Today is , 13 March 2010

High expectations

Since the colonial period, Americans have expected a great deal from their educational institutions. Just teaching the usual subjects has rarely satisfied demands on the schools. Americans have also wanted learning to serve other social institutions, ideals and goals. Such expectations invite disappointment and controversy. Combined with the circumstances of the country's history, they have also led to a very distinctive educational system. With its fusion of church and state, Puritan New England aimed at religious indoctrination, making even learning the alphabet a series of theological lessons, though maxims of 'good sense' for getting on in the world also received attention. American optimism shines through in much later pedagogy. The Founding Fathers hoped schooling would discover natural merit in citizens and nurture an elite to defend the republic from tyranny. People on the frontier dreamed education would be the 'great leveller', a compensator for their alleged inferiority to coastal society and a guarantee of democratic equality. Well into the twentieth century schoolbooks fairly glow with faith in the possibility of endless self-improvement for boys dedicated to American ideals. The schools taught girls to play a supportive role, Blacks to know their place, Indians to be civilized, and immigrants to be American workers. Until recently, only a few private institutions and schools outside the main stream provided correctives to this hierarchy. But since the mid-1950s, civil rights movements (starting with African Americans' demands for educational equality) have made schools a centre of contention over which traditions and ideals, what order in society, and what means of reaching those goals Americans should support. Educational institutions become the bearers of each age's values. In part because expectations and the rate of change remain high in the US, education is a focus of intense debate.

American educational history

Local control over education developed early in America and remains characteristic of its educational institutions. During the colonial period, the British authorities did not provide money for education, so the lirst schools varied according to the interest local settlers had in education. The common view was that parents were responsible for children's education. In the southern colonies, schooling often came from a private tutor, if the family could afford one. bach town tried to build a school in colonial New England and Pennsylvania. The colonists expected the schools to teach religion, and reading skill was highly valued because it allowed people to read the Bible. Puritan Massachusetts founded the first American public school under a law entitled the 'Old Delude Satan Act'. Beading, writing, and arithmetic (the so-called three 'R's') were the core subjects, and through them, pupils were prepared for local religious, economic and political life. Higher education also began early in the colonial period. In 1636 Harvard College was founded, only six years after the Puritan migration to America had begun. By the Revolutionary War, tune colleges prepared a small elite of men for the ministry and leadership in public life. Although these colleges encouraged religious toleration, rivalry among them was evident, in part because all but two (Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania) represented one of the major Protestant denominations. At this point, church and state were not separate, and essentially private institutions of higher education regularly received public funding. Building a society along the frontier also motivated the early development of schools. Because they were few and the wilderness vast, the settlers discovered that law, order and social tradition broke down unless people cooperated to establish the basic institutions of society. Thus, 'school-raisings' became as much a standard part of cooperative community building as 'house- or barn-raisings'.

