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As I've mentioned I did a significant sampling of the LA schools (11 elementary, 3 jhs, 2 hs). But the one school I liked best, by demographic accident was very much like the study you cited for Raleigh. It was highly integrated by race, ethnicity, with a moderately high percentage of poor kids. Thinking back on it, that school might have also have been some kind of target for trying out `progressive' education ideas of the period. The teachers I had were the best I was going to have for a long time.
Two years after I got out high school, the state elected Max Rafferity as the state's school superintendent. He proceeded to do his best to fuck up public education from 1963-1971, claiming to have destroyed progressive education in California. That was an overstatement but he sure laid the foundations.
Switching subjects, I am reading through the Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers letters from the early sixties. They are trading views over current events in the first year of the Kennedy administration.
They are also debating over what to do with the German and American university systems. I think what they are seeing lost was a system that assumed a strong secondary background in preliminary preparation so that university students didn't really have anything like a two year lower division requirement series. Instead they started off right away in their subject or field. Part of that was by design under the von Humboldt model.
``The university teacher is thus no longer a teacher and the student is no longer a pupil. Instead the student conducts research on his own behalf and the professor supervises his research and supports him in it.''
Here's another wiki on the history of European universities:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_European_research_universities
This was probably only possible with an elite gymnasium system. It divided students between those who went on in academic life and those who were passed on to trade occupations. A national test is given, I gather sometime between 10-14 or whatever is near the end of primary education. The students who pass go on to the gymnasiums.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gymnasium_(school)
As I saw from my journeyman Walt who graduated from carpenter trade school in Germany, this system has a tremendous impact on the society it produces. It stratifies the society in much more clear cut divisions. On the other hand, it also produces a much better educated and literate working class (or it did at one time). Of course we need an well regulated economy that corresponds to the production of a highly trained trade and working class. Or I guess what's now called socialism.
In any event, I think what Arendt and Jaspers were reflecting on was the turn toward a more systematic means of mass higher education and its over emphasis on administrative management. In their student generation, they entered the university and basically arranged their own education under some faculty member. They could also transfer to another university in the state system. I did pretty much the same, because art had such a strange place in academic life. It meant that I could take pretty much anything, except the prerequisite laden math and hard science series.
By contrast here's the wiki on the California system: http://www.calstate.edu/pa/info/milestones.shtml
Scan down to the 1961 entry on the state education master plan.
One of the strange consequences of this 1961 master plan was to make it difficult to transfer from community college to state college to university systems which is what I did. The only planned transfer was from community college two year academic program into the undergraduate university system. The key sticking points were English and foreign language requirements. As a consequence I had to take three semesters of the same English requirement and added French and Italian to my fill in the foreign language unit requirements.
But all that is pure nostalgia compared to now. I just read that the state college system is cutting enrollments on top of cutting pay and course days. Here:
http://www.contracostatimes.com/california/ci_13758032
``CSU officials estimate the system has cut 4,000 students for this fall semester. Campuses will see a larger drop in the spring in order to curtail enrollment, which includes the elimination of spring admissions.
The reduction comes when demand to attend CSU's 23 campuses continues to rise...
...CSU has received more than 266,000 applications, a 53 percent increase over the same time last year.
There has been a 127 percent increase in applications from community college transfers, partially due to the closing of spring admissions.
Freshmen applications are up by about 32 percent from last November, which is the system's enrollment period.''