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The First Schools
The colony of Massachusetts was the first to require children to go to school and Learn Latin in order to read the Bible and get basic knowledge about Calvinist Religion. During that time only boys and men went to school.By the time of the American Revolution, some colonies like Georgia, were partially funding public grammar schools. -
Thomas Jefferson's Impact
Thomas Jefferson proposes a two-track educational system, with different tracks in his words for "the laboring and the learned." Scholarship would allow a very few of the laboring class to advance. However the system was still very much in favor of the wealthy families who had the ability to send their children to school. -
The Beginning of Public Schools
Pennsylvania state constitution calls for free public education but only for poor children. At that time it was expected that rich people were very able to pay for their children's schooling. -
Teachers Power
The New York Public School Society formed by the wealthy to provide education for poor children. Schools are run on the Lancasterian model, in which one teacher could teach hundreds of students in a single room. The master gives a rote lesson to the older students, who then passed it down to the younger students. These schools emphasized discipline and obedience qualities that factory owners want in their workers. The teacher had a lot of authority on the studens. -
The First Public High School in the U.S.
First public high school in the U.S. opens in Boston. -
A New Age
Prior to the mid-19th century, students of all ages were taught together in one-room schoolhouses. But well-traveled U.S. educators, like Horace Mann, knew that in other countries, students were segregated by age. Building upon the Prussian system, Mann introduced "age grading" of students in Massachusetts in 1848. This method proved so successful that it quickly became the norm in public education across the country. -
Plessy V. Ferguson
U.S. Supreme Court decision that upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation under the “separate but equal” doctrine. The case stemmed from an 1892 incident in which African American train passenger Homer Plessy refused to sit in a car for blacks. Rejecting Plessy’s argument that his constitutional rights were violated, the Supreme Court ruled that a law that “implies merely a legal distinction” between whites and blacks was not unconstitutional. -
First Scholarships
At the end of World War 2, the G.I. Bill of Rights gives thousands of working class men college scholarships for the first time in U.S. history. -
Brown V. Board of Education
The Brown V. Board of Education was a landmark of the U.S. Supreme Court in which the law that passed segregation in public schools was decided to be unethical, despite segregated schools being equal. It involved a group of black students who could were prevented from entering a public school, until the intervention of the president Dwight Eisenhower. The Supreme Court finally banned Segregation in schools. -
Title IX
The law was passed because the Civil Rights Act did not discrimination against women in the workforce especially in education. A woman named Dorothy Raffel Koltz's complaint was that the government failed to enforce the law against discrimination. Title IX prohibited sex discrimination in education and any organization that recueved federal aid and allowed girl's event to be organized in schools, like sports and other activities. -
Education for All Handicapped Children's Act
The law was enacted by the United States Congress in 1975. This act required all public schools accepting federal funds to provide equal access to education and one free meal a day for children with physical and mental disabilities. Public schools were required to evaluate children with disabilities and create an educational plan with parent input that would emulate as closely as possible the educational experience of non-disabled students. -
Plyler v. Doe
James Plyler, a the Superintendent of the Independent School District appealed to a case in which the Supreme Court of the United States struck down both a state statute denying funding for education to undocumented immigrant children in the United States and a municipal school district's attempt to charge an annual $1,000 tuition fee for each student to compensate for lost state funding. The school district accused the state of violating the 14th amendment.