Making Public Education Mandatory:
The Consequences of a Foundation-Supported Idea in City Schools
Judith Sealander
In 1913, Philander P. Claxton, United States Commissioner of Education warned,
"We cannot educate children for a republic like ours, for a democratic government in an
age like ours, if we have them in school only through the years of childhood and
previous to adolescence."1
Throughout the twentieth century leaders of American
foundations agreed. Education in America should be extended, supported by taxes, and
made mandatory.
Education ranked along with medicine and health as the cause most championed by
organized philanthropy between l900 and 2000.2 An estimated one-third to almost onehalf of all monies distributed by organized philanthropy targetted education.3
At
century's beginning and at its end, the country's biggest and most generously endowed
foundations focussed on education of the young as a key to social betterment. Indeed,
many of the nation's most influential philanthropies consistently championed the
improvement of public education as a crucial goal. And a host of smaller organizations
followed the lead established by the Rockefeller, Carnegie, Ford, Spencer, Packard,
Kellogg, Lilly, Danforth, and Gates Foundations.
Not a minute should be wasted. That theme echoed down the decades. Raymond
Fosdick, adviser to both John D. Rockefeller Senior and Junior, and later President of
the Rockefeller Foundation, summarized the need for urgency in a speech given at a
Wellesley College commencement in which he told new graduates:
"We hurry from birth to death, goaded only to greater
haste by our increasingly speedy conveyances, feverishly
trying to catch up with the machinery we ourselves
1
have created. ... You will be tested in a way your
grandfathers never were tested."4
Fosdick spoke in 1922. Alan Pifer, long-time president of the Carnegie Corporation,
repeated the call-to-arms in 1984 with strikingly similar language:
"So forceful is the pervasive impact of new technologies...
that intransigence to change ... can turn proud institutions
into ... decaying edifices where the main road used to run."5
Fosdick, Pifer, and a long list of other influential foundations leaders thought they
had at least one solution to the problems caused by rapid change: expanded and
cumpulsory public education, with philanthropy working in concert with government to
create a new kind of tax-supported institution that would help the country thrive in
turbulent times. That was the kind of "big idea" that Rockefeller Senior's chief adviser
on philanthropy, former Baptist minister Frederick Gates, always promoted.6 And it
was still supported - for the same kinds of reasons - decades after Gates retired in the
late l920s.
Compusory schooling was a policy that dramatically changed American public
education, especially in the cities.
This essay will not chronicle the century of
foundation-supported initiatives to expand public education and make it mandatory.
They range from the General Education Board's financing of lobbyists to help state
legislatures craft compulsory education laws in the early twentieth century to the Gates
Millennium Scholarships, announced in 1999, and meant to improve the performance of
black and other minority students in the nation's public elementary and secondary public
schools.7
Rather, it intends to do something else - to assess the long-term impact of a
foundation-supported idea, the imposition of compulsory public schooling, on American
cities, and on the American mind.
2
The common school movement of the nineteenth century had called for public
education of children. Twentieth century compulsory education policy demanded that
American youth attend high school, transforming an institution previously meant for a
tiny elite. Fewer than seven percent of all seventeen year olds in the country were high
school graduates in 1900. By l940, almost half were. The percentages of American
youth earning a high school degree steadily increased before stalling in the mid l970s.
For the rest of the century the percentage of the country's high school graduates
remained relatively constant. A little over eighty percent earned a diploma.8
Was that a policy victory? The answer cannot be a simple "yes" or "no." twentieth
century public education's legacy was complicated. On one hand, extended schooling
certainly became a more universal experience for most American youth.
But the
language of applied psychology, not doctrines of democracy, dominated decisions
made about the appropriate training of millions of youngsters. Generations of educators
and politicians disagreed about what standards should organize compulsory education.
They debated the relative value of education before employment and education after
employment. They invented and then re-invented curriculums. In l923 analysts at the
U.S. Office of Education concluded wearily that much of the time they were "laying
down principles in the dark."9
That continued to be true throughout the century.
The early twentieth century campaign to compel teenagers to attend school extended
the efforts of nineteenth century reformers to create public or "common" schools.
In
l852, Massachusetts enacted the country's first mandatory attendance code - requiring
parents to send children from ages seven to fourteen to a public school for at least
twelve weeks a year. However, this Massachusett's initiative was not influential.
Decades passed before most other states required some form of mandatory schooling.
By l900, however, compulsory education had become a national norm. Nonetheless,
that statement demands qualification.
Nowhere were mandatory education laws
3
effectively enforced, and common schools remained highly individualistic local
institutions.
Citizens and state legislatures certainly resisted the principle that the
property of all could be taxed to educate the children of all. Tuition fees and voluntary
contributions continued to provide substantial portions of school budgets in many parts
of the country through the late nineteenth century. In the South, a region where few
states had compulsory education statutues, even this kind of "public" schooling was
unavailable for many children, regardless of race.10
Finally, nineteenth century education laws, where they existed, focussed on the
basic training of young children. Indeed, in l873 the Massachusetts legislature revised
its landmark statute and no longer required anyone after age twelve to attend school. In
classrooms that emphasized memorization and recitation, adolescents could throw order
into disarray. They could certainly challenge young female teachers - themselves often
teenagers or barely into their twenties.11
As a new century began in l900, high percentages of American children, especially
outside of the South, went to elementary schools. Nonetheless, only about one-half of
those who entered first grade went further than the sixth. Barely one in three completed
the typical eight-year grammar school course. Fewer than one in five went on to high
school, and of that number five out of six failed to graduate.12
There was no one reason why a generation of reformers well represented in the
offices of America's first major foundations viewed these statistics as threatening and
demanded extended, state-sponsored education.
