The progressive era in
education was part of a larger Progressive Movement, extending from the 1890s to the 1930s.
(Progressives had read the
Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx (1848) and were busy having government take
over US education to indoctrinate the students.)
The era was notable for a
dramatic expansion in the number of schools and students served, especially in
the fast-growing metropolitan cities. After 1910, smaller cities also began
building high schools. By 1940, 50% of young adults had earned a high school
diploma.
Radical historians in the
1960s, steeped in the anti-bureaucratic ethos of the New Left, deplored the
emergence of bureaucratic school systems. They argue its purpose was to
suppress the upward aspirations of the working class. But other historians
have emphasized the necessity of building non-politicized standardized systems.
The reforms in St. Louis, according to historian Selwyn Troen, were, "born
of necessity as educators first confronted the problems of managing a rapidly
expanding and increasingly complex institutions." Troen found that the
bureaucratic solution removed schools from the bitterness and spite of ward
politics.
Troen argues: In the space
of only a generation, public education had left behind a highly regimented and
politicized system dedicated to training children in the basic skills of
literacy and the special discipline required of urban citizens, and had
replaced it with a largely apolitical, more highly organized and efficient
structure specifically designed to teach students the many specialized skills
demanded in a modern, industrial society. In terms of programs this entailed
the introduction of vocational instruction, a doubling of the period of
schooling, and a broader concern for the welfare of urban youth.
The social elite in many
cities in the 1890s led the reform movement. Their goal was to permanently end
political party control of the local schools for the benefit of patronage jobs
and construction contracts, which had arisen out of ward politics that absorbed
and taught the millions of new immigrants. New York City elite led progressive
reforms.
Reformers installed a
bureaucratic system run by experts, and demanded expertise from prospective
teachers. The reforms opened the way for hiring more Irish Catholic and Jewish
teachers, who proved adept at handling the civil service tests and gaining the
necessary academic credentials.
Before the reforms,
schools had often been used as a means to provide patronage jobs for party foot
soldiers. The new emphasis concentrated on broadening opportunities for the
students. New programs were established for the physically handicapped; evening
recreation centers were set up; vacation schools were opened; medical
inspections became routine; programs began to teach English as a second
language; and school libraries were opened.
The leading educational
theorist of the era was John Dewey (1859–1952), a
philosophy professor at the University of Chicago (1894–1904) and at Teachers College (1904 to 1930),
of Columbia University in New York City. Dewey was a leading proponent of
"Progressive Education" and wrote many books and articles to promote the central
role of democracy in education. He believed that schools were not only a
place for students to gain content knowledge, but also as a place for them to
learn how to live. The purpose of education was thus to realize the student's
full potential and the ability to use those skills for the greater good.
Dewey noted that, "to prepare him for the future life means
to give him command of himself; it means so to train him that he will have the
full and ready use of all his capacities." Dewey insisted that education
and schooling are instrumental in creating social change and reform. He noted
that "education is a regulation of the process of coming to share in the
social consciousness; and that the adjustment of individual activity on the
basis of this social consciousness is the only sure method of social
reconstruction.". Although Dewey's ideas were very widely discussed,
they were implemented chiefly in small experimental schools attached to
colleges of education. In the public schools, Dewey and the other progressive
theorists encountered a highly bureaucratic system of school administration
that was typically not receptive to new methods.
Booker T. Washington was the dominant black political and educational leader in
the United States from the 1890s until his death in 1915. Washington not only
led his own college, Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, but his advice, political support, and
financial connections proved important to many other black colleges and high
schools, which were primarily located in the South. This was the center of the
black population until after the Great Migration of the first half of the 20th
century. Washington was a respected advisor to major philanthropies, such as
the Rockefeller, Rosenwald and Jeanes foundations, which provided funding for
leading black schools and colleges. The Rosenwald Foundation provided matching
funds for the construction of schools for rural black students in the South.
