History of education in the United States

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The history of education in the United States, often called foundations of education, is the study of educational policy, formal institutions and informal learning from the 17th to the 21st century.

Contents 1 History 1.1 The "High School Movement" 1.2 Higher education 1.3 Segregation and inequality 2 Current policy 3 Bibliography 3.1 Surveys 3.2 Pre 1880 3.3 Since 1880 3.4 Ethnicity, race, gender, religion 3.5 Higher Education 3.6 Regional and Local Studies 3.7 Primary Sources 3.8 Recent 3.9 Journals 3.10 Notes and references

[edit] History

The first American schools opened during the colonial era. As the colonies began to develop, many in New England began to institute mandatory education schemes. In 1642 the Massachusetts Bay Colony made "proper" education compulsory.^[1] Similar statutes were adopted in other colonies in the 1640s and 1650s. Virtually all of the schools opened as a result were private. The nation's first institution of higher learning, Harvard University, was founded in 1636 and opened in 1638.

Religious denominations established most early universities in order to train ministers. In New England there was an emphasis on literacy so that people could read the Bible. Most of the universities which opened between 1640 and 1750 form the contemporary Ivy League, including Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Princeton, Brown, the University of Pennsylvania, and several others.^[2] After the American Revolution, the new national government passed the Land Ordinance of 1785, which set aside a portion of every township in the unincorporated territories of the United States for use in education. The provisions of the law remained unchanged until the Homestead Act of 1862. After the Revolution, an emphasis was put on education, especially in the northern states, which made the US have one of the highest literacy rates at the time.

The school system remained largely private and unorganized until the 1840s. In fact, the first national census conducted in 1840 indicated that near-universal (about 97%) literacy among the white population had been achieved.^[3] The same data tables demonstrate that of the 1.8 millions girls between five and fifteen (and 1.88 million boys of the same age) about 55% attended the primary schools and academies.^[4] The data tables do not note the actual attendance rates, but only reflect the static numbers at the time of the U.S. census.

Data from the indentured servant contracts of German immigrant children in Pennsylvania from 1771-1817 showed that the number of children receiving education increased from 33.3% in 1771-1773 to 69% in 1787-1804. Additionally, the same data showed that the ratio of school education versus home education rose from .25 in 1771-1773 to 1.68 in 1787-1804.^[5] The increase in the number of children being educated, and the fact that more students were being educated in school rather than at home, could help explain how near-universal literacy was achieved by 1840.

Education reformers such as Horace Mann of Massachusetts began calling for public education systems for all. Upon becoming the secretary of education in Massachusetts in 1837, Mann helped to create a statewide system of "common schools," which referred to the belief that everyone was entitled to the same content in education. These early efforts focused primarily on elementary education. The common-school movement began to catch on in the North. Connecticut adopted a similar system in 1849, and Massachusetts passed a compulsory attendance law in 1852.

It was not until after the Civil War and under Reconstruction governments, that the coalition of black and white Republicans in state legislatures established universal public education in the South. This was one of the major achievements of Reconstruction governments.^[6] By 1870, every state provided free elementary education. Although in some states, education was first established as integrated, after white Democrats regained political power in the 1870s, they imposed segregation on all schools, and later on all public facilities. The South was struggling after the war, but as they had before the war, the wealthiest classes resisted taxes that would provide sufficient funding for education.

More significantly, through laws and new constitutions, white legislatures systematically disfranchised most African Americans and tens of thousands of poor whites in each Southern state from 1890-1908. The disfranchisement lasted for decades; in most states, it lasted with little relief until the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s had gained passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. ^[7] As one result, white-dominated legislatures consistently underfunded schools for African Americans. Most rural schools ran shortened schedules because children were needed in farming. It was chiefly due to the African American community's own tremendous efforts with the help of some Northern financial support in establishing schools and colleges, that 30,000 African American teachers were trained and by 1900, a majority of blacks in the South were literate.^[8]

By 1900, 31 states required children to attend school from the ages of 8- to 14-years-old. As a result, by 1910 72 percent of American children attended school. Half the nation's children attended one-room schools. In 1918, every state required students to at least complete elementary school. Lessons consisted of students reading aloud from their texts such as the McGuffey Readers, and placed emphasis on rote memorization. Teachers often used physical punishment, such as hitting students on the knuckles with birch switches, for incorrect answers.