Before the Civil War

None the less, only five of the thirteen original stales included, provisions for public schools in the constitutions they wrote during the War for Independence (1776-81), In 1830, none offered state-wide, free public education. But support for common schools was strong. Thomas Jefferson and other Founding Fathers insisted that universal public education was essential to produce the informed citizenry on which a democracy depended. In the 1870s the federal government passed laws providing for education and land for schools in the future states of the Grear Lakes region. Jefferson envisioned replacing Europe's aristocracy of birth with a school-bred meritocracy of talent. But in the 1830s, President Andrew Jackson's Democratic Party opposed that ideal as elitist, and supported public schools as an equalizer that would give every man a chance to rise in society. Around the same time, reformers in the Northeast, such as Horace Mann, publicized the notion that public schools could reduce the growing crime, poverty and vice of the cities by helping to assimilate their growing immigrant population. Towards those ends. Mann led a movement to lengthen the school year, add 'practical' subjects, raise teachers' salaries and provide professional teacher-training. By the Civil War, all states accepted the principle of taxsupported, free elementary schools. Every state had such schools in some places, but most teachers were poorly trained, and the quality of the schools was considerably lower in the South and West. Most children went to school sporadically or not at all. In the North only one out of six White children attended public school in 1860. In the South, the figure was one out of seven, and it was illegal to give slaves schooling. At the time, public opinion rejected the idea ol mandatory school attendance, mainly because most people believed parents, rather than governments, should be responsible for education. Moreover, most parents needed their children's work or wages to make ends meet. Public secondary education was available at some 300 'free academies' across the nation, for those who could spare their children's contributions to the family economy. As the states abolished established religions after the Revolution, church and state became separate. Only gradually, however, did Protestant instruction disappear from public schools. In the North and Midwest, immigrant groups begen to establish parochial (private, church-related) elementary__and secondary shools in the 1840s to preserve their ethnic heritage and avoid pressures to assimilate in public schools. The pattern of higher education was transformed before 1865. The Supreme Court distinguished between public and private colleges in 1819 and freed private institutions of higher learning from state control. Thereafter hundreds of private experiments in higher education appeared, even though public funding dropped to very low levels. During the Cavil War, the Morrill Act (or Land Grant College Act) set a revolutionary precedent by laying the foundation for the state university. The beginning of the federal government's involvement in public higher education, the Act gave each state huge land areas for higher education. The result was dozens of Land-Grant Colleges, which developed into State universities. Equally important, it promoted the higher education of larger numbers of students and called for collegelevel courses in agriculture, technical and industrial subjects, in order to attract students from the working classes. The first colleges to admit African Americans and women also opened before the Cavil War.

1865-1945

The rapid pace of urbanization, industrialization and immigration brought a turning point in American education after 1865. In the popular print media, the immigrant slum child became the symbol of the dangers of these processes, and the public schools were asked to remedy the situation. Assimilation through the schools seemed increasingly necessary as immigrants from southern and eastern Europe and several Asian nations arrived in large numbers. The schools were expected to Americanize these exotic newcomers by teaching them English the principles of American democracy, and the skills needed for the workplace. Just as important, the schools would get inimigrant children out of unhealthy tenement housing, off the streets, out of factories, and away from gangs. To accomplish these goals, compulsory school attendance laws were soon adopted in the