Rather,
many factors promoted
mandatory schooling past age twelve. The reformers who wanted to restrict child labor,
especially for those aged fourteen to sixteen, naturally tied their cause to demands for
increased opportunities for public schooling. But the child labor laws championed by
philanthropies like the Russell Sage Foundation cost the average taxpayer nothing, at
least directly. In contrast, the implementation of mandatory adolescent education was
4
expensive. As attendance skyrocketed, so did costs, financed in most states by a welter
of new property taxes. Public schools dependent on voluntary contributions became
increasingly rare.13
An urban elite much influenced by foundation arguments led the drive for expanded
public education, just as it had the movement to restrict child labor. Clearly top-down
reform, compulsory education nonetheless tapped into a deep national unease. During
decades of tumultuous social and economic change, ordinary Americans accepted a
new notion - that decisions about the education of teenagers could "no longer be the
province of the home."14
Indeed, a rapidly changing society which separated work
from family life could no longer depend on parents alone to guide the lives of its
teenagers. If extended education were to repair a fraying national civic culture, it had
to be made mandatory. Jane Addams was only one of dozens of Progressives who
warned that "Until educators take hold of the situation, the rest of the community is
powerless."15
Moreover, the "lazy" native-born fathers who had long played a prominent role as
villains in child labor law campaigns had potential reinforcements among the millions
of immigrants flooding into the nation's urban areas.16
The threat of the country's
"foreign" cities, in which over one-third of the male adults were non-voting, noncitizens, loomed large.
This was true even in the nation's rural areas. In l903, for
instance, Kentucky was one the country's least urban states, with one of its lowest rates
of in-migration from abroad. Nonetheless, the chambers of its state legislature echoed
with speeches about the "hordes of prolific immigrants which pour upon our shores."17
In Kentucky, and throughout the country, alarmed politicians responded by passing
the kinds of education laws organized philanthropies demanded. By l918, when
Mississippi became the last state in the nation to enact a mandatory public schooling
statute, trends that distinguished twentieth century compulsory education from its
5
nineteenth century antecedents were already apparent.18 Legislation usually established
much longer periods of schooling per year and demanded that children between the ages
of six and sixteen consistently attend classes.
Moreover, most statutes established
enforcement mechanisms, requiring school districts to employ attendance officers and
keep truancy records.19 A few months a year of attendance at a common school from
the ages of six to thirteen no longer typified the average American child's public
education.
The public high school had arrived. During the first two decades of the
twentieth century, a new one opened, on average, every single day.
20
But the new
high schools were not like the old. Unlike their predecessors, the former promised to
train for citizenship, not for college.
Education leaders, like the Rockefeller Foundation's Abraham Flexner, promoted
the comprehensive high school as the best institution in America to unify young people
of all abilities, goals, and backgrounds.
But they also embraced psychological
techniques that categorized and separated students. Intelligence testing meant that a
vision of schools as microcosms of democracy never received wide-spread application.
The separations by supposed ability intelligence testing introduced, especially in big
cities, dramatically re-interpreted that goal.
Between l900 and l928,
a first generation of psychologists with Ph.D.'s from
American universities struggled for legitimacy. Few members of the general public
knew the profession even existed, much less what its practitioners really did. The
regular physicians who controlled hospitals and health care rarely treated psychologists
as equal colleagues. Few followed the latter group's largely internal arguments about
human mentality or emotional growth. Nor was the conception that intelligence was
quantifiable and measurable widely accepted. Only in the conference rooms of a
rarified number of academic institutions like Yale, Harvard, or the University of
Chicago, all liberally endowed by leading foundations, or in the offices of a select
6
group of nationally-oriented philanthropies, led by the Laura Rockefeller Spelman
Memorial, headed in the l920s by a young psychologist named Beardsley Ruml, did
such "big ideas" stir genuine excitement.21
In fact when the French psychologist Alfred Binet first tried to study intelligence
during the first decade of the twentieth century, he turned to old-fashioned nineteenth
century craniometry and took out calipers to measure skulls. However, Binet soon
abandoned the work, regarding all his results as hopelessly inconclusive. Instead, he
invented "mental testing."
The ability to reason, not physical characteristics, like the
width of the skull or the speed of blinking, demonstrated intelligence. In l904, Binet
persuaded the French ministry of public education to allow him to develop a set of
procedures
to identify feeble-minded children who would not succeed in regular
classrooms. By l906, he created a battery of tasks, calculated to determine a child's
ability to reason. Youngsters copied drawings, judged which of two objects was
heavier, identified parts of their bodies ("Which is your left eye?") and repeated
sentences verbatim. Children began the Binet tests with tasks for the youngest age and
proceeded until they could no longer complete any instructions successfully. The age at
which a child failed to perform was his "mental age." When the tester divided this
mental age by the subject's chronological age, then multiplied by one hundred, he
determined an "intelligence quotient."22
The IQ was born, but initially few noted the appearance of a calculation that would
affect the lives of millions of American schoolchildren and permanently change the way
Americans thought about ability and education.
After all,
rankings of feeble-
mindedness among French schoolchildren did not resonate with the general American
public. Mass testing of men summoned for the draft in l9l7 and l9l8, however, certainly
did.
7
Robert Yerkes, a Harvard professor and president of the fledgling American
Psychological Association, scored a coup of immense importance to his profession
when, with the direct help of Raymond Fosdick, he persuaded Secretary of War Newton
D. Baker to test recruits to eliminate the "mentally unfit." The Binet test had required an
examiner to spend between two and three hours with each individual child, recording
responses to dozens of tasks and questions.
Yerkes knew that such a system would
never work when utilized on a huge scale.
Instead, he and Stanford University
colleague Lewis Terman, created a symplified system that could be administered to
large groups and two sets of tests - Alpha for those who could read English and Beta for those who could not.
