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Education in the United States, programs of instruction offered to children, youths, and adults in the United States, through schools and colleges operated by state and local governments, as well as by private and religious groups. The development of formal education in the United States differed from that in other Western societies in three fundamental respects: First, Americans possessed a profound faith in education as a principal means to achieve increasingly complex individual and social goals. Second, Americans were pathbreakers in providing more years of schooling for a larger percentage of children and adolescents than any previous society. Third, Americans' remarkable faith in mass schooling was implemented through a largely decentralized organization. Unlike the educational systems of other countries, which are usually directed and financed by the national government, American education in practice has been mainly, although not exclusively, the responsibility of the state and local governments; the word education does not even appear in the U.S. Constitution.

History of Mass Education

After the American Revolution, the Philadelphia scientist and statesman Benjamin Rush wrote that “we have changed our forms of government, but it remains yet to effect a revolution in our principles, opinions, and manners.” To Rush, Thomas Jefferson, and others, the expansion of educational opportunity was necessary to guarantee that newly won freedoms would not be lost through a passive or ignorant citizenry.

Both Rush and Jefferson recommended elaborate, publicly supported systems of mass education, but their ambitious proposals were not implemented. American education at first was not a system at all; instead, it was a collection of local, often private traditions. The extent and kind of schooling available depended on the resources and ambitions of particular towns and cities, on the activities of religious denominations seeking to further their sectarian ends through schools and colleges, and on a great variety of private groups (both nonprofit and profit making) that established many kinds of schools for many different reasons.

The Common-School Movement  

Educational reformers in the early 19th century became increasingly troubled by the chaotic absence of any system in American schools, particularly at the elementary, or common-school, level. Leading educators such as Horace Mann in Massachusetts and Henry Barnard in Connecticut advocated systematic elementary education. The common-school reformers set forth optimistic arguments that education could transform all youth into literate, virtuous citizens, as well as nationalistic arguments that education could build a distinctive new society. In addition, they appealed to people's fears about growing tensions and conflict in American society, stating that mass elementary schooling would preserve social stability and prevent crime and poverty. Repeatedly, the reformers contended that elementary education should be universally available and free, should be financed by public funds, and should be realized by public schools that were accountable to state governments. By the end of the century they had achieved their goal: Universal, free public education was a reality. Beginning with Massachusetts (1852) and New York (1853), all states had passed compulsory school attendance laws by 1918.

Not everyone, however, accepted public schools as the single best way to provide schooling. The most significant opposition came from American Roman Catholics, who believed that the moral values taught in public schools were biased toward Protestant beliefs. Arguing that sound education could not sever intellectual development from moral development, Roman Catholics created their own separate school system. Its position was strengthened in 1925 by the U.S. Supreme Court ruling (Pierce v. Society of Sisters) that states could not compel children to attend public schools. By 1990 about 14 percent of American youth attended nonpublic schools. 

Colleges and Universities

American higher education also expanded during the 19th century, but unlike elementary schooling, no public system developed that quickly overwhelmed private and religious institutions. Religious convictions motivated the creation of the earliest colleges, among them Harvard (1636), William and Mary (1693), and Yale (1701). In the 19th century rivalry among Protestant denominations was one reason for the founding of hundreds of colleges. Despite their religious origins, many of these colleges were thought to serve nonreligious public purposes, and some received public assistance. The lines between public and private remained blurred much longer in higher education than in elementary schooling.

By the late 19th century, moreover, higher education seemed to confer benefits to society as a whole, and not only to those who attended college. Publicly supported state universities—especially those established or given federal assistance as a result of the land grants provided by the Morrill Act (1862), such as Kansas State University and the University of Wisconsin—were leaders in research that had practical application in fields such as agriculture, engineering, and public service See Agricultural Education; See Land-Grant Colleges. More basic research in the natural and social sciences flourished in private universities newly created to foster such study, for example, Johns Hopkins University (1876) and the University of Chicago (1890).

By 1900 higher education was a significant national resource; in that year, however, only 4 percent of older American adolescents were enrolled in college. Mass higher education began in the 1950s and '60s. In 1990 more than 41 percent of U.S. high school graduates enrolled in institutions of higher education.

Secondary Schools

Education for younger adolescents—secondary education in the form of the high school and junior high (or middle) school—developed coherently and systematically only in the early 20th century, much later than the growth of elementary schools and colleges. Before about 1900 a bewildering variety of institutions existed for the small percentage of teenagers who wanted to go beyond the common or elementary school, whether to learn a complex skill in lieu of increasingly unavailable on-the-job apprenticeships, or to prepare for college. Available institutions included private tutoring ventures, privately supported academies, and, beginning with Boston English High School in 1821, public high schools. Nevertheless, it was only in 1874, in a Michigan Supreme Court decision involving the city of Kalamazoo, that it was clearly established that communities could use local property taxes to support high schools.

