To Enforce Education constitutes a portion of a larger history, that of federal involvement in public educational policy and practice, and the cycles of action and reaction which abetted and retarded nineteenth-century school development, the complementary roles of cultural centrism and urban growth in promoting school bureaucratization, and the impact of Civil War and Reconstruction on education. The author has assumed this context in order to focus on the beginnings of the first effort to render American public education more effective and efficient through a federal agency.