As critics correctly charged, cultural and class biases riddled the exams. Bettereducated recruits were far more likely successfully to complete the verbal analogies that
the Alpha tests emphasized. Expected to work rapidly and timed by stop-watches, they
raced through lists of words to choose whether "butter, rain, cold, cotton, or water,"
most resembled "ivory, snow, and milk."
Even the non-verbal Beta tests demanded
comprehension of cultural cues many poorly-educated natives and the vast majority of
new immigrants did not possess. A Beta recruit's fate rested in his ability, for instance,
to assemble a picture of the American flag, with the proper number of stars and stripes.23
Army
testing
certainly
imprinted
intelligence
testing
on
the
American
consciousness. It did not establish its permanence. Illinois Senator Lawrence Sherman
was not the only politician who ridiculed psychology's power during openly-skeptical
Congressional hearings held in late l9l8, but he was among the most sarcastic. With
Yerkes as his unhappy victim, Sherman ranted about his dislike of a strange new
profession peopled by men
" ...
with x-ray vision (who) drop different colored
handkerchiefs on a table, spill a half-pint of navy beans, ask you in sepulchral tones
8
what disease Sir Walter Raleigh died of, and demand the number of legumes without
counting."24
Indeed, at war's end, the Army promptly disbanded its testing program.
Most
generals thought psychological testing posed threats to chain of command and
successfully lobbied the War Department to abandon the experiment.
Moreover,
American business executives, after an initial flurry of enthuasism, quickly discovered
that workers in factories and offices resented IQ tests - especially if they were made part
of interviews for employment.25
Only one group of American leaders, superintendent of schools, enthusiastically
accepted intelligence testing.
American adults shunned IQ exams, but they became
central to the organization of American public education. Psychological decisions about
their mental abilities determined the kind of schooling millions of children would
receive, Even when words popularized by the tests, like "idiot, moron, and imbecile"
ceased to have psychological significance, they remained as invectives, and Americans
continually sought to be "normal."26
Extended compulsory public education was the product of a highly segregated age.
The policy's paeans to unity did not include African-Americans. But race alone proved
an insufficient division for beleaguered school superintendents in crowded urban
schools. Intelligence tests provided many more for officials struggling to organize the
new mass systems of American public education. Funded by a $25,000 grant from the
General Education Board, soon to be supplemented with additional help from the
Carnegie Foundation, Yerkes and Terman assembled a team which converted their
Army IQ tests for use by educational administrators. School superintendents, unlike
their business counterparts, quickly incorporated these adapted tests and made them a
vital part of public schooling's organizational structure.
9
The dramatic growth urban schools, in fact, spurred the creation of the job of
superintendent. At the turn of the century, when 70 percent of Americans still lived in
rural areas,
hundreds of thousands of local school boards made decisions about
children's education. The members of these boards were rarely professional educators.
Instead they reflected the communities which elected them to serve and were farmers,
businessmen, and lawyers who presided over relatively simple school systems in which
one-room schoolhouses were still common, but paid administrators were a rarity.
In
big cities, school boards were huge and highly political. Boards with between one
hundred and two hundred members, all elected by wards, squabbled over everything
from the price of paint to the cost of textbooks.
The same foundation-supported Progressives who engineered extended mandatory
schooling revolutionalized this system during the first two decades of the twentieth
century. In many states, charters from state legislatures allowed them to reorganize
public education without popular vote. Everywhere, the watchword was consolidation.
Previously independent school populations merged.
Per capita spending on public
education increased six-fold, and a new group of professionals began to run systems that
suddenly seemed too complicated for amateurs.27
Especially in extremely overcrowded urban school districts, intelligence testing
provided a vehicle that classified students by ability. No longer needed by the Army,
Lewis Terman devoted his considerable energies to promotion of the use of his revised
Stanford-Binet battery of examinations in the public schools. By l925, almost 90
percent of urban school districts used some form of intelligence testing, and big city
systems employed staffs of full-time psychologists.28
By the time the enthusiasm for testing peaked in l930, many districts employed a
panoply of mental examinations. Schoolchildren took speed tests that draftees in l9l8
would have found familiar - naming four synonyms for "red" in one minute; counting
10
backwards, finding the missing element in a picture. They also faced many more
examinations, some of which greatly blurred the line between tests of intelligence and
judgments about character.
The "Will-Profile Test" purportedly measured childrens'
"will-to-do" - the ability to stick to a task even when distracted - by demanding that
they write the same word repeatedly.
Psychologists studied the resultant handwriting
samples and scored the test-takers for such personality characteristics as "perseverance,"
"self assurance" and "self-inhibition."29
The "Liao Test" attempted to judge "trustworthiness and moral worth." It presented
students with a statement, underneath which were placed five reasons for its truth. The
statements were verbal minefields; only one answer was a "morally good" one. For
example, appended to the the phrase: "It is wrong not to work" were the following five
explanations:
"1) Idle people are called lazy.
2) Idle people earn no money.
3) Idle people are discontented.
4) Idle people live on the work of others.
5) Good men tell us we should work. "30
Pity the poor child who did not choose the correct answer: number four. His or her
school records would include the notation: "doubtful intellectual honesty."31
As pyschologist Edwin Baring admitted in l923, "Intelligence as a measurable
capacity must at the start be defined as the capacity to do well in an intelligence test."32
At least he was being intellectually honest. Few of his colleagues were as forthright.
After the l930s, fewer school systems openly tested for intelligence. Instead, they
examined for "ability" and organized students into "ability groupings." The change
meant little, even if softer words replaced the early twentieth century's stark divisions
into "defectives," "inferiors," "normals," and "superiors." "Superior" children continued
11
to be white, native-born, and relatively privileged.
