Editing Education in the United States (section)

===19th century===
[[New England]] encouraged its towns to support free public schools funded by taxation. In the early 19th century, [[Massachusetts]] took the lead in [[education reform]] and [[public education]] with programs designed by [[Horace Mann]] that were widely emulated across the North. Teachers were specially trained in [[Normal schools in the United States|normal schools]] and taught [[the three Rs]] (reading, writing, and arithmetic) and also history and geography. Public education was at the elementary level in most places.

After the [[American Civil War|Civil War]] end in 1865, cities began building high schools. The [[Southern United States|South]] was far behind [[Northern United States|northern]] standards on every educational measure and gave weak support to its segregated all-black schools. However, northern philanthropy and northern churches provided assistance to private black colleges across the South. Religious denominations across the country set up their private colleges. States also opened state universities, but they were quite small until well into the 20th century.

In 1823, [[Samuel Read Hall]] founded the first [[Normal schools in the United States|normal school]], the Columbian School in [[Concord, Vermont]],<ref>[http://oldstonehousemuseum.org/srhallbio.html Samuel Read Hall Biography at the Old Stone House Museum website] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100405231650/http://www.oldstonehousemuseum.org/srhallbio.html|date=April 5, 2010}}, Retrieved on July 3, 2009</ref><ref name="melrosemirror.media.mit.edu">{{cite web|url=http://melrosemirror.media.mit.edu/servlet/pluto?state=303034706167653030375765625061676530303269643030353130353631|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20060920192639/http://melrosemirror.media.mit.edu/servlet/pluto?state=303034706167653030375765625061676530303269643030353130353631|url-status=dead|archive-date=September 20, 2006|title=An early Yankee=April 1, 2005|access-date=January 16, 2014}}</ref> aimed at improving the quality of the burgeoning common school system by producing more qualified teachers.

During [[Reconstruction era|Reconstruction]], the [[United States Office of Education]] was created in an attempt to standardize educational reform across the country. At the outset, the goals of the Office were to track [[statistical data]] on schools and provide insight into the educational outcomes of schools in each state. While supportive of educational improvement, the office lacked the power to enforce policies in any state. Educational aims across the states in the nineteenth century were broad, making it difficult to create shared goals and priorities. States like [[Massachusetts]], with long-established educational institutions, had well-developed priorities in place by the time the [[United States Office of Education|Office of Education]] was established. In the South and the West, however, newly formed common school systems had different needs and priorities.<ref>{{Cite journal|last=Steudeman|first=Michael J.|date=May 2018|title=From Civic Imperative to Bird's-Eye View: Renegotiating the Idioms of Education Governance during the Reconstruction Era|journal=History of Education Quarterly|language=en|volume=58|issue=2|pages=199–228|doi=10.1017/heq.2018.3|issn=0018-2680|doi-access=free}}</ref> Competing interests among state legislators limited the ability of the Office of Education to enact change.

In the mid-19th century, the rapidly increasing Catholic population led to the formation of [[parochial school]]s in the largest cities. Theologically oriented [[Episcopal Church (United States)|Episcopalian]], Lutheran, and Jewish bodies on a smaller scale set up their own parochial schools. There were debates over whether tax money could be used to support them, with the answer typically being no. From about 1876, thirty-nine states passed a constitutional amendment to their state constitutions, called [[Blaine Amendment]] after [[James G. Blaine]], one of their chief promoters, forbidding the use of public tax money to fund local parochial schools.

States passed laws to make [[Compulsory education|schooling compulsory]] between 1852 ([[Massachusetts]]) and 1917 ([[Mississippi]]). They also used federal funding designated by the [[Morrill Land-Grant Acts]] of 1862 and 1890 to set up [[land grant colleges]] specializing in agriculture and engineering. By 1870, every state had free elementary schools,<ref>Paul Monroe, ''"A cyclopedia of education"'' (4 vol. 1911) covers each state</ref> albeit only in urban centers. According to a 2018 study in the ''[[The Economic Journal|Economic Journal]]'', states were more likely to adopt compulsory education laws during the Age of Mass Migration (1850–1914) if they hosted more European immigrants with lower exposure to civic values.<ref>{{Cite journal|last1=Bandiera|first1=Oriana|last2=Mohnen|first2=Myra|last3=Rasul|first3=Imran|last4=Viarengo|first4=Martina|date=2018-06-09|title=Nation-Building Through Compulsory Schooling During the Age of Mass Migration|journal=The Economic Journal|volume=129|issue=617|pages=62–109|doi=10.1111/ecoj.12624|issn=0013-0133|url=http://sticerd.lse.ac.uk/dps/eopp/eopp57.pdf |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170808164135/http://sticerd.lse.ac.uk/dps/eopp/eopp57.pdf |archive-date=2017-08-08 |url-status=live|doi-access=free}}</ref>

Following Reconstruction the [[Tuskegee University|Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute]] was founded in 1881 as a state college, in [[Tuskegee, Alabama]], to train "Colored Teachers," led by [[Booker T. Washington]], (1856–1915), who was himself a freed slave. His movement spread, leading many other Southern states to establish small colleges for "Colored or Negro" students entitled "A. & M." ("Agricultural and Mechanical") or "A. & T." ("Agricultural and Technical"), some of which later developed into state universities. Before the 1940s, there were very few black students at private or state colleges in the North and almost none in the South.<ref>Walter R., Allen, Edgar G. Epps, and Nesha Z. Haniff, ''College in Black and White: African American students in predominantly White and in historically Black public universities'' (SUNY Press, 1991).</ref>

Responding to the many competing academic philosophies being promoted at the time, an influential working group of educators, known as the [[Committee of Ten]] and established in 1892 by the [[National Education Association]], recommended that children should receive twelve years of instruction, consisting of eight years of [[elementary education]] (in what were also known as "[[Grammar school#United States|grammar schools]]") followed by four years in [[High school in the United States|high school]] ("freshmen", "sophomores", "juniors" and "seniors").

Gradually by the late 1890s, regional associations of high schools, colleges and universities were being organized to coordinate proper accrediting standards, examinations, and regular surveys of various institutions in order to assure equal treatment in graduation and admissions requirements, as well as course completion and transfer procedures.