Because the public schools focused on assimilation, immigrants who were not Protestant organized to develop their own schools. This was also an effort to create a social environment more supportive than the often hostile natives who resented immigration by Catholics. In addition, Catholic communities raised money to build colleges and seminaries to train teachers and religious to head their churches.^[9] The most numerous early Catholics were Irish immigrants in the early to mid-19th century, followed by Germans, Italians and other Catholics from southern and eastern Europe. By the time the later groups immigrated, Irish immigrants and their descendants had often built an extensive network of churches and schools in many cities. The Irish dominated the American Catholic Church for generations. Though the private schools met some opposition, in 1925 the Supreme Court ruled in Pierce v. Society of Sisters that students could attend private schools to comply with compulsory education laws.

To put the historical progress of education in the United States into perspective, American towns began providing high schools in 1910. By 1940, 50% of young adults had earned a high school diploma.

[edit] The "High School Movement"

At the dawn of the twentieth century, for the first time in history, leaders believed that the post-literacy schooling of the masses at the secondary and higher levels, would greatly enhance economic production. This “high school movement” in America radically changed the education of its youth and set the United States apart from other nations for much of the twentieth century.

In 1900 the American high school underwent a series of fundamental changes. It became less classical and more practical, although still primarily academic. Its diploma was a terminal degree for youths whose first jobs would be in a host of white-collar positions and certain blue-collar ones as well. Economist Claudia Goldin believed the incredible growth of secondary schooling occurred in United States was accompanied by a set of “virtues”. These virtues included public funding, openness, gender neutrality, local (and also state) control, separation of church and state, and an academic curriculum. Relative to other nations in Europe, the United States took on this movement as a result of these virtues, whereas others lagged. Europe had more exclusivity to their education system and focused on apprentice-type schools. The openness and gender neutrality, according to Goldin, allowed for the United States to have higher rates of enrollment than in nations of Europe. ^[10]

America chose a type of post-elementary schooling that was consistent with the particular features of the New World — flexible, general and widely applicable skills that were not tied to particular occupations and geographic places had enormous option value. Skills had to survive transport across firms, industries, occupations, and geography in the dynamic America economy.

Support for the high school movement occurred at the grass-roots level of local cities and school systems. The federal government had virtually no involvement until much later in the twentieth century. State compulsory education and child labor laws played only a minor role in the expansion of secondary-school education, but states had encouraged broader education by supporting state colleges and normal schools before the turn of the century. The U.S. system of education was characterized for much of the twentieth century by a set of virtues that included publicly funded mass secondary education that was open and forgiving, academic yet practical, secular, gender neutral, and funded by small, fiscally independent districts. During the first half of the twentieth century, the American template succeeded far better than did the competing templates of Britain, France, and Germany. The U.S. system produced a considerably larger group of educated citizens and workers.

[edit] Higher education

At the beginning of the 20th century, fewer than 1,000 colleges with 160,000 students existed in the United States. Explosive growth in the number of colleges occurred at the end of the 1800s and early twentieth century. Philanthropists endowed many of these institutions. Leland Stanford, one of The Big Four, for example, established Stanford University in 1891.

Many American public universities were created because of the Morrill Land-Grant Colleges Acts of 1862 and 1890.^[11] During the rapid westward expansion of the United States during the 19th century, the federal government took control of huge amounts of so-called "empty" land (often after forcing the previous Native American residents into reservations). Under the Morrill Acts, the Federal government offered to give 30,000 acres (121 km²) of federal land to each state on the condition that they used the land (or proceeds from its sale) to establish colleges. ^[11] The resulting schools are often referred to as land-grant colleges.

