Katz, Michael. Reconstructing American Education. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989.

== Summary ==
This
book is a collection of previous published essays that aim to reconstruct
American education in three senses: as history, reform, and historiography. The three central themese are:
interpreting the present, understanding of history as a choice among
alternative possibilities, and the realization of the contingent nature of
ideas and institutions. In these
essays, Katz argues that contemporary concepts such as public education, modern
organizational forms, especially bureaucracy, and institutional structures such
as the multiversity originated as choices among alterative solutions to
problems of public policy, such as paternalist voluntarisma and democratic localism. Bureaucracy and its subsequent structures, for example,
are not neutral shells, but “are structural details and operational rules that
reflect priorities, limit possibilities, and shape outcomes.”  Katz sees American public education is a product of the forces of capitalism as well as
the ideals of democracy; so, too, is bureaucracy, which sits at the juncture
between these competing forces. These concepts were
historical and contingent on process, not
inevitable.
Example:The creation of public school systems originated with: the emergence of democratic politics (male suffrage, party system, local political machines); industrialization, urbanization, and the formation of a working class; the state’s assumption of direct responsibility for some aspects of social welfare (progressivism); the invention of institutions as means for solving social problems and the redefinition of family (separation of home and work). *Key: capitalism
Debate: Boston School Systems, 1850-1854
See also: Lawrence Cremin, David Tyack, David Tyack-Larry Cuban