The History of Education in America (a slightly warped timeline of events)

1492
Christopher Columbus makes the first of four voyages to the New World, funded by the Spanish Crown, seeking a western sea route to Asia. On October 12, sailing the Santa Maria, he lands in the Bahamas, thinking it is an outlying Japanese island. He will not be the only one to make this mistake.

1607
Jamestown is founded in Virginia by the colonists of the London Company. By the end of the year, starvation and disease reduce the original 105 settlers to just 32 survivors. Needless to say, education is not the first thing on the settlers' minds.

1620
The first public library in the colonies is organized in Virginia with books donated by English landowners, including such titles as How to Be a GoodWife: the Martha Stewart Way and Bundling for Dummies.

1635
Boston Latin School is established by the Puritan community as the first free, public school in America. Hornbooks (a wooden paddle with lessons and a prayer tacked onto it, covered by a transparency made from the horn of an ox or sheep) and Dame Schools (a colonial-style daycare where women taught children the alphabet, numbers and prayers) become popular.

1636
Harvard College is founded.

1642
Puritans in Massachusetts pass a law stating that all children and servants must learn to read, in order to keep them away from Satan. Following in the cloven footsteps of this philosophy, the 1642 law is followed in 1647 by the (no kidding) Old Deluder Satan Act requiring towns of 50-100 families to hire a schoolmaster who would teach children to read and to write. This Act, known as "ODSA," also requires towns of 100 families to hire a schoolmaster learned in grammer who could prepare children to attend Harvard College, as Yale had not yet been created.

1690
Benjamin Harris prints The New England Primer, the first textbook used in North America. The Primer introduces the letters of the alphabet along with a religious phrase and a woodcut illustration of the letter. The Primer takes the tone of the day, emphasizing the fear of sin and the fact that all people must face death, leading to the first cases of text anxiety in American students.

1701
Yale University, aka The Collegiate School is founded, finally making it possible for genuine college rivalry. (William and Mary College, established in 1693, just did not cut it in this respect).

1728
Jewish colonists in New York City build the first American synagogue. The first Sunday School curriculum is created 110 years later in 1838 by Rebecca Gratz, followed almost immediately by the first Sunday School Complaint by a Parent.

1729
Benjamin Franklin begins publishing The Pennsylvania Gazette. It eventually becomes the most popular colonial newspaper, beginning his long career dedicated to educating the masses whether they liked it or not.

1731
The first American public library is founded in Philadelphia by... Benjamin Franklin.

1782
Patriot Noah Webster, believing that "For America in her infancy to adopt the maxims of the Old World would be to stamp the wrinkles of old age on the bloom of youth," publishes a textbook promoting a new national language spelled and pronounced differently from British English. This "Blueback Speller" becomes the precursor to Webster's American Dictionary of the English Language, and is the reason why the British sound sophisticated and American English is ridiculed worldwide.

1778
While serving in the General Assembly of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson introduces a bill that would create a free system of tax-supported elementary education for all children except slaves. The bill fails soundly. He will introduce this legislation two more times, each time meeting with the same defeat. (Jefferson was no quitter).

1958
Horace Mann, the founding father of public educaton, is born in (a coincidence?) Franklin, Massachusetts.

1822
Catherine Beecher, a minister's daughter living in Connecticut, loses her fiancé to the sea and decides to dedicate her life to education. A year later, she opens the Hartford Female Seminary, the first academically-oriented school for women in the U.S. She remains an advocate of education for women for the next three decades, and is best known for urging women to enter the teaching profession, although her influence had its downside; she once wrote that "Women can afford to teach for one half, or even less the salary which men would ask, because the female teacher has only herself; she does not look forward to the duty of supporting a family...nor has she the ambition to amass a fortune." Yeah...thanks a lot, Cathy.

1837
Mary Lyon, another advocate for the education of the fairer sex, establishes Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, opening the doors of higher education to American women. A Mount Holyoke trusty, Henry Durant, will later found Wellesley College.

1839
As Secretary of the Board of Education, Horace Mann presides over the establishment of the first public normal school in the United States at Lexington, Massachusetts. It is the last period of time when U.S. schools will be considered "normal." During the next twelve years, Mann will dedicate his life to the passage of legislation ensuring a free, public education for all children in Massachusetts, as well as the establishment of teacher training academies and the publication of the Common Schools Journal.

1840
During the Great School Debates in New York City, Catholic Bishop John Hughes attempts to persuade city leaders to fund parochial schools. Up until this time, common school curriculum was firmly based in Protestant theology. Although Hughes is unsuccessful, the debates do result in textbook reform and the beginnings of the movement toward a more secular (i.e. non-religious) education for all students.

1848
Horace Mann resigns as Secretary of Education in Massachusetts to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives. In 1952, he leaves to take the post of President of Antioch College, the first college to admit both men and women regardless of color. Mann remains at the college until his death on August 27, 1859.

1855
After a long battle (including a case lost to their state Supreme Court), African Americans in Massachusetts succeed in getting passed a state law abolishing segregation in the schools. It is the first such law in the nation.