Founded in 1863, Kansas State University is the pioneer land-grant institution. Other well-known land-grant universities include Texas A&M University, Pennsylvania State University, The Ohio State University and the University of California system. Some states, especially in the South, created more than one land-grant institution, with one established as a historically black college (HBCU). Three states, Alabama, Massachusetts and New York, designated private universities as one of their land-grant institutions. Respectively, these were Tuskegee University, an HBCU; Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Cornell University.

Following World War II, the GI Bill made college education possible for many veterans. It helped create a widespread belief in the necessity of college education, and decreased an association of higher education as a pursuit only for the wealthy.^[12] The rate of enrollment at institutions of higher learning has grown ever since, although it has varied by gender and ethnicity.

[edit] Segregation and inequality

For much of its history, education in the United States was segregated (or even only available) based upon race. Early integrated schools such as the Noyes Academy, founded in 1835, in Canaan, New Hampshire, were generally met with fierce local opposition. For the most part, African Americans received very little to no formal education before the Civil War, but some in the North managed to become literate. In the south where slavery was legal, many states had laws prohibiting teaching enslaved African Americans to read or write. A few taught themselves, others learned from white playmates or more generous masters, but most were not able to learn to read and write. Schools for free people of color were privately run and supported, as were most of the limited schools for white children. Poor white children did not attend school. The wealthier planters hired tutors for their children.

After the Civil War and emancipation, a coalition of freedmen and white Republicans in Reconstruction state legislatures passed most of the first laws establishing public education in Southern states. The Freedman's Bureau was created as an agency of the military governments that managed Reconstruction. It set up schools in many areas, ran banks where freedmen could save earnings, helped administer labor contracts between planters and freedmen, and tried to help to help educate and protect freedmen during the transition after the war. Congress passed civil rights bills, but these were difficult to enforce in an atmosphere where white paramilitary groups operated to suppress, terrorize and control freedmen.

After white Democrats regained power in state legislatures in the late 1870s, they began to pass legislation to control African Americans: the so-called Jim Crow laws imposed legal segregation in public facilities, worked to control African American freedom of movement and work, established convict-lease programs (which adversely affected African Americans), and created provisions to reduce voting by blacks and poor whites, such as imposition of poll taxes, more strict residency requirements, and literacy tests. As the numbers of blacks and poor whites on voter registration rolls decreased, state legislatures went on to pass new constitutions that completed effective disfranchisement of most African Americans and many poor whites.

Although the African American community quickly began litigation to challenge such provisions, in the 19th century Supreme Court challenges generally were not decided in their favor. The Supreme Court case of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) upheld the segregation of races in schools as long as each race enjoyed parity in quality of education (the "separate but equal" principle). However, few black students actually received equal education, and they suffered for decades from inadequate funding, outmoded or dilapidated facilities, and deficient textbooks (often ones previously used in white schools).

Starting in 1914 and going into the 1930s, Julius Rosenwald, a Sears Roebuck executive and philanthropist from Chicago, established the Rosenwald Fund to provide seed money for matching local contributions and stimulating the construction of new schools for African Americans, mostly in the rural South. He worked in association with Booker T. Washington and architects at Tuskegee University to create model plans for schools and teacher housing. With the requirement that money had to be raised by both blacks and whites, and schools approved by local school boards (controlled by whites), Rosenwald helped get more than 5,000 schools built across the South. African Americans went to extraordinary efforts to raise money for such schools, in effect taxing themselves twice, since part of the money came from public funds raised from their taxes. In some communities, people with property took out second mortgages to help fund the schools, and parents contributed direct labor to build them.^[13]

The Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s helped publicize the inequities of the long system of segregation. In 1954 the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education unanimously declared that separate facilities were inherently unequal and unconstitutional. The Civil Rights Acts of 1960 and 1964 further helped end legal segregation of public facilities.

