Nineteenth-century American common schooling differed from today's K–12 school system. One-room, one-teacher schools rather than age-graded schools operated in most places. Many public schools were not entirely free but instead charged tuition fees, known as rate bills. School calendars had yet to be standardized to begin in September. In Making the Grade, William A. Fischel explores how the early American public schools evolved into their modern form by looking at the history through the lens of economics.

Not surprisingly given his prior contributions to the literature on the economics of education, Fischel focuses on the role of school districts and local governance to explain the evolution of the American public school system. This approach is valid, as American public schools have been established and managed at the local level since their foundation. Although varying greatly in the size, local school districts were the basic units for both finance and governance. And at every defining moment, enfranchised residents had to endorse the important changes in the local public school system.

At least two key factors may have affected local voters' decisions to change the American public school system. One was the wage premium for schooling, and the second was the gain in property values associated with proximity to a better school. The former influences the voting behavior of parents, while the latter impacts on the decisions made by the owners of housing properties. In this book, Fischel concentrates on the latter as a coordinating channel between local taxpayers and the shape of public schools.

The basic story proposed by Fischel may be neatly summarized. The book argues that, at every stage in the history of American public schools, voters chose the most rational options for their local school. When teachers were scarce, transportation for pupils was under-provided, and people's mobility was high, the most efficient schooling type for remote rural towns was a one-room, one-teacher school where children in various ages and grades were educated together. As demand for multi-grade schools and also high schools rose over the twentieth century, rural voters supported the consolidation of their one-room schools. Fearing a drop in property values, localities voted to standardize the school calendar to more easily accommodate mobile pupils across different regions. Indeed, the evolution of American rural public schools was not a top-down movement led by educational leaders or statesmen but a bottom-up affair, backed by local voters who were concerned for their property values and had the authority to endorse any changes in their school system.

This bottom-up interpretation sounds plausible, given that there was wide variation in the timing of school district consolidation in the United States. It is also true that the consolidation movement led by state officials and education professionals did not always lead to success in every place. Nevertheless, a simple dichotomy of top-down versus bottom-up movements does not look sufficient to frame the history of American public schools for the recent two hundred years. As Fischel also noted throughout this book, educational leaders were relatively more influential in cities, and undeniably the modern standards of the school system appeared and developed first in the urban areas.

Another aspect that is only briefly mentioned but that was very important in the early history of public school finance is the local school budget constraint and its strong association with property values. Nineteenth-century public school reforms such as the abolition of rate bills and the consolidation of rural one-room schools into multigrade schools demanded a greater amount of tax revenue, which could have been more affordable with lowering tax price where the average property value was higher and property holdings were unequally distributed. Though Fischel's chapter 5 finds a role for property values when explaining the urban leadership in high schooling, the idea would have been also very useful for expanding the discussion about the nineteenth-century schooling in the earlier chapters.

While the author applies his political economy logic over the entire period, the book becomes clearer and better supported by evidence when dealing with more recent changes. In the last two chapters, Fischel takes the spirit of bottom-up movement in explaining the geographical variations in school district sizes and educational reforms today. His analysis of the school district size using Google Earth is innovative, and his use of the social capital framework to explain the rise of charter schools in big cities is persuasive. A definite plus here is his abundant knowledge on the school district size patterns and recent reforms related to vouchers, charter schools, and state school finance equalization.

To summarize, the book is rich in insights on the evolution of the American public schooling system since the nineteenth century. Two out of the six chapters are from the author's previous journal articles, but they are well adapted to fit into the overall theme of this intriguing book. A final merit of the book is that, by presenting various hypotheses on the nineteenth-century American public schooling system, the author provides several potential research agendas for economic historians and scholars in the history of education.