If you want to be better informed about the best ways to reform our schools, you ought to study the history of American education. A good place to start might be William J. Reese’s informative book, America’s Public Schools: From the Common School to “No Child Left Behind (Johns Hopkins, $21.95, 333 pages).
Mr. Reese, an education historian at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, has set out to tell the entire history of our schools in a book.