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It's the Brian Lara Show. I'm Tiffany Hansen in for Brian today, and we continue now with our WNYC Centennial series.

We are, of course, celebrating our 100 years, and so we are looking at 100 years of 100 things.

We are on thing number 86, 100 years of public education, meaning publicly funded education

and mostly the compulsory part.

So elementary school through high school.

We're going to look at how schools are funded, who controls that funding, why they are funded.

A bit of an echo here from our conversation earlier in the program, what those factors as well mean for civil society as we go through the decades.

Joining us again here on the Brian Larson Show is Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor of history of education at the University of Pennsylvania.

You might remember that he took us through the

hundred years of school culture wars earlier in our centennial series. So welcome back, Professor Zimmerman.

Good to be here again. Thanks for having me. Well, let's start at the beginning. Why not?

You know, American public education back in the colonial days started out very community-based,

often church-based. But if we zip forward to the 1920s, schools were starting to get organized

at the state level, which is essentially how it happens now. So just take us through that

evolution a little bit. Well, actually, the key juncture is a little bit before the period you talked about.

It's in the Antebellemae, the 1830s and 1840s.

When figures like Horace Mann created these state school systems,

at that time they were called common school systems,

and the effort was to try to stitch together all of these tiny little schools, most of them one room, into something like a system.

But to your point, it was a threadbare one. Horace Mann envisioned a system where everyone had the same curriculum,

and the school was open for the same amount of time, and teachers had the same level of education or certification.

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