Percentage of High Schoolers Taking Academic Courses: 1928 to 1961
Source: The failed promise of the American high school, 1890-1995 by Angus, David l.: Mirel, Jeffrey E. Copyright 1999. Reproduced with permission of Teachers College Press in the format of Textbook via Copyright Clearance Center.
It was not until after World War II that the need for a high school education became widespread. By the 1950s, a majority of teenagers were earning high school diplomas. Although more students were attending high school, not all of them were happy with the curriculum and the way they were treated. By the end of the 1960s and into the 1970s, students of color were disrupting many high schools as they confronted discrimination and demanded that their cultures be included in the curriculum. High schools entered the 1980s more peacefully, but with more rights for students, in part, due to a number of court cases. The curriculum and textbooks began to incorporate content on the experiences and history of people beyond the white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant male.
Middle Level Education
At the beginning of the 20th century, psychologist G. Stanley Hall argued that early adolescents were neither children nor adults. He believed that separate education would better serve the students between elementary and high school (Beane, 2001). A second reason for the creation of this new level of schooling was to prepare young people for the differentiated comprehensive high school in which they would be sorted into academic and vocational tracks (Urban & Wagoner, 2009). Table 6.2 lists some of the educators who have influenced U.S. education.
The first junior high school was established in1909 in Columbus, Ohio, followed by one in Berkley, California, in 1910. Although some educators and psychologists were calling for the creation of schools between elementary and high school, the number of junior high schools grew over the next few decades primarily in response to social conditions. Elementary schools were overcrowded with the large influx of immigrant children and the increasing number of students not being promoted to the next grade (Beane, 2001). Four in five students were attending junior high school by 1960 (McEwin, Dickinson, & Jenkins, 2003). For the most part, they had become miniature high schools that were not effectively serving young adolescents.
Still believing that early adolescents deserved an education that was different from that provided in elementary and secondary schools, middle level educators proposed a new structure. Like junior high schools, middle schools evolved, in part, because of the practicalities of the times. By the late 1950s, the baby boom generation was overcrowding elementary schools, which suggested building more elementary schools. Another option was to add a wing to the high school, move to it the ninth grade from the high school, and grades 6–8 from the elementary school. Some communities built a new high school and remodeled the old one for grades 6–8. Sometimes the fifth grade was moved into the new intermediate schools.
Middle school advocates argued that schooling for young adolescents should focus on their developmental as well as academic needs. Rather than a large, departmentalized school like high school, their vision was smaller clusters of teachers and students. Teachers and other school professionals in these schools were to provide guidance to help students maneuver though their changing social and physical development. Educators were to be more affectionate and sensitive to young people.
As the popularity of junior high schools declined, the number of middle schools grew quickly to more than 11,000 by 1999 (Snyder & Dillow, 2011) and more than 15,000 today (McEwin & Greene, 2011). With the national focus on academics in the 1990s, middle level educators pushed for a curriculum that would provide access to academic subjects in a positive and nurturing climate. Teachers were encouraged to use collaborative and cooperative learning with interdisciplinary teams of teachers and block scheduling. Advocates promoted eliminating the tracking of students and creating heterogeneous groups in which cultural diversity was celebrated and diverse learning styles were recognized.
Deeper Look Read about the history of Head Start.
How to best serve preadolescent students remains an unsettled issue. Critics charge that the middle school philosophy focuses on the self-exploration, socialization, and group learning to the detriment of academics. These charges are fueled by poor showings of eighth graders on national and international tests where they rank lower than fourth graders, suggesting that they are losing ground as they progress through the middle grades. Some research suggests that these students would be better served in K–8 schools (Meyer, 2011). You are likely to be engaged in discussions about the value of middle schools as you proceed through your teaching career.