Integration of schools has been a protracted process, however, with results affected by vast population movement in many areas, affected by suburban sprawl, the disappearance of industrial jobs, and movement of jobs out of former powerhouse industrial cities and into new areas of the South. Although required by court order, integrating the first black students in the South met with intense opposition. In 1957 the integration of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, had to be enforced by federal troops. President Dwight D. Eisenhower took control of the National Guard, after the governor tried to use them to prevent integration. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, integration continued with varying degrees of difficulty. Some states and cities tried to overcome de facto segregation that was the result of housing patterns, by using forced busing, a method that provoked resistance in many places, including northern cities.

Although full equality and parity in education would take many years (many school districts are technically still under the integration mandates of local courts), technical equality in education had been achieved by 1970.^[14]

The comparative quality of education among black and white students, however, is still often the subject of dispute. While middle class African American children have made good progress, poor minorities have struggled. With school systems based on property taxes, there are wide disparities in funding between wealthy suburbs or districts and often poor, inner-city areas or towns. "De facto segregation" has been difficult to overcome as residential neighborhoods have remained more segregated than workplaces or public facilities. Racial segregation has not been the only factor in inequities; residents in New Hampshire challenged property tax funding and contrasts between wealthy and poorer areas through lawsuits that sought to have more equal funding of school systems across the state.

Some scholars believe that transformation of the Pell Grant program to a loan program in the early 1980s has caused an increase in the gap between the growth rates of white, Asian American and African American college graduates since the 1970s.^[15] Others believe the issue is increasingly related more to class and family capacity than ethnicity. Some school systems have used economics to create a different way to identify populations in need of supplemental help.

In 1975 Congress passed Public Law 92-142, Education of the Handicapped Act. One of the most comprehensive laws in the history of education in the United States, this Act brought together several pieces of state and federal legislation, making free, appropriate education available to all eligible students with a disability. The law was amended in 1986 to extend its coverage to include younger children. In 1990 the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) extended its definitions and changed the label "handicap" to "disabilities". Further procedural changes were amended to IDEA in 1997.

[edit] Current policy

The neutrality and factual accuracy of this section are disputed. Please see the relevant discussion on the talk page. (June 2008)

Another important, recent reform in America's education system came under the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. The current educational structure in the United States has been compared with the development of fast food - standardized, prepackaged, and unhealthy. Political acts such as No Child Left Behind that are intended to improve education tend to reinforce the Philosophy of Education that knowledge is something that can be delivered in a uniform and efficient manner. This undermines the roles of both the student and the teachers.

[edit] Bibliography

for more detailed bibliography see History of Education in the United States: Bibliography

[edit] Surveys

• Button, H. Warren and Provenzo, Eugene F., Jr. History of Education and Culture in America. Prentice-Hall, 1983. 379 pp.
• Cremin, Lawrence A. American Education: The Colonial Experience, 1607–1783. (1970); American Education: The National Experience, 1783–1876. (1980); American Education: The Metropolitan Experience, 1876-1980 (1990); standard 3 vol detailed scholarly history
• Curti, M. E. The social ideas of American educators, with new chapter on the last twenty-five years. (1959).
• Herbst, Juergen. The once and future school: Three hundred and fifty years of American secondary education. (1996).
• Herbst, Juergen. School Choice and School Governance: A Historical Study of the United States and Germany 2006. ISBN 1-4039-7302-4.
• Lucas, C. J. American higher education: A history. (1994). pp.; reprinted essays from History of Education Quarterly
• McClellan, B. Edward and Reese, William J., ed. The Social History of American Education. U. of Illinois Pr., 1988. 370 pp.; reprinted essays from History of Education Quarterly
• David Nasaw; Schooled to Order: A Social History of Public Schooling in the United States (1981) online version
• Parkerson, Donald H. and Parkerson, Jo Ann. Transitions in American Education: A Social History of Teaching. Routledge, 2001. 242 pp.
• Parkerson, Donald H. and Parkerson, Jo Ann. The Emergence of the Common School in the U.S. Countryside. Edwin Mellen, 1998. 192 pp.
• John L. Rury; Education and Social Change: Themes in the History of American Schooling.'; Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. 2002. online version
• Theobald, Paul. Call School: Rural Education in the Midwest to 1918. Southern Illinois U. Pr., 1995. 246 pp.
• David B. Tyack. The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education (1974),
• Tyack, David B., & Hansot, E. Managers of virtue: Public school leadership in America, 1820–1980. (1982).

