1. Further multiplying this presence of the social sciences in the field of educational history is the fact that many of the best historians of education have been deeply influenced by social science theory and methods, including Michael Katz, David Tyack, Carl Kaestle, and David Hogan. Works by these social scientists and historians are listed below, as I review the various schools in the study of the social history of education.

2. Schools allow many to escape their parents' social position, but they also allow (or condemn) others to continue their parents' life trajectories. Nearly half of the resemblance between parents and children in occupational status is due to how much education the children get. See Christopher Jencks et al., Inequality (New York: Basic), pp. 201, n. 17, 215; and Jencks, et al., Who Gets Ahead? (New York: Basic, 1979), pp. 74, 214–15, 218Google Scholar.

3. For more on the major theories of the social functions of education, see Dougherty, Kevin and Hammack, Floyd, eds., Education and Society (San Diego: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1990), esp. ch. 2Google Scholar.

4. Heidenheimer, Arnold J., “Education and Social Security Entitlements in Europe and North America,” in The Development of Welfare States in Europe and North America, ed. Flora, Peter and Heidenheimer, Arnold J. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1981)Google Scholar.

5. Harold Wilensky, Arnold Heidenheimer, and Francis Fox Piven and Richard Cloward had long been working on the origins of the American welfare state. But the field has experienced an explosion of activity during the 1980s, in good part due to the efforts of Theda Skocpol and her colleagues and students. For an introduction to much of the best scholarship on the development of the American welfare state, see Weir, Margaret, Orloff, Ann Shola, and Skocpol, Theda, eds., The Politics of Social Policy in the United States (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988)Google Scholar.

6. Emirbayer, “The Shaping of a Virtuous Citizenry,” p. 402 (this volume).

7. Ibid., p. 396.

8. Ibid., pp. 394–96, 404.

9. Ibid., pp. 397–399. It should be noted that the establishment of the common school in the mid-19th century did not involve the creation of public schooling, much less schooling per se. Rather, it entailed the extension of state control and financing over existing schools. Americans had long been sending their children to private schools and to quasi-public district schools. The latter, in a typically muddled American way, took in the majority of students in an area, but financed themselves through a combination of local taxation, state aid, and tuition. See Kaestle, Carl, Pillars of the Republic (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983)Google Scholar, esp. chs. 2–3.

10. Emirbayer, “Virtuous Citizenry,” p. 404.

11. The school is centered around the sociologist John Meyer and his students, principally Richard Rubinson, Francisco Ramirez, and John Boli. See Meyer, John, “The Effects of Education as an Institution,” American Journal of Sociology 83 (1977): 55–77Google Scholar; Meyer, John and Hannan, Michael, eds., Xational Development and the Modern World System (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979)Google Scholar; Meyer, John, Tyack, David, Nagel, Joane, and Gordon, Audri, “Public Education as Nation-Building in America,” American Journal of Sociology 85 (1979): 591–613Google Scholar; Ramirez, Francisco and Boli, John, “Political Construction of Mass Schooling,” Sociology of Education 60 (1987): 2–18Google Scholar; Boli, John, Ramirez, Francisco, and Meyer, John, “Explaining the Origins and Expansion of Mass Education,” Comparative Education Review 29 (1985): 145–71Google Scholar; and Rubinson, Richard, “Class Formation, Politics, and Institutions: Schooling in the United States,” American Journal of Sociology 92 (11 1986): 519–48Google Scholar.

12. Meyer et al., “Public Education,” p. 592.

13. This functionalism is not the technological functionalism associated with human capital theory or such followers of Talcott Parsons as Rather, Martin Trow., it is rooted in the Durkheim of The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (Glencoe, 111.: Free Press, 1965)Google Scholar and has a strong anthropological flavor. This shows up in the way John Meyer describes education as a “religion” or “myth”: “as religions do, it provides a legitimating account of the competency of citizens, the authority of elites, and the sources of the adequacy of the social system to maintain itself in the face of uncertainty” (“Effects of Education,” p. 72). For Meyer, schooling creates categories of knowledge that people defer to, divides people into different occupations according to these categories of knowledge (expert or possessor of knowledge as versus layperson or nonpossesor of knowledge), and allocates people into these occupations. In the process of creating these categories of knowledge and people, schools do not just socialize their students but also construct society.