School psychologists remained a
fixture of American public education, and American kids contined to be tested. In the
early twentieth century high percentages of the children of the poor
and recent
immigrants scored in "sub-normal" ranges. After the l960s, when American public
schools finally began to de-segregate, so did black youngsters.
Despite a rising tide of criticism of testing's cultural, racial, class, and gender biases,
it remained "the bread and butter" of an influential group of public school specialists.33
Indeed the numbers and percentages of psychologists employed by the nation's public
schools steadily increased during the last three decades of the century. During years of
retrenchment, school psychology was still a growth area. 34
Indeed, the one-half of high school students who were college bound took more
intelligence tests than ever. In l948, the non-profit corporation, the Educational Testing
Service (ETS) , opened its doors for business in Princeton, New Jersey. In the decades
to follow, dozens of other examinations joined its first test battery, the Scholastic
Achievement Test. Though ETS took great pains to say otherwise, in fact the SAT was
an IQ test. Like all its predecessors, it best measured language fluency. And the notion
that intelligence bore racial and ethnic tags persisted. In l994, Rutgers University
president Francis Lawrence created a firestorm when he let slip his view that few blacks
had the "genetic, hereditary background" to earn high SAT scores.35
Indeed American schoolchildren remained "the most thoroughly IQ tested in the
world."36 The consequences were enormous. The really extraordinary increases in U.
S. high school attendance occurred in the early twentieth century, far ahead of parallel
surges in other highly industrialized countries in Europe and Asia. There, substantial
opportunities for publicly-funded education past the elementary level came only after
World War Two. In some countries, American-style mass access had not yet arrived. 37
12
But mass access did not unify American teenagers. By the time most adolescents
left the eighth grade they had long since been divided into groups - ostensibly ranked by
intelligence.
In l922, for instance, the Pittsburgh schools tested all first and second
graders. By the third grade, in most of the city's elementary schools, Pittsburgh kids
judged to be "defectives" "subnormals" and "low-grade normals"
had special
classrooms. After another round of group intelligence testing in the sixth grade, "high
superiors" had the chance to take accelerated classes, including courses in chemistry,
botany, and advanced Latin.
By the eighth grade, all pupils with poor scores were
urged to take vocational courses. 38
To a greater or lesser degree most American school systems followed Pittsburgh's
model for the rest of the century.
rigorous academic curriculum.
Only a minority of high school students studied a
Between a half and two-thirds instead enrolled in
"general" or "vocational tracks."
In 1919 Lewis Terman reassured that "inferiors were ... not necessarily undesirable
members of society."39 But academic training for anyone who tested at or below 80 IQ
was "just so much dead waste."40 In fact, for much of the twentieth century, few public
schools focussed on rigorous curriculums. Schools by mid-century still repeated the
early twentieth century mantras about instilling common citizenship, but, perhaps
appropriate for institutions shaped by foundation-supported psychology, schools for also
for "life adjustment."
Critics furiously charged that, "The men who drafted our Constitution were not
trained for the task by 'field trips' to the mayor's office and the county jail."41 But lifeadustment education had a impact. In l987 Diane Ravitch and Chester Finn, then codirectors of the Educational Excellence Network, an organization created to lobby for
more academic content in public education, published the results of a nation-wide
13
survey of history and literature teaching in secondary schools. They asked the question,
"What Do Our Seventeen Year Olds Know?" and answered, "appalling little."42
Until the l940s students on an academic track studied history every year from
kindergarten through twelfth grade. By the late l980s few states required more than one
year of history instruction. Often history was no longer even taught as a separate
course, but instead was part of a "social studies" or "community living" unit. Not
surprisingly, eleventh graders had only a vague grasp of which European nations
explored and settled different parts of North America, had never heard of the Federalist
Papers, were only fuzzily aware of the causes of the Civil War, and unable to answer
whether the Soviet Union in l944 was allied with or opposed to Nazi Germany. They
had seen a video of "Macbeth" but had not read the play and had never heard of T. S.
Eliot or of Homer.43 Ravitch and Finn concluded that something was "gravely awry."
American high school students were not "stupid," but they were "ignorant of important
things that (they) should know."44
The century began with the rapid expansion of public secondary education and a
new expectation: that teenagers stay in school longer. It ended with little agreement
about what they should be doing there. Critics charged that "after decades of endless
gold stars, happy faces, and inflated grades" American adults were not ready for a
"reality check about how much our schools are really teaching."45 And angry parents
did storm planning sessions all over the country, when, by the 1990s, state education
departments tried to create more rigorous systems for teaching and testing subjects like
math, English, and science.
The opposition to standards-based education created odd
alliances between suburban soccer moms and residents of inner-city slums. Middle
class parents fretted about the "excessive pressure" their children faced.46 On the other
hand, minority groups argued that blacks and Hispanics failed the tests at
14
disproportionately higher rates and that graduation testing was a "sad blow for civil
rights."47
A review of public compulsory education reveals the enormous influence of
generations of school administrators and their allies within organized philanthropy and
other private institutions. The latter rarely spent much time consulting teachers, parents,
or children themselves.
But students did make one clear statement. Throughout the
century, a percentage of them dropped out of school.
The actual numbers of American children legally compelled to be in school who
were not there was always contested. The guesses ranged wildly. Even at the end of the
century, when the school census was a universal bureaucratic routine, estimates of
drop-out rates varied. Some studies found that fewer than two percent of students who
should have been in school had, in fact, left. Others publicized rates as alarmingly high
as thirty percent.48 Experts, however, did agree that the century had seen a steady
increase in the numbers of American teens who completed high school.
