| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Jurgen Herbst. School Choice and School Governance: A Historical Study of the United States and Germany. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2006. Pp. xiii, 207. $65.00.
There was a time when comparative education was a vibrant scholarly field. Its many practitioners compared and analyzed the structures of educational systems in different nation states for the insights that might be revealed. Jurgen Herbst's study might be classified as a book in this field. But instead of focusing on how the systems of education in the United States and Germany have been and are now organized Herbst concentrates on the history of school choice (Schulwahl). The structural characteristics of the German and American systems of education necessarily come into play in this discussion but only as a means to a very specific end.	1
Herbst argues that German and American parents had to accept a smaller role in their children's education after their respective countries created state systems of schooling. The development of these systems in the nineteenth century and the subsequent professionalization of teaching gradually diminished parental authority in the making of such important decisions as where their children would enroll in school and what they would learn. But the similarities end there. For a long time the practice of local control helped American parents mute the effects of centralized decision making and government domination in public education. The doctrine of church-state separation, however, limited their access to public money for private education. Until very recently, public support for non-public schools had to function within strict limits, making vouchers less effective as a form of choice in education.	. . .

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