Washington explained, "We need not only the industrial school, but the
college and professional school as well, for a people so largely segregated, as
we are.... Our teachers, ministers, lawyers and doctors will prosper just in
proportion as they have about them an intelligent and skillful producing
class." Washington was a strong advocate of progressive reforms as
advocated by Dewey, emphasizing scientific, industrial and agricultural
education that produced a base for lifelong learning, and enabled careers for
many black teachers, professionals, and upwardly mobile workers. He tried to
adapt to the system and did not support political protests against the
segregated Jim Crow system.
At the same time,
Washington used his network to provide important funding to support numerous
legal challenges by the NAACP against the systemsof disenfranchisement which southern
legislatures had passed at the turn of the century, effectively excluding
blacks from politics for decades into the 1960s.
In most American cities,
Progressives in the Efficiency Movement looked for ways to eliminate waste and corruption. They
emphasized using experts in schools. For example, in the 1897 reform of
the Atlanta schools, the school board was reduced in size, eliminating the power of
ward bosses. The members of the school board were elected at-large, reducing the influence
of various interest groups. The power of the superintendent was increased.
Centralized purchasing allowed for economies of scale, although it also added
opportunities for censorship and suppression of dissent. Standards of hiring
and tenure in teachers were made uniform. Architects designed school buildings
in which the classrooms, offices, workshops and other facilities related
together. Curricular innovations were introduced. The reforms were designed to
produce a school system for white students according to the best practices of
the day. Middle-class professionals instituted these reforms; they were equally
antagonistic to the traditional business elites and to working-class elements.
The "Gary plan"
was implemented in the new industrial "steel" city of Gary, Indiana, by William Wirt, the superintendent who served from 1907–30. Although the U.S. Steel Corporation dominated the Gary economy and paid abundant taxes, it did
not shape Wirt's educational reforms. The Gary Plan emphasized highly efficient
use of buildings and other facilities. This model was adopted by more than 200
cities around the country, including New York City. Wirt divided students into
two platoons—one platoon used the academic classrooms, while the second platoon
was divided among the shops, nature studies, auditorium, gymnasium, and outdoor
facilities. Then the platoons rotated position.
Wirt set up an elaborate
night school program, especially to Americanize new immigrants. The introduction of vocational educational
programs, such as wood shop, machine shop, typing, and secretarial skills
proved especially popular with parents who wanted their children to become
foremen and office workers. By the Great Depression, most cities found the
Gary plan too expensive, and abandoned it.
Public schools across the
country were badly hurt by the Great Depression, as tax revenues fell in local
and state governments shifted funding to relief projects. Budgets were slashed,
and teachers went unpaid. During the New Deal, 1933–39, President Franklin Roosevelt and his advisers were hostile to the
elitism shown by the educational establishment. They refused all pleas for
direct federal help to public or private schools or universities. They rejected
proposals for federal funding for research at universities. But they did help
poor students, and the major New Deal relief programs built many schools
buildings As requested by local governments.
The New Deal approach to
education was a radical departure from educational best practices. ¨ It was
specifically designed for the poor and staffed largely by women on relief. It
was not based on professionalism, nor was it designed by experts. Instead it
was premised on the anti-elitist notion that a good teacher does not need paper
credentials, that learning does not need a formal classroom and that the
highest priority should go to the bottom tier of society. Leaders in the public
schools were shocked: They were shut out as consultants and as recipients of
New Deal funding. They desperately needed cash to cover the local and state
revenues that it disappeared during the depression, they were well organized,
and made repeated concerted efforts in 1934, 1937, and 1939, all to no avail.
The conservative
Republican establishment headed collaborated with for so long was out of power
and Roosevelt himself was the leader in anti-elitism. The federal government
had a highly professional Office of Education; Roosevelt cut its budget and
staff, and refused to consult with its leader John Ward Studebaker.
The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) programs were deliberately
designed not teach skills that would put them in competition with unemployed
union members. The CCC did have its own classes. They were voluntary, took
place after work, and focused on teaching basic literacy to young men who had
quit school before high school.