1872
Booker T. Washington, a slave from Franklin County, Virgina (note another Franklin reference), walks the 500-mile journey to attend college at the state Hampton Institute. He graduates three years later at the head of his class. In 1881, after establishing a normal school in Tuskegee, Alabama, he purchases the school and surrounding land and begins raising funds for what will become the Tuskegee Institute, the first American college to be owned and operated by African Americans.

1899
The School and Society by John Dewey is published, bringing in a new era of Progressivist education.

1906
Citizens of Gary, Indiana name William A. Wirt, a Dewey disciple, as superintendent of schools. Wirt creates the nation's first school district based on Progressivist principles. The curriculum includes art, nature and animal husbandry. Children change classes for different subjects and the first "field trips" begin.

1917
In a race for mayor of New York, Democrat John Hylan attacks incumbent John Mitchel's endorsement of "the Gary plan" in New York City schools. He argues that Progressivist education is a plot to turn immigrant children into labor fodder instead of teaching them the classical subjects meant to prepare students for higher education. His argument resonates with NYC immigrant parents; Hylan is elected mayor and the Gary plan is dropped by the city's schools. The struggle between classical (Essentialist/Perennialist) education and more flexible (Progressivist/Existentialist) pedagogy continues to the present day.

1920s
Following World War I, Lewis Terman takes the tests he had created for U.S. Army recruits and refines them for children. The idea for these "Intelligence Quotient" or I.Q. tests actually originated in with Afred Binet of France, but Terman, a professor at Stanford University and a publicity hound, is the one to lobby stateside for their use. Soon most school in the U.S. are using these tests to identify which students will learn what subject matter, and the concept of “tracking” is born. Tracking is used in many ways, but the most harmful will be to keep minority students from obtaining equal access to education.

1945
Julian Nava graduates from Roosevelt High School in Los Angeles. Nava, a Mexican American, would earn his doctorate from Harvard and go on to serve on the Los Angeles Unified School District Board of Education, battling against and eventually winning the elimination of tracking in L.A. schools.

1954
The Supreme Court announces its ruling in the case of Brown et. al. versus the Board of Education of Topeka: "Separate educational facilities [for minority students] are inherently unequal." While the Topeka school district readily complies to admit black students, schools in the South will fight the court decision for the next decade.

1959
In the wake of the successful Russian launch of Sputnik the previous October, U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower signs the National Defense Education Act, initiating the first major influx of federal funds to schools and beginning a new emphasis on science and mathematics education.

1964
President (and former schoolteacher) Lyndon B. Johnson, signs the Civil Rights Act, which bans discrimination on the basis of race in all federally funded programs, including schools. He also makes more federal funding available for school districts, providing an incentive for schools to comply with the Act.

1968
The Bilingual Education Act is passed by Congress. For the first time, the needs of English language learners are acknowledged, although only limited federal funding is provided at first. The law is renewed, along with provisions for increased funding, until 2002 when it is allowed to quietly expire in the wake of No Child Left Behind.

1972
Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 is signed into law. Title IX prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in educational programs and activities at educational institutions that receive federal funds, making it possible for female athletes to eventually join their male cohorts on not only school playing fields but also the covers of Wheaties boxes and in shilling for American Express.

1973
Congress passes Public Law 94-142, the Education for Handicapped Children Act. P.L. 94-142, which would eventually be renewed as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), provides that children with physical, mental and/or emotional disabilities should be included in typical classrooms to the maximum extent possible for a "free and appropriate" education. (Sadly, as parents and teachers soon learn, getting even a halfway decent education for children with disabilities is not anywhere near free, and most districts fall far short of providing what is adequate, much less what is appropriate, for such kids to succeed in society. This is why the IDEA is, was and remains a seriously underfunded mandate.)

1983
The U.S. Department of Education commissions a report on the quality of the nation's schools. Titled "A Nation at Risk," the report leads President Ronald Reagan to comment that the aforementioned emphasis on civil rights in education had hurt educators' abilities to teach. Thus begins a decades-long fight began between the economic security of the nation and the need for education reform, along with the sweeping in of the era of high-stakes testing (followed by the flight of embittered teachers from their chosen profession).

1991
The birth of school choice: Minnesota passes the nation's first charter school law.

1992
More choice, as California also legalizes charter schools and New York City begins allowing students to seek enrollment in any public school within the city limits.

1997
President Clinton, in his State of the Union address, calls for the creation of 3,000 new charter schools by the year 2002. However, Democrats in Congress continue to battle against other education reforms, such as school voucher programs, up through the election of Pres. George W. Bush in 2000.

2002
In January, amid a storm of controversey, a jubiliant Pres. George W. Bush signs the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. This sweeping piece of legislative reform was the culmination of the standards and testing era initiated by "A Nation at Risk." It mandated that states create a series of academic standards, provide annual reports on how districts are faring in terms of student achievement using standardized testing and demonstrate continuing improvement in the areas of reading and mathematics. Support for the legislation remains divided, giving rise to numerous web sites (and several interesting parodies) devoted to both sides of the debate.
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