Ideas
The organising concepts — the common school, the Carnegie unit, progressive education, tracking, standards — as historical events with start dates.
Tax-supported, non-sectarian, tuition-free — and implemented unevenly.
Photo: Efrem Efre / Pexels
5 pieces in Ideas
Everything →- Free, Public, and Not Quite Universal — What the Common School Actually WasThe 'common school' as a concept — a tax-supported, non-sectarian, tuition-free school open to all — was articulated in the 1830s and 1840s but put into practice unevenly: Massachusetts made attendance compulsory in 1852, but Southern states did not build common school systems until Reconstruction, and those systems were segregated from the start.
- The Hour That Became the CredentialThe Carnegie unit — one unit equals a course meeting for forty to sixty minutes on five days a week for at least thirty-six weeks — was defined by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in 1906 as a condition for pension eligibility, and within a decade it had become the universal currency of American high school graduation.
- The Laboratory School Had a Kitchen Where the Curriculum WasJohn Dewey's Laboratory School at the University of Chicago (1896–1904) tested the proposition that children learn by doing rather than recitation; its curriculum was organised around 'occupations' — cooking, weaving, carpentry — chosen because they reproduced the productive work of adult life.
- Sorted at Fourteen: How the Curriculum Divided ItselfAcademic tracking — separating secondary students into differentiated course sequences by measured ability — was formalised in American high schools in the decade after the Smith-Hughes Act (1917) created a vocational track requiring its own funding stream, and it structured who had access to college-preparatory mathematics and science for most of the twentieth century.
- The Report That Declared a Rising Tide of Mediocrity'A Nation at Risk' (April 1983), the final report of the National Commission on Excellence in Education, argued that American schools were failing against an international standard and recommended a set of specified course requirements — the 'Five New Basics' — for high school graduation.