Repudiation, Reinvention, and Educational Reform: The Comprehensive High School in Historical Perspective

The December 1997 issue of Educational Administration Quarterly was devoted to the theme, "What will replace the comprehensive high school?" The articles were uninformed by a historical perspective on the American comprehensive high school. The authors of these articles ignored historic proposals for the comprehensive model and overlooked tensions between the ideal and reality of the comprehensive high school. Instead, the authors contrived a negative image of the comprehensive high school that served as a straw man against which restructuring measures were defined. In fact, each restructuring measure proposed by the EAQ contributors has precedents in the historic literature advocating the comprehensive high school. An alternative and ironic answer to the issueʹs rhetorical question, then, is "the comprehensive high school."