Introduction

Schools in America have danced to different drummers during their long history. Sometimes the drumbeat demanded rigidity in all programs; sometimes it wanted academic learning for only a few. Sometimes it encouraged unleashing children’s creativity, not teaching them facts. Sometimes it wanted children to solve the social problems, such as racial segregation, adults could not handle. Sometimes it tacitly supported some schools as warehouses, not instructional facilities. Sometimes it sought schooling to be the equalizer in a society in which the gap between rich and poor was growing. Sometimes the principal purpose of schooling seemed to be teaching citizenship and developing habits of work appropriate for a democratic society, while at other times its purpose seemed to be preparation for employment, which needed the same habits of work but also some academic skills. Now, the drumbeat demands that all children achieve academically at a high level and the measure of that achievement is tests. The rhythm and tempo of the drumbeats have shifted relatively frequently, but the schools have not adjusted to the new musical scores with alacrity. They are typically just beginning to master the previous drummers’ music when new drummers appear. Many, though not all, of the new beats have been improvements both for the children and for the nation. All drummers have sought literacy in English for American children, though very modest literacy levels have been acceptable in the past. Drummers have always sought a few students who attained high levels of academic achievement, including children from disparate social, economic, and racial backgrounds. Beyond that consensus, however, what we have wanted from schooling has changed dramatically over time. These expectations for schools typically have been expressed through criticisms—often virulent—of current school practices, and the responses that followed inevitably were slower and less complete than the most ardent critics demanded. These are the shifting assignments given to schools. The following chapters of this book describe these shifting assignments given to schools and then to colleges during the last century: “Assimilation: 1900– 1920”; “Adjustment: 1920–1954”; “Access: 1954–1983”; and “Achievement: 1983–Present.”

Conclusion

How Well Have American Educational Institutions fulfilled their shifting assignments: assimilation, adjustment, access, achievement, and accountability? On the whole schools and colleges have delivered what Americans wanted but never as promptly or as completely as they wished. Impatience is a national trait, one to which policy people are particularly prone. Typically educational practice changes slowly, finally achieving the new objective after it is decades old. Furthermore, the reforms are usually only a partial implementation of the new idea, which often changes substantially the value of the innovation. Such sluggishness, while annoying to the reformers who want immediate results for their new idea, nonetheless insulates us from the dramatic swings of enthusiasm, such as education for cognition only or for self-esteem only, both necessary and thus both to be sought, but in a balance. Schools and colleges today principally justify their existence by how well they are preparing their students to participate in the economy. Most of the evidence they are inclined to present (or to hide) is based on indicators of student academic learning, an important, though inevitably partial, influence on one’s capacity to be productive in the economy. Two important elements are missing here. The first is whether participation in the economy is a sufficient justification for tax-supported education in a democracy. The second is whether measures of academic learning, most commonly tests, are broad enough indicators of what students have gained from their schooling. Traditionally the goals of education and the more specific task of schooling have been much broader than preparing workers for employment. Both in the United States and elsewhere, education has been seen as the means by which the older generation prepares the younger one to assume responsibilities of adulthood, a much wider role than simple employment. Public schools, especially in a democracy such as ours, have the primary institutional obligation to provide children with the academic skills—particularly literacy, numeracy, and an acquaintance with other disciplines, such as history, science, and the arts—to learn about the world in which they live. In addition, schools typically have had an important role in shaping youngsters’ traits and attitudes, such as their ingenuity, integrity, and capacity for hard work both individually and collectively.

