-
Period: to
The American Colonial Period (1600-1776)
During this time, most schools were taught by women in the neighborhood they lived in, were owned and controlled by churches, and taught the Lord’s Prayer, the Ten Commandments, and a list of the books of the Bible from the textbook "The New England Primer". A focus not only on scripture and salvation but also on educating children to be better, more well rounded citizens -
The Boston Latin School was established in Massachusetts.
-
The Old Deluder Satan Law
Required towns of 50 or more families to hire a teacher and collect taxes to fund schools -
The Massachusetts School Law of 1642
Children were required to be taught to read to understand the bible and the country's laws. -
Period: to
The Common School
-
Noah Webster The School Master of America
A Teacher who believed that a national history had to be taught and couldn't be done with British textbooks. So to combat this he called to eliminate British textbooks from schools and wrote his own, The Blueack Speller. The Speller introduced new spellings and pronunciation of English words to differentiate between British and American English. This textbook was the precursor to Webster's American Dictionary of the English Language. -
The Land Ordinance of 1785
Required each new state to address education as one of its founding components -
The English Classical School
The first high school is established in Boston -
Childcare
The first known child care center opened in New Harmony, Indiana. -
High School
Massachusetts law established high schools. -
Horace Mann
The first Massachusetts Secretary of Education believed that all children should have access to safe, useful, and public education. He visited and documented the state of over 1,000 schools across the country and came up with the Common School Journal to detail his findings and various solutions to the problems of the system. -
Public Normal Schools
The first public normal school for preparing teachers opened in Lexington, Massachusetts. -
The Great School Debates - New York City
Debates done by Irish Catholic Bishop John Hughes on the basis of education for all children regardless of religion. He argued that Catholic children should be able to attend school without having to be worried about being indoctrinated into the Protestant faith, which had dominated the school system up until this point. Many people were against his argument because they believed that if the Catholics were given money, all the other sects would start demanding money to start schools as well. -
Board Of Education
The Public School Society was replaced with the New York City Board of Education, an elected body that allowed more public voice in decision-making. -
Segregation in the School System
A group of nearly 90 African Americans wrote up a petition to the Boston School Committee calling for an end to segregation in the city's public schools. -
Catholic Schools
John Hughes was named Archbishop of New York and used his power to help create a national system of Catholic schools, becoming a major group of alternative schools. -
Complusory Education Laws
The first compulsory attendance law is enacted in Massachusetts. Requiring 12 weeks of attendance, this sets the groundwork for the rest of the states to do so by 1918 -
Catherine Beecher
Catherine Beecher was the main driving voice behind the movement that convinced women that it was ok to be teachers and educated them in the profession. She claimed that women were the natural teachers it was something that women were meant to do by their nature. She set up colleges that would train women to be teachers as Americans moved west onto the frontier, taking the demand for teachers with them. -
Sarah and Benjamin Roberts
Benjamin Roberts tried and was denied several times to enroll his daughter, Sarah, into public schools that were better and closer than the Smith school she was currently enrolled in. In response to this Benjamin sued the City of Boston and was eventually able to win his case and a law is put in place, abolishing segregation in schools of Massachusetts -
End of the Civi War
After the Civil War was fought and won, there were now 4 million slaves freed and able to get the education that had previously been denied to them, causing Black literacy to soar from 5% to 70% after the Civil War. Congress also required states to guarantee in their Constitution that they would offer free nonsectarian education to all children. -
Public Education and Taxes
The Kalamazoo School Case made it possible for public high schools to be supported by taxes. -
Kindergarten
St. Louis, Missouri, opened the first public kindergarten in the United States. -
Major School Reform
By 1890, the US was providing more schooling to more children than any other nation on earth. However, this did come with its downfalls. Native Americans were sent to government schools that prohibited the use of their languages, customs, and native dress. African Americans were also prohibited from a lot of schools and in response created their own schools. -
John Dewey
He believed that if schools were anchored in the whole child, in the social, intellectual, emotional, and physical development of a child, that teaching, learning, and schools as a whole would be very different, hospitable places for children. -
Period: to
As American as Public School
-
William A. Wirt
Hired as the superintendent of schools in Gary, Indiana. A disciple of John Dewey, Wirt designed lavish, modern buildings that served all grades and a curriculum that kept students in motion. This would not only offer them more excitement in their day to prevent boredom but also provide more opportunities for learning new subjects and skills they never would have before. -
The Great Depression and Child Labor
Up until the Great Depression, child labor had been one of the main factors holding children back from getting the same amount of education as others their age. Some may have had to work to support their family or simply wanted to work instead of going to school. The Federal government finally outlawed child labor and all states required at least some mandatory schooling, helping to even the playing field more for these children. -
Wirt's Gary Plan expanded and attacked
Educators from 200 American cities would adopt Wirt's system after its staggering success in Indiana. Eventually, it was implemented in 30 New York schools. However, in the mayor's race of 1917, Democratic opponent John Hylan attacked the Gary plan as a plot to turn out cheap labor for large corporations. After John Hylan won the election, he quickly dismantled the Gary system in New York and the city returned to a more traditional curriculum model -
Wartime in America
As World War 1 was ongoing, there was a huge push for an English-only curriculum, as opposed to the multitude of languages that were previously available in schools. At the end of the war, 35 states required instruction in only English and history courses that celebrated American heroes. -
Elwood P. Cubberley
Finding the American School Model "woefully out of date" Head of the Department of Education at Stanford University, Cubberley trained a generation of administrators in what was called the science of school management. Due to his teachings, educators embraced the idea that the college-bound program was only for the very smart kids and that everybody else should be divided up into different programs depending on where they expected to be in their life -
IQ Testing and Lewis Herman
Lewis Terman, a colleague of Cubberly, believed that the intelligence test could transform American schools and society as a whole. In Terman's view, they could use the test to assess every child in the public schools to have a better understanding of each individual's ability or capacity and put them "on the right track" in school for a predetermined future or program. -
Period: to
A Struggle for Educational Equality
-
Arthur Bestor
An American Historian who argued that progressive education was regressive education. In his book, Educational Wasteland, he summarizes that Many schools gave up the intellectual mission and became much more concerned with social adjustment, life adjustment, and developing kids with well-rounded personalities. Bestor ended up leading a campaign for a return to basic academic subjects. -
Brown vs. The Board of Education of Topeka
The monumental Supreme Court case declared the previous way of schooling, "separate but equal" unconstitutional and outlawed segregation in schools -
Cold War Paranoia
Because of the Sputnik launch, the Russians getting to space before us, and the assumption that this could only happen if the Russians were better educated than us, President Eisenhower signed the National Defense Education Act. This act sent over $100 million yearly to aid public education, changing the school system overnight -
Lyndon B. Johnson
Former School teacher turned U.S. President, Johnson believed that equal opportunities in education meant equal opportunities in life. -
Civil Rights Act of 1964
This law banned discrimination based on race or ethnicity in all federally funded programs, most notably public schools -
Julian Nava
Dr. Julian Nava led a successful fight to ban IQ testing in Los Angeles schools while on the board of education for the district. Similarly, other minority leaders helped to end career tracking in the schools of Washington, DC. -
The Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965.
