The compromise I have worked out draws from historian David Tyack’s conclusion that contemporary decisionmakers already have a picture in their minds of what the past was like. Accurate or not, they will formulate policy based on those blurred images of the past. Like Tyack, I believe that more accurate renderings of the past than currently exist can inform the present not by prescribing particular policies but in helping educational decision makers, again in Tyack’s words: “not only to use a sense of the past (which they do willy-nilly) but also to make sense of it.” (“Historical Perspectives on the School as a Social Service Institution,” 1979, p. 56)