools

21. Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare (New York: Vintage Books, 1971), chap. 9; and Richard A. Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, The Politics of Turmoil: Poverty, Race, and the Urban Crisis (New York: Vintage Books, 1975),

22. On the origins of ESEA, see Stephen K. Bailey and Edith K. Mosher, ESEA: The Office of Education Administers a Law (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1968); Eugene Eidenberg and Roy D. Morey, An Act of Congress: The Legislative Process and the Making of Education Policy (New York: W. W. Norton, 1969); Julie Roy Jeffrey, Education for Children of the Poor: A Study of the Origins and lmplementation of the Nementary and Secondary Education Act (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1978); and Hugh Davis Graham, The Uncertain Triumph: Federal Education Policy and the Kennedy and Johnson Years (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984).

23. Jeffrey, Education for Children of the Poor, 132-36; Jerome Murphy, "The Education Bureaucracies Implement Novel Policy: The Politics of Title I of ESEA, 1965-1 972," in Policy and Politics in America, ed. Allan P. Sindler (Boston: Little Brown, 1973), 161-97; and Jennifer Hochschild, The New American Dilemma: Liberal Democracy and School Desegregation (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1984), 102-3.

24. For an account of the events in Chicago, see Gary Orfield, The Reconstruction of Southern Education: The Schools and the 7964 Civil Rights Act (New York: John Wiley, 1969), chap. 4.

25. Ibid., chap. 5.

271 -84.

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in accordance with black interests, black discontent increasingly centered on local school systems. But here too the dialectic of legitimation and recalcitrance remained the central theme. Because schools were locally controlled and appeared to be accessible to popular influence, local school boards became the target for black discontent. At the same time, however, demands for desegregation posed a threat to working-class whites who feared black encroachment on their neighborhood schools, while the desire for community control upset the decision-making prerogatives of local school leaders. The result was a cycle of intensified white resistance and increasingly disruptive black protestz6 that produced concessions - including hiring more black teachers and counselors, expanding curriculum offerings to speak more directly to the concerns of black students, and provisions for community boards or greater participation in parent councils - beneficial to some black students. At the same time, however, those concessions generally left basic issues of control untouched. Indeed, Katznelson has argued that such concessions actually blunted insurgency by directing black protest toward relatively minor redistributional issues at the expense of more fundamental questions about who controlled the schools and for what purposes.’’

On the other hand, by the early 1970% blacks did begin to gain access to positions of authority in large urban centers. But by then demographic change rendered their power problematic. The flight of middle-class whites and the containment of primarily poor blacks, a process stimulated by state policies including tax deductions for homeowners, the placement of public housing in inner-city neighborhoods, and, most importantly, FHA and VA mortgage guarantee programs, impoverished the tax bases of urban areas at a time when the need for services soared. Control without resources spelled limited power to shape the development of public education.”

Ill.

None of this means that scholars studying the history of education during the 1960s should abandon entirely their interest in policymakers and the evolution of national educational policy. As we have pointed out, the history of the decade presents a complex picture of dynamic interaction between black struggle and state response. What our analysis suggests, however, is that the history of the decade cannot be viewed solely through the eyes of school officials and educational policymakers, nor can it be seen entirely from a national perspective. On the contrary, if educational historians are to understand the political dynamics of the period, they must also listen closely to the voices of black school activists, especially at the local level where doing history from the bottom up is most viable,zg and they must integrate the study of the state at the national level with investigations of school politics in local communities.

Based on our analysis thus far we think such an approach suggests some ways of looking at the 1960s that have received little attention. First, the notion that matters of excellence succumbed to ones of equity dissolves in the face of a serious examination of black efforts to engender curricular reform. We see these efforts as attempts to broaden definitions of appropriate subject matter as well as to expand access to college

26. A number of writers emphasize the disruptiveness of blacks without understanding the context which made such behavior politically necessary. See, for example, Raymond Wolters, The Burden of Brown: Thirty Years of School Desegregations (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984), 255-58; and Robert Hampel, The Last Little Citadel: American High Schools Since 1940 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1986), 119, 129.

27. Ira Katznelson, City Trenches: Urban Politics and the Patterning of Class in the United States (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981), chap. 7.

28. On the role of public policy in the spatial patterning of race and class, see Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), esp. chaps. 11-12; and William Julius Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged: The lnner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), chap. 2.

29. One of the few studies that have accomplished this is William Chafe, Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro, North Carolina, and the Black Struggle for Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980).

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preparatory courses. For those historically denied equal educational opportunity, equity and excellence are not opposites; they become interdependent categories.

Second, we think it is a mistake to overemphasize the discontinuity between black efforts to promote desegregation and community control. Rather than simply view the former as the expression of an integrationist ideology and the latter as the articulation of a separatist one, we see them more as alternate tactics to achieve educational opportunity in the face of state re~alcitrance.~'

Third, an easy equation between the achievement of racial balance and educational equity underscores the chasm between legal formulations and much black experience. This equation at the very least overlooks the extent to which black activism has been able to transform many inner-city schools and the extent to which black students have been subjected to second-generation segregation in racially balanced scho~ls .~ ' In fact, we think it can be plausibly argued that the transition from segregated to desegregated school systems had masked continuing inequities. By dispersing black students into far-flung schools and by satisfying the legal requirements for just schools, desegregation has undercut black communities' capacity to seek change through either direct-action tactics or legal recourse. In the absence of protest and the presence of formal equality, persistent institutional injustices are rendered invisible.32

Finally, we agree with Theda Skocpol that the development and implementation of state policy is shaped partly by the needs of state officials and the administrative capacities of the state. But we think it is a mistake to view the history of state educational policy in the 1960s chiefly as a story about the inner workings of governmental institutions, the development of legal doctrines, the evolution of intergovernmental relations, or the relative merits of different implementation strategies. Rather, our analysis suggests that the history of state policy is chiefly about the ways social struggles were channeled through governmental institutions and how those institutions in turn structured the processes of educational

We see the above conclusions as tentative, as hypotheses to be tested in further research. In addition, a fuller account of the 1960s would look not only at blacks, but at other minorities, women, and youth culture; it would examine policy at the state as well as the federal level; it would observe higher education as well as elementary and secondary education; and, of course, it would look at the struggles over education in the context of larger social, political, and economic developments. What we have tried to do here is outline an approach - one that explores the tensions between deter- mination and self-determination - that will help us achieve a deeper understanding of a period too often clouded by "nostalgia or regret."34

30. One historical analysis that makes this point is Robert G. Newby and David Tyack, "Victims without Crimes: Some Historical Perspectives on Black Education," Journal of Negro Education 40 (Summer 1971): 192-206.

31. For a discussion of this phenomenon, see Hochschild, The New American Dilemma, 83- 86.

32. For the notion of naturalizing injustice by removing policies from the likelihood of contestation, see Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1979).

33. See, for example, Theda Skocpol and John Ikenberry, "The Political Formation of the American Welfare State," in Comparative Social Research, vol. 6 (JAI Press, 1983), 87-148; Ann Shola Orloff and Theda Skocpol, "Why Not Equal Protection? Explaining the Politics of Public Social Spending in Britain, 1900-1 91 1, and the United States, 1880s-1920," American Sociological Review 49 (December 1984): 726-50; and Theda Skocpol, "Bringing the State Back In," ltems 36 (June 1982): 1-8.

34. The phrase is taken from Susman, Culture as History, 153.

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