Reprint of the original, first published in 1872. The publishing house Anatiposi publishes historical books as reprints. Due to their age, these books may have missing pages or inferior quality. Our aim is to preserve these books and make them available to the public so that they do not get lost.

In Dividing the Public, Matthew Gardner Kelly takes aim at the racial and economic disparities that characterize public education funding in the United States. With California as his focus, Kelly illustrates that the use of local taxes to fund public education was never an inadvertent or de facto product of past practices, but an intentional decision adopted in place of well-known alternatives during the Progressive Era, against past precedent and principle in several states. From efforts to convert expropriated Indigenous and Mexican land into common school funding in the 1850s, to reforms that directed state aid to expanding white suburbs during the years surrounding World War II, Dividing the Public traces, in intricate detail, how a host of policies connected to school funding have divided California by race and class over time. In bringing into view the neglected and poorly understood history of policymaking connected to school finance, Kelly offers a new story about the role public education played in shaping the racially segregated, economically divided, and politically fragmented world of the post-1945 metropolis.

The book narrates the story of how the school, founded by women pioneers of public education in a Rocky Mountain mining settlement, became the centre and sustaining force of the town's community life from its beginning in the 1870s to the present day.

America’s schools are constantly in the news today for safety concerns, contested curricula, teacher quality, test scores, and a variety of other topics. Although most people spend at least 12 years in school systems, they know little of the history or evolution of American schooling. The collection of papers assembled in this book are divided into three categories which greatly impacted American schooling: people, policy, and practices. This work seeks to shed light on what has occurred in curriculum history in the past so as to help readers develop a deeper understanding of how our system of schooling arrived at its current state. The first section of the book examines the stories of people who had an influence on schooling and education. The second section focuses on the curricula and programs that were utilized in schools and districts throughout the country. The final chapter of the book looks at decisions that had long-ranging impact on educational policies. The chapters of this book offer a glimpse into the history of American schooling and those people, policies, and practices that influenced its development. It is the editors’ hope that the work will spark interest in scholars and students of educational history to examine other past, as well as present, stories of educators to expand our understanding of the saga that is the American schooling experience.