Student Aid Reform

Carl Kaestle is University Professor and Professor of Education, History, and Public Policy emeritus at Brown University. He previously taught at the University of Wisconsin and the University of Chicago. He has given courses on the history of American education, current policy issues in education, and the history of print culture in America. Among Kaestle's books are Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools in American Society, 1780–1860 (Hill & Wang, 1983) and Literacy in the United States: Readers and Reading Since 1880 (Yale University Press, 1990).

From 2001 to 2005, Kaestle directed the Advanced Studies Fellowship Program at Brown, in which ten postdoctoral fellows met for several days twice annually, and related to each other in myriad other ways to develop their skills in historical, political and policy analysis around questions of federalism, federal-state relationships, and the federal role in education. For the past two years they have honed some of their best work into a book entitled To Educate a Nation: Federal and National Strategies of School Reform, published in fall 2007 by University Press of Kansas. Another milestone was the recent publication of Clio at the Table: Using History to Inform and Improve Education Policy, ed. Kenneth Wong and Robert Rothman (Lang, 2009), including essays given at a conference exploring the relationship between history and policy on topics that Kaestle has pondered in his work over the years. A long-term project also came to fruition the same month: Print in Motion: The Expansion of Publishing and Reading in the United States, 1880—1940, ed. Carl Kaestle and Janice Radway (University of North Carolina Press, 2009).

Kaestle has been Principal of the American School of Warsaw, Director of the Wisconsin Center for Education Research, the President of the National Academy of Education, Vice-Chair of the Board on Testing and Assessment of the National Research Council, and a principal consultant for the PBS documentary, "School." He is currently working on a history of the federal role in elementary and secondary education from 1940 to 1980. In addition to participating on the College Board's Rethinking Student Aid study group, he has recently pursued his interests in history and education policy on the Southern Education Foundation's study group on equal educational opportunity, the New York State Archives project on state influences on federal education policy, the Spencer Foundation committee on philosophy and education policy, and the American Educational Research Associations task force on the reauthorization of the Center for Education Sciences. From January to June 2008, Kaestle was a Resident Scholar at the Spencer Foundation in Chicago.