Until mid-century harried school administrators, especially in cities, did not really
regard those who failed to finish as a problem. They were too overwhelmed by the
numbers crowding into their schools to worry very much about those who chose to
leave. While most state compulsory education laws required attendance at school until
age sixteen, most also allowed exemptions for children over age fourteen with valid
work permits. No law ever demanded high school graduation. And no-one spent much
energy reviewing permits or looking for absentees.
Mandatory attendance laws remained as they had been written in the early twentieth
century, with school-leaving legal after age sixteen. But increasingly the drop-out was
defined not as an teenager absent illegally who had not reached that age. Instead, he or
she was anyone who failed to finish high school.
15
By the l950s drop-outs had emerged as a danger to society. Early twentieth century
educators assumed, generally correctly, that school leavers needed to go to work or help
cope with a family crisis at home. Their mid-century successors decried them as "social
misfits ... with an emotional block."49 The fact that, like their early twentieth century
counterparts, most kids said they left school to find work, meant nothing. They gave
such answers, according to George Smith, Superintendent of Schools in Hollywood,
California, only to "save face."50 They really failed to graduate because "they have
never been satisfied with anything, and have never have had any success in life."51
An early twentieth century education official would have been glad to see the backs
of such pariahs. But if school was for social adjustment, then drop-outs were the lost
sheep most worth saving.
For the rest of the century, local, state, and federal
governments, and like-minded reformers at institutions like the Ford, Spencer, Lilly, and
Danforth Foundations, spent tens of millions of dollars on programs meant to coax the
unwilling to stay in school.
But beyond the rhetoric no real consensus existed about the virtues of school
attendance for all. Not everyone accepted the idea that a drop out would soon be a jail
bird, despite the overwhelming popularity of the notion among policy makers. Nor did
all analysts judge school-leaving to be a ticket to economic oblivion. In their first year
after leaving school drop-outs were twice as likely as high school graduates to be
unemployed. However, after that first twelve-month period, the differences between
the two groups faded. Once employed, a drop-out's job was indistinguishable from that
held by a person with a high school diploma, but no further education. In the late
twentieth century most professional work demanded a college degree. Luck and pluck,
much more than a high school certificate, determined success at all other sorts of
enterprises.52
16
Policy recommendations about school attendance ran the gamut.
Some school
boards began openly to discuss the problems caused by "stay-ins." Some began to
formulate expulsion policies for teenagers who came to school - only to engage in a
range of misbehaviors - from carrying weapons to nodding off in class. Indeed, during
the l990s high school detentions, suspensions, and permanent expulsion rates exploded,
jumping tenfold between l995 and l999 alone.53
But paralleling this phenomenon was another. If schools were throwing record
numbers of students out, they also were beefing up truancy enforcement. Around the
country, public school administrators teamed up with prosecutors and threatened parents
of children who chronically skipped school with fines and jail time. And unlike early
twentieth officials, they meant it. Parents in several states found themselves serving
from sixty to ninety days in the slammer when they failed to heed repeated warnings to
get their kids to school. Some districts tried another approach - one many prosecutors
claimed to be even more effective. Truants learned that their parents were not going to
jail. Rather they would be "sentenced" to school, required to sit next to their children in
class. Michael Godwin, district attorney of Escambia County, Alabama, explained,
"The kids don't care that their parents go to jail, but they do not want a parent in the
classroom. That strikes fear in their hearts."54 The half-dozen states that followed West
Virginia's 1986 example did something even more potentially terrifying. They created
"no-pass, no-drive" laws that withheld the car keys from school drop-outs.55
At the least, the messages were mixed. Critics, like Bard College president Leon
Botstein, challenged the "twelve year sentence" early twentieth century reforms had
imposed on millions of American youngsters. Botstein, for instance, wanted children to
begin elementary school at age four and demanded the abolition of junior high, to be
replaced by four additional years of mandatory secondary education beginning with the
seventh grade. Most American kids would be out of high school before they reached
17
their sixteenth birthdays. "Adults," said Botstein, should "face the fact that they don't
like adolescents, and that they have used high school to isolate (them) away from (us.)
"56 Other students of American education policy went further than Bostein and urged
that compulsory education itself be abolished.57
This kind of opposition would likely have astonished many of the early twentieth
century philanthropists who helped create extended, mandatory public schooling. In
1913, University of Chicago President Henry Pratt Judson reflected a common view in a
long, thoughtful letter to John D. Rockefeller, Junior.
Plans, he predicted, that
"normally accord with human desire" would be relatively easy to implement.
Education, he assured, "would fall in this category." People were glad to accept the
"blessings" of knowledge and training for their children.
"If they do not avail
themselves it is usually from inertia (rather than from) active opposition." While
Judson was certainly right that "plans which conflict with human desire," such as efforts
to ban alcohol and prostitution, would face great difficulties, he was unduly optimistic
about easy success and uniformly positive outcomes for plans that improved America by
expanding its systems of public education.58
This examination
of some of the
unexpected consequences of acceptance of an idea that received enthusiastic foundation
support throughout the twentieth century certainly reveals that. Compulsory education
changed the nation's cities, but not everyone saw all the changes as "blessings."
18
1
P. P. Claxton, "A Substitute for Child Labor," Child Labor Bulletin 2 (1913): 6
2
Preparing for a l924 conference attended by major foundation leaders from around the country, Edwin
Embree, then at the Rockefeller Foundation but soon to join the Rosenwald Fund, wrote, correctly, " The
general foundations committed to objects other than medicne, health, or education, are surprisingly few."
Edward Embree, Paper Read For a Conference of Officers of the Several Rockefeller Philanthropies, Gedney
Farms, New York, January 18, 1924, Records of the Rockefeller Foundation, (Hereafter RF) Record Group 3,
Series 900, Box 22, Folder 165, Rockefeller Archive Center, Tarrytown, New York, (Hereafter RAC.)
