Ever since the massive immigration from Europe of the late 19th century, American society has accommodated people of many cultures, religions, languages, and expectations. The task of integration has increasingly fallen to the schools, where children are taught a common language and a set of democratic values and sent on their ways to become productive members of society. How American schools have set about educating these diverse students, and how these students' needs have altered the face of education, are issues central to the social history of the United States in the 20th century. In her pathbreaking new book Paula S. Fass presents a wide ranging examination of the role of "outsiders" in the creation of modern education. Through a series of in-depth and fascinating case studies, she demonstrates how issues of pluralism have shaped the educational landscape and how various minority groups have been affected by their educational experiences. Fass first looks at how public schools absorbed the children of immigrants in the early years of the century and how those children gradually began to use the schools for their own social purposes. She then turns to the experiences of other groups of Americans whose struggles for educational and social opportunities have defined cultural life over the last fifty years: blacks, whose education became a major concern of the federal government in the 1930s and 1940s; women, who had access to higher education but were denied commensurate job opportunities; and Catholics, who created schools that succeeded both in protecting minority integrity and in providing Catholics with a path to American success. Along the way, she presents a wealth of fascinating and surprising detail. Through an examination of New York City high school yearbooks from the 1930s and 1940s, she shows how a student's ethnic identity determined which activities he or she would engage in and how ethnicity was etched into schooling. And she examines how the New Deal and the army in World War II succeeded in educating large numbers of blacks and making the inequalities in their educational opportunities a critical national concern. A sweeping and highly original history of American education, Outside In helps us to understand how schools have been shaped by their students, how educational issues have merged with wider social concerns, and how outsiders have recreated schooling and culture in the 20th century. By opening up new historical terrain and rejecting a vision of outsiders as merely victims of American educational policy, the book has important implications for contemporary social and educational issues.

This book examines how Catholic educators grappled with public educational policies and reforms like standardization and accreditation, educational measurement and testing, and federal funding for schools during the early to mid-twentieth century. These issues elicited an array of reactions including resistance, cooperation, and co-optation. American Catholics had established one of the largest private educational organizations in the United States by the twentieth century. It rivaled only that of the public school system. At mid-century Catholic schools enrolled some 12 percent of the American school-age population and their enrollments grew in number through the 1960s. The Catholic Church’s lobbying arm, the National Catholic Welfare Conference (NCWC), used its well-earned stature to push for federal funds for students attending their schools. The NCWC succeeded in securing funds with the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 for students needing special education services and students living in poverty attending Catholic schools. This signified a major shift in American education policy. Despite this radical change, Catholic schools lost significant enrollment over the next several decades to public, private, and newly minted public charter schools. Catholic schools faced an increasingly competitive landscape in an ever-expanding school-choice environment that they helped create.

Nearly half of all American high school students participate in sports teams. With a total of 7.6 million participants as of 2008, this makes the high school sports program in America the largest organized sports program in the world. Pruter’s work traces the history of high school sports from the student-led athletic clubs of the 1800s through to the establishment of educator control of high school sports under a national federation by the 1930s. Pruter’s research serves not only to highlight this rich history but also to provide new perspectives on how high school sports became the arena by which Americans fought for some of the most contentious issues in society, such as race, immigration and Americanization, gender roles, religious conflict, the role of the military in democracy, and the commercial exploitation of our youth.

Ten Commandments displays, prayer at football games, Bible in the curriculum, vouchers for tuition at religious schools, Pledge of Allegiance, wall of separation between church and state, among other hot button issues at the intersection of religion and education, generate a great deal of heat, but often light is sorely lacking. The Praeger Handbook of Religion and Education in the United States provides a unique source of light to educators, religious leaders, journalists, policy-makers, parents, and the general public as well as a useful resource for scholars interested in the impact of religion on the origins, development, and current shape of the American educational landscape. Following an introductory essay that surveys the relationship of religion to elementary and secondary education from the 1600s to the present, this set offers 175 entries written by more than 40 scholars with national reputations that cover a wide range of topics related to religion and education, both in the past and the present. These jargon-free entries are cross-referenced and provide suggestions for further reading. Readers who want to know what is behind the heat in current debates will find entries on: United States Supreme Court decisions on religion and education, current controversies regarding religion in the public schools, religious, legal, and educational associations involved in these controversies, religion and the curriculum, religious schools, individuals and movements that have affected the role of religion in education, and religion and education developments in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This one of a kind set also includes a convenient table summarizing all of the religious liberty decisions of the Supreme Court from 1815 to the present.

In the past two decades in the United States, more than 1,600 Catholic elementary and secondary schools have closed, and more than 4,500 charter schools—public schools that are often privately operated and freed from certain regulations—have opened, many in urban areas. With a particular emphasis on Catholic school closures, Lost Classroom, Lost Community examines the implications of these dramatic shifts in the urban educational landscape. More than just educational institutions, Catholic schools promote the development of social capital—the social networks and mutual trust that form the foundation of safe and cohesive communities. Drawing on data from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods and crime reports collected at the police beat or census tract level in Chicago, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles, Margaret F. Brinig and Nicole Stelle Garnett demonstrate that the loss of Catholic schools triggers disorder, crime, and an overall decline in community cohesiveness, and suggest that new charter schools fail to fill the gaps left behind. This book shows that the closing of Catholic schools harms the very communities they were created to bring together and serve, and it will have vital implications for both education and policing policy debates.

The questions raised by government support for faith-based schools are now proving to be increasingly relevant and contentious. In one form or another they have a long history and are embedded in classical disagreements about the proper relationship between State and Church, or between secular power and religious freedom. They have been given a sharper edge by recent events, and by the emphasis laid by some governments on the importance of increasing public support for schools attached to different denominations and religions. Is it appropriate in a pluralist society to support some forms of religious expression and not others? What are the basic reasons for mingling (or indeed refusing to mingle) political and religious issues? What are the larger social effects of encouraging separate schooling for distinct sectors of society? These are among the questions raised and illuminated by this case study – historical and comparative in character – of the developing relationship between the State and the Catholic communities in three very different societies.