Building the federal schoolhouse

Over the past fifty years, the federal government's efforts to reform American public education have transformed U.S. schools from locally-run enterprises into complex systems jointly constructed by federal, state, and local actors. The construction of this federal schoolhouse-an educational system with common national expectations and practices-has fundamentally altered both education politics and the norms governing educational policy at the local level. Building the Federal Schoolhouse examines these issues through an in-depth, fifty-year examination of federal educational policies in the c