Assimilation: 1900–1920

Alively, Towheaded, Eight-Year-Old Boy shivered with dread and excitement on a cool morning in September 1900 in Ottertail County, Minnesota, as he headed for his first day of school. His older brother, Mads, and his older sister, Esther, had already attempted this venture, and neither had liked it at all. For many, not only the first day of school but latter days as well were a harrowing experience. Subsequently his six younger brothers and sisters would make the same journey, and most of them would not like it either. His father offered one piece of advice in Danish, the only language spoken in the family, “When the teacher looks at you, stand up and say, ‘My name is Victor Lincoln Albjerg.’” That was his preparation for schooling in America. His parents’ concession to his need for Americanization was his middle name; they offered few others. Victor Lincoln Albjerg was my father. Little Victor followed his father’s advice precisely, and when the teacher turned to him, he rose and replied as his father had instructed. Derisive laughter from his fellow students and a frown from the teacher greeted him. Confused and embarrassed, he sat immediately, and understood why Mads and Esther had sought to avoid school. Obviously the teacher had asked him something other than his name, but, since she spoke English and he spoke only Danish, he had no idea what she had said. The teacher, on the other hand, recognized that her preeminent task was to teach her pupils English, and to do so she forbade them from speaking their family language to each other in the school or schoolyard. The sharp rap of the birch rod met such infractions. Despite his inauspicious beginning, Victor prospered in the school, more than his father wished. Victor’s father believed in schooling only within “thrifty limits,” by which he meant a modicum of English and arithmetic and perhaps a bit else but not enough to give students an appetite for further book learning that might take them away from their local environment. As his father feared, Victor, unlike his brothers, did not want to return to the family farm. As he expressed it, “I wanted to be somebody—a rural schoolteacher.”

Autonomy to Accountability

When is Schooling Complete? At the beginning of the twentieth century most Americans believed they had “completed” their schooling if they finished the eighth grade. Only 6 percent of young people then graduated from high school. Eighth-grade graduation was a major celebration, particularly in rural neighborhoods, with the newly recognized scholars feted and dressed in their best as the photograph of my father’s 1908 Ottertail County, Minnesota, eighth-grade class illustrates. In 1955 a ninth-grade student in my homeroom, when queried how far her father had gone in school, replied confidently, “all the way.” That meant high school graduation in the Deep Creek, Virginia, neighborhood. By the end of the twentieth century, however, that definition had changed radically. “Completing schooling” now means some college at a minimum, with about 66 percent of high school graduates now attending, and increasingly it has meant acquiring a post-graduate degree. These changing expectations for what is considered sufficient schooling have dramatically altered American views of higher education. Once thought the domain of the very few (less than 2 percent of the age group in 1900) and largely peripheral to the economy, colleges and universities occupied a very different position at the beginning of the twenty-first century. They now appeal to a mass population, and they constitute a crucial link in the economy through their research and development activities. Furthermore, unlike 1900 when few foreigners would ever have considered coming to the United States to study, they now attract both students and faculty from all over the world, including some of the most gifted and ambitious. The range of these institutions from the leading research universities, which remain among the best in the world, to “open enrollment” institutions (with no requirements for admission other than paying the tuition), which provide unparalleled access to higher education, is extraordinary. Today the academic overlap between some of the best high schools and some undergraduate institutions is considerable, with high school juniors and seniors flourishing in college classes.

Achievement: 1983–Present

Milton Goldberg Worried. As he entered the White House State Dining Room with the members of the commission that he had staffed for the previous two years, the teacher and administrator from Philadelphia pondered what the president of the United States, Ronald Reagan, would say about the report on which they had labored so vigorously. Everyone understood that most federal commission documents descend into immediate obscurity. He feared that destiny for their report. He also feared that the president would call again for policies, such as prayer in schools, vouchers for private school tuition, tuition tax credits, or abolition of the Department of Education (Goldberg’s current employer), that the commission had not endorsed. The president strode vigorously into the room as Goldberg rose anxiously. Reagan genially introduced the report, saying that it fully accorded with his earlier enunciated views on education. Obviously he had not read the report since it did not deal with any of those issues. This report was Reagan’s last major presidential effort on education, although he continued to discuss education in various speeches. The commissioners, who sought public attention for their report as a stimulus to change, feared that the press would now ignore the report, believing they had written a Reagan-support document. As one of the commissioners, physicist Gerald Holton, reported, the authors were appalled and one said loudly enough for the press to hear, “We have been had.” Hearing the remark, journalists in attendance suddenly developed an intense interest in the report. They immediately recognized a profound disconnect between the Reagan administration’s rhetoric about education and the content of the report. Both the political disconnect and the subject matter initially intrigued them, but the substance of the document caught the public’s attention and has remained there for nearly a quarter of a century. A Nation at Risk alerted the American people, often in rather colorful and occasionally purple and erroneous prose, to the danger the country faced if the academic achievement of schoolchildren did not improve.