In the hundred years that followed, the rise in high school attendance was one of the most striking features of American education. In 1880 only 2.5 percent of American youth of high school age graduated from a secondary school; in 1990 about 75 percent did so. More than any other educational institution, the public high school exemplified the American faith that schooling could successfully address a lengthening list of individual and social issues. These concerns included preparation for college and for employment; preparation for many life activities; achieving social objectives such as the Americanization of immigrants and the custodial care of youth who had no plans and nowhere else to go; and, at their most idealistic, meeting the societal objectives of social mobility and equality of opportunity. Significantly, laws were passed that pushed compulsory attendance upward to the age of 14 in most states and to the age of 16 in many others.

Control and Financing

Because the Tenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution reserves to the states all powers not specifically delegated to the national government, public education in the U.S. is fundamentally a state responsibility. Beginning in 1794, with the establishment of the Board of Regents of the University of the State of New York, each state slowly created a department of education and enacted laws defining control and finance of public education within its borders. Although final authority resided with the state governments, the dominant American tradition has been one of decentralized administration. The most significant unit of educational authority has been the local school district, the boundaries of which usually coincide with those of a city or town. Thus, American schools tend to reflect the educational values and financial capacities of the communities in which they are located.

State Regulations

From earliest times, however, control of education by local communities was subjected to centralizing pressures. Especially after the American Civil War, the states began to assert more aggressively the educational authority that technically they had always possessed. State laws increasingly regulated compulsory school attendance, teacher qualifications, and sometimes curriculum content.

In the 1970s state regulation was also applied to public school finance. Historically, local property taxes had been the principal means of raising revenues for both public elementary and secondary schools; dependence on this tax, however, meant that the wealth of the communities in which children lived determined the quality and extent of the schooling available to them. In the early 20th century, in order to help poorer communities, many states began to supplement local tax revenues with state funds. In the 1950s and ‘60s, when state programs to aid public higher education were expanded dramatically, general state revenues also largely financed such programs. In 1971 a landmark decision by the California Supreme Court, Serrano v. Priest, determined that reliance on local property taxes to finance public schooling violated the California state constitution. Equalization of educational expenditures among the school districts of a given state became a major educational issue. The possibility arose that in years to come public schooling in many states might be completely funded through state governments.

Administrative Developments

Also weakening local autonomy was the modern social movement to increase the size, efficiency, and orderliness of public school systems and their administrative structures. For example, the position of the school superintendent increased in importance. The first public school superintendent was appointed in 1837, for Buffalo, New York; by 1900 the superintendent was commonly regarded as the most influential figure in elementary and secondary education. In addition, school districts were consolidated and, though larger, were more unified. In 1900 more than 100,000 school districts existed in the U.S. By 1960 the number had fallen to about 40,000, and by the mid-1980s it had been further reduced to fewer than 16,000.

Other centralizing trends further eroded local control. By 1870, American cities and rural areas had firmly established the modern pattern of age-graded classes, sequential promotion, and formal graduation after a stipulated number of years of school attendance. Even though the U.S. supposedly had no national system of education, the pattern of schooling was in fact remarkably similar among American communities. The rise of mass-market textbook publishing companies and of educational testing organizations encouraged uniformity more than diversity. Another pressure toward uniform organization and standards came in the 1960s and ‘70s, when the rapid growth of teachers' unions demonstrated the power of large-scale collective bargaining in negotiating teachers' salaries, working conditions, and nonsalary benefits.

Federal Activity

The federal government brought a third significant pressure on local control of public education. Although educational authority rested with the states, the federal government encouraged and specifically assisted educational activities that were considered in the national interest. The Smith-Hughes Act of 1917, for example, helped create vocational programs in high schools, and the G.I. Bill of 1944 made unprecedented financial aid available to veterans seeking higher education. Beginning in the 1950s, the growing activity of federal courts, especially in issues of civil rights, pressed local school districts and colleges to conform to a national sense of what was educationally just.

Federal commitment to financing public education expanded enormously after the passage of the National Defense Education Act (1958) and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (1965). Congress addressed such broad problems as expanding educational opportunity for poor children and upgrading instruction in science, mathematics, and foreign languages. Both public and private institutions of higher education received substantial federal funds for research as well as for student financial aid. This largesse was accompanied by increased regulation. The 1965 act was revised as the Education Consolidation and Improvement Act in 1981; this act gave each state more control over the allocation of federal funds for programs with educational purposes.

Education and Equality

The most dramatic characteristic of the American educational system is the large number of people who have participated in it. The ideal of universal elementary education was largely achieved by the end of the 19th century, and in 1990 Americans who were 25 years of age or older had completed a median 12.4 years of schooling (in 1910 the median was 8 years). Higher education, historically reserved for a privileged minority in the United States as in other countries, underwent remarkable growth after World War II; U.S. college enrollments soared from 2.6 million in 1950 to 13.7 million in 1990. No statistic better expresses the increasing egalitarianism of U.S. society or its popular consensus on the value of education.