3
For reviews of foundation goals and spending in the twentieth century see: David Hammack, "Foundations in
the American Polity, 1900-1950," and Peter Frumkin, "Private Foundations as Public Institutions, Regulation,
Professionalization, and the Redefinition of Organized Philanthropy," in: Ellen Lagemann, Ed., Philanthropic
Foundations, New Scholarship, New Possibilities (Bloomington, 1999), 43-101.
4
Raymond Fosdick, "An Address Delivered at Commencent Exercises, Wellesley College, June 20, 1922," in:
Rockefeller Family Archives, Rockefeller Boards, Rockefeller Foundation (Hereafter, Family), Box 25, Folder
257, RAC. Emphasis in original.
5
Alan Pifer, "Foundations at the Service of the Public," in: Philanthropy in an Age of Transition, (New York,
1984), 31.
6
See, for example, Frederick Gates, "Thoughts on the Rockefeller Public and Private Benefactions," Typed
Copy, 1926, Records of the General Education Board (Hereafter GEB) Series 1, Sub-series 5, Box 717, Folder
7388, RAC.
7
For a review of the continued emphasis through the end of the century on foundation support for public
schools see: "Nation's Wealthy Are Stepping in to Assist Schools," New York Times, September 23, 1999.
19
8
Educators and government agencies sometimes challenged that 80 percent figure. Those who believed that
recipients of general educational development (GED) or other high school equivalency certificates, often
earned many years after dates of school leaving, should be included in American high school graduation rates
argued that high school graduation rates, by the l990s, were closer to 90 percent. Since this essay examines
the consequences of compulsory education, and not the consequences of the creation of post-high school
remediation programs, it will use the former percentage. For discussion of high school graduation rates in the
twentieth century see: U. S. National Center for Education Statistics, Digest of Education Statistics l992
(Washington, D. C., 1992), 108-110.
9
United States Office of Education, Summary Report on Apprentice Education in the United States
(Washington, D. C., 1923): 13.
10
Despite a major focus on improving southern public education, the directors of the General Education Board
concluded in 1914 that "There are certain conditions distinctly unfavorable to orderly educational
development." They were right. The South would be the last region in the country to join the compulsory
education movement, and Mississippi would be the last state to require its children in l9l8 to go to a stateapproved school at least part of every year. "Confidential Memo to the Members of the General Education
Board," May 1, 1914, GEB, Series 1, Sub-series 5, Box 720, Folder 7416, RAC.
11
For discussions of nineteenth century compulsory education legislation and the common school see: Joseph
Kett, "School Leaving: Dead End or Detour?" in: Diane Ravitch and Maris Vinovskis, Learning from the
Past: What History Teaches Us About School Reform (Baltimore, l995), 265-71; Carl Kaestle and Maris
Vinovskis, Education and Social Change in Ninteenth Century Massachusetts, (Cambridge, 1980); Leon
Botstein, Jefferson's Children: Education and the Promise of American Culture (New York, 1998); Michael
Katz, A History of Compulsory Education Laws, (Bloomington, In., l976), 14-21.
12
In the nineteenth century a typical school system paired an eight year elementary school curriculum with a
four-year high school course attended by a tiny percentage of a community's children. Junior high schools
remained atypical innovations until the l920s. In many rural areas, public education ended at the elementary
20
level, and even moderately large cities of 50,000 to 80,000 residents had only one high school. Everett Lord,
"Child Labor and the Public Schools," National Child Labor Committee, Pamphlet 93, (New York, l909), 5-7;
Hollis Caswell, "The Great Reappraisal of Public Education," Teachers College Record 54 (1952): 12 -22.
13
The significance of the great increase in the number of teenagers served by secondary public schools
becomes clearer when high school enrollments are compared with population data for youth 14-17 years of
age. While high school enrollments doubled during every decade between l890 and l940, the increases in the
numbers and percentages of the nation's population between 14 and l7 were far more modest. A nation with
5, 300, 000 residents of that age in l890 included 9, 340,000 in l940 - a rate of increase dwarfed by those for
high school enrollments. See: Report of the First Commission on Life Adjustment Education for Youth,
Bulletin 1951:3 , United States Office of Education, Vitalizing Secondary Education (Washington, D. C.,
1951), 4-6.
14
Everett Lord, "Child Labor and the Public Schools," 4.
15
Jane Addams, The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets, (New York, 1915), 110.
16
The "lazy and too proud" man who willfully refused to allow his children education was a staple of
literature demanding tougher compulsory education laws, just as it was for that decrying child labor. For a
typical example, see: Harriet Comstock, "The Whitest Gift of All," Child Labor Bulletin 3 (1914): 7-12. In
this story little Maria Maud has a "turrible" desire for learning, but her father refuses to allow her to go to
school, and in her "southern hills" state laws did not exist to challenge him.
17
Oratory of this type often ended with a plea to educate the "American stock" of which Kentucky was so
proud, in order to "balance" immigration. For a collection of such speeches see: "A Rare Type of Oratory,"
Berea Quarterly 7 (1903): 26-32, The Berea College Archives, Berea, Kentucky.
18
For a graph that provides a timetable for the passage of early twentieth century mandatory education
statutues see: Appendix ____
19
Interestingly, once in place by l920, compulsory education laws changed relatively little for the rest of the
century.
The mean legal age for leaving school remained sixteen in most states. The one state (Delaware)
21
that compelled attendance until age seventeen and the five (Idaho, Ohio, Oklahoma, Nevada, and Utah) which
required it until age eighteen had already done so by l920. Southern states were the last to adopt compulsory
education, and they remained the states with the fewest numbers of days per year of required schooling and the
greatest number of exemptions.
20
Michael Katz, A History of Compulsory Education, 23.