states. By 1880 almost three-quarters of school-aged children were in school. These laws also applied to racial minorities. After the Civil War, the federal government's Freedmen's Bureau and other Northern organizations founded many schools in the South for the former slaves. But whether African-, Asian-, or Native-American, minority students everywhere were placed in separate schools. In 1896 the Supreme Court's Plessy v, Ferguson ruling gave legal hacking to the segregation that already existed. Politicians quickly put children in school, but they did not as quickly appropriate money for hiring more teachers and erecting new buildings. Overcrowded, poorly maintained schools and staff shortages were typical of American public schools between the 1880s and 1920s. Opening leaching to women (often the daughters of immigrants) provided the new teachers, and 'normal schools' to train them grew rapidly in number. Around 1900, public school teaching was not considered a profession. The average annual salary for teachers was lower than that of an unskilled worker, and many teachers had no more than a high school education themselves. Yet real progress was made in teacher preparation in the decades after compulsory attendance laws were passed. States set standards for teaching licences, which increasingly included a college degree with courses. in pedagogy. After the 1920s, 'school inarms' and 'schoolkeepers' were members of a profession called 'educators'. Salaries for teachers, however, remained low, and the profession was regarded as one of the least prestigious. In the same period, reformers assigned the schools new priorities and duties. John Dewey and others held that curricula and teaching methods had to be changed. Instead of moralistic piety and rote memorization, the schools had to give pupils practical skills suited to their environment and the habit of discovering knowledge for themselves. 'Learning by doing', personal growth, and childcentred rather than subject-centred teaching became the goal. Public schools were to become community centres and the means of social progress. About this time, progressive education introduced physical education, music and fine arts, and vocational subjects (training in skilled occupations) as electives (optional courses). These educators also developed the after-school extracurricular activities, such as team sports, that became a typical part of American education. In 1917, the federal government offered financial support to any public secondary school that emphasized vocational education. Some immigrant parents criticized progressive education because they felt less demanding electives took time away from academic subjects. They also objected to the frequent assumption that immigrant; children did not need academic studies, since they would not go on to higher education. After 1865. private church-related colleges, often founded by European immigrant groups, rapidly increased in number, especially in the Midwest. Coeducational higher education (colleges open to both men and women) became the norm there during the Civil War, when fee-paying women were necessary to replace the men who had joined the Union armies. Coeducation continued to spread, and by the 1920s almost half of American college students were women. Further east, however, the so called Ivy League universities (Harvard and other prestigious schools from the colonial period) remained men's institutions, and hence, benefactors established separate women's colleges in that region. Racial segregation extended to higher education during this period, when colleges for African Americans, such as Howard University and Hampton Institute, were founded in the South after the War. In 1890 a new Morrill Act provided the region with land for Black public colleges that emphasized manual and industrial education. After 1900, graduate and professional schools became more common. Advanced degree programmes began to transform some well-established universities into research institutions, and engineering schools, business colleges, law and medical schools were founded in growing numbers. For all but a small elite, however, a college degree seemed a luxury. Even in 1940, less than two out of ten college-age people attended institutions of higher learning. Instead, as parents less often had farms, handicrafts, or family businesses to pass on, they secured their children's future through further education at vocational, office, secretarial, or management schools.