In its first four years, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act provided $4 billion to aid disadvantaged students. Combining this with the Civil Rights act, the South finally caved and started to integrated their schools -
Bilingual Education Act
This act offered federal money to help schools meet the needs of children whose first language was not English. -
Crystal City Walkout
In Crystal City Schools Mexican Americans were prohibited from speaking Spanish, and lessons about Mexican history, culture, or literature were not taught in any of the classes. Frustrated with this and constant mistreatment by teachers and the school board, the students staged a walkout. With the walkout and being able to eventually elect Mexican Americans to the school board, the students of Crystal City were able to get the representation and education they deserved -
Title IX
This act prohibited sending federal grants to schools or programs that discriminated on the basis of gender -
Busing
to remedy the blatant educational difference between the suburbs and the city a federal judge ordered schools to bus the suburban students in the city, and Detroit students out to the suburbs. -
Religious Vouchers
Since Vouchers were able to be used at non-religious schools many argued they should be able to do the same at religious schools. However, it blurs the lines between church and state separation when you are using government money to send a child to a religious school. In spite of this debate, students in Cleveland, Ohio and Milwaukee, Wisconsin were allowed to attend religious schools on vouchers -
San Fransico and Bilingual Education
San Francisco Lawyers sued the San Francisco School District on 1,800 Chinese-American elementary students.
Their school held classes in English only, which few of the children understood. Due to this case, the Supreme Court ruled that children with different needs needed to be treated differently to make it equal. The federal government allocated 68 million dollars for bilingual education and published new teaching materials in almost 70 languages. -
The Choice Experiment
East Harlem asked some of the district's best teachers to create small alternative public schools within existing buildings to combat low test scores and hopefully raise academic achievement overall -
Department of Education
The U.S. Department of Education was established by President Jimmy Carter. -
Period: to
The Bottom Line in Education
-
President Ronald Reagan
He believed that the educational system was in crisis, caused by low standards, lack of purpose, and the failure to strive for excellence. To remedy this they were going to try to increase competition among students and schools and attempt to strengthen parental choice and local controls. -
The Learning Crisis
The declaration of a learning crisis by politicians would open the door to free market reforms that challenged the basic ideals of public education. They believed the way to reform public schools was to get public schools to compete, allowing them the chance to compete with private enterprises, and vice versa. in response the federal government scaled back its role in education, shifting the burden to state and local authorities while shifting the focus from equity to excellence -
Unilateral Educational Disarmament
The phrase symbolizing the tone of the Reagan administration's belief of what was happening to the public school system. Essentially, American education is being undermined by this "rising tide of mediocrity" -
George Bush and Vouchers
President George Bush, like Nixon and Reagan before him called for a voucher system, with Wisconsin being the first state to pass the first voucher legislation. Beginning in 1990, some low-income students were allowed to attend private, non-religious schools with vouchers paid for with tax money. -
Polly Williams
Representative Polly Williams pushed the Milwaukee voucher bill through the legislature despite widespread opposition, stating " I'm not in this battle on education to save any institution. I'm in here to save the lives of children by any means necessary." -
Homeschooling
The Christian Right led a successful campaign to make homeschooling legal in all 50 states, furthering the choice movement, even if in a different direction. -
New York Enrollment
The City began allowing students to seek enrollment anywhere in the city. Parents who were fed up with the quality of education in public schools could take their children out of local classrooms and place them in schools of their choice. -
Educational Alternatives Incorporated
Looking for a solution to the infinite list of problems within their publically funded school, schools in Baltimore hired Educational Alternatives Incorporated to manage nine of their public school. As a private company, they could bypass a lot of the red tape and bureaucracy that the Government couldn't and spend less money on doing more repairs, renovations, and getting more supplies while still making a profit. -
Charter Schools
They were a new form of public school, they were a school of choice and were not controlled by a school district or Board but rather a contract or founding charter (hence the name) -
State Testing
Originally, the philosophy was that every state should test every fourth grader in reading and every eighth grader in math. this eventually switched to the idea that children should be tested every year in reading and math, every single year. -
No Child Left Behind
ESEA was reauthorized under President George W. Bush as No Child Left Behind (NCLB), requiring accountability based on student test scores.