American public education, building by building and law by law

Designs For Change documents how American public schooling was designed — the buildings it was carried out in, the statutes that decided who was in the room, the objects that were on the desk, the people whose careers bent the system, and the organising ideas that gave it its shape.

The site runs from Horace Mann’s appointment to the Massachusetts Board of Education in 1837 to the publication of A Nation at Risk in 1983, with the earlier land ordinances and the later statutes included where the record requires them. Seven sections divide the material: Buildings, Laws, Objects, People, Ideas, a single chronological Timeline, and a longer study of Crow Island School in Winnetka, Illinois.

Every piece is written from the documentary record — enrolled statutes, court opinions, landmark nominations, annual reports, and the enrolment and spending series published by the National Center for Education Statistics. Sections are reachable from the menu on every page; the complete archive lists all thirty pieces in one place.

How to read it

Each piece opens with a photograph and a standfirst, and interrupts itself with the material the writing draws on: a chronology, the design decisions at issue, the people and firms involved, the numbers as they were reported. Those panels are the record; the prose around them is the argument the record supports.