a high-quality education, a person can live in the richest nation on earth yet lack adequate job opportunities, housing, and health benefits, and he or she can too easily fall victim to crime, addiction, abuse, and other dangerous behavior. A high-quality education has become so vital that it is now viewed as an essential and guaranteed civil right.
The culture of K–12 public education established long ago is changing in remarkable ways. Local control of schools is being transformed through federal and state policies and sanctions. The old process of sorting students into general education, college preparatory, and vocational tracks—the standard in most of the world’s developed nations—has been supplemented by policy-driven mandates for minimal student achievement proficiencies and is giving way to a system designed to provide a single rigorous curriculum for all students. “Slow-learning” tracks and “acceptable dropout rates” are being replaced with the goal of all students meeting proficiency standards and graduating. Bell-curve evaluations are being replaced with mastery learning. Freelance teaching based on textbooks, teacher interest, and personal prerogative is being set aside by a system of carefully planned, aligned, and prescribed instruction. However, as the traditional philosophies that have governed public education for so long have begun to change, remnants of their failed policies will likely linger for some time. While more blatant school sorting practices are being challenged and increasingly eliminated, others, like assigning each student a “class rank,” still reflect the bell-curve mentality and are not likely to vanish anytime soon. We are rapidly leaving the old world of education behind and being swept into a new world driven by an emerging science of teaching and learning, dramatic changes in the economic marketplace and technology, and new state and federal legislation and policies. This educational revolution is unprecedented in the history of our civilization. Has any nation, anywhere and at any time, truly been determined to leave no child behind?
Education’s transformation into an essential and guaranteed civil right has not happened by chance. It has emerged through a long and turbulent history of social protests and educational policy, from the denial of education to a variety of under-represented and disadvantaged groups, to segregated and “separate but equal” education, to equal opportunity and education for all, and finally to the goal of academic proficiency for all children and youth. The American Association of School Administrators has illustrated this journey to academic proficiency for every student by identifying key milestones of the past two centuries (figure 1.1).
Figure 1.1: Milestones in American Public Education (American Association of School Administrators, 2004)
The Struggle for Education
The recognition of education as a civil right essential for economic opportunity did not happen overnight. For close to 200 years, policymakers and educators have slowly taken significant steps in the often tortuous struggle toward educational freedom for all citizens. This journey has progressed from access to education for only the advantaged, where many groups were denied educational opportunities, to the expectation of proficiency for all. Those denied the right to an education included African Americans, Latinos, and other minorities; the poor; women; the handicapped; people living in isolated, rural areas; and many others. These transformations in public education have been accomplished through a long history of social strife.
From Exclusion to Access
Beginning in the mid-1800s, states began to enact legislation and policies designed to provide access to “universal” public education. Access to elementary education for all was slowly enacted in the United States, first in Massachusetts, and then in scattered locations along the East Coast. But even in states where policies were established for educational access, the vast majority of children were too often unable to participate. Even into the early 1900s, few students attended school beyond the elementary level. At that time, more than 9 out of 10 children failed to graduate from high school. By the late 1950s, the dropout rate was still at least 50% (Education Commission of the States, 1998).
Segregated and Separate but Equal
Although the end of the Civil War marked the freeing of slaves in the United States, southern states continued to deny civil rights to African Americans—including the right to effective education—though the creation of Jim Crow laws. Among other things, these laws established a poll tax and literacy tests for voting. In addition, they denied African Americans the right to participate in a fully integrated society by denying them open housing, by segregating them in poor neighborhoods, and by restricting their access to public transportation, city parks, swimming pools, restaurants, many forms of entertainment, and other services.
In 1954, the court case of Brown v. Topeka Board of Education seemed to finally make the dream of equal education for all a reality; however, 2 years later, federal troops were required to protect nine African-American students in Little Rock, Arkansas, as they enrolled in all-white Central High School. In the early 1960s, James Meredith became the first African American to enroll at the University of Mississippi, and civil rights demonstrations continued to sweep across the South. By the early 1970s, federal courts increasingly ordered school desegregation in the major cities of America.
Equal Opportunity and Education for All
Soon after Lyndon Johnson became president in 1963, he launched his War on Poverty. A significant portion of this legislation was the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). This landmark legislation established the goal of equal access and treatment for poor and minority students and supported these students with a variety of compensatory programs such as Title I.
By the mid-1970s, separate but equal was finally giving way to a national policy of equal education for all, and new legislation began to ensure the equal treatment of female students in public education. The Title IX section regarding female students was added to ESEA and began a massive realignment of educational programs and funding for young women that continues today. Following the legislation and court decisions that opened access and opportunity to females was the Education for All Handicapped Children Act passed by Congress in 1974, which sought to end the segregation of handicapped students by providing them with equal access and opportunity.
Despite this long struggle to provide equal educational access and opportunity for the poor, minorities, female students, and the handicapped, even into the year 2000, researchers have continued to document schools that still use the destructive practices of segregation and isolation of poor and minority students. School districts have redrawn boundaries to establish school attendance zones that isolate poor and minority neighborhoods; ability grouping and tracking programs have been used to segregate poor and minority students within schools. “White flight”—when middle-class and affluent families sell their homes in cities and relocate to suburbia—exacerbates this problem. Poor children have been isolated into second-class facilities with insufficient and outdated instructional materials, where they are far more likely to be taught by inexperienced, inadequately prepared, or misassigned teachers. Inner-city schools have thus been largely abandoned to poor and minority students, leaving our nation’s schools more segregated by race and socioeconomic status today than before federal desegregation policies went into effect.
Sadly, educational research in the mid-1960s provided an intellectual rationale for the continued use of these destructive school practices. James Coleman of the University of Chicago conducted the largest educational study to date, gathering data from 600,000 students, 60,000 teachers, and 6,000 schools. He concluded that teachers could only impact about 10% of the effects of poverty (Coleman et al., 1966). Although Coleman’s conclusion was later disproved, the flawed research led to more than 3 decades of destructive school practices that stigmatized the neediest of our children and youth and created a growing underclass of Americans who are undereducated, illiterate, underemployed, or, even worse, unemployable.
A New Standard
