This commission’s final report, Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education, built its case on two interrelated assumptions that became central to discussions of the American high school formost of the 20th century. In October 1957, following the launch of Sputnik, criticism of high schools became front-page news, spurring a high-profile debate about problems of secondary education. One of the offshoots of the civil rights movement was a change in the approach to teaching American history. The result of such actions will be disastrous for high schools, as students enter with little or none of the crucial background they need to master the subjects they will be required to take on the secondary level. '” To receive pension funds from the Carnegie Foundation’s program, colleges had to comply with the foundation’s rules. model equal educational opportunity was achieved because all graduates received the same ultimate credential, a high-school diploma, despite having followed very different education programs and having met very different standards in the process. Finally, we must avoid reform efforts that hide curricular differentiation under an assumed name. The first step toward its defeat must be, as the Committee of Ten recognized more than 110 years ago, having all high-school students follow an intellectually rich liberal arts course of study. In 1908, for example, students admitted “on condition,” some as young as 14, constituted 49 percent, 53 percent, and 58 percent of their respective classes at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. On this issue, we can learn much from history. Conant concluded that American high schools were sound and that the differentiated high-school curriculum was the key to secondary schools’ fulfilling their democratic mission. and immigrant families, were arguably providing the best academic and, for a smaller number of students, vocational education available in the United States at that time. While the Committee of Ten membership leaned toward college (in addition to the college presidents, it included two  headmasters and a college professor), the Commission for the Reorganization of Secondary Education was dominated by members of the newly emerging profession of education, specifically, professors from schools and colleges of education. programs, offered for the first time this year, are in educational leadership and special education. Jeffrey Mirel is professor of educational studies and history, the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Second, it claimed that since these new, students lacked the intellectual ability, aspirations, and financial means to attend college, it was counterproductive to demand that they follow a college-preparatory program. 1960s: White colleges were described as It will cover the social, political, and cultural movements and changes that occurred during the decade. State boards of vocational edu cation were made responsible for de fining the curriculum … In 1954, the U.S. commissioner of education, Samuel M. Brownell, authorized a study that found the Carnegie Unit was being used “in almost every high school in the country.” Why? Identify ways in which African Americans protested to get equality. EmailEducation_Next@hks.harvard.edu, University of Chicago Press(for subscription service to the printed journal) Not surprisingly, the young people who set the standards for their peers were those with athletic prowess, good looks, and winsome personalities, not those who devoted the most time and energy to doing well in school. BY Jake Rossen. By the 1960s, Driver's Ed was available to 70 percent of high school students. But despite a series of unanimous Supreme Court decisions meant to reverse this trend, in the ensuing years large numbers of black students failed to gain access to the best programs the newly integrated schools offered. Until the 1960s, the NEA tended to represent the interests of school administrators and educators from colleges and universities. Clearly, they argued, the relevant, less-demanding curriculum was attracting larger numbers of students and keeping them in school longer. In the end, 14 units of coursework would constitute “the minimum preparation which may be interpreted as ‘four years of academic or high-school preparation.'”. The origins of this long-running argument can be traced to 1893, when the influential Committee of Ten, a blue-chip panel of educators, issued a report proposing that all public high-school students receive a strong, liberal-arts education. In 1928 nonacademic courses accounted for about 33 percent of the classes taken by U.S. high-school students; by 1961 that number had increased to 43 percent. Guided by the new IQ tests (which did as much as any single thing to convince American educators that tracking was not only possible but preferable) and the rise of guidance and counseling programs (which could match young people with the curriculum track best suited to their“scientifically” determined individual profiles), America entered an era of democratic dumbing down: the equal opportunity to choose (or be chosen for) failing programs. It called for expanded and differentiated high-school programs, which it believed would more effectively serve the new and diverse high-school student population. The most recent findings from the Long-Term Trend Reading and Mathematics Assessment of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) illuminate this situation clearly. cational inequality. By making choice the driving force behind high-school programs, as Arthur Powell, Eleanor Farrar, and David Cohen noted in The Shopping Mall High School (1985), the schools came to resemble education shopping malls, with students searching for bargains (that is, courses that were easy, relevant, and satisfied graduation requirements). Different system, different world ? foundations for future learning in core subject areas. The United States accepted two new states, Hawaii and Alaska (www.fifties.com). This policy greatly expanded student choice and clearly fit into the counterculture zeitgeist. vailing high school curriculum unre lated to their goals. In it they outlined the requirements for admission (candidates should be over fifteen years of age, and be abl… Most troublesome, he said, was that within the new adolescent society peer groups often superseded adult authority in shaping behavior. Lincoln Interactive is a curriculum service provided by Vintage 1960s Junior High School Math Textbook, The New Mathematics Book 1, 1956 AffeldtVintageHome. But recent research by sociologists Douglas Ready and Valerie Lee (of the University of Oregon and University of Michigan, respectively) found that the new arrangements simply re-created the differentiated curricula of the old system. Browse courses by subject or grade level. Over the next half century health and PE was the fastest-growing segment of course taking. Many of those who successfully completed them went on to teach foreign languages in secondary schools. Compounding the impact of these trends was the emergence of a new phenomenon related to the dominant presence of high schools in the lives of young Americans, the development of what sociologist James Coleman called “the adolescent society.” In his now-classic 1961 study The Adolescent Society: The Social Life of the Teenager and Its Impact on Education (excerpts), Coleman identified a series of problems that resulted from the separate society that high school had created for teenagers. Students now attended small schools within schools, each with a new name and mission, but the courses and education expectations were essentially the same as those of the tracking regime in the old, larger high school. Industrial arts and home economics, the most widely touted vocational courses, accounted for less than 9 percent of student course taking. Today, the National Center for Edu-cation Statistics has a staff of approximately 130 who collect information through nearly 40 surveys and Historically, as we have seen, school leaders “solved” this problem by assigning supposedly less able students to the general or vocational tracks and watering down the  courses they took. Call Toll Free: 866-990-6637. It is not hard to see where the battle lines would have been drawn, even then, especially as a wave of new immigrants was bringing tens of thousands of foreign adolescents to our shores. But the reality was that soon the number of students aged 14–17 attending high school soared, rising from 359,949, less than 6 percent of the age group, to 4,804,255, almost 51 percent of the age group, between 1890 and 1930 (see Figure 1). 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