The Federal Role in Education and the Rise of Social Science Research

Abstract

Studies of the rise of social science research in education typically focus on the Progressive Era, from 1890 to 1930, the period in which the American Educational Research Association (AERA) was founded. As central as this story is to the intellectual history of education as a field, however, it obscures an earlier set of events that arguably is even more important to understanding why AERA and the larger progressive education research enterprise of which it was a part developed when and how they did. That episode was the major but ultimately failed effort of the 1870s and 1880s to establish a national education system in the United States. This chapter focuses on the use of social science research in this earlier episode of education reform. It reveals how the rise of education research during the Progressive Era, and ultimately the founding of AERA, responded to the failure of this earlier effort in multiple ways. More precisely, it shows how social science research in education developed historically in relation to the peculiarly decentralized and racialized structure of education authority and policy in the United States.