Access: 1954–1983

“I’ll Never go to School with a Nigger!” Dickie, an eighth grader in my social studies class, shouted vehemently as we began to discuss the Brown v. Board of Education case prohibiting segregation in public schools that the Supreme Court had decided a year before, in 1954. Dickie was right; he never did, dropping out of school two years later, before his Virginia public high school began desegregation. I was flabbergasted and appalled by Dickie’s assertion, only gradually coming to realize that my new profession, teaching, was heading on a rocky road to improvement. In September 1955, as a new, navy bride, I began teaching in still segregated Deep Creek High School serving the predominantly low-income white community of the Dismal Swamp in southeastern Virginia. Prepared as I had been by the mushy adjustment curriculum of my Indiana public schools (lots of attention to my deficient social skills, not much to strengthening my intellect), I had zipped through college. I added the teacher training sequence after I became engaged in order to have a saleable skill when I married on graduation day. My five education courses, most of which I thought academically and professionally worthless, required that I memorize the Seven Cardinal Principles, still the reigning dogma, and I did, believing they represented the fuzzy thinking I associated with public education. I lived in a totally white world, never having had a black friend, fellow student, or teacher. Under Virginia law at that time Deep Creek High School was also a totally white high school world, though surrounded by a black community. The drop-out rate was high: 140 students in eighth grade but only 40 high school seniors. When Dickie made his assertion about segregation, I was astounded both by the language and by the sentiment. We did not use such a term in my household, and, innocent that I was, I thought the Supreme Court had decided the year before in Brown v. Board of Education that public schools could not be legally segregated by race.

Adjustment: 1920–1954

World War I, according to President Woodrow Wilson and other sloganeers, made “the world safe for democracy.” Americans were largely spared the cataclysmic effects of the Great War endured by Europeans. Nonetheless, the national mood in the United States changed dramatically, and, as is so often the case, this shift in sentiments could be clearly discerned in new priorities for the school system, initially for children of welleducated and wealthy parents. Pundits proclaimed that assimilation had been achieved, although the practices associated with it faded only gradually over the next two decades and particularly persisted in schools serving immigrant and other low-income children. America in the 1920s experienced a period of growing wealth, considerable corporate and governmentally ignored greed, widespread racial and religious bigotry, and rapidly changing social mores, particularly for urbanites. In such a period, discussions about the national need for assimilation as a means of preserving the democracy seemed out of place. With so much change in the air, “adjustment” to the new times emerged as the new catchword. Many of the most salient events and practices of the post–World War I period (the Teapot Dome financial scandal, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, lynchings of blacks in the South, and the economic depression following the stock market crash of 1929) did not reflect well on the democracy Americans aspired to have. President Wilson might claim that the world was “safe for democracy,” but his piece of the world, the United States, did not admirably demonstrate it at the time. Nor, of course, did the new Soviet Russia, recently emerged both from incredible losses in World War I and from the yoke of the czars and now engaging in a different form of authoritarian rule. Germany, principal adversary of the Allies in World War I, entered the 1920s badly broken. The Germans attempted a new and ultimately unstable form of government before acquiescing to Hitler’s takeover in 1933, resulting in a devastating defeat of democracy. As the Roaring Twenties took off, American educators, always anxious to be au courant with what was expected of them, found their old priorities obsolete. Prescient school men recognized that the focus was shifting from schools serving a need defined by the nation (assimilation) to one defined by informed, ambitious, and often affluent parents seeking a more supportive school environment for their children and by newly articulate professors of education.