The Yankee Leviathan Collects Statistics: Federal Education Policy During Reconstruction

Column Editors’ Note: Collecting data from students and schools is one of the prime ways in which people across the globe have come to understand the impact of education. As Andrew Donnelly shows, there is nothing obvious about how to collect or interpret these numbers. By looking at the early statistics collection at the federal level in late nineteenth-century America, he argues that educational data have always been political and politicized. As a “fact-getting device,” American educational statistics served from the start as a basis for larger debates about racial and regional equality, as well as a mechanism for highlighting the success of partisan policies.