The relief programs did
offer indirect help. The CWA and FERA focused on hiring unemployed people on
relief, and putting them to work on public buildings, including public schools.
It built or upgraded 40,000 schools, plus thousands of playgrounds and athletic
fields. It gave jobs to 50,000 teachers to keep rural schools open and to teach
adult education classes in the cities. It gave a temporary jobs to unemployed
teachers in cities like Boston. Although the New Deal refused to give
money to impoverished school districts, it did give money to impoverished high
school and college students. The CWA used "work study" programs to
fund students, both male and female.
The National Youth Administration (NYA), a semi-autonomous branch of the
WPA under Aubrey Williams developed apprenticeship programs and residential camps
specializing in teaching vocational skills. It was one of the first agencies to
set up a “Division of Negro Affairs" and make an explicit effort to enroll
black students. Williams believed that the traditional high school curricula
had failed to meet the needs of the poorest youth. In opposition, the
well-established National Education Association (NEA) saw NYA as a dangerous challenge
to local control of education NYA expanded Work-study money to reach up to
500,000 students per month in high schools, colleges, and graduate schools. The
average pay was $15 a month. However, in line with the anti-elitist
policy, the NYA set up its own high schools, entirely separate from the public
school system or academic schools of education. Despite appeals from Ickes
and Eleanor Roosevelt, Howard University–the federally operated
school for blacks—saw its budget cut below Hoover administration levels.
In 1880, American high
schools were primarily considered to be preparatory academies for students who
were going to attend college. But by 1910 they had been transformed into core
elements of the common school system and had broader goals of preparing many
students for work after high school. The explosive growth brought the number of
students from 200,000 in 1890 to 1,000,000 in 1910, to almost 2,000,000 by
1920; 7% of youths aged 14 to 17 were enrolled in 1890, rising to 32% in 1920.
The graduates found jobs especially in the rapidly growing white-collar sector.
Cities large and small across the country raced to build new high schools. Few
were built in rural areas, so ambitious parents moved close to town to enable
their teenagers to attend high school. After 1910, vocational education was
added, as a mechanism to train the technicians and skilled workers needed by
the booming industrial sector.
In the 1880s the high
schools started developing as community centers. They added sports and by the
1920s were building gymnasiums that attracted large local crowds to basketball
and other games, especially in small town schools that served nearby rural
areas.
In the 1865–1914 era, the
number and character of schools changed to meet the demands of new and larger
cities and of new immigrants. They had to adjust to the new spirit of reform
permeating the country. High schools increased in number, adjusted their
curriculum to prepare students for the growing state and private universities;
education at all levels began to offer more utilitarian studies in place of an
emphasis on the classics. John Dewey and other
Progressives advocated changes from their base in teachers' colleges.
Before 1920 most secondary
education, whether private or public, emphasized college entry for a select few
headed for college. Proficiency in Greek and Latin was emphasized.
Abraham Flexner, under commission from
the philanthropic General Education Board (GEB), wrote A Modern School (1916), calling
for a de-emphasis on the classics. The classics teachers fought back in a
losing effort.
Prior to World War I,
German was preferred as a subject for a second spoken language. Prussian and
German educational systems had served as a model for many communities in the
United States and its intellectual standing was highly respected. Due to
Germany being an enemy of the US during the war, an anti-German attitude arose
in the United States. French, the international language of diplomacy, was
promoted as the preferred second language instead. French survived as the
second language of choice until the 1960s, when Spanish became
popular. This reflected a strong increase in the Spanish-speaking
population in the United States, which has continued since the late 20th century.
By 1900 educators argued
that the post-literacy schooling of the
masses at the secondary and higher levels, would improve citizenship, develop
higher-order traits, and produce the managerial and professional leadership
needed for rapid economic modernization. The commitment to expanded education
past age 14 set the U.S. apart from Europe for much of the 20th century.
