This 1938 U.S. Government study focuses on education funding in America and its wide variances across the country.

At the time of the publication of this study, there were few federal aid programs beyond vocational education aid and ad hoc New Deal programs. This one of many ACE reports on education. General aid for education to lift per pupil spending to an adequate threshold became a major subject of congressional debate in the 1940s and 1950s.

A digitized copy of this study, which can be found at https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=pur1.32754004396689&view=1up&seq=1.

You can download a copy here.

This 84-page long publication is, believe it or not, a book review. Well, it is a review of 10 books, written by Diane Ravitch.

And it is wonderful and withering. Ravitch casts a white hot light on the work of various lefty scholars and shows the various ways they politicized it and simply got history wrong. She closes her essay with a clarion call and an agenda for the field of study:

“History-writing has political impications; it influence public opinion and policymaking…. The most useful and relevant approach to educational history is that which seeks to determine how ideas are translated into policy, how policy is translated into practice, how practice grows into policy, how schools respond or fail to respond…. An understanding of the democratic process, a respect for rational inquiry, and a capacity for surprise are necessary equipment for those who attempt to reconstruct a sense of the past and to understand the role of education in it.”

One year after this review was published, Ravitch similarly-named, much expanded, book-length study was published: The Revisionists Revised: A Critique of the Radical Attack on Schools (Basic Books, 1978).