ABSTRACT
The "One Best System" David Tyack has characterized the development of urban schooling in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as the creation of a "one best system" that would serve in every situation. Many historians refer to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as the period of modernization in our nation's development. In most systems, the superintendent was intimately involved in both curriculum and test development. The bureaucratic school system that was emerging in the nation's cities in the late nineteenth century needed a single person at the top of its structure. American Education Specialization in the Educational System Despite the development of a budding educational bureaucracy in the late nineteenth-century cities, the common curriculum adopted earlier in the century did not disappear. The appearance of specialized curricula aimed at different groups of students did not occur until after 1890.
