ABSTRACT
With a few exceptional periods, the first eight decades of the twentieth century have been marked by policies reflecting the liberal perspective, particularly in the realm of public education. Matching the development of rationalized and depoliticized public management that saw the rise of town managers, public education developed a professionalized school bureaucracy and universities correspondingly developed departments of educational administration (Katz 1992). Later, at mid-century, school desegregation dominated the social issues of the 1950s and 1960s, as ‘separate but equal’ was overturned by Brown v. Topeka Board of Education. In the late 1960s, in line with the philosophy of the federal government’s war on poverty, compensatory funding to offset the disadvantages of poverty or special conditions of children became an accepted mechanism to broaden access to equality of educational opportunity.
