Public education in the United States consists of programs of instruction offered to children and adolescents through individual school districts administered by state and local governments. Ultimately, educational authority resides with the states, but the federal government has a history of facilitating specific educational programs considered to be in the national interest. This action in the field of education has further federalized, in effect, American schooling. Moreover, federal civil rights laws mandate that all schools conform to national standards of educational equality. In landmark statutes passed in 1958, 1965, and 1972, Congress for the first time broached problems related to improving instruction in primary subjects like science, mathematics, and foreign languages and enhancing educational opportunity for low-income children.
During the course of the 20th century, most states assumed a more active regulatory role than in the past, incorporating school districts into larger areas with common procedures. Prior to World War II, there were more than 117,000 school districts in the United States; by 1990 the number had decreased to just more than 15,000. State officials often supported efforts to equalize local school district expenses by using state funds and state laws to ensure more equitable per pupil expenditures, regardless of the wealth or poverty of individual districts. Local property taxes financed 68 percent of public school expenses in 1940, while the states contributed 30 percent. By 1990 states and local districts each contributed 47 percent to public school revenues. The federal government contributed the majority of the remaining funds.
Educational achievements of the 1960s and 1970s were impressive. The number of children attending public schools nearly doubled between 1945 and 1975. Almost 60 million students were attending schools in the United States by 1970, and more than $78 billion annually was spent on education. In 1970, three out of every four Americans were graduating from high school, two out of every five were going to college, and nearly a million people were earning a college or university degree every year. Substantial changes were made in teacher education programs, and significant modifications were introduced to the school curricula.
In spite of these gains, there were disturbing trends in the American education system. During the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, cities began to reject bond issues designed to provide revenue for the schools. Concurrently, the achievement of many schools left much to be desired. In 1975 the College Entrance Examination Board disclosed that Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) scores had declined steadily since 1964. Reports over the next few years identified appalling deficiencies in the school system. A Carnegie Foundation report, The Quest for Common Learning (1981), decried general education in the United States and asserted that an inordinate amount of specialized courses and haphazard selection of topics and themes had resulted in curricular chaos. The report found that secondary students received good grades, although most students did not appear to work very hard in school, supporting widespread complaints about unqualified students being passed from grade to grade.
A series of investigations and recommendations for improvement followed the Carnegie report. Sponsored by President RONALD W Reagan’s administration and appointed by the National Commission on Excellence in Education, an 18-member panel presented its findings in a report entitled A Nation at Risk (1983). The link between demanding schools and a sound ECONOMY was the thesis
Students at work on their laptops at the Discovery Charter School in Tracy, Colorado (Sullivan/Getty Images)
In this educational document of the late 20th century. The report blamed the public schools for a weak economy and demanded more academic requirements and higher standards and test scores, to overcome the low scholastic achievement of American students. Statistics in the document suggested students from other industrial societies outperformed their Americans counterparts on international academic tests.
By 1980 more than 2 million of the nation’s instructors (75 percent of the total) were members of the American Federation of Teachers or the National Education Association. In the eyes of critics, the teachers’ unions were more motivated by salary and job security issues than by new teaching techniques and student scholastic development. Several state legislatures passed antiunion measures restricting the rights of tenure, implementing merit pay procedures, and making it easier to dismiss teachers. The states, already involved in the financing of the schools, began to establish standards of performance and statewide testing programs for accountability of teachers and administrators. The pressure for accountability and reform increased in the early 1980s. Concurrently, the position of the federal government grew through the increasing amounts of educational appropriations by Congress and the creation of the Department of Education. This department was created by Congress in 1979 during the James Earl Carter, Jr., administration and officially established in May 1980. A movement in the 1980s to institute national standards and to determine national priorities in education prompted opposition and controversy. The larger issue of federal involvement in education reflected partisan disputes.
A Nation at Risk continued to focus states’ attention on raising education standards throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Many parents, teachers, administrators, and government officials held that only a concerted, centralized reform movement could surmount the manifest shortcomings of American education. Because the apparent crisis in student performance was based primarily on test-score results, most states had put into place reform tactics that emphasize more frequent and effective state testing and more state-legislated curriculum requirements. Some educators also suggested using test results to either allow or restrict a student’s access to higher education or the job market. Although there is widespread support for such examinations, few states have mandated them.
Federal involvement in schools since the 1980s has been expressed less by legislation providing money for new programs than by government reports and proclamations that schools were performing insufficiently. A Nation at Risk and many subsequent federal reports and studies on the condition of schooling sparked a vigorous school reform effort at local and state levels.
In response to A Nation at Risk and subsequent federal reports on the condition of schooling, each president since 1983 established national directives for educational improvement. In 1991 President George H. W. Bush proposed America 2000 as a nationwide strategy to improve education in preparation for the needs of a new century. Under President William J. Clinton, Goals 2000, the Educate America Act, was enacted in 1994, providing federal support for educational reform efforts conducted at the state level.