Such impressive statistics are easily misleading, however, for expanding educational opportunities were not equally available to all groups of Americans. The cultural and linguistic heritage of immigrant groups was ignored in the schools' single-minded concern for Americanization. For religious communities such as the Amish, state insistence on compulsory attendance and a secular curriculum ran counter to their own fundamental beliefs. The educational resources of most poor people were narrowly determined by the economic limitations of their communities. In the mid-20th century blacks and women commanded national attention, demanding equality of educational opportunity, which, for the first time, became a dominant objective of national educational policy.

Racial Integration

In American schools during the 1950s racial segregation was still prevalent. In the South separate schools for black and white youth were sanctioned by state laws that had been upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court. In the North no such laws existed; nevertheless, racial segregation was the common outcome in local schools fed by segregated neighborhoods and located in districts whose boundaries were deliberately drawn to ensure racial separation. Although all-black schools were supposedly equal in quality to all-white schools, and although some all-black schools—such as Dunbar High School in Washington, D.C.—were far more distinguished than most white schools, the nearly nationwide result of official or unofficial segregation was inferior education for blacks. In 1950 adult nonwhite males had completed a median 6.4 years of schooling, compared with 9.3 years for adult white males.

In 1954, in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that deliberate racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional, thus overturning a policy it had first legitimized in 1896. Despite vigorous objections from many southern states, by 1980 the federal courts had largely succeeded in eliminating the “separate but equal” system of southern public schools.

Most black Americans, however, lived in northern cities and not in the South. In cities where intentional segregation was proven to exist, the courts ordered the redrawing of school district lines and sometimes ordered the busing of children from one neighborhood to another to achieve a racial balance. The use of judicial power to achieve desegregation and equality of opportunity had limits, however. Many whites had moved out of central cities by the 1970s, and in general the courts refused to sanction “metropolitan” busing plans—those that required busing between city and suburb—as a tool for achieving racial integration. In a 1974 ruling, the Supreme Court, in effect, barred busing across school-district lines.

Remedial Programs

Mere access to a school—educational opportunity in the narrowest sense—was increasingly regarded by educators and political leaders as an inadequate solution to the problem of educational inequality. Special programs and resources were believed essential to guarantee genuine equality of education to disadvantaged youth. Whereas federal interest in school reform was confined in the late 1950s to promoting excellence in traditional academic fields, that interest soon shifted decisively to achieving social equity. Title I of the influential Elementary and Secondary Education Act (1965), passed under President Lyndon B. Johnson, provided federal funds for supplementary programs targeted toward poor and black children. Most Title I (later called Chapter I) funds were spent on elementary-age children, according to a prevailing theory that educational disadvantages could best be eliminated at an early age, before their cumulative effect was impossible to reverse. The federal Head Start program, established in 1965, extended remedial help to preschoolers.

The strategies of targeted programs and categorical federal assistance were applied to other disadvantaged groups. The Bilingual Education Act, part of the 1967 amendments to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, authorized federal funds for school districts having substantial numbers of students with limited mastery of English. In 1983 about $140 million was allocated to school districts for bilingual education programs to meet the needs of Hispanic and Asian children. The Education for All Handicapped Children Act (1975) was a catalyst for providing new opportunities for other children with special needs. Problems of violence and apathy in many inner-city high schools also led to calls for federal programs to meet the needs of disadvantaged adolescents.

Education of Women

Educational discrimination against women, although different from racial discrimination, was equally pervasive in U.S. society. Girls and boys in the 19th century were legally afforded equal educational opportunity; most public elementary schools were coeducational by the time of the American Revolution, and most public high schools became so after the Civil War. Even at the elementary level, however, girls were subtly but firmly taught that a woman's place is in the home only, rather than also in secondary schools, universities, and the professions. The first college to admit women alongside men was Oberlin College, coeducational since its founding in 1833. During this era, members of the first generation of women educational reformers, including Catharine Beecher, Emma Willard, and Mary Lyon, established women's academies that provided female students with secondary and sometimes college-level education and offered subjects, such as mathematics, science, and history, that previously were considered unnecessary for women. The first successful women's college, Vassar College, opened in 1865. Not until the 20th century, however, did women in large numbers participate in higher education; even then, social expectations as well as male discrimination often closed career doors to well-educated women. Only in the 1960s did many of these barriers begin to recede. Title IX of the federal Education Amendments of 1972 prohibited discrimination on the basis of sex in educational institutions that received federal aid.

Contemporary Issues

A number of new developments had emerged in American education by the 1980s.

