While it scarcely exists as a physical object these days, the report card remains as powerful a cultural force as ever. Journalists and critics dole out “report cards” for professional sports teams and restaurants; the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration releases an annual “Arctic Report Card” to assess the impact of climate change; and now, not only individual students but entire state school systems receive scores via the Nation’s Report Card, or the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), a program of the US Department of Education. While the NAEP was introduced in 1969, references to these results as “report cards” only took off following the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) in 2001. As Wade H. Morris explains near the end of his fascinating book Report Cards: A Cultural History, after the passage of NCLB, “everyone seemed to be surveilling, evaluating, and reporting on everyone else” (p. 143). The report card, a nearly two-hundred-year-old piece of educational technology, was only gaining power and cultural primacy at the turn of the twenty-first century. Meanwhile, old blackboards and erasers filled school dumpsters across the nation.

The words power and control appear frequently throughout Report Cards. Morris uses both terms when he aptly describes the report card as “a sometimes-cruel attempt at control that also carried the power to make or break a child’s future” (p. 93). Most academics could probably guess, then, that Morris engages with the work of Michel Foucault here. Morris, however, is an “ambivalent Foucaultian” (p. 215), as he puts it in the book’s “Essay on Sources.” And his wise storytelling decisions here make this less a book where power itself is the main actor, and more one about how a diverse cross section of individuals reacted when they encountered this tool of control.

Morris explores the history of the report card through six cases studies that stretch from the common school era to the alternative school movement of the 1960s and 1970s. While the author covers a great deal of ground here, the book avoids the pitfalls of being either superficial or exhaustive. It instead offers a lively overview of nearly two centuries of American educational history. Readers of this journal will encounter a bevy of familiar names and concepts: Horace Mann, the General Education Board, the Committee of Ten, and A Nation at Risk all make appearances. While Morris ably plays the hits, he also dives into the lives of his subjects with skill and care. The result is a surprisingly entertaining and accessible book that still has plenty of scholarly heft.

Morris’s first chapter centers on George Willson, a teacher at Canandaigua Academy in western New York who claimed to be the inventor of the report card. For Willson and other educators in the common school era, the report card served to connect school and home. In a time when many parents were skeptical of teachers and schooling more generally, report cards helped “co-opt parental support” (p. 9) and allowed teachers to establish a modicum of authority. Chapter 2 traces the life of William B. Matthews, who was born into slavery in 1864 before becoming a career educator in the American South. Matthews excelled in school, and the affirmation he received from his own report cards in turn led him to a life in education. Chapter 3 focuses on Indiana mother Martha Nicholson McKay, who, despite her relatively privileged social position, discovered that her children’s report cards created new burdens. Schools used these documents to push mothers like McKay to become more involved in their children’s education, adding to an already daunting slate of domestic tasks.

“The Eye of the Juvenile Court,” Morris’s gripping fourth chapter, sketches the life of a Colorado boy whose school records chart how he became institutionalized at—and eventually escaped from—a so-called industrial school for troubled boys in the early 1900s. Chapter 5 then moves to New York City, where budding journalist Daniel Schorr, the son of Russian-Jewish immigrant parents, used humor to cope with the stress and expectations that came with school and to bond with his classmates. Morris’s last chapter looks at Kirsten Albrecht, a Minnesotan who thrived at an ungraded, experimental public school in Mankato during the 1970s. Albrecht’s experience underlines the disconnect between the high-minded ideals of many educators and the expectations placed on schools by administrators and parents alike: her school eventually closes because of a lack of support during the early years of the accountability craze.

One of the challenges of writing a book that covers so much temporal and geographic ground lies in contextualization: it isn’t easy to capture the worlds of Reconstruction-era Georgia, 1970s Minnesota, and several places in between over the course of less than two hundred pages. But Morris does so with aplomb; while he necessarily takes readers down a number of side paths, they likely won’t get lost along the way. Some of the book’s most entertaining moments can be found in the concluding sections of each chapter, where Morris contrasts his subjects with examples drawn from pop culture and today’s headlines. A tactic that could be hokey in the wrong hands pays handsome dividends here, as Morris proves just as adept at analyzing rapper Killer Mike’s verse on “Walking in the Snow” as he is at explaining various Progressive Era standardization measures.

All told, Report Cards is an engaging and smart book that should appeal to scholars and students alike. Morris dwells on the book’s theoretical underpinnings a bit too much at times, which might limit the book’s appeal to general readers, but his candor and thoughtfulness in describing his process is welcome. And while Report Cards maps terrain that will be familiar to many experts in educational history, it contains plenty of original insights and draws novel connections between disparate eras and places. Indeed, the book certainly succeeds in its stated goal of offering a succinct cultural history of the report card. What’s more, you would be hard pressed to find a more accessible and entertaining overview of American educational history than the one presented here.