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Colonial Period
Education mostly for wealthy males. Was based on apprenticeship and private tutors.
Education for Native Americans was implamented by missionaries. -
First Education Laws - Massachusetts
First step towards government-sponsored public education
Formation of grammar schools
Goal of education was to save people from sin -
Noah Webster
Created his "blue-backed speller" to teach children to read and write
Wanted children to be educated as "Americans". He changed the way words were spelled from British English -
Horace Mann and Common Schools
MOST IMPORTANT
http://www.pbs.org/onlyateacher/horace.html
Horace Mann appointed Secretary of Education
Rode on horseback throughout the states to evaluate school conditions
Brought to public attention the need for school reform and introduced the idea of the Common School
This influenced the modern concept of state-mantained public schools, funded by taxes. -
Frederick Douglas
Civil-rights activist and preacher.
Was a former slave who escaped and led the abolitionist movement in Massachusettes and New York.
Was a great orator who campaigned for a right to education for black people. -
Population Growth and Immigration
MOST IMPORTANT
http://www.angelfire.com/ns/immigration/
Immigrants, mostly from Europe, came to the US in search of work.
They settled in the cities of the Eastern states, and doubled the population of children to be educated. This created benefits as well as drawbacks in the classrooms, such as large class sizes with few teachers, and language barriers.
It is still a current issue that influences how we teach in the classroom. -
Committee of Ten
A committee of ten educators that wanted to reform education to be based around classical subjects in order to prepare for college.
They influenced the standardization of secondary education, including high schools -
John Dewey and the Progressive Reform
His philosophy was that school wasn't just a place to gain an education, it was a place to learn how to live.
Schools established during the Progressive Era had a wider range of extra-curricular subjects to teach students basic life skills.
The movement was rejected when people rebelled against the idea of children being educated merely as a trained workforce -
The Measurement Movement
In France, Afred Binet created a series of test to determine the mental age of a child. This later became known as the Binet-Simon test, and is currently one of the most popular IQ tests in the world.
The use of intellegence tests to determine success is still widely controversial, and contrary to the original purpose behind why the test were developed. -
Brown vs Board of Education
MOST IMPORTANT
http://www.nps.gov/brvb/index
Decision that ruled "seperate but equal" to be unconstitutional and ended segregation.
The case involved Oliver L. Brown, a pastor, who encouraged his daughter Linda to apply to go to the schools for white children, as it was closer to their home and in better condition.
The ruling had some unexpected drawbacks, including lose of employment for black teachers, and it would be several more years before all public schools in the South would desegregate. -
Lyndon B Johnson - War on Poverty
Lyndon B. Johnson, a former schoolteacher, announced in his State of the Union address that he wanted to find a solution to combat the rising poverty levels in the US.
Some of these measures included the Social Security and Food Stamp programs, and also Head Start and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), which provided government funding to public schools. -
Elementary and Secondary Education Act
ESEA was an act passed as part of President Johnson's War on Poverty. It provided funding to public education schools, with a higher amount of funds being sent to schools with a large population of low-income students.
ESEA was later re-instated as part of the No Child Left Behind Act -
Individuals with Disablities in Education Act
MOST IMPORTANT
http://idea.ed.gov/
This is a federal law passed to protect children with physical, mental, or learning disabilities and gave them the right to access to as much education as an individual without disabilities.
Before the act was passed, disabled children often weren't educated at all. These days, disabled children usually graduate and attend college, and are given the means to learn and progress in the regular school classroom. -
A Nation at Risk Report
MOST IMPORTANT
http://www2.ed.gov/pubs/NatAtRisk/index.html
President Regan's report stated that, although many reforms had been successfully implament in public schools, on the global stage the US students were performing poorly.
The results of this report are still being monitered today, and school curriculums are constructed around testing and other methods to measure academic acheivement and success on both a national and global scale.
https://www2.ed.gov/pubs/NatAtRisk/risk.html -
No Child Left Behind
This Act was passed by President Bush in an attempt to raise performances during standardized testing and other academic assessments. Schools that failed to meet Annual Yearly Progress (AYP) would be investigated and reformed. Controversy arose when schools performed differently based on the content level and difficulty of their individual tests, with some schools decreasing the difficulty of the tests intentionally in order to make AYP. NCLB was replaced with the Every Child Succeeds Act.