14. Meyer et al., “Public Education,” pp. 595–96, 604–5. For further evidence on this. see Collins, Randall, The Credential Society (New York: Academic Press, 1979)Google Scholar, ch. 1; and Kaestle, Pillars, pp. 24–29. However, we should be careful to not take these findings about the limits of technological functionalism too far. Several studies find that technological demands do seem to play some role in educational expansion later in American education history. In a lime-series analysis, Rubinson, Richard and Ralph, John find that total factor productivity (measured by the Gross National Product net of capital and labor inputs) is a significant predictor of increases in elementary enrollment between the years 1900 and 1922 and secondary enrollment between 1923 and 1970 but not earlier (“Technical Change and the Expansion of Schooling in the United States, 1890–1970,” Sociology of Education 57 [1984]: 134–52)Google Scholar. Similarly, , Walters, Pamela B. finds in a time-series analysis that changes in the proportion of the labor force in professional-technical and clerical occupations are a significant predictor of increases in high-school enrollments in the years 1952–1979 (“Occupational and Labor Market Effects on Secondary and Postsecondarv Educational Expansion in the United States, 1922–1979,” American Sociological Review 49 [1984]: 659–71)Google Scholar.

15. Meyer et al., “Public Education,” p. 601, cited by Emirbayer, “The Shaping of a Virtuous Citizenry,” p. 404.

16. Meyer et al., “Public Education,” p. 601.

17. Emirbayer, “Virtuous Citizenry,” pp. 408–413. Indeed, there is considerable evidence that Emirbayer is correct in citing this opposition. See, for example. Kaestle, Pillars, ch. 7; Katz, Michael, Class, Bureaucracy, and Schools (New York: Praeger, 1971)Google Scholar; and Spring, Joel, The American School, 1642–1985 (White Plains, N.Y.: Longman, 1986), pp. 94–109Google Scholar. This element of cultural domination also holds for the Western values that John Meyer and his colleagues see as underpinning the worldwide spread of public schooling. European humanist culture, with its individualistic bent, is not socially neutral. It undermines traditional society and stimulates processes of modernization (European assimilation) that bring Third World societies within the sphere of influence of Western capitalist economic, political, and cultural structures. Testimony to the conflictual element in the spread of Western culture is the recent call by many Third World nations for a new “world information order” in which they have greater control over the messages entering their societies.

18. Boli, Ramirez, and Meyer, “Mass Education,” pp. 147–49, 152–53.

19. See Boli, Ramirez, and Meyer, “Mass Education”; and Ramirez and Boli, “Mass Schooling.”

20. For example, see Meyer et al., “Public Education,” pp. 596, 599; and Rubinson, “Class Formation,” p. 535.

21. See, for example, Kaestle, Pillars, pp. 26, 29; and Tyack, David, The One Best System (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974)Google Scholar.

22. See Spring, American School pp. 83–90.

23. The leading exponents of the instrumentalist school in American educational history include Bowles, Samuel and Gintis, Herbert, Schooling in Capitalist America (New York: Basic Books, 1976)Google Scholar; Carnoy, Martin, ed., Schooling in a Corporate Society (New York: McKay, 1975)Google Scholar; Carnoy, Martin and Levin, Henry, eds., The Limits of Educational Reform (New York: Longman, 1976)Google Scholar; and Karabel, Jerome, “Community Colleges and Social Stratification,” Harvard Educational Review 42 (1972): 521–62Google Scholar. In addition, though their political theory is less obvious and blurry, one could argue that the following historians are instrumentalists: Katz, Michael, The Irony of Early School Reform (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969)Google Scholar and Class; and Karier, Clarence J., Violas, Paul C., and Spring, Joel, Roots of Crisis: American Education in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1973)Google Scholar.

