In classrooms and in living rooms, in research institutions and on Capitol Hill, teenage pregnancy is one of the most controversial public issues of our day. Yet after all the investigation and government effort, what is really known about the problem of adolescent pregnancy and how to deal with it? And what is the role of the social scientist and historian in a public issue of this kind? In this study, Maris Vinovskis--a prominent demographic historian and a participant in both Carter's and Reagan's Presidential initiatives on teenage pregnancy--sets these questions within a historical...

There has been considerable debate about the process of and the underlying motivation for the expansion of public education in nineteenth-century America. Interpretations which focused on the role of reformer like Horace Mann, or on the demands by workers for more public education, have been criticized by revisionists who see education being imposed upon an uninterested and unwilling populace by capitalists seeking to maintain a docile labor force during industrialization. Here, Maris. A. Vinovskis challenges that revisionist view, employing sophisticated social science methodology in a work...

In this book, an eminent educational historian examines some important aspects of American schooling over the past centuries, illuminating the relation between education and other broad changes in American society and providing a historical perspective for contemporary efforts at school reform. Maris Vinovskis critically reviews and integrates recent work in educational history and provides new research on neglected topics. He discusses such issues as: the gradual shift from the family to the public schools in the responsibility for educating the young; the rise and fall of infant schools...

Many Americans view today's problems in education as an unprecedented crisis brought on by the rise of contemporary social problems. In Learning from the Past a group of distinguished educational historians and scholars of public policy reminds us that many current difficulties-as well as recent reform efforts-have important historical antecedents. What can we learn, they ask, from nineteenth-century efforts to promote early childhood education, or debates in the 1920s about universal secondary education, or the curriculum reforms of the 1950s?

One of the most popular and enduring legacies of President Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society programs, Project Head Start continues to support young children of low-income families-close to one million annually-by providing a range of developmental and educational services. Yet as Head Start reaches its fortieth anniversary, debates over the function and scope of this federal program persist. Although the program's importance is unquestioned across party lines, the direction of its future whether toward a greater focus on school readiness and literacy or the continuation of a holistic...

This important contribution to scholarship in social science history examines the development of public education in nineteenth-century Massachusetts. Until the 1950s educational historians emphasized the relationship of schooling to the political system and the development of a common American culture. In recent years a social history perspective has emerged that stresses the socioeconomic influences that tie education to other institutions and processes in society rather than to political ideals. Carl Kaestle's and Maris Vinovskis's study is firmly grounded in this newer perspective....