The post-war period

The Second World War was a watershed in American higher education. To easy the return of war veterans to civilian life, Congress passed the Servicemen's Readjustment Act (the so-called 'G.I. Bill') in 1944. Under the Act, the federal government paid tution and living costs for veterans in higher education and directly funded the expansion of study programmes for the first time. Within two years, half the people in college were veterans, many of them from working-class families with little education. More students graduated than ever before, and the typical student ceased to be a member of the upper-middle or upper classes. By 1971, when the programme ended, nearly 2,500,000 veterans had benefited from its provisions. Higher education in the US had become mass education and was regarded as a right rather than a privilege. The launching of the Soviet satellite Sputnik in 1957 spurred another increase in the federal government's role in public education . Now the schools were enlisted in the Cold War and called on to meet the challenge of Soviet technology. The National Defense Education Act (1958) provided federal money for research and university programmes in science and technology, as well as loans to college students. The legislation also allotted federal funds for teaching science, mathematics and foreign languages in high schools. After 1958, federal money was targeted for college-level foreign language teaching, the equipping of language laboratories, and eventually for the humanities in general. In the 1950s, state after state required teachers to sign 'loyalty oaths' to the US, and Senator Joseph McCarthy (among others) attacked the universities as hotbeds of communism. Education became a patriotic obligation as well as a right. The Supreme Court's Brown decision struck down the principle of separate but-equal educational facilities for the races in 1954. One year later the Court ruled that public school districts all over the nation had to present plans for achieving 'racial balance' in their schools, federal school policy began to show a profound change in national priorities. For almost twenty years, from 1955 to 1974, the Court tried to desegregate America's public schools. It settled on busing as the most effective way to integrate the schools. Until very recently, one universal rule in America was that pupils attended the school closest to their homes. Since Blacks and Whites live in different residential sections ol US cities, they attend different school districts. Residential segregation produces segregated schools. Therefore, the Supreme Court decided to 'bus' students to other districts until 'racial balance' in all city schools had resulted. In city after city across the nation, parents, school authorities and politicians of both races protested and resisted. But the Court held firm, with the result that Whites fled to the suburbs in greater numbers, and the small percentage who could afford to, sent their children to private schools. Federal authorities decided that busing plans could produce integrated schools only if they included the 'lily-White' suburban schools around major cities. Alter such plans began transporting Whites into city schools, the public outcry grew louder. By 1974, the nation's mood had become strongly anti-busing, and when asked to decide whether a city- and-suburbs busing plan was constitutional, the Supreme Court hacked down, saying no tradition in American public education was more deeply rooted than the local control of schools. Thus busing stopped being effective for school desegregation. In the 1990s, about 30 per cent of the schools are still mostly or entirely Black. An even larger percentage are 'racially segtegated' if the definition includes schools that are predominantly Latino and Black. Most oi these schools are located in the North or Southwest, because the Court integrated Southern schools first and did not support busing between the suburbs and inner cities of the North after 1974. Since the 1960s, the federal authorities have fought the effects of prejudice and the related problem of poverty through involvement in educational programmes. In 1963, Congress began providing money for college and university buildings. In 1964, it decided that federal funding was available only to educational institutions that could prove they did not discriminate on the basis of race, religion or national origin. The Higher Education Act of 1965 helped minority and 'disadvantaged' students get college loans. State and federal grants to poorer public schools have generally come in two ways. First, laws made the income levels in local districts the basis for distributing public funds. 'Low-income' areas qualified for extra grants and special programmes to attract good teachers. Second, governments more than tripled their contribution to the general budgets of cities with social and educational problems. In general, federal government policy has aimed to implement the principle of affirmative action that President Lyndon Johnson expressed in his commencement speech at Howard University in 1965: You do not take a person who for years has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line ot a race, and then say, 'You are free to compete with all the others', and still justly believe that you have been completely fair. Affirmative action programmes to improve women's and minority groups' access to education have proliferated since the early 1970s. On the primary and secondary levels of public education, affirmative action first led to a redesigning of teaching programmes and textbooks. Discriminatory references to women and minorities have been replaced with even-handed treatments, or more often, with 'positive role models' and examples of how Women and minorities have contributed to American history and culture. History and literature books, especially, have changed as a result of this effort. The hiring of staff on all levels has also been affected because governments have required educational institutions to become equal opportunity employers. That has meant hiring more teachers from minority groups at elementary and secondary schools and more women professors at universities and colleges. By law, educational institutions must encourage minority group members to apply for teaching positions. They must be sought out and interviewed or the school might lose government funding, binding qualified women and minority group members for positions has been somewhat easier since the 1970s because of affirmative action plans for teacher-training programmes and the increased number of students from these groups who have completed university degrees. Two affirmative action programmes are designed to help 'disadvantaged' pupils succeed in primary and secondary schools. Head Start provides preschool tutoring to children in educationally deprived families to help them begin formal schooling at the same level as those in more fortunate families. Upward Bound supplies remedial teaching, private tutoring and work-study programmes for older children. While Upward Bound has suffered funding reductions, Head Start is considered a success and has received additional congressional appropriations. It benefits close to a million children today. Affirmative action programmes in education have, however, provoked a number of US Supreme Court decisions. These have not called for the end of affirmative action, but have changed the methods used to put it into effect. The best-known court cases in this area have involved complaints from White males denied admission to university programmes, in their opinion, because female and minority-group applicants were given preferential treatment. In the Bakke decision (1977). for example, the Supreme Court ruled that it is unconstitutional to increase the number of students from racial minorities in university programmes by setting numerical quotas. In 1996 California voters ended the state's affirmative action programmes by supporting Proposition 209. In the early 1980s, Diane Ravitch, a well-known authority on US schools, listed the accumulated expectations Americans had for their educational institutions. It was hoped that education would reduce social inequality; improve the economy and economic opportunity for individuals; spread the capacity for personal fulfilment; civilize and uplift the nation's cultural life; raise the level of and participation in its political life; and lessen alienation, distrust and prejudice by increasing the contact among racial and socio-economic groups. Perhaps understandably, a mood of disappointment with educational institutions has been evident in the US since then, because most of the social dilemmas the schools were supposed to solve remain serious problems.

