Unsettled schools, two centuries ago and now

I could get used to days like this again, where I spend most of the day doing nothing but reading what I choose, in this case two books. My undergraduate papers are due next week, and so next weekend I will be swamped with other stuff, but I had the chance to finish two books I'd been unable to get to for months: Nancy Beadie's Education and the Creation of Capital in the Early American Republic and Alexander Russo's Stray Dogs, Saints, and Saviors. The first is Beadie's magnum opus on the social networks involved in school creation and governance in early nineteenth-century upstate New York, focusing on the social and educational history of Lima, New York. The second is Russo's story of the Green Dot takeover of Locke High School in Los Angeles. 

Beadie somehow persuaded Cambridge University Press to print a monographic book that runs for more than 300 pages, something almost unheard of these days, and I am delighted Yale did the right thing, because I would not have wanted Beadie to have cut a single part of the book out. For those who read Claudia Goldin and Larry Katz's book on the human capital argument and wanted something more historically complex, Beadie wrote a book that is is simultaneously a local case study and also a broader exploration of the ties between merchant capitalism, schooling, the Second Great Awakening, and the state in the early 19th century. Put briefly, Beadie argues that local school politics and financing served as the social glue in the young nation at a time when broad swaths of the rural North were undergoing a deep transformation in social relations. While New York state had some unique characteristics (for example, a dual state-aid structure where academies received funding along with district/town schools), Beadie makes a reasonable case that the business of running local schools created the type of social network that served capitalism even better than the type of personal credit networks that were also developing (and being tested in financial crises such as the panic of 1837). She also argues that the development of a "Methodist economy" embodied in such institutions as the Genesee Wesleyan Academy (established in Lima in the 1830s) went hand-in-hand with the development of new social capital. This is a book that every historian of education in the U.S. needs to read. 

After that, I turned to Russo's book, which is a reasonably straight journalist's narrative of the Green Dot charter story at Locke High School. Russo takes the reader from the petition process in 2006-07 through the second year of the takeover in 2009-10 in 23 very short chapters. He explores the hard daily work of the Locke "turnaround" staff, focusing on the administrators and teachers in the legacy remnant of the pre-charter Locke. (Green Dot divided the Locke campus and students into five mini-schools, three of which began with just ninth graders in fall 2008, one that was the alternative program, and the last that was the legacy remnant, called "Big Locke" by Russo and school staff.) In the end, he concludes that the school made significant strides in creating a safer environment that was slowly (perhaps far too slowly) able to concentrate on instructional issues. One reader on Amazon suggested it had too much of an insider-game feel to it. I disagree — it's the type of book that you will find assigned in a number of general-education classes alongside Gregory Michie, Deborah Meier, and others: detail-oriented, focused on one-school, full of nuance and ripe for discussion. I would have written a different book, but I didn't write this. Russo did the legwork at Locke, and at least for someone well outside Los Angeles, it's a good and useful read. 

There isn't too much that connects the two books other than they were both on my to-read stack, except perhaps that they are both about transitions, one the micro-scale transition at an individual school (Russo) and the other the broad-scale transition of schooling more generally. I enjoyed and recommend both.