[edit] Pre 1880

• Axtell, J. The school upon a hill: Education and society in colonial New England. Yale University Press. (1974).
• Cremin, Lawrence A. American Education: The Colonial Experience, 1607–1783. (1970); American Education: The National Experience, 1783–1876. (1980);
• Parkerson, Donald H. and Parkerson, Jo Ann. The Emergence of the Common School in the U.S. Countryside. Edwin Mellen, 1998. 192 pp.
• Reese, William J. The Origins of the American High School. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995.

[edit] Since 1880

• Maurice R. Berube; American School Reform: Progressive, Equity, and Excellence Movements, 1883-1993. 1994. online version
• Brint, S., & Karabel, J. The Diverted Dream: Community colleges and the promise of educational opportunity in America, 1900–1985. Oxford University Press. (1989).
• Cremin, Lawrence A. The transformation of the school: Progressivism in American education, 1876–1957. (1961).
• Cremin, Lawrence A. American Education: The Metropolitan Experience, 1876-1980 (1990); vol 3 of standard detailed scholarly history
• Gatto, John Taylor. The Underground History of American Education: An Intimate Investigation into the Prison of Modern Schooling. Oxford Village Press, 2001, 412 pp. online version
• Krug, Edward A. The shaping of the American high school, 1880–1920. (1964); The American high school, 1920–1940. (1972). standard 2 vol scholarly history
• Peterson, Paul E. The politics of school reform, 1870–1940. (1985).
• Ravitch, Diane. Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms. Simon & Schuster, 2000. 555 pp.
• Theobald, Paul. Call School: Rural Education in the Midwest to 1918. Southern Illinois U. Pr., 1995. 246 pp.
• Tyack, David B. The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education (1974),
• Tyack, David and Cuban, Larry. Tinkering toward Utopia: A Century of Public School Reform. Harvard U. Pr., 1995. 184 pp.
• Tyack, David B., & Hansot, E. Managers of virtue: Public school leadership in America, 1820–1980. (1982).

[edit] Ethnicity, race, gender, religion

• Walter R. Allen, Joseph O. Jewell; "African American Education since 'An American Dilemma'" Daedalus, Vol. 124, 1995 online version
• James D. Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935 (University of North Carolina Press, 1988). online edition
• Eisenmann, Linda ed. Historical Dictionary of Women's Education in the United States. (1998)
• MacDonald, Victoria-Maria. Latino Education in the United States: A Narrated History from 1513-2000 (2004)
• Nash, Margaret A. Women's Education in the United States, 1780-1840 (2005)
• Sanders, James W The education of an urban minority: Catholics in Chicago, 1833–1965. (1977).
• Solomon, Barbara M. In the company of educated women: A history of women and higher education in America. (1985).
• Walch, Timothy. Parish School: American Catholic Parochial Education from Colonial Times to the Present. 1996.

[edit] Higher Education

• Brint, S., & Karabel, J. The Diverted Dream: Community colleges and the promise of educational opportunity in America, 1900–1985. Oxford University Press. (1989).
• Geiger, Roger L., ed. The American College in the Nineteenth Century. Vanderbilt University Press. (2000).
• Geiger, Roger L. To Advance Knowledge: The Growth of American Research Universities, 1900-1940. Oxford University Press. (1986).
• Geiger, Roger L. Research and Relevant Knowledge: American Research Universities Since World War II. Oxford University Press. (2001).
• Horowitz, Helen L. Campus life: Undergraduate cultures from the end of the eighteenth century to the present. (1987).
• Levine, D. O. The American college and the culture of aspiration, 1915–1940. (1986).
• Lucas, C. J. American higher education: A history. (1994).
• Veysey Lawrence R. The emergence of the American university. (1965).

[edit] Regional and Local Studies

• Edgar W. Knight; Education in the South (1924) online edition
• Lazerson, Marvin; Origins of the Urban School: Public Education in Massachusetts, 1870-1915 Harvard University Press, 1971 online version
• Leloudis, J. L. Schooling the New South: Pedagogy, self, and society in North Carolina, 1880–1920. (1996). online version
• Troen, Selwyn K.; The Public and the Schools: Shaping the St. Louis System, 1838-1920 (1975) online version

[edit] Primary Sources

• Richard Hofstadter and C. Dewitt Hardy, eds; The Development and Scope of Higher Education in the United States (1952) online edition
• Knight, Edgar W. and Clifton L. Hall, eds.; Readings in American Educational History (1951) online edition

[edit] Recent

• Gatto, John Taylor. The Underground History of American Education. (2003) online edition
• John E. Chubb and Terry M. Moe. Politics, Markets and America's Schools (1990)
• Kosar, Kevin R. Failing Grades: The Federal Politics of Education Standards. Rienner, 2005. 259 pp.
• E. Wayne Ross et al eds. Defending Public Schools. (Praeger, 2004), 4 vol: Volume: 1: Education Under the Security State (2004) online version; Volume: 2: Teaching for a Democratic Society (2004) online version; Volume: 3: Curriculum Continuity and Change in the 21st Century (2004) online version; Volume: 4: The Nature and Limits of Standards-Based Reform and Assessment (2004) online version
• Tyack, David. Seeking Common Ground: Public Schools in a Diverse Society. Harvard U. Pr., 2003. 237 pp.

[edit] Journals

• American Educational History Journal

[edit] Notes and references

1. ^ Massachusetts Education Laws of 1642 and 1647. History of American Education], accessed February 15, 2006.
2. ^ Agriculture and Education in Colonial America. North Carolina State University. URL accessed on February 28, 2006.
3. ^ 1840 Census Data. Progress of the United States in Population and Wealth in Fifty Years, accessed May 10, 2008.
4. ^ 1840 Census Data. Progress of the United States in Population and Wealth in Fifty years, accessed May 10, 2008.
5. ^ Grubb, Farley. "Educational Choice in the Era Before Free Public Schooling: Evidence from German Immigrant Children in Pennsylvania, 1771-1817" The Journal of Economic History, Vol. 52, No. 2. (Jun., 1992), pp. 363-375.
6. ^ W.E.B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880, New York: Oxford University Press, 1935; reprint, The Free Press, 1998
7. ^ Richard H. Pildes, "Democracy, Anti-Democracy, and the Canon", Constitutional Commentary, Vol.17, 2000, pp.12-13, accessed 10 Mar 2008
8. ^ James D.Anderson, Black Education in the South, 1860-1935, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1988, pp. 244-245
9. ^ Dennis Clark, The Irish in Philadelphia: Ten Generations of Urban Experience, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 4th printing, 1984, pp.96-101
10. ^ Goldin, Claudia (June 2001). ""The Human-Capital Century and American Leadership: Virtues of the Past"". The Journal of Economic History 61: 263–290. doi:10.1017/S0022050701028017. 
11. ^ ^{a b} Primary Documents in American History. Library of Congress. URL accessed February 19, 2005.
12. ^ 1944 GI Bill of Rights. History of Education: Selected Moments of the 20th Century. URL accessed on February 18, 2005.
13. ^ James D. Anderson, Black Education in the South, 1880-1935, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1988, pp.158-161
14. ^ Madison Desegregation Hearing To Be Held Tuesday, TheJacksonChannel, accessed February 14, 2006.
15. ^ Adams, J.Q.; Pearlie Strother-Adams (2001). Dealing with Diversity. Chicago, IL: Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company. 0-7872-8145-X.