From 1910 to 1940, high schools
grew in number and size, reaching out to a broader clientele. In 1910, for
example, 9% of Americans had a high school diploma; in 1935, the rate was
40%. By 1940, the number had increased to 50%. This phenomenon was
uniquely American; no other nation attempted such widespread coverage. The
fastest growth came in states with greater wealth, more homogeneity of wealth,
and less manufacturing activity than others. The high schools provided
necessary skill sets for youth planning to teach school, and essential skills
for those planning careers in white collar work and some high-paying blue
collar jobs. Claudia
Goldin argues
this rapid growth was facilitated by public funding, openness, gender
neutrality, local (and also state) control, separation of church and state, and an academic curriculum. The wealthiest
European nations, such as Germany and Britain, had far more exclusivity in
their education system; few youth attended past age 14. Apart from technical
training schools, European secondary schooling was dominated by children of the
wealthy and the social elites.
American post-elementary
schooling was designed to be consistent with national needs. It stressed
general and widely applicable skills not tied to particular occupations or
geographic areas, in order that students would have flexible employment
options. As the economy was dynamic, the emphasis was on portable skills that
could be used in a variety of occupations, industries, and regions.
Public schools were funded
and supervised by independent districts that depended on taxpayer support. In
dramatic contrast to the centralized systems in Europe, where national agencies
made the major decisions, the American districts designed their own rules and
curricula.
Early public school
superintendents emphasized discipline and rote learning, and school principals
made sure the mandate was imposed on teachers. Disruptive students were
expelled.
Support for the high
school movement occurred at the grass-roots level of local cities and school
systems. After 1916, the federal government began to provide for vocational
education funding as part of support for raising readiness to work in
industrial and artisan jobs. In these years, states and religious bodies
generally funded teacher training colleges, often called "normal schools". Gradually they
developed full four-year curriculums and developed as state colleges after
1945.
Teachers organized
themselves during the 1920s and 1930s. In 1917, the National Education Association (NEA) was reorganized to better
mobilize and represent teachers and educational staff. The rate of increase in
membership was constant under the chairmanship of James
Crabtree—from 8,466 members in 1917 to 220,149 in 1931.
The rival American Federation of Teachers (AFT) was based in
large cities and formed alliances with the local labor unions. The NEA
identified as an upper-middle-class professional organization, while the AFT
identified with the working class and the union movement.
Main article: History of higher education in the United States
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 19th and early 20th centuries, supported in part by Congress' land grant
programs. Philanthropists endowed many of these institutions. For example,
wealthy philanthropists established Johns Hopkins University,
Stanford University, Carnegie Mellon University, Vanderbilt University and Duke University; John D. Rockefeller funded the University of Chicago without imposing his name on it.
Each state used federal
funding from the Morrill Land-Grant Colleges Acts of 1862 and 1890 to
set up "land grant colleges" that specialized in agriculture and engineering. The 1890
act required states that had segregation also to provide all-black land grant
colleges, which were dedicated primarily to teacher training. These colleges
contributed to rural development, including the establishment of a traveling
school program by Tuskegee Institute in 1906. Rural conferences sponsored by Tuskegee also
attempted to improve the life of rural blacks. In the late 20th century, many
of the schools established in 1890 have helped train students from
less-developed countries to return home with the skills and knowledge to
improve agricultural production.
Iowa State University was the first existing school whose state legislature
officially accepted the provisions of the Morrill Act on September 11,
1862. Other universities soon followed, such as Purdue University, Michigan State University, Kansas State University, Cornell University (in New York), Texas A&M University, Pennsylvania State University, The Ohio State University, and the University of California. Few alumni became farmers, but they did
play an increasingly important role in the larger food industry, especially
after the federal extension system was set up in 1916 that put trained
agronomists in every agricultural county.
Engineering graduates
played a major role in rapid technological development. The land-grant
college system produced the agricultural scientists and industrial engineers
who constituted the critical human resources of the managerial revolution in
government and business, 1862–1917, laying the foundation of the world's
pre-eminent educational infrastructure that supported the world's foremost
technology-based economy.