Extension of Schooling

The most recent expression of the American tendency toward more schooling for more people was the extension of schooling opportunities to people both younger and older than the ages traditionally served by formal education. At the preprimary level, more children attended various kinds of nursery schools and day-care centers. In 1966 less than 30 percent of American children age 3 to 5 were enrolled in preprimary programs; by 1990 almost 60 percent participated in such programs. If emphasis continues on programs for early education to compensate for educational disadvantages, and if more parents work, either in dual-career or single-parent households, the percentage of children in preprimary programs will probably continue to rise.

Adult education, or “lifelong-learning” programs—usually defined as part-time study not directed toward a degree—also increased substantially. More than 21 million adults took part in such programs in 1981. Most of those enrolling in such programs do so for job-related reasons, although personal interests and hobbies are also significant motivations. In general, people who have had previous experience with higher education are more likely to enroll in adult education classes than those who have not. With the recent decline in the adolescent population—those available for conventional college enrollment in the 1980s—many colleges, faced with excess capacity, vigorously promoted adult education as a means to boost enrollments. This trend, together with a growing public realization that human development continues beyond adolescence, will probably guarantee the continued expansion of this new sector of the educational market.

Education Outside of Schools

Although Americans frequently behave as though education takes place only in schools and colleges, it in fact occurs in many settings, directly and indirectly, intentionally and unintentionally. Many educators in the 1970s and '80s worked to improve the quality of education in nonschool settings. The instructional programs of museums, for example, were revised, and in cities such as Boston and San Francisco, museums were founded that were particularly oriented toward children. Families gained access to an outpouring of books, courses, and workshops designed to teach parenting as a distinct skill. In the form of on-the-job training or staff development, education in the workplace also expanded. Finally, highly professional organizations began to emerge in children's television in the 1960s, particularly the Children's Television Workshop, producing such shows as “Sesame Street” and “The Electric Company.” These programs were explicitly designed to assist schools by providing the home teaching of basic skills. In the coming generation it is likely that an increasing portion of education funds will be spent in nonschool settings.

Science and Technology

Although the objectives assigned to formal education increased dramatically in the past century, the science and art of U.S. educational practice underwent no comparable revolution. Despite occasional experiments such as team teaching and ungraded primary classrooms, the essentials of American school practice in 1900 were all intact near the end of the 20th century: instruction in age-graded groups, in time periods of 30-60 minutes, with one adult teacher, leading to promotion or graduation primarily as a function of age. The influence of distinguished educators such as the American John Dewey has combined with the popularization of psychoanalytic ideas to make American education substantially more child centered than it used to be. In addition, the gradual accumulation of knowledge about the different ways in which children learn and about the special needs of many children have led the elementary education system to be more sensitive to identifying and attending to individual differences. Most so-called technological breakthroughs, such as the teaching-machine movement of the 1950s, proved to be mere fads and were short-lived. Whether the increasing availability of microcomputers or contemporary biomedical research (for example, on the human brain or in human genetics) will substantially alter American educational practice is not yet known. What is clear is that the format and techniques of American classroom education are slow to change.

The Limits of Schooling

Americans have placed an increasing number of unusual burdens on their educational system. Schools are currently expected to teach basic skills in reading, writing, mathematics, and reasoning. They are also supposed to introduce students to a complex cultural tradition in the liberal arts and the sciences, a tradition that now includes the entire world, not simply Western civilization. They are further charged with developing individual skills relating to such nonacademic areas as vocation, leisure-time activity, and citizenship, as well as providing such specialized programs as driver education, sex education, drug education, and parent education. As social institutions, schools are expected to be, simultaneously, agents of social stability and social change—to teach conformity to the America that is and aspiration toward the America that should be.

By the 1970s apprehensions grew that American schools were not accomplishing all these objectives; indeed, the objectives themselves were questioned as possibly unreasonable. In a famous research study, Equality of Educational Opportunity (1966), the American educator James Coleman concluded that family background had more impact than did school experience on many of the objectives that schools were attempting to achieve. Public concern and even pessimism about the educational and social impact of schools were reflected in the subsequent reluctance by taxpayers to approve additional expenditures for public education. The back-to-basics movement at the end of the 1970s was an early attempt by educators to narrow and sharpen their ambitions. Other efforts began in the 1980s to restore interest in academic quality and excellence. A Nation at Risk, a 1983 report issued by a bipartisan federal commission, emphasized the need to upgrade American education at all levels.

Such efforts to clarify what schools can and cannot accomplish coincided with the political changes that led to the 1980 election of President Ronald Reagan. Reagan criticized public schools for causing, rather than resolving, many educational problems, and he was the first recent president who pledged to strengthen private schools as an alternative to public education.

By: Arthur G. Powell

"Education in the United States," Microsoft® Encarta® 96 Encyclopedia. © 1993-1995 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. © Funk & Wagnalls Corporation. All rights reserved.