21
Among other important philanthropies which watched the development of the new discipline of psychology
with interest and provided it with significant financial support were: the Commonwealth Fund, the
Rockerfeller Foundation itself, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, and John D.
Rockefeller Junior's Bureau of Social Hygiene - where researchers sought to tap psychology's potential to
solve the social problems caused by vice crime, among other things.
22
For discussions of Binet's work see: Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York, 1981), 146-
158; Leonard Ayres, "The Binet-Simon Measuring Scale for Intelligence: Some Criticisms and Suggestions,"
Psychological Clinic 5 (1911): l87-96; Paul David Chapman, Schools as Sorters: Lewis Terman, Applied
Psychology, and the Intelligence Testing Movement, l890-l930 (New York, l988), 19-36; John Burnham,
"Psychology, Psychiatry, and the Progressive Movement," American Quarterly 12 (l960): 457-65; Paula
Fass, "The IQ: A Cultural and Historical Framework," American Journal of Education 88 (l980): 431-58.
23
For a scholarly summary of the Army testing see: Daniel Kevles, "Testing the Army's Intelligence:
Psychologists and the Military in World War One," Journal of American History 55 (l968): 565-81. Yerkes
himself wrote extensively about the program. See Robert Yerkes and Clarence Yoakum, Eds., Army Mental
Tests (New York, l920); Robert Yerkes, "Psychology in Relation to War," Psychological Review 25 (1918):
85-115; Robert Yerkes, "Report of the Psychology Committee of the National Research Council,"
Psychological Review 26 (1919): 83-149.
24
Senator Lawrence Sherman, (Republican of Illinois) quoted in: JoAnne Brown, The Definition of a
Profession: The Authority of Metaphor in the History of Intelligence Testing, 1890-1930 (Princeton, l992),
114.
22
25
Ibid., 58-117.
26
Some state asylums used the term "idiot" in the nineteenth century, but it was not as commonly used in
typical speech as it became after the advent of the IQ tests, nor did the term in the nineteenth century mean a
specific numerical deficiency of intelligence, as it did in the twentieth century tests. Common nineteenth
century terms for those deemed to be of low intelligence were not necessarily kinder, but they derived from
long use in popular culture: "fool, simpleton, and dim-wit" were most likely to be heard.
27
For discussions of the transformation of school systems between l900-l925 see: David Tyack, One Best
System (Cambridge, Ma., l974), 66-88; David Tyack and Elizabeth Hansot, Managers of Virtue: Public
School Leadership in America, l820-1980 (New York, l982); Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order
(Cambridge, Ma., l978); 123-134; Michael Kirst, "School Board: Evolution of an American Institution,"
American School Board Journal Special Issue (1991): 11-15; Michael Kirst, "Who's in Charge? Federal,
State, and Local Control," in Diane Ravitch and Maris Vinovskis, Learning from the Past, 30-34; Diane
Ravitch, Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms (New York, 2000), 13-202; David Angus and
Jeffrey Mirel, The Failed Promise of the American High School: 1890-1995 (New York, 1999), 1-57; Larry
Cuban and David Tyack, Tinkering Towards Utopia: A Century of Public School Reform (Cambridge, Ma.,
1995), 5-75; Alan Ryan, John Dewey: And the High Tide of American Liberalism (New York, 1995.) In
proportional terms increases in public spending on schools during the first half of the twentieth century greatly
exceeded those since l950, and the greatest spurts in school expenditures came between l900 and l929. Since
l960, the major increases in state spending were for prisons, health care, and hospitals.
28
Paul David Chapman, Schools as Sorters, 3; Paul David Chapman, "Schools as Sorters: Testing and
Tracking in California, 1910-1925," Journal of Social History 14 (1981): 701-17. Most large school systems
also established separate bureaucracies for testing - though the names varied. Pittsburgh established the model
of a Department of Hygiene, which housed a Psychological Clinic. Other cities used a system organized first
in the Cincinnati schools - a "Guidance Bureau." West coast cities followed Oakland's example and often
created "Bureaus of Research." For detailed discussions of the incorporation of psychological testing and
23
applied psychology into public school systems see: United States Children's Bureau, "Vocational Guidance
and Junior Placement: Twelve Cities in the United States," Bureau Publication 149, (Washington, D. C., l925(,
93-275.
29
"Self-inhibition" was a "clear" characteritistic of intelligent and successful people. Complete descriptions of
the test can be found in: Guy Montrose Whipple, Ed., Twenty-First Yearbook of the National Society for the
Study of Education, Intelligence Tests and Their Uses: The Nature, History and General Principles of
Intelligence Testing and the Administrative Use of Intelligence Tests (Bloomington, Il, 1923), 39.
30
Ibid., 40-41.
31
Ibid., 41. Another example of the bewildering quality of the Liao Test, which allowed for no deviation
from the one "right" answer. Statement: "A kind word is better than a harsh word." Explanations: 1. A harsh
word makes others unhappy. 2. A harsh word makes us disliked. 3. President Roosevelt said, "Speak Softly."
4. A harsh word is generally a hasty word. 5. Kind people succeed in life.
(The child with "good moral judgment" was supposed to pick answer one. )
32
Edwin Baring, "Intelligence as the Tests Test It," The New Republic 35 (l923): 35.
33
For an interesting series of interviews conducted with school psychologists in the l980s see: Carl Milofsky,
Testers and Testing: The Sociology of School Psychology (New Brunswick, l989), quotation: 22.
Psychologists Milofsky interviewed argued that, while they often had doubts about the validity of their
results, without ability testing they would lose legitimacy and probably their jobs.
34
J. M Heffron, "Intelligence Testing and Its Pitfalls: The Making of an American Tradition," History of
Education Quarterly, 31 (l991): 82-88.