Representative was Pennsylvania State University. The Farmers' High School of Pennsylvania
(later the Agricultural College of Pennsylvania and then Pennsylvania State
University), chartered in 1855, was intended to uphold declining agrarian
values and show farmers ways to prosper through more productive farming.
Students were to build character and meet a part of their expenses by
performing agricultural labor. By 1875 the compulsory labor requirement was
dropped, but male students were required to have an hour a day of military
training in order to meet the requirements of the Morrill Land Grant College
Act. In the early years, the agricultural curriculum was not well developed,
and politicians in the state capital of Harrisburg often considered the
land-grant college a costly and useless experiment. The college was a center of
middle-class values that served to help young people on their journey to
white-collar occupations.
Rejecting liberal calls
for large-scale aid to education, Congress in 1944 during World War II passed
the conservative program of aid limited to veterans who had served in wartime.
Daniel Brumberg and Farideh Farhi state, "The expansive and generous
postwar education benefits of the GI Bill were due not to Roosevelt's
progressive vision but to the conservative American
Legion." The GI Bill made college
education possible for millions by paying tuition and living expenses. The government
provided between $800 and $1,400 each year to these veterans as a subsidy to
attend college, which covered 50–80% of total costs. This included foregone
earnings in addition to tuition, which allowed them to have enough funds for
life outside of school. The GI Bill helped create a widespread belief in the
necessity of college education. It opened up higher education to ambitious
young men who would otherwise have been forced to immediately enter the job
market after being discharged from the military. When comparing college
attendance rates between veterans and non-veterans during this period, veterans
were found to be 10% more likely to go to college than non-veterans.
In the early decades after
the bill was passed, most campuses became largely male thanks to the GI Bill,
since only 2% of wartime veterans were women. But by 2000, female veterans had
grown in numbers and began passing men in rates of college and graduate school
attendance.
When liberals regained
control of Congress in 1964, they passed numerous Great Society programs supported
by President Lyndon B. Johnson to expand federal
support for education. The Higher Education Act of 1965 set up federal scholarships and
low-interest loans for college students, and subsidized better academic
libraries, ten to twenty new graduate centers, several new technical
institutes, classrooms for several hundred thousand students, and twenty-five
to thirty new community colleges a year. A separate education bill enacted that
same year provided similar assistance to dental and medical schools. On an even
larger scale, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 began
pumping federal money into local school districts.
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. Some free blacks 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 and sent them to private
academies and colleges at the appropriate age.
During Reconstruction a coalition of freedmen and white Republicans in Southern state legislatures passed laws
establishing public education. The Freedmen's Bureau was created as an agency of the military governments that
managed Reconstruction. It set up schools in many areas and tried to help
educate and protect freedmen during the transition after the war. With the
notable exception of the desegregated public schools in New Orleans, the schools were
segregated by race. By 1900 more than 30,000 black teachers had been trained
and put to work in the South, and the literacy rate had climbed to more than
50%, a major achievement in little more than a generation.
Many colleges were set up
for blacks; some were state schools like Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, others were private ones subsidized by
Northern missionary societies.
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 received equal education. 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 philanthropist from
Chicago, established the Rosenwald Fund to provide seed money for
matching local contributions and stimulating the construction of new schools
for African American children, mostly in the rural South. He worked in
association with Booker T. Washington and architects at Tuskegee University to have model plans created 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 stimulated construction of more than 5,000 schools built across the
South. In addition to Northern philanthrops and state taxes, African Americans
went to extraordinary efforts to raise money for such schools.[130]
The Civil Rights Movement during the 1950s and 1960s helped publicize the inequities
of segregation. In 1954, the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education unanimously declared that separate facilities were inherently
unequal and unconstitutional. By the 1970s segregated districts had practically
vanished in the South.