Elementary and secondary schools

Local control over schools was the tradition during the colonial period. The Constitution makes no mention of education, which reserves power over education to the states or people, according to the Tenth Amendment. All fifty stale constitutions have quite specific provisions about education. Generally, these clauses (and state education laws) define the state's role and delegate primary responsibility for schools to local governments. As these are created by the states, their powers over education can be altered by the states. Local authorities set up independent school districts, whose elected local boards of education make most decisions regarding public elementary and secondary schools. Generally, the districts organize their schools into kindergardens for 5 year olds; elemertary schools for 6 to 12 year olds; middle schools (or junior highs) for pupils from 13 to 15, and high schools for students between 16 and 18 years old. In the 1990s school year there were some 15,500 of these school districts with a total enrolment of over 40 million pupils. Only when specific powers given to the federal government in the Constitution are involved, such as the protection of rights guaranteed in the Bill of Rights, do the federal authorities become directly involved in educational issues. In practice, the federal government seldom interfered with local schools to protect civil rights until the 1950s. The national government has also provided land for school sites, funds for special educational projects, and influenced local school policy by making federal grants for education dependent on following non-discriminatory practices. The federal government's involvement in education remains quite limited. Its administrative agency for overseeing and formulating educational policies was formed late and is still understaffed compared to that in other developed countries. Not until the early 1950s did Congress set up a federal Office of Education in the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, A separate Department of Education was not established until 1979. Ronald Reagan received considerable support then, when he promised to eliminate the Department if he was elected. Even today the federal government provides on average only about 4 per cent of the funding for public primary and secondary schools. Until the 1950s almost all state governments limited their involvement in education to two areas: establishing public state universities and setting general guidelines for public primary and secondary education. A state board of education, appointed by the governor, formulated the guidelines, and the state's agency or department of education was to see that they were carried out in local districts. The state hoard of education commonly sets only general minimum standards. It determines the number of days in the school year; the procedures for licensing teachers and administrators; the school-leaving age (usually 16), the 'core curriculum' that pupils must complete at each level of school; and minimum requirements for academic progress at different grade levels. To graduate from secondary school, for example, students must pass a core curriculum that usually includes four years of courses in English, three in social studies, and two in mathematics and science. These common requirements serve several purposes, by establishing a degree of uniformity among diverse school districts, they allow educational leaders to keep the schools in line with standards in other states and developments in pedagogics. Hence, the core curriculum also facilitates the evaluation of individual schools and makes it easier for pupils to move from one district or state to another and gain admission to colleges and universities around the nation. In recent decades, state boards have increasingly implemented testing programmes to make individual districts more accountable for reaching a certain level of academic achievement at specified points in pupils' schooling. The same tests are often used in many states, and the results for districts and states are publicly available. The state board and parents are therefore better able to judge the relative success of the local schools in meeting educational goals. During the 1980s, growing numbers of state boards won approval for state-wide tests to measure teachers' mastery of core subjects and educational methods. There are three important kinds of localism encouraged by the delegation of state authority to local school districts. Financial localism generally refers to the delegation of responsibility for funding schools to local districts. In the 1980s, state spending on education increased by as much as 70 per cent, and federal contributions to public schools grew significantly as well. Yet, local real-estate taxes currently raise 46 per cent of local school budgets. (The average school district receives half its funds from the state and the rest of its financial resources from the federal government.) In other words, local money still makes a very significant difference for public schools. In a rich district with valuable homes and businesses 46 per cent represents the resources for better teaching salaries, buildings and equipment than those in most other districts. In the smaller school budget of a poor district, 46 per cent represents less money, and that has just the opposite effect on resources for its schools. Each district is free to decide how high it wants to set property taxes for education. But even though poor districts approve higher tax rates than wealthy districts, they raise less money for schools because local property has so little value. Thus, financial localism (in combination with the causes of the great economic differences between school districts) is still the reason for wide variations in the quality of American public schools. State plans to redistribute local property taxes aim to reduce the educational inequality resulting from financial localism. Redistribution plans collect the real-estate taxes in the state and pace them in a fund for public education. This money is then redistributed to even out the differences in school budgets across the state. Such plans can bring drastic changes in the school budgets of both rich and poor districts. Generally, they