24. A more contemporary reminder is the role business mobilization in the 1970s played in paving the way for Reaganism and Thatcherism in the 1980s. For more on this, see Useem, Michael, The Inner Circle (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984)Google Scholar; and Amott, Teresa and Krieger, Joel, “Thatcher and Reagan: State Theory and the ‘Hyper Capitalist’ Regime,” New Political Science 8 (Spring 1982): 9–37Google Scholar.

25. Barrow, “The Reconstruction of American Higher Education,” pp. 435–36.

26. Bowles and Gintis, Schooling, pp. 178–79.

27. In Schooling, Bowles and Gintis also discuss, but do not employ in their main analysis, another channel of capitalist influence, which they call “pluralist accommodation.” It operates when parents and government officials tailor their actions to the requirements of a changing economy not because of capitalist command, but because they perceive this accommodation to be in their own interest (pp. 236–37). This resembles the idea of the relative autonomy of the state that I discuss below.

28. For evidence of business involvement in the reform of the high school, see Tyack, One Best System pp. 7, 126–76; Hogan, David, Class and Reform (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), pp. 155–65Google Scholar; Spring, American School, pp. 208–9, 225–30; and Bowles and Gintis, Schooling, pp. 186–200. For evidence on the reform of elementary schooling, see Bowles and Gintis, Schooling, pp. 155–78.

29. Furthermore, enrollments were higher in rural areas than in urban areas during the period 1870 to 1930. On both points, see Meyer et al., “Public Education,” pp. 595–98, 604; and Rubinson, “Class Formation,” pp. 525–26. It could be argued that even if industrial capitalism had little effect on primary school enrollments, simple commodity capitalism (that is, the spread of market relations) did. For this, see Kaestle, Pillars, pp. 25–29. However, instrumentalist Marxists have couched their arguments in terms of the requirements of industrial capitalism and not simple commodity capitalism.

30. See Wrigley, Julia, Class Politics and Public Schools (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1982), pp. 60–90Google Scholar; and Hogan, Class and Reform, pp. 175–80.

31. The most prominent representatives of this approach have been Wrigley, Class Politics; Hogan, Class and Reform; and Katznelson, Ira and Weir, Margaret, Schooling for All (New York: Basic, 1985), pp. 10–27Google Scholar. However, it also includes corporate liberal theorists who have had second thoughts: Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, “Education as a Site of Contradictions in the Reproduction of the Capital-Labor Relationship: Second Thoughts on the ‘Correspondence Principle’,” Economic and Industrial Democracy 2: 223–12; andCarnoy, Martin and Levin, Henry, Schooling and Work in the Democratic Stale (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985), pp. 1–15Google Scholar.

32. Katznelson and Weir, Schooling for All, pp. 14, 151.

33. See Hogan, Class and Reform, pp. 175–80; Katznelson and Weir, Schooling for All, p. 159; and Wrigley, Class Politics, pp. 15, 264–68.

34. Today, the teachers' unions are emerging as major shapers of the educational system. In the face of the “educational excellence” movement that exploded in the early 1980s, they have had to acknowledge the parlous state of American education and craft responses of their own. Some of their proposals—for example, school-based decision making in which teachers enjoy parity of power with administrators—have been widely implemented. See Dougherty, Kevin, Schools to the Rescue: The Political Origins of the Educational Excellence Movement (Report to the Spencer Foundation, Manhattan College, 03 1992)Google Scholar.

35. Barrow, “Higher Education,” p. 434.

36. Ibid., pp. 436, 442. Emphasis mine.

37. Ibid., p. 436.

38. Ibid., p. 440.

39. Skocpol, Theda, “Political Responses to Capitalist Crisis: Neo-Marxist Theories of the State and the Case of the New Deal,” Politics and Society 10 (1980): 155–201Google Scholar, at p. 200. For other examples of the statecentric perspective, see Block, Fred, Revising State Theory (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987)Google Scholar; Evans, Peter, Rueschemeyer, Dietrich, and Skocpol, Theda, eds., Bringing the State Back In (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985)Google Scholar; and Weir, Orloff, and Skocpol, eds., Politics of Social Policy. Many of the adherents of state-centric theory are Weberians. But many are also Marxists who find that the capitalist class is often not the witting author of its own future and therefore reject instrumentalist theory.