Integration of schools has
been a protracted process, however, with results affected by vast population
migrations in many areas, and affected by suburban sprawl, the disappearance of
industrial jobs, and movement of jobs out of former industrial cities of the
North and Midwest 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, a result
of housing patterns, by using forced busing. This method of integrating student
populations provoked resistance in many places, including northern cities,
where parents wanted children educated in neighborhood schools.
Although full equality and
parity in education has still to be achieved (many school districts are
technically still under the integration mandates of local courts), technical
equality in education had been achieved by 1970.
In mid-20th century
America, there was intense interest in using institutions to support the innate
creativity of children. It helped reshape children's play, the design of
suburban homes, schools, parks, and museums. Producers of children's
television programming worked to spark creativity. Educational toys
proliferated that were designed to teach skills or develop abilities. For
schools there was a new emphasis on arts as well as science in the curriculum.
School buildings no longer were monumental testimonies to urban wealth; they
were redesigned with the students in mind.
The emphasis on creativity
was reversed in the 1980s, as public policy emphasized test scores, school
principal were forced to downplay art, drama, music, history and anything that
was not being scored on standardized tests, lest their school be labelled
"failing" by the quantifiers behind the "No Child Left Behind Act. In the 21st century teachers report
that many students in classrooms seem mesmerized by their personal cell phones
or smart phones, often checking their text messages or Facebook page.
The Coleman Report, by
University of Chicago sociology professor James Coleman proved especially controversial in 1966. Based on massive
statistical data, the 1966 report titled "Equality of Educational
Opportunity" fueled debate about "school effects" that has continued since. The report was widely seen
as evidence that school funding has little effect on student final achievement.
A more precise reading of the Coleman Report is that student background and
socioeconomic status are much more important in determining educational
outcomes than are measured differences in school resources (i.e. per pupil spending).
Coleman found that, on average, black schools were funded on a nearly equal
basis by the 1960s, and that black students benefited from racially mixed
classrooms.
The comparative quality of
education among rich and poor districts 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 small 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 because of steep contrasts between education funds in wealthy and
poorer areas. They filed lawsuits to seek a system to provide 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. 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 94-142, Education for All Handicapped Children 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.
In 1983, the National Commission on Excellence in Education released a report
titled A Nation at Risk. Soon afterward,
conservatives were calling for an increase in academic rigor including an
increase in the number of school days per year, longer school days and higher
testing standards. English scholar E.D. Hirsch made an influential
attack on progressive education, advocating an emphasis on "cultural
literacy"—the facts, phrases, and texts that Hirsch asserted are essential
for decoding basic texts and maintaining communication. Hirsch's ideas remain
influential in conservative circles into the 21st century. Hirsch's ideas have
been controversial because as Edwards argues:
Opponents from the political left generally accuse Hirsch of
elitism. Worse yet in their minds, Hirsch’s assertion might lead to a rejection
of toleration, pluralism, and relativism. On the political right, Hirsch has
been assailed as totalitarian, for his idea lends itself to turning over
curriculum selection to federal authorities and thereby eliminating the
time-honored American tradition of locally controlled schools.
By 1990, the United States
spent 2 per cent of its budget on education, compared with 30 per cent on
support for the elderly.
"No Child Left
Behind" Was a major national law passed by a bipartisan coalition in
Congress in 2002, marked a new direction. In exchange for more federal aid, the
states were required to measure progress and punish schools that were not
meeting the goals as measured by standardized state exams in math and language
skills. By 2012, half the states were given waivers because the original
goal that 100% students by 2014 be deemed "proficient" had proven
unrealistic.
By 2012, 45 states had
dropped the requirement to teach cursive writing from the curriculum.
Few schools start the school day by singing the national anthem, as was once done. Few schools have mandatory recess for children.
Educators are trying to reinstate recess. Few schools have mandatory arts
class. Continuing reports of a student's progress can be found online,
supplementing the former method of periodic report cards.
