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The best history of American education is Lawrence Cremin’s prizewinning three-volume work, culminating in his recent American Education: The Metropolitan Experience (New York: Harper and Row, 1988). Three books on school reform in different periods, written from very different points of view, are: Carl F. Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983), on the pre-Civil War period; David B. Tyack, The One Best System (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974), on the progressive period; and Diane Ravitch, The Troubled Crusade (New York: Basic Books, 1983), on the period after World War II.

—C.F.K.