have taken money for education from the suburbs and given it to inner-city areas . Hence, there has been less money for schools dominated by White pupils and more for schools with many Blacks, Latinos, and Asian Americans. As expected, redistribution plans have met opposition. Some suburban groups have tried to preserve the advantages of their schools through private donations or special local education taxes. At least one state (New Jersey) has responded by ruling that any increase in the school budgets of richer districts will result in an automatic equal increase in the budgets of poorer districts. Recently, state courts all over the nation have begun to demand redistribution programmes. Increased state contributions to local school budgets and redistribution plans have given state boards of education greater leverage in enforcing state-wide standards. However, state authorities often show a reluctance to use their power. Like the public they serve, they still believe that in a democracy, education should not be imparted by central authorities, but designed by the people in the governments closest to them. Such thinking and the opposition of suburban voters have limited the effects of redistribution plans. The result is that the money spent per pupil in predominantly White suburban schools is commonly one and a half to two times that spent in racially mixed city schools. American traditions of financial localism in education remain strong. Political localism is chiefly exercised through the members of the local board of education. They have more power over the schools than members of the state board do and are nearly always elected. Anyone who lives in the district can be a candidate for the board. The majority of those elected are parents, teachers and local business people. The school system's chief administrator is usually an ex officio member of the board with no vote but great informal influence over decisions. Recently it is more accepted to elect a student to the board. While some boards have difficulty reaching agreement because members represent opposing political views, often the board as a whole reflects the district's predominant conservative or liberal political attitudes. The local board is powerful because it makes a range of important decisions. It determines the size and content of the school budget and controls the hiring and firing of teachers and administrators. The choice of subjects, programmes and educational goals beyond the state minintums is the board's, as is the definition of school disciplinary rules and routines. It must approve the selection of library and textbooks, and it has the final word on how educational facilities should be designed, instructed and maintained. Local boards make decisions on Whether the district should apply to the state or federal government for aid under specific programmes. Boards that are most resourceful in applying for these funds get more help. In practice, that means districts with well educated populations (and usually higher incomes) often succeed in getting more money from the state and federal governments. Another important source of political localism is the PTA (the Parent-Teaeher Association). The PTA is a voluntary organization , whose officers are elected by the members. It has no legal authority to make school policy, but its discussions often frame the issues debated and decided by the school board. Moreover, people who have been active in the PTA are often the local residents who get elected to the board. The third kind of localism in American education, social localism, refers to the distinctiveness of districts' educational priorities and goals that results from differences in their populations' social attitudes. These attitudes generally reflect the local population's dominant socio-economic class and mix of occupations, religions, races and ethnic groups. It can be argued that social localism produces differences in the public schools that are quite as significant as those caused by differences in districts' ability to pay for schooling. School board members and PTA leaders, who may or may not be representative of the local population, cannot afford to ignore these attitudes and the population characteristics from which they spring. Social localism is significant because local boards make important policy decisions. It has led to public schools emphasizing agricultural methods, industrial arts, commercial studies, or college-level 'advanced placement' courses. It has inspired religious, White supremacist, and assimilatiortist policies in some districts, and opposing policies in others. Recently, extreme examples of social localism have resulted in replacing evolutionary theory with the biblical story of creation in science courses; removing literary classics from school libraries; sex education lessons and the presentation of alternative lifestyles and sexual orientations in elementary schools; a district policy of teaching that American society is the world's greatest; and decisions to refuse the children of illegal immigrants public schooling. Many such extreme social policies are struck down by judicial rulings or changed after public reactions. The goal of Americanizing immigrant children has been discarded. Today, after the civil rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s, support for equal educational opportunity and pluralism is standard in the rhetoric (though not as often in the practices) of most American school districts. In fact, equal opportunity today means that both state and federal governments sometimes deem it necessary to intervene in the alfairs of local school districts to ensure that minority students are given an education fitted to their special needs and problems. Pluralism produces even more various public schools as some local districts tailor their curricula to suit Blacks as well as Latino and Asian immigrant children and add ethnic studies courses and bilingual education programmes. Today pluralism in the public schools means debate over the core curriculum. Led by scholars in college education departments who question the traditional content of required subjects, districts, states, and even the federal government have tried to redefine common standards and the canon (accepted principle content) of