By 2015, criticisms from a
broad range of political ideologies had cumulated so far that a bipartisan
Congress stripped away all the national features of No Child Left Behind,
turning the remnants over to the states.
Beginning in the 1980s,
government, educators, and major employers issued a series of reports
identifying key skills and implementation strategies to steer students and
workers towards meeting the demands of the changing and increasingly digital
workplace and society. 21st century skills are a series of
higher-order skills, abilities, and learning
dispositions that have been identified as being required for success in 21st
century society and workplaces by educators, business leaders, academics, and
governmental agencies. Many of these skills are also associated with deeper learning, including analytic
reasoning, complex problem solving, and teamwork, compared to traditional
knowledge-based academic skills. Many schools and school districts are
adjusting learning environments, curricula, and learning spaces to include and
support more active
learning (such
as experiential learning) to foster deeper learning and the development
of 21st century skills.
Further information: Social history § History of
education
For much of the 20th
century, the dominant historiography, as exemplified by Ellwood Patterson Cubberley (1868–1941) at Stanford, emphasized the
rise of American education as a powerful force for literacy, democracy, and
equal opportunity and a firm basis for higher education and advanced research
institutions. It was a story of enlightenment and modernization triumphing over
ignorance, cost-cutting, and narrow traditionalism whereby parents tried to
block their children's intellectual access to the wider world. Teachers
dedicated to the public interest, reformers with a wide vision, and public
support from the civic-minded community were the heroes. The textbooks help
inspire students to become public schools teachers and thereby fulfill their
own civic mission.
The crisis came in the
1960s, when a new generation of New Left scholars and
students rejected the traditional celebratory accounts, and identified the
educational system as the villain for many of America's weaknesses, failures,
and crimes. Michael Katz (1939–2014) states they:tried to explain the origins of the Vietnam War; the persistence
of racism and segregation; the distribution of power among gender and classes;
intractable poverty and the decay of cities; and the failure of social
institutions and policies designed to deal with mental illness, crime,
delinquency, and education.
The old guard fought back
in bitter historiographical contests. The younger scholars largely
promoted the proposition that schools were not the solution To America's ills,
they were in part the cause of Americans problems. The fierce battles of the
1960s died out by the 1990s, but enrollment declined sharply in education
history courses and never recovered.
Most histories of
education deal with institutions or focus on the ideas histories of major
reformers, but a new social history has recently
emerged, focused on who were the students in terms of social background and
social mobility. Attention has often focused on minority, and ethnic
students. The social history of teachers has also been studied in depth.
Historians have recently
looked at the relationship between schooling and urban growth by studying
educational institutions as agents in class formation, relating urban schooling
to changes in the shape of cities, linking urbanization with social reform
movements, and examining the material conditions affecting child life and the
relationship between schools and other agencies that socialize the young.
The most economics-minded
historians have sought to relate education to changes in the quality of labor,
productivity and economic growth, and rates of return on investment in
education. A major recent exemplar is Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F.
Katz, The Race between Education
and Technology (2009), on the social and economic history of
20th-century American schooling.
Comments
Education
does not appear as an enumerated power granted to the federal government by the
US Constitution for good reason. Congress has made no attempt to pass an
Amendment granting education as an additional power and sending it to the
States for ratification. The 10th Amendment states that those powers
not allowed for the federal government go to the States and the People. In the
case of education, the People need to take it back.
The
beginnings of our educational system in the US outlined above tells us how our
educational system has declined and misplaced responsibility for education from
the student and family to the government bureaucracy. It also explains how US
schools turned into Communist political indoctrination camps. It should make it
clear why federal and state legislators need to get out of the education
business.
Homeschooling
is the most successful model in the US in 2018, because it more closely
resembles the one-room schoolhouse and affords the students the freedom to be
responsible for their own education. Homeschooled children typically perform 2
grades ahead of their age group and they do it in half the time at no expense
to the taxpayer and they never become “snowflakes” or liberal college cult
victims who break windows and burn police cars.
Norb Leahy,
Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader
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