Who Controls American Education?

— James D. Koerner, Who Controls American Education? (1968)

His book Who Controls American Education? was published in 1968. The area even Koerner, with his gilt-edged résumé and contacts, hesitated to tread hard in was that region of philosophy, history, principles, and goals which might uncover the belief system that really drives mass schooling. While noting accurately the "missionary zeal" of those who sell ideas in the educational marketplace and deploring what he termed the "hideous coinages" of political palaver like "key influentials," "change agents," and "demand articulators," and while even noting that experts at the Educational Testing Service "tell us that schools should seek to build a new social order and that they, the experts, know what the new order should be"[p.175], Koerner carefully avoided that sensitive zone of ultimate motives—except to caution laymen to "regard with great skepticism the solutions to educational problems that may be offered to him with great certitude by experts"[p.174].