Early Childhood Education
Throughout history, some mothers have had to work to support their families. Almost always, they have had to leave their children with someone, often a relative or a neighbor. Some women in the neighborhood watched several children, but organized schools with child care providers were not available until the 19th century. Robert Owens opened the first known child care center at a mill in New Harmony, Indiana, in 1825–1826 with more than 100 children (Ranck & NAEYC’s History & Archives Panel, 2001).
| Noah Webster | Author of spellers and textbooks that influenced the elementary school curriculum from 1783–1875. |
| Emma Willard | An early feminist who opened the Troy Female Seminary in 1821 where women prepared for a certificate to teach. |
| Reverend Samuel Hall | Established the Columbian School in Vermont in 1823 for preparing teachers. |
| Robert Owens | Welsh social reformer who opened the first known child care center at a mill in New Harmony, Indiana, in 1825–1826. |
| Horace Mann | First secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education and father of the common school movement. |
| William Holmes McGuffey | Wrote the McGuffey Readers that were used between 1836 and 1960. |
| Friedrich Froebel | Established the first kindergarten in 1837 in Germany that served as the model for early kindergartens in the United States. |
| Samuel Chapman Armstrong | Founder of Hampton Institute in 1868 to prepare African American teachers who paid for their education through manual labor. |
| Booker T. Washington | Educator and author who served as the first president of Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in 1881 and promoted preparing African Americans for the trades and their appropriate roles in the Jim Crow South. |
| W. E. B. Du Bois | Sociologist, historian, professor, author, and civil rights activist who challenged the oppressive southern economy and argued that African Americans should have a classical education to prepare them to be leaders. |
| John Dewey | Philosopher and professor who established a laboratory school in Chicago in 1896 to test his progressive ideas about a child-oriented curriculum. His ideas have been very influential in education and social reform. |
| William James | Harvard philosopher and psychologist who found that the stimulus-response concepts of learning could be used to help children develop desirable habits. |
| G. Stanley Hall | Psychologist who established child development and child psychology as fields that influenced education at the end of the 19th century. |
| Margaret Haley | Activist teacher who was an early member of the Chicago Federation of Teachers and later an organizer for the American Federation of Teachers. |
| Catherine Goggin | Along with Margaret Haley, she helped affiliate the Chicago Federation of Teachers with organized labor. |
| Edward Thorndike | Professor at Teachers College, Columbia University and author of Educational Psychology (1903). He promoted behaviorism and testing, which was widely used by the military. |
| Mary McLeod Bethune | An educational leader who opened a school for African American girls in 1904 in Daytona Beach, Florida, that evolved into Bethune-Cookman University. Also served as an adviser to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. |
| William Chandler Bagley | Professor and author of Classroom Management (1907), which was the primary guide for preparing effective teachers for many years. |
| William Heard Kilpatrick | Teachers College, Columbia University professor who supported progressive education and introduced in 1918 the “project method” in which students direct their own learning. |
| Thurgood Marshall | U.S. Supreme Court justice who had argued Brown v. Board of Education in 1952–1953. |
| Theodore Sizer | Education reformer who wrote Horace’s Compromise and founded the Coalition of Essential Schools in 1984 to create a group of high schools based on the progressive tradition. |
Table 6.2 Who’s Who in U.S. Education
The first kindergarten was opened by Friedrich Froebel in 1837 in Germany for three- and four-year-old children. He believed that the kindergarten teacher should not be authoritarian , but instead would guide children’s learning through their own play, songs, stories, and activities (Gutek, 2012). The first public kindergarten in the United States opened in St. Louis in 1873 to serve children in poverty. Children were to learn the virtues and manners, moral habits, cleanliness, politeness, obedience, promptness, and self-control that would prepare them for elementary school. By the 1880s, Froebelian kindergartens had become popular in the United States (Spring, 2001).
Early nursery schools were developed in the 1920s and 1930s on what was known from the emerging field of child development and psychology.
By the beginning of the 20th century, about 6% of the kindergarten-aged population was enrolled in kindergarten. It was at this time that the work of G. Stanley Hall established child development and child psychology as fields of study. He defined childhood as the years between four and eight, which remains the general range for primary education today. The focus of a kindergarten class focused on creating order and discipline in the child’s life, but continued to encourage children to play and be creative. During this period, the age for kindergarteners in public schools was raised to five. Approximately 90% of five-year-olds were attending kindergarten in the 1980s at the time that the curriculum was beginning to shift from being child-centered to academics (Berg, 2003).
Understanding and Using Evidence