This article summarizes and assesses federal K-12 compensatory education policies during the past six decades. It focuses on the centerpiece of that effort, Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. Related programs such as America 2000, Goals 2000, No Child Left Behind, and Every Student Succeeds Act are discussed. It analyzes the increasing use of ambitious federal education goals since the 1990s as well as greater reliance on high-stakes testing. It also considers the role of presidents as well as governors in this process.

With the election of a Republican-controlled Congress in 1994, new questions are being raised about the federal role in education. Some members of Congress, for example, are questioning the need for a U.S. Department of Education and have even introduced legislation to abolish that cabinet-level agency. While there are few indications at this time that the U.S. Department of Education will be terminated in the near future, disagreements over the proper role of the federal government in education matters have intensified. Interestingly, during the current debates over education, the topics of the federal role in research and statistics have surfaced only occasionally. Attention more often is focused on either federal aid to education or federal regulation of schools; the issue of federal funding and dissemination of research and statistics usually is ignored or discussed only in passing.

Public high schools were relatively rare in antebellum America. The first public high school in the United States opened in Boston in 1821, but it was not until the late 1840s and 1850s, when there was a rapid expansion of public high schools throughout the commonwealth, that they became more common in Massachusetts. Most communities in other states, especially those outside of New England, did not provide public high schools for their teenagers.

The essays below continue a debate that began with the publication of Michael B. Katz, The Irony of Early School Reform: Educational Innovation in Mid-Nineteenth Century Massachusetts (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968). One celebrated part of this important work was a study of the controversy over the public high school in Beverly, Massachusetts, including a close analysis of the vote in 1860 to abolish the school. The occasion for these essays is the publication of Maris A. Vinovskis, The Origins of Public High Schools: A Reexamination of the Beverly High School Controversy (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1985). The first essay is a review of the Vinovskis study by Katz, now professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania; the second is a review by Edward Stevens, Jr., professor of education at Ohio University; the third is a response to these reviews by Vinovskis, professor of history and research scientist at the Center for Political Studies at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan.