Education

Education OverviewThe Public School MovementCollegiate EducationThe Rise of the UniversityEducation in Contemporary America
Overview From the founding of Harvard College in 1636 and Massachusetts's public‐school law of 1647 to America's vast and diverse modern‐day educational system, education has been a central thread in the national experience, a focus of reform effort, and a subject of urgent public debate. The founders and early leaders of the new nation viewed an educated electorate as crucial to their republican experiment. As nineteenth‐century municipalities expanded their public‐school systems, religious bodies founded colleges to educate and nurture their young. While some turn‐of‐the‐century reformers looked to the public schools to “Americanize” the immigrant masses, the philosopher John Dewey viewed the schools as incubators of a more just and humane social order. In the same era, research universities arose to promote scientific inquiry, scholarly endeavor, and professional training. In the 1944 Servicemen's Readjustment Act, Congress granted generous educational benefits to returning World War II veterans. When the Russians launched the space satellite Sputnik in 1957, Congress responded with increased funds for education, especially in math and science. When the civil rights movement arose in the 1950s, schools became a prime battleground. Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court's landmark 1954 civil rights decision, outlawed racial segregation in the public schools. Soon, women and other disadvantaged groups would also demand equal access to educational opportunities. As the twentieth century ended, politicians vied to propose strategies for improving American education. The underlying point is clear: There are few better ways to approach American history as a whole than to examine the nation's centuries‐long effort to educate its citizens.

Paul S. Boyer

The Public School Movement The people who devised the U.S. Constitution and wrote about the nature of republican government often emphasized the importance of education. However, proposals to create state systems of common schools, such as those put forward by Thomas Jefferson in Virginia and Benjamin Rush in Pennsylvania, did not succeed in the early national period. New state legislatures resisted both governmental innovation and increased taxes. Still, by comparison with other countries, local primary schools were widely available. They were funded locally by a patchwork of tuition payments, property taxes, in‐kind contributions, endowments, and church support. Thus, the rhetoric of republicanism did not translate into a movement to create free public schools.

Beginnings of the Public School Movement

. By the 1840s conditions were more auspicious for such a reform. Industrialization and urbanization led to visible social problems. The immigration of large numbers of Roman Catholics led native‐born Protestants to worry about how to assimilate newcomers while maintaining the hegemony and institutions they had created. By this time state governments had become more active in shaping institutions and the economy. The Whig party in particular advocated such state activism and thus championed legislation that required towns to provide free education through property taxes. In many states, Whigs also promoted legislation to consolidate small, rural districts into town‐level school systems, and they created state school boards and superintendents to oversee the creation of rudimentary state systems of public schools. Into these superintendencies came some of the famous school reformers, like Horace Mann of Massachusetts, Henry Barnard of Connecticut, and John Pierce of Michigan. They worked to consolidate district schools and promoted longer school terms, normal schools for teacher training, higher school expenditures per pupil, and innovations in curriculum and pedagogy.

By 1860 such systems were the general rule in the Northeast and the Middle West, while they failed, after considerable debate, in the South. During the postwar Reconstruction period, southern legislatures created fledgling public school systems, and by the late nineteenth century they were mostly tax‐supported. However, harshly unequal per‐pupil expenditures for segregated black schools forced African Americans to provide supplementary funds from their meager resources.

Gilded Age to the 1950s

. The public school movement in the nation as a whole went through a period of consolidation in the Gilded Age. The teaching force had become largely female, and normal schools proliferated; a male‐dominated profession of school administration was emerging; city school systems with age‐graded classes became the model; and the public high school surpassed the private academy as the predominant provider of secondary education.

Late nineteenth‐century immigration, urbanization, labor strife, and the depression of the 1890s helped launch another period of reform. Like the Antebellum Era, this was a time of accelerated population movement, transformative economic reorganization, and cultural anxiety. In education, this turbulence led to reform proposals that varied greatly in their assumptions and goals. Some, following John Dewey, believed that schools should recognize the individuality of children, appeal to their interests, make learning an active process, and produce citizens who were good critical thinkers. Others, like David Snedden, looked more to teaching of specific content and attitudes, tailoring programs to categories of children and training them for specific roles, depending upon predictions about their likely occupational destinations. These predictions were often made on the basis of family background and, increasingly, standardized tests scores. The Progressive‐Era values of efficiency and scientific measurement prevailed. In school policy the progressive administrators adopted a corporate model of school‐board governance and a hierarchical model for school systems, with a superintendent firmly in charge of all activity.

Some of the features of child‐centered progressive education made their way into the public schools. Surviving records suggest increasing concern for the interests of children, widespread use of the project method, and somewhat more active classrooms. As Robert and Helen Lynd said of the schools of Muncie, Indiana, in the 1930s, however, “in the struggle between quantitative administrative efficiency and qualitative educational goals in an era of strain like the present, the big guns” were all on the side of efficiency. (Middletown in Transition, p.241).

By 1940 most children aged five to sixteen were enrolled in school for at least a part of the year; 73 percent of high‐school aged youths were in school. In the hundred years since the beginning of the common school reform movement, the states had created public school systems quite similar from state to state. Local school districts were governed by the states on such matters as the length of the school year, teacher certification, and some basic curriculum requirements. Schools were otherwise governed locally. They were inclusive, with less than 10 percent of school children in private schools. Still, the public schools were often Protestant in outlook and in some of their religious practices, like Bible reading and daily prayers. Furthermore, the public schools were highly segregated by race, either formally or informally, not just in the South and not only for African Americans, but more generally across the nation, with regard to all people of color. Finally, financial resources for public schools varied greatly from state to state and district to district.

New Currents of Reform, 1960–2000

. A new phase of public school reform addressed some of these remaining issues. Tackling problems like equity of funding, racial integration, and other group rights was the hallmark of educational reform in the 1960s and 1970s, and it coincided with the expansion of the federal role in education. The Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education (1954), declaring legalized school segregation unconstitutional, laid the groundwork for racial integration, but it gained momentum only when subsequent cases, beginning in the mid‐1960s, defined the demands on local school systems and provided mechanisms for enforcement. Bolstered by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, the Lyndon B. Johnson administration launched a “War on Poverty,” which attempted to promote equality of opportunity through compensatory education, Head Start for preschool‐aged children, school integration, and job training programs. Court decisions and executive activism led to substantial integration of southern schools, and the legislation that aimed at equalizing opportunity proved popular despite ambiguous evidence of the programs' effectiveness.

The quest to secure group rights expanded in the 1970s. Federal legislation defined and made mandatory the recognition of educational rights of women, language minorities, and children with disabilities. The Supreme Court (in San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez, 1973) ruled that equalization of resources across districts was not required by the Constitution. However, many states had voluntarily implemented partial equalization formulas, and in the 1980s and 1990s several state supreme courts demanded such equalization, citing specific language regarding equal educational opportunity in their state constitutions.

While the ambitious federal agenda eventually encountered a backlash from weary bureaucrats and defenders of various traditions, it also installed a new recognition of diversity in the practices, procedures, and expectations of local school systems, much of it reinforced by new state laws and regulations. Integration efforts also encountered backlash from both whites and blacks, when the negative aspects of busing children were often not matched with improved school achievement by minorities. This disappointment, coupled with the heavy concentration of nonwhite citizens in many large cities, hindered the government's efforts to bring school integration to the North and West. In the face of these obstacles, aggressive, liberal school reform declined. The shift of mood was reflected in the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. Public school reformers changed their emphasis from equity and inclusion to concerns about the content of the curriculum and the quality of learning across all groups. Reforms were implemented in many states to require more and better coursework from high school students, recruit and train better teachers, and change the structure of school systems to enhance professional control by principals and teachers in local schools.

Some educators and parents concluded that it was too little, too late. Disillusionment with the public schools grew. Many people called for school reform outside the structure of the public school system, either through “voucher” payments to private schools or the creation of “charter” schools, variously regulated in different states but everywhere freed from some of the supervision and rules of public systems. The popularity of free‐market models, as well as the growing proportion of the population without school‐aged children, contributed to the sense of crisis. Supporters of public schools worried that the civic and integrative purposes of schools would founder if people abandoned a common, public system.

The “public school movement” of the previous century and a half had, in truth, been many movements, many efforts to reform public schools, which had become a focal point for debates about America's values, its children, and its future. The twenty‐first century would face the question of whether there would be a public school system, and, if so, how it would restore public confidence in its ability to provide high‐quality education and assist in the imperative task of unifying a diverse population, those twin mandates established in the 1840s.
See also Americanization Movement; Americans with Disabilities Act; Civil Rights Legislation; Civil Rights Movement; Depressions, Economic; Education: Collegiate Education; Education in Contemporary America; Education: The Rise of the University; Intelligence, Concepts of; Poverty; Protestantism; Segregation, Racial; Taxation.

Bibliography

Lawrence A. Cremin , American Education, 3 vols. 1970–1988.
David B. Tyack , The One Best System: A History of Urban Education in America, 1974.
Carl Kaestle , Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools and American Society, 1780–1860, 1983.
Diane Ravitch , The Troubled Crusade: American Education, 1945–1980, 1983.
James D. Anderson , The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860–1935, 1988.

Carl F. Kaestle

Collegiate Education Since the founding of Harvard College in 1636, American colleges have responded to society's perceived needs. From the late nineteenth century on, American institutions of higher learning have focused on three goals: the transmission of knowledge, especially of Western civilization; the creation of new knowledge in an increasing array of academic disciplines; and the integration of young people into the upper economic and social strata through training and socialization. Young people attended college not just to further their education, but to learn the elite's values and mores and to make the connections considered vital to success.

These broad academic and social aims have been met at a variety of diverse institutions, which mirrored American society itself: public and private institutions, small colleges and large universities, rural residential and urban commuter schools, secular and denominational colleges, as well as women's and historically black colleges. In their myriad admissions procedures, faculty recruitment, and curricular approaches, American colleges have expressed America's democratic ideals as well as its overt and subtle patterns of class and racial discrimination.

Colonial and Antebellum Era Beginnings

. The European university was a model for American higher education, but a distinctive American tradition emerged as early as the eighteenth century. By the time of the Revolutionary War, nine colleges had been established, primarily to provide denominational education for future ministers and upper‐class gentlemen. However, the College of Philadelphia and King's College in New York (later the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University, respectively), founded in the 1750s, embraced nonsectarian and utilitarian principles and soon introduced such “practical” subjects as English literature and legal and medical education.

In the Antebellum Era, even the most conservative colleges confronted the conflict between classical and contemporary American influences: What role did the past and its tradition of education for the clergy and for “gentlemen” have in a dynamic society bent on progress? What was education's function in a society geared to individual opportunity and mobility? Balancing meritocratic and democratic values, the traditional curriculum was soon augmented by scientific and other modern studies, though often after considerable internal debate. The Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the nation's first technical college, started in 1824. By contrast, the Yale College faculty defended the classical curriculum in an 1828 report. Still, with fewer than one hundred students graduating annually, Yale by 1847 had established a School of Applied Chemistry, soon renamed the Sheffield School after a benefactor, thereby opening the door to instruction in science, modern languages, history, and other popular subjects.

Beginning in the Colonial Era, both public and private colleges solicited government support. After the Revolution, the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 promoted broad educational opportunity through the allocation of federal land grants to schools and colleges. The Morrill Land Grant Act (1862) and the Hatch Act (1887) stimulated the creation of state land‐grant colleges and universities and other publicly funded agricultural, technical, and teachers' colleges. In the later nineteenth century, the state‐university movement was led by midwestern and western institutions such as the state universities of Michgan, Wisconsin, and California. At the same time, philanthropists such as Leland Stanford and Ezra Cornell founded private colleges and universities where, in Cornell's words, “any person [could] find instruction in any study.”

Throughout the 1800s, the United States became a “land of colleges” as religious‐sponsored institutions, from rural Protestant denominational colleges in the Middle West to urban Catholic colleges, were formed to cater to local, first‐generation students. In Indiana, for example, between 1835 and 1844, Presbyterians formed Wabash College, the Methodists started Indiana Asbury (now DePauw University), and the Baptists established Franklin College. Typical of the evolution of Jesuit higher education was the Loyola University of Chicago, which began as St. Ignatius College in 1870. Over time these schools deemphasized the parochial impulses of their founders to satisfy their students' social and professional aspirations. Nevertheless, higher education remained the prerogative of a small minority of the population. In 1915, fewer than one in twenty young people went to college.

1865–1920

. Women's colleges and the historically black colleges, which provided opportunity and training to women and minorities excluded from, or made to feel unwelcome at, private and public colleges and universities, grew rapidly in the Gilded Age. Vassar, Smith, and Wellesley colleges were the first of the so‐called Seven Sisters women's liberal arts colleges. Predominantly white benevolent societies and missionary bodies, black religious organizations, and wealthy individuals and corporate philanthropic foundations started and maintained private black liberal arts colleges, such as Fisk and Howard universities, to prepare an educated leadership class as well as to enable individual students to move into the mainstream, national culture.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially during the Progressive Era, entrepreneurial academic leaders, research‐focused faculty, and ambitious young people transformed the traditional college into the forward‐looking university, the stepping‐stone to respectability and individual success, by expanding the curriculum and stimulating increased enrollment. Subject areas formerly considered inappropriate to a liberal education, such as agriculture and social work, now became accepted courses of study as colleges and universities sought to meet the increasing demand for more practical education and training. The nation's first undergraduate business school, the Wharton School of Finance and Commerce, was founded at the University of Pennsylvania in 1881.

Since 1920

. By the 1920s, the day of the so‐called self‐made man had passed; the college‐educated fraternity man became the arbiter of taste and training in American life. The boom in college enrollment after World War I forced Americans to confront the contradiction between their belief in individual opportunity and their desire to preserve the existing structure of social privilege. If a college education earmarked a student for future occupational achievement and social status, was higher education in a democracy a privilege or a right? How many and who should attend? What criteria should apply? Between the world wars, elite liberal arts colleges drawing from a national pool of applicants emerged, but they were selective institutions often rooted in class and ethnic prejudice. Most well‐known schools limited the number of Jewish and Catholic students. More subtle class distinctions among students were often reflected in student life on campus, for example in fraternity and sorority organizations.

Admissions policies became a battleground between traditional institutional prerogatives and democratic social policy. Despite decades of rapid enrollment growth, the 1947 President's Commission on Higher Education concluded that American collegiate education still had not realized its democratic potential because of its high cost, restrictive curriculum, and racial and religious discrimination in admissions. Free and universal access to at least two years of postsecondary work, the commission insisted, should be a public policy goal.

During the twentieth century, the federal government encouraged the growth of colleges and universities through financial support for individual students as well as through institutional support for faculty and research. In World War I, Washington created the Student Army Training Corps and the Reserve Officer Training Corps, but the number of participating students paled in comparison to the millions of veterans who flocked to college after World War II thanks to the Servicemen's Readjustment Act, or GI Bill of Rights (1944). The National Defense Student Loan Program of 1958, a response to the Soviet Union's launch of the Sputnik satellite, encouraged increased enrollment, particularly in science and engineering programs. President Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society reforms in the mid‐1960s and subsequent domestic social policy initiatives included grant programs for disadvantaged students and general loan programs for a broader range of students. By the end of the twentieth century, the federal government was allocating well over ten billion dollars a year to college and university research and development activities, mostly from the Department of Health and Human Services and the National Science Foundation, as well as the Department of Defense.

As enrollments grew and a college degree became highly valued, institutions found their niche in an increasingly differentiated structure. Name changes often signaled an institution's expanded offerings and its quest for prestige: the teacher‐training “normal school” became, often around 1920, the “state teacher's college”; then the “state college”; and, finally, in the 1950s and 1960s, the “state university.” Over one thousand public two‐year junior and community colleges were established during the twentieth century to expand access to post‐secondary education. At the same time, a select number of liberal arts colleges and research universities emerged at the apex of the higher education pyramid. In 1995, over 12.2 million undergraduates were enrolled in nearly 3,700 institutions, about 11 million of them in public institutions.

At the end of the twentieth century, colleges and universities constituted a significant industry in the United States, with annual expenditures in excess of $175 billion. Moreover, numerous high technology and biotechnology companies were affiliated with schools or their faculty. Intercollegiate athletics, especially football and basketball, supervised by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), figured prominently in the nation's popular culture and media. From its beginnings in the 1630s, the American college had come a long way.
See also African Americans; Anti‐Semitism; Biological Sciences; Biotechnology Industry; Earth Sciences; Education: Education in Contemporary America; Education: The Rise of the University; Land Policy, Federal; Philanthropy and Philanthropic Foundations; Physical Sciences; Protestantism; Roman Catholicism; Social Class; Social Science; Sports: Amateur Sports and Recreation; Women's Rights Movements.

Bibliography

Frederick Rudolph , The American College and University, 1962.
Laurence R. Veysey , The Emergence of the American University, 1965.
Lawrence Cremin , American Education, 3 vols., 1970–1988.
Frank Bowles and and Frank A. DeCosta , Between Two Worlds: A Profile of Negro Higher Education, 1971.
Frederick Rudolph , Curriculum: A History of the American Undergraduate Course of Study since 1636, 1977.
Harold Wechsler , The Qualified Student, 1977.
Barbara M. Solomon , In the Company of Educated Women, 1985.
David O. Levine , The American College and the Culture of Aspiration, 1915–1940, 1986.
Helen L. Horowitz , Campus Life: Undergraduate Cultures from the End of the Eighteenth Century to the Present, 1987.

David O. Levine

The Rise of the University The original institution for advanced education in America was the liberal arts college. Soon after the Revolutionary War, however, the term “university” arose, with several meanings implied. The University of the State of New York (1784–) and the short‐lived University of Maryland (1784–1805) were overarching structures, designed to encompass individual colleges much like the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. The idea of a national university, first advocated by Benjamin Rush in 1787, envisioned an institution providing advanced studies for college graduates. The most common usage of the term, however, implied a college possessing one or more professional schools, much like the universities of continental Europe.

The Pre‐modern University

. By the 1820s, Harvard and Yale, each with a full complement of professional schools, exemplified what might be called the premodern university. American realities were a far cry from European models, however. Schools of medicine and law were essentially proprietary undertakings that accepted students whether or not they had attended college. In the colleges, all students took the same course, and no modern subjects were taught in depth. The only postbaccalaureate course, theology, was intended to train ministers rather than scholars.

In the 1850s, critics lamented the inability of American institutions to cultivate and teach advanced knowledge. Henry Tappan in University Education (1851), praising the scientific achievements of German universities, advocated an American university that would teach beyond the collegiate level. As president of the University of Michigan (1853–1863), Tappan established an earned master's degree and encouraged faculty scholarship. More characteristic of the era, however, were the “scientific schools” established at Harvard and Yale. These new units accommodated both scientific studies and advanced learning without disturbing the separate operations of the college. Yale awarded the first American Ph.D.s in 1861 for work done in its scientific school.

The American University Takes Shape

. Following the Civil War, scientific schools, new institutes of technology, and colleges spawned by the 1862 Morrill Land Grant Act offered practical science‐based instruction. However, the issue of advanced learning reemerged most strongly at Harvard and the new Johns Hopkins University (1876). Charles William Eliot assumed the presidency of Harvard in 1869 with a clear vision of reform. His elective system allowed students to choose their own studies and permitted the learned Harvard faculty to teach advanced subjects. Believing that professional studies should be pursued at the postgraduate level, Eliot restructured Harvard's professional schools accordingly. Daniel Coit Gilman, president of Johns Hopkins from 1876 to 1901, designed it largely as a graduate university committed first and foremost to the advancement of knowledge and the professional organization of scholarship. Clark University, which opened in 1889 in Worcester, Massachusetts, solely for graduate studies, carried this notion even further.

By 1890, a lively debate raged over the relation of the colleges to the emerging universities. Suggestions for shortening or subordinating the college course, however, were overcome by the college's resilience as a social and educational institution. Instead, the universities arose upon a collegiate base: a large faculty engaged in undergraduate teaching would also pursue scholarship and train future scholars. The new universities of Stanford (1891) and Chicago (1892), created through philanthropy, conformed in their own fashion to this pattern. This template also suited the stronger state universities, which included undergraduate professional schools as well as the arts and sciences core.

The new universities proved highly popular. Their mushroom growth outdistanced all other types of institutions for the next quarter‐century, transforming American higher education. In 1900, the leaders in graduate education organized the Association of American Universities to define good practice in graduate education and also serve as an unofficial accrediting agency for colleges. The professional associations and learned journals of the various academic disciplines established a new canon of academic knowledge that ineluctably reshaped undergraduate colleges. Simultaneously, the new philanthropic foundations created by Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller employed their wealth to bolster standards in higher education—standards largely derived from universities.

The college at the heart of the American university became a source of considerable strength. Educators debated the nature of liberal education in an era of growing academic specialization, but the universities benefited from the high social value placed upon the collegiate experience. The collegiate dimension also ensured that American universities would differ markedly from one another.

After World War I, these differences became more pronounced as public and private universities were shaped by different forces. The major state universities continued to grow by accommodating the burgeoning ranks of high‐school graduates. The wealthy private universities looked for support largely from their alumni, who favored greater investment in educational quality, both in the classroom and collegiate life. Although private universities restricted enrollments, their relative affluence allowed them to hire and retain distinguished faculty. The role of advancing knowledge was nevertheless furthered most notably in the interwar years by philanthropic foundations.

Before World War I, universities could finance separate expenditures for research only through special gifts or endowments. The latter, for example, funded university museums and observatories, producing the characteristic American pattern of separately organized university research institutes. But such funds were rare. After the war, however, the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations sought to advance the natural and social sciences, principally through academic research. Foundation support of academic research had a double‐barreled effect. While it proved decisive in raising American science to world‐class status in many fields, especially nuclear physics, it was also instrumental in inducing universities consciously to expand their internal research capacity as a way of attracting foundation grants. By the 1930s, however, it became apparent that private research support was inadequate for the growing scientific needs of universities.

World War II and Beyond

. The services of university scientists during World War II demonstrated the value of academic research as a public investment. However, the blueprint for broad government support of pure science envisioned by Vannevar Bush in Science—The Endless Frontier (1945) was not followed and research funding remained, with slight alternations, in military channels. University research underwent unprecedented expansion in the early postwar period, but largely in defense‐related fields. University leaders continue to argue for greater support for disinterested basic research, and after the Soviet Union launched theSputnik satellites in 1957, they got their wish.

Sputnik touched off a surge in civilian federal support for basic academic research. The National Science Foundation, created in 1950, now received significant appropriations to support research. The National Institutes of Health, aided by the spirit of the times and a powerful lobby, enormously increased its external grants. All told, federal support for academic research increased by 200 percent from 1959 to 1964, stimulating the most frenetic pace of academic development since the 1890s. In a veritable “academic revolution,” the values and specialized approach of the university graduate schools spread throughout American higher education. Numerous institutions now transformed themselves into “research universities” and their doctoral graduates filled the faculties of other institutions. Pundits such as the sociologist Daniel Bell (The Coming of Post‐Industrial Society, 1973) identified the university as a central institution of the postindustrial, knowledge‐based societies.

At this moment of apparent triumph, American universities were sorely tested. Beginning in 1965, disaffected students protested against the complicity of universities in the Vietnam War and Cold War militarism, and the alleged irrelevance of theoretical, disciplinary scholarship. The federal government, meanwhile, demanded more applied knowledge from its huge investment in university research. Universities themselves advocated a new national agenda of egalitarianism and social meliorism, but those concerns ill fit their natural propensities toward pursuing excellence in science and scholarship and training society's elite.

American universities finally overcame the malaise of the 1970s by embracing a new role of economic relevance in the 1980s. Swept along by the revolution in the biotechnology industry, universities forged partnerships with American industry. Although this new role enlarged and complicated the university's mission, it was largely accommodated, as in the past, by adding ancillary units to the academic core.

The twentieth‐century American university succeeded most emphatically in the mission that had been most problematic in the previous century: the advancement of knowledge. At century's end, universities conducted approximately half of the nation's basic research. To maintain this role, they had to adapt continually to rapidly changing frontiers of knowledge. The close link between research and graduate education has made American universities the world's chief magnet for advanced students and scholars—the position occupied by Germany a century before. Having become huge, complex organizations, serving American society in numerous and contested ways, American universities retained a resilience and strength stemming from the core mission they fashioned at the end of the nineteenth century: advancing knowledge through free, systematic, rational inquiry.
See also Agricultural Education and Extension; Education: Collegiate Education; Engineering; Gilded Age; Philanthropy and Philanthropic Foundations; Physical Sciences; Sixties, The; Social Sciences; Servicemen's Readjustment Act; Sports: Amateur Sports and Recreation.

Bibliography

Edwin E. Slosson , Great American Universities, 1910.
Richard Storr , The Beginnings of Graduate Education, 1953.
Laurence Veysey , The Emergence of the American University, 1965.
Alexandra Oleson and John Voss, eds., The Organization of Knowledge in Modern America, 1979.
Roger Geiger , To Advance Knowledge: The Growth of American Research Universities, 1900–1914, 1986.
Richard M. Freeland , Academia's Golden Age: Universities in Massachusetts, 1945–1970, 1992.
Roger Geiger , Research and Relevant Knowledge: American Research Universities since World War II, 1993.
Burton R. Clark , Places of Inquiry: Research and Advanced Education in the Modern Universities, 1995.

Roger L. Geiger

Education in Contemporary America Few subjects generated more partisan rhetoric and less consensus in the 1990s than the fate of the public schools. The nation's schools have always had strident critics and impassioned defenders, but the demand for educational reforms echoed throughout the land as the twentieth century ended. Presidential hopefuls routinely aspired to become the “education president,” even though public schools were largely funded and controlled by state and local officials. Governors' task forces, big‐city mayors, and local worthies all favored school reforms and improvements, from charter schools to high‐stakes testing, from voucher plans to more funding for Head Start. In his final State of the Union message in January 2000, President Bill Clinton, proclaiming education central to the good life, called for a “twenty‐first‐century revolution in education, guided by our faith that every child can learn. Because education is more than ever the key to our children's future, we must make sure all our children have that key. That means quality preschool and after school, the best‐trained teachers in every classroom, and college opportunities for all our children.” What was at stake, he concluded, was the American dream.

The centrality of education in everyday life in 1990s America was nothing short of astounding. The nation made impressive emotional and financial investments in its schools. By 1997, more than 46 million pupils were enrolled in the public schools. In 1995, roughly 65 percent of public‐school pupils were white, 35 percent minority (including 17 percent African American and 14 percent Hispanic American), reflecting America's ethnic and racial diversity. The teaching force (86 percent white) numbered well over 2 million, and the country spent many billions of dollars on salaries, school construction and repair, and innumerable school‐related services and programs, from school transportation to hot lunches to educating children with special needs. All this occurred in the Western world's most decentralized school system. Compared to European ministries of education, the U.S. Department of Education (created only in 1976) was relatively weak, poorly funded, and vastly less important in educational matters than state and local governments. Formal control over the nation's tens of thousands of schools resided in the hands of lay people elected or appointed to the school boards of more than fifteen thousand independent districts. The enormous reach and diversity of this vast educational enterprise, ranging from inner cities to suburbs and rural America, gave ample scope to critics and friends alike.

The schools most often attracted criticisms as numerous campaigns for educational reform gained popularity. As in the past, many stakeholders in the schools—parents, politicians, educators, teachers, and pundits—joined the debate. Characterizing the countless reformers of the 1990s is complicated by the willingness of so many people to voice their complaints and offer proposals for improvement. One large strand of reform reflected the broad influence of a seminal report, A Nation at Risk (1983), published by a national commission under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Education during the early years of Ronald Reagan's presidency. Despite the occasional insults they hurled at the department, Republicans effectively used this report as a catalyst for larger national debates on the public schools. Indeed, they set the terms of most subsequent educational debates.

Written at a time of national preoccupation with Japan's seemingly invincible economy and presumably superior educational system, A Nation at Risk blamed America's schools for the nation's economic woes and low industrial productivity. The sustained economic growth of the United States in the 1990s, in contrast, did not cause politicians to see public schools more favorably. Instead, Republicans and increasingly Democrats, too, chanted a familiar mantra: that the public schools were failing and test scores were unimpressive, reflecting permissive, liberal school policies and practices, leading to incivility and even violence in the classroom. Only more testing, accountability, and school choice could possibly save the beleaguered schools. Other interest groups agreed, while adding their own spin to school improvement. Evangelical Christians, among the strongest advocates of independent church schools and home schooling, lobbied conservative legislators to guarantee equal time for the teaching of “creation science” in biology classes and for voluntary prayer in the public schools. Back‐to‐basics zealots scrutinized textbooks for hints of anti‐Americanism, whole‐language teaching, and “secular humanism.” Admirers of free markets and liberty, energized by the collapse of communism abroad, pressed for public aid to private schools, whether through tuition tax credits or vouchers, whose constitutionality in pilot programs in Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Cleveland, Ohio; and other places remained unclear. Conservatives differed on the means but not the ends: to restore competitiveness, discipline, high achievement, and character training to the schools. That might mean ending social promotion, tightening graduation standards, and expunging the permissiveness widely perceived as the offspring of 1960s‐era social turmoil. Jeremiads on the state of youth and the schools proliferated.

As Great Society liberalism became less influential within the Democratic party and identity politics gained momentum, left‐of‐center activists lost political clout. Many eloquently defended the public schools, but Republican criticisms of education remained popular throughout the 1990s. To oppose higher standards, testing, discipline, and market solutions to school improvement seemed out of step with the times, while holding schools more accountable, weakening teachers' unions, and upgrading the curriculum and graduation requirements had considerable appeal. Like sporting events, the test scores of school districts were publicized by the local media, to applaud the high achievers and chastize the rest (usually the poorest, nonwhite districts). Schoolteachers had long been criticized for their failures, so much of this was familiar, but it was persistent. After all, the left had offered many of the same criticisms of the nation's schools in the 1960s, calling them racist, sexist, class biased, and unable to educate the poor and minorities well. By the 1980s and 1990s conservatives threw most of the stones and set the agenda for most policy debates.

More liberal or left‐of‐center educational activists remained on the defensive throughout the 1990s. Faculty who trained teachers on the nation's campuses had difficulty refuting attacks on teacher‐certification programs. With few exceptions, schools of education were widely regarded as diploma mills. Teachers' unions faced considerable hostility in this age of accountability, even though Albert Shanker of the American Federation of Teachers and other union leaders endorsed more teacher and student testing and tougher standards. Civil‐rights and feminist leaders in turn divided on the issue of single‐sex education, despite the long tradition of coeducation in the public schools, and liberals and activists similarly split on the question of racial integration, with a resurgence of support for racial separatism. African American parents in inner cities, whose children often faced the greatest educational hurdles, increasingly embraced the idea of “school choice,” even voucher plans, in defiance of traditional black leadership.

Culture wars, debates over standards, and occasionally struggles for economic justice preoccupied many activists. In a seemingly endless battle over religion in the classroom, groups such as Americans United for the Separation of Church and State and the American Civil Liberties Union spent much time and money in court challenges to the teaching of “creation science” and the reestablishment of school prayer. Battle lines formed over attempts to frame national history standards; while white liberals and Afrocentrists debated academic content, Congress loudly rejected a more multicultural approach to social studies and history teaching. California residents reflected the conservative mood by voting down state‐sponsored bilingual education programs, further alienating liberal elites from the masses of voters. As liberal groups filed lawsuits on behalf of poor districts, some states declared existing school‐funding formulas unconstitutional; legislatures proved less diligent in sharing the public purse with poorer districts.

Despite splits within both conservative and liberal ranks, Republicans largely shaped late twentieth‐century educational debates. Democratic aspirants for office realized that conservative times required more moderate approaches to educational and social issues. Reacting to the wholesale rejection of liberalism in presidential elections in the 1980s, a new generation of politicians like Arkansas governor Bill Clinton shifted the Democratic party rightward. A leader in the moderate Democratic Leadership Council, Clinton joined with Republicans late in the decade to frame a series of national goals for America's schools for the year 2000. Less concerned with how to educate poor and minority children well, or with difficult issues related to multiculturalism, economic inequality, and racial injustice than with standards, discipline, competition, testing, and accountability, the goals reflected the broader public mood. While Democrats often resisted endorsing voucher or choice plans that included private and church‐related schools, the two major parties had become nearly indistinguishable on most educational issues.

When President Clinton linked the fate of the public schools with the American dream in his 2000 State of the Union address, he tapped deep convictions about education's role in shaping the public good. To most students climbing the educational ladder, however, school seemed like a series of courses, tests, and quizzes on a wide variety of academic subjects. They often perceived the school as a social as much as an academic institution: a place offering sports teams, clubs, and peer groups. As a new century dawned, however, adults continued to argue mostly about how to toughen standards, enhance competition, and tighten discipline in institutions that seemed forever in need of reform.

The administration of President George W. Bush (2001 –  ) strongly backed “school choice” plans that funneled tax dollars to private, usually church-related schools. In 2002 a closely divided Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of Cleveland's tuition‐voucher arrangement. The administration's showcase education bill, the No Child Left Behind Act, became law in 2002. Drafted by conservatives alarmed by the public schools' alleged academic failings, this measure, among other provisions, required every public school to administer standardized tests to all children from grades three through eight in reading, math, and science. Critics, including teachers, school administrators, and many state officials, charged that the measure represented an unprecedented level of federal meddling in public education, historically a local matter, forced instructors to “teach to the test”, discriminated against schools with large immigrant enrollments, and provided insufficient funds to pay for the new federal mandates.
See also Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching; Cultural Pluralism; Evolution, Theory of; Federal Government, Executive Branch: Other Departments (Department of Education); Post–Cold War Era.

Bibliography

Diane Ravitch and Maris Vinovskis, eds., Learning from the Past: Historical Perspectives on Current Educational Reforms, 1994.
Wayne J. Urban and and Jennings L. Waggoner Jr. , American Education: A History, 1996.

William J. Reese

; Updated by

Paul S. Boyer