Following the Clinton administration, George W. Bush undertook the first major expansion of the federal government’s role in education in several decades. In January 2001 Bush announced his No Child Left Behind (NCLB) program, with the goal to achieve 100 percent proficiency in reading and math by 2014. Bush proposed that schools show improvement over time, based on standardized tests, or lose their federal funding. Under his plan, schools failing to show improvement would relinquish their funds in the form of vouchers so that students could seek education at private schools. The voucher plan lacked congressional approval, owing to concerns about using federal funds to support religious schools, and was dropped from the bill. Instead, NCLB provided that funds from failing schools be used for tutoring programs, summer school, teacher training, and transportation of students to better performing schools.
The No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 was a comprehensive package that reauthorized the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (1995), required states to measure school performance by testing students in the third through eighth grades annually, provided funding for schools to meet targeted improvement goals, and increased federal aid to schools at higher risk for failure because of the prevalence of poverty, non-English-speaking students, or students with learning disabilities. States could set their own standards for achievement and design their own tests, but national tests would be given periodically to ensure that states met national standards. Under NCLB, states were given the flexibility to determine how federal funds were spent while being held accountable for showing measurable progress toward proficiency.
Although the act passed with bipartisan support, NCLB soon met with resistance, particularly from the education establishment. The National Education Association, a national teachers’ union, led the opposition to NCLB when many schools found it difficult to meet goals. They claimed that some states had difficulties due to higher incidence of disabilities and language obstacles, and that states received inadequate funding from the federal government to institute required programs. More than a dozen states passed resolutions to opt out of NCLB or asked for relaxed provisions. Critics also claimed that teachers and administrators neglected liberal arts subjects, teaching only subjects covered on standardized tests.
The first test of progress under NCLB, conducted in spring 2005, showed overall improvement among young students. More significantly, tests showed that the achievement gap between whites and minorities had narrowed among nine-year-olds between 1999 and 2004. NCLB was due for reauthorization in 2007.
Public school enrollment from kindergarten through grade eight rose from 29.9 million in the fall of 1990 to an estimated 34.2 million in the fall of 2003. Enrollment in the upper grades rose from 11.3 million in 1990 to 14.3 million in 2003. The increase was most rapid in the elementary grades, but this pattern is expected to change. The growing numbers of young pupils who have been filling the elementary schools will cause significant increases at the secondary school level during the next decade. Between the fall of 2000 and the fall of 2010, public elementary enrollment is expected to remain fairly stable, while public secondary school enrollment is expected to rise by 4 percent. Public school enrollment is projected to rise every year until 2014.
Elementary enrollment has risen faster than the number of schools, with the average elementary school size increasing as a result. Regular elementary schools grew from an average of 433 students in 1988-89 to 478 in 199899. During the same time period, the average secondary school size rose from 689 to 707. The rising numbers of alternative schools, which tend to be small, have mitigated the increase in the average size of secondary schools. The average size of regular secondary schools, which exclude the alternative schools, special education, and vocational education schools, rose from 697 to 786 between 1989 and 1999. In 2005, 11.6 percent of American students in elementary and secondary schools attended private institutions. Most of these attended Catholic schools. Increasing numbers of American children are eschewing institutional education at both private and public schools, turning to home schools as their alternative.
Increasing numbers and proportions of children are being assisted in programs for the disabled. During the 1990-91 school year, 10 percent of students were served in these programs compared with 13.5 percent in 200304. Some of the increase since 1990-91 may be ascribed to the increasing percentage of children identified as learning-disabled, which rose from 5 percent of enrollment to 6 percent of enrollment in 2003-04.
The increase in American high school attendance was one of the most conspicuous developments in U. S. education during the 20th century. From 1900 to 1996 the percentage of teenagers who graduated from high school grew from approximately 6 percent to roughly 85 percent. During the course of the 20th century, most states passed legislation extending compulsory education laws to the age of 16. The 20th-century high school was a uniquely American invention. More so than either primary schools or colleges, high schools demonstrated the American ideal that education could successfully address a growing list of individual and social concerns.
At the beginning of the 21st century, educational thought and debate centered on how schools can promote individual mobility and the economy. Issues like governmental vouchers for financing private education, test scores and their administration, and the United States’s ranks among other industrial nations continued to be the subject of intense deliberation.
See also EDUCATION, HIGHER; EDUCATION, HOMESCHOOLING.
Further reading: Hugh Graham, The Uncertain Tri-wmph: Federal Education Policy in the Kennedy and Johnson Years (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984); Amy Guttmann, Democracy and Education (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1987); Edythe Margolin, Young Children, Their Curriculum, and Learning Processes (New York: MacMillan Publishing Company, 1976); U. S. Department of Education. Available online. URL: Http://www. ed. gov/index. jhtml. Accessed December 30, 2008.
—Michele Rutledge
World History