35
Francis Lawrence quoted in: Nicholas Lemann, "The Great Sorting," Atlantic Monthly 276 (l995): 88.
36
Ibid. And as the century ended, controveries over IQ and its meanings continued unabated. Despite
decades of experiments that suggested that racial, gender, or ethnic intellectual differences had less to do with
heredity, and more to do with environmental advantage, notions of intelligence by group persisted. For
instance, black and multi-racial children raised in white homes, approached or exceeded IQ norms for white
24
populations. Nonetheless, a l990 poll of members of the American Psychological Association revealed that a
majority of respondents believed that black-white IQ difference to be a product of both genetic and
environmental variation, comp[ared to only fifteen percent who felt the difference to be due entirely to
environmental variation. For further discussion see: Benjamin Stickney and Laurence Marcus, "Nature or
Nurture: A Decade of Controversy," Journal of Intergroup Relations 9 (1981): 37-50; Asa Hilliard, "What
Good is This Thing Called Intelligence and Why Bother to Measure It?" Journal of Black Psychology 20
(1994): 430-44. (Results of poll on 438.)
37
For discussions of the different approaches to high school training in other developed countries see: Patricia
Albjerg Graham, S.O.S: Sustain Our Schools (New York, l992), 22-23.
38
United States Children's Bureau, "Vocational Guidance and Junior Placement," 288-93.
39
Lewis Terman, The Intelligence of Schoolchildren, (New York, 1919), 133. The book enjoyed several re-
printings and was a staple item on the shelves of school superintendents and principals in the l920s. It is
tempting to indulge in a little arm-chair psychological assessment of Terman himself. Born the twelfth of
fourteen children in a struggling Indiana farm family, Terman was the only member of his family to attend
high school and receive a teacher's certificate from a normal college. After years teaching in rural Indiana
one-room schools, Terman made an improbable leap. He worked his way towards a more prestigious college
degree from Indiana University and then, by dint of a cheeky letter writing campaign, convinced G. Stanley
Hall to mentor him to study for a PhD in psychology at Clark University. Would Terman, as a six or eight
year old, have had the cultural background to have even tested "normal?" For biographical information on
Terman see: JoAnne Brown, The Definition of a Profession, 68-71; Robert Church, "Educational Psychology
and Social Reform in the Progressive Era," History of Education Quarterly 11 (1971): 390-405.
40
Ibid., 288.
41
Arthur Bestor, Educational Wastelands: The Retreat from Learning in Our Public Schools (Urbana, Il,
1953), 64.
25
42
Diane Ravitch and Chester Finn, What Do Our Seventeen Year Olds Know? (New York, l987). The
National Endowment for the Humanities funded the survey.
43
Ibid., 53-120.
44
Ibid., 200-201.
45
Charles Sykes, "Soccer Moms v. Standardized Tests," New York Times, December 6, l999.
46
Charles Sykes,"Soccer Moms v. Standardized Tests," New York Times, December 6, 1999.
47
As the century ended numerous challenges to standardized testing clogged the courts. In Texas, for
instance, a federal judge ruled a state-wide graduation test constitutional but critics vowed to appeal, arguing
that testing placed minority students at extreme disadvantage because they were more likely to attend schools
with fewer resources and teacher ill equipped to get their students well prepared to pass. "Jim Yardley, "Texas
Graduation Test Ruled Constitutional," New York Times, January 8, 2000.
48
The huge discrepencies often came when figures collected by the National Center for Educational Statistics
were misinterpreted. The Center distributed three different measures - event drop out rates, comparing the
number of students at the beginning and end of a twelve month period, cohort drop out rates - the experiences
of a single group of students, and status drop out rates - a composite of event rates summed over several years.
See: Joseph Kett, "School Leaving: Dead End or Detour?" 267.
49
"Why Do Boys and Girls Drop Out of School and What Can We Do About It?" Work Conference on Life
Adjustment Education, Chicago, Illinois, January 24-27, l950, Report of Representatives of School Systems in
Cities of More than 200,000 Population, Circular 269, United States Office of Education, (Washington, D. C.,
1950), 19-20.
50
George Smith, quoted in: Ibid., 20.
51
Ibid., 21.
52
Graham Lower and harvey Krahn, "Reconceptualizing Youth Unemployment," in: Julian Barling and E.
Kevin Kelloway, Young Workers: Varieties of Experience (Washington, D. C., l999), 201-33.
26
53
Dirk Johnson, "Schools are Cracking Down on Misconduct," New York Times, December 1, 1999.
54
Robyn Meredith, "Truants' Parents Face Crackdown Across the U.S.," New York Times, December 6, 1999.
55
Jackson Toby, "Coercion or Choice?" Public Interest 96 (1989): 135-36. Most such laws said that a drop-
out would have to wait until he or she reached age eighteen before getting a license, while teenagers who
stayed in school could win the right to drive at age sixteen. Supporters of the West Virginia law reported that
as a result of its passage 33 percent fewer West Virginia students dropped out of high school in the years l988
and l989 after the bill's passage. Critics countered that these figures were flawed, and that, while this group of
students had not formally left, they had very high rates of absenteeism and were "stay-ins" who disrupted
education for everybody else.
56
Leon Botstein, "Let Teenagers Try Adulthood," New York Times, May 17, 1999.
57
For a review of some of these arguments see: Stanley William Rothstein, Schooling the Poor: A Social
Inquiry into the American Educational Experience (Westport, Ct., 1994); Stanley William Rothstein, Identity
and Ideology: Sociocultural Theories of Schooling (Westport, Ct., 1991.)
58
Henry Pratt Judson to John D. Rockefeller Junior, November 13, 1913, Family, Box 25, Folder 256, RAC.
27