ABSTRACT
James Bryant Conant issued his famous report The American High School Today in 1959, giving voice to a clear and influential reaffirmation of the comprehensive secondary school. Just two years later he published another study, perhaps somewhat less influential, in Slums and Suburbs (1961), and five years after that he completed his final report on secondary education, The Comprehensive High School (1967). Two of these books were about the nation as a whole, but especially about the small and mid-sized communities that most Americans considered a cultural norm; Slums and Suburbs focused on the country’s major metropolitan areas-big cities and the communities around them. A scientist who served as president of Harvard for twenty years, followed by tours as U.S. High Commissioner and ambassador to West Germany, Conant was among the period’s most visible intellectual figures, and he dedicated the closing years of his public life to educational reform. His vision in these works makes an interesting point of departure for consideration of the forces that have shaped the American high school in the latter half of the twentieth century.1 The question such a treatment raises is whether the comprehensive high school, and the democratic ideal that it represented at the time of Conant’s reports, is possible in a society as divided by race, social class, and culture as the United States is today. This is particularly true when one examines secondary education in metropolitan America, where about 80 percent of American youth live and learn at the start of the twenty-first century (Fox, 1985; Goldsmith and Blakely, 1992).
