School, Society, and State: A New Education to Govern Modern America, 1890-1940

Tracy L. Steffes

This project explores the expansion and transformation of public schooling from 1890-1940 as a central American response to industrialization. While historians and social scientists have often puzzled why American social welfare policies were so weak and stingy compared to Europe, this project argues that public education reform was an underacknowledged, distinctly American effort to meet the same goals: to provide for the welfare of citizens, address the vagaries of the new industrial economy, and reconcile tensions between deepening economic inequality and political democracy. This project explores how and why Americans invested so heavily in schooling, how these reforms subtly transformed schooling into a more powerful project of social governance, and what consequences flowed from these choices. The project draws insights from the interdisciplinary social science effort to “bring the state back in” and from political and legal history to offer a synthetic reinterpretation of American education at a pivotal moment. This reinterpretation highlights the central role that schooling played as a site of governance and traces important changes in the legal and political power of schooling. It also places educational reform at the very center of the history of the period, including American progressive reform, responses to industrialization, and political development.

About Tracy L. Steffes

Tracy Steffes is Assistant Professor of Education and Assistant Professor of History at Brown University. She received her B.A. in history and political science from Western Michigan University and her M.A. and Ph.D. in history from University of Chicago. Her primary research and teaching interests are in modern American history, including United States state-building, politics, and public policy; history of American education; legal and constitutional history; political and social thought; and rights, obligations, and citizenship. Steffes is currently at work revising her dissertation for publication with University of Chicago Press, tentatively titled School, Society, and State: A New Education to Govern Modern America, 1890-1940. She has received fellowships from the Miller Center for Public Affairs, the Social Science Research Council Program on Philanthropy and the Non-Profit Sector, and the National Parent-Teachers Association as well as a Richard B. Salomon Faculty Research Award from Brown University. She has also worked on projects relating to history education, including a study of the history major and its relationship to undergraduate liberal education with the National History Center and a National History Education Clearinghouse project on secondary school history teacher training in the states.