40. I am drawing on work I have reported in Kevin Dougherty, “The Politics of Community College Expansion: Beyond the Functionalist and Class Reproduction Theories, ' American Journal of Education 96 (May 1988): 351–93; and “Educational Policymaking and the Relative Autonomy of the State: The Case of Occupational Education in the Community College,” Sociological Forum 3 (Summer 1988): 400–32.

41. Tyack, One Best System, pp. 143–44.

42. I use the term ”resource dependence” to describe this form of constraint in order to connect my argument to resource dependence theory in the field of complex organizations.See Aldrich, Howard and Pfeffer, Jeffrey, “Environments of Organizations,” Annual Review of Sociology 2 (1976): 79–105Google Scholar; and Pfeffer, Jeffrey and Salancik, Gerald R., The External Control of Organizations (New York: Harper and Row, 1978)Google Scholar.

43. For evidence on the importance of economic conditions to slate officials' reelection chances, see Beyle, Thad and Muchmore, Lynn, eds., Being Governor (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1983)Google Scholar; Lockard, Duane, State and Local Politics (New York: Macmillan, 1969)Google Scholar; and Osborne, David, Laboratones of Democracy (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1990)Google Scholar. For similar evidence pertaining to federal elected officials, see Jacobson, Gary, The Politics of Congressional Elections (Boston: Little, Brown, 1983)Google Scholar; Sundquist, James, Politics and Policy (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1968)Google Scholar; and Tufte, Edward, Political Control of the Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978)Google Scholar.

44. Sec Dougherty, “Educational Policymaking.”

45. Barrow, “Higher Education,” pp. 421, 435 n.73.

46. Theda Skocpol, “Bringing the State Back In,” in Evans et al., Bringing the State Back In, pp. 2–37, at p. 9. Interestingly, this quotation comes from the very page in Skocpol that Barrow cites in his paraphrase of the state autonomy argument.

47. Major exponents of the Weberian approach include Archer, Margaret, ed., The Sociology of Educational Expansion (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1982)Google Scholar; Ben-David, Joseph and Zloczower, Awraham, “Universities and Academic Systems in Modern Societies,” European Journal of Sociology 33 (1962): 45–84Google Scholar; Collins Credential Society; Collins, , “Some Comparative Principles of Educational Stratification,” Harvard Educational Review 47 (1977): 1–27;Google Scholar and Ringer, Fritz, Education and Society in Modern Europe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979)Google Scholar.

48. Collins, Credential Society, chs. 2, 5–6, and “Some Comparative Principles.”

49. Collins, Credential Society, pp. 98–99, 102.

50. Collins, Credential Society, pp. 122–27.

51. See Tyack, One Best System, pp. 104–9; and Kaestle, Pillars, pp. 161–63. This effort at indoctrination encountered strong immigrant resistance, especially from Catholics who found the Protestant-tinged instruction of the public schools distasteful. Hence, many sent their children to private schools of their own. See Spring, American School, pp. 101–7; and Kaestle, Pillars, pp. 163–71. This partial immigrant boycott may partly explain the finding of a negative correlation between the percentage Catholic in a state and the proportion of young people enrolled in public elementary and secondary schools in the late 19th century (Meyer et al., “Public Education,” p. 606; and Ralph, John and Rubinson, Richard, “Immigration and the Expansion of Schooling in the United States, 1890–1970,” American Sociological Review 45 [1980]: 943–54)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

52. Kaestle, Pillars, p. 181. David Tyack adds: “urban schools of the nineteenth century… «imposed» a curriculum and an urban discipline, but they also opened up opportunities that many of the students might otherwise never have had: to read a newspaper, to compute, to know something of history and geography, to speak standard English. These new skills often created alternatives for the literate that were unavailable to the illiterate” (One Best System, p. 72).

53. Tyack, One Best System, pp. 75–76. This shows up in the fact that evangelical Protestant sentiment moves from being a positive to a negative predictor of state by state differences in public elementary school enrollments after 1900. See Meyer et al., “Public Education,” p. 604.