Great question! A few recommendations for American education:

• I'm a big fan of The School in the United States: A Documentary History. It gives you a really good sense of the push for public education in early America.

• Rethinking the History of American Education is more about historiography but it gives you a good sense of how thinking has changed with regards to the historical record.

• Pretty much anything by Carl Kaestle will give you a good sense of what's what.

• There's some really exciting new work that's emerging regarding the history of Black education. Crystal Lynn Webster is a historian to keep an eye and her book, Beyond the Boundaries of Childhood: African American Children in the Antebellum North is a wonderful read.

My other standing recommendations are:

The Teacher Wars: A History of America’s Most Embattled Profession (2014) by Dana Goldstein. It’s an easy read – full of compelling narratives and familiar touchstones from education so as she’s laying on the complexity, you don’t feel overwhelmed by the history.

Blackboard Unions: The AFT and the NEA, 1900-1980 (1990) by Marjorie Murphy. An older book, it has new meaning in light of current events. It gets at the tension between the male-dominated model of labor unions with the goals of a female-dominated profession and how unions have been fight for students and better learning conditions from the beginning.

First Class: The Legacy of Dunbar, America’s First Black Public High School (2013) by Allison Stewart. I had no idea about the history of Dunbar until I came across this book. Stewart introduces the reader to Anna Julia Cooper, who, in a just world, would be as famous as Horace Mann.

Testing Wars in the Public Schools (2013) by Williams Reese. This was the first ed history book I read that intersected with my day job and it blew my mind. Reese goes in-depth on the use of large-scale standardized tests in Boston in the 1840s and there are entire citations from primary texts that sound like they could have been written today.

If those don't hit the spot, say the word and I'm happy to suggest more! (Also, as an aside, don't waste your time with Gatto. His "Underground History" is very bad and no good.)