By Harlow G. Unger
The Encyclopedia of American Education Third Edition is designed as an easy-to-use reference for the entire educational community: above all, students of education, but also teachers, librarians, parents, school administrators, school board members, legislators and all others directly or indirectly affiliated with or interested in education and the education process.
With more than 2,500 entries, the encyclopedia was honored by the American Library Association as one of the best new reference works when the first edition appeared in 1996. The second edition, published five years later, improved and expanded the contents, and now this third edition has raised the standards still higher. The most comprehensive reference work of its kind, the new edition of the encyclopedia covers every broad area of education: administration, federal and state legislation, court decisions, finance, pedagogy special education, vocational education, history, school reform, classroom technology, and so on. The list is all but endless.
The encyclopedia also presents in-depth examinations of the many complex problems facing American educators: illegal immigrants, the spread of Islam, bilingual education, ethnic and racial educational achievement gaps, campus crime, charter schools, intelligent design, rewards and risks of Internet in classrooms and libraries, failing schools, failing students, digital libraries, illiteracy, high school and college graduation rates, national testing, school vouchers, financial aid and hundreds of other topics. The appendixes add another dimension, providing an extensive cross-referenced bibliography for each subject area, a chronology of education in America since 1607, a listing and summary of significant federal legislation in education since 1787, and a listing with summaries of major U.S. Supreme Court decisions affecting education since the first decision in 1819 to the most recent.
Entries range in length from a couple of sentences to several pages. Length does not necessarily correlate with current importance; for instance, Missionary education movements is longer than Minority education, and Military education is longer than Migrant education. The humanities are covered more extensively than the sciences. Individual colleges and historical aspects of education outweigh research and reform (e.g., there is no index listing for statistics, and ethnography is missing entirely). Literacies are under-represented; computer literacy is included but media, visual, and information literacies are excluded. There is no mention of young adult literature, which continues to be a controversial and important topic. Except for those appended to new entries, lists of references contain few current titles.
Several appendixes follow the entries: a sketchy chronology of significant educational benchmarks (none for the 1980s), a list of significant U. S. Supreme Court decisions in education, a list of education majors and degrees, and a topical bibliography of generally older resources.
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