Tyack, David. The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974.

== Summary ==
This
book examines the “organizational revolution that took place in American school
during the last century,” in which schools were transformed from a “village
school” to an “urban system” as reformers sought to create a “one best system”
to prepare students for the demands of urbanization and industrialization.  It examines the politics of education and the
transformation of the U.S. into an urban-industrial nation (“modernity”) and
how these forces influenced the institutional structure and ideology of
education. Schools reflected the changes in society as well as shaped them.
Community control gave way to corporate-bureaucratic models under the guise of
depoliticizing schools and created new curriculums that reflected the
differentiation of economic roles in the larger social order. Seeking a “one
best system,” these changes, ironically, marginalized and left out minority
students (segregation) or limited their opportunities (tracking). He concludes
that the search for a “one best system” has “ill-served the pluralistic
character of American society”; that bureaucratization has resulted in the
displacement of goals and perpetuation of outworn practices; that schools have
rarely taught the poor effectively and in fact have perpetuated social
injustices; and the talk of “keeping schools out of politics” have often served
to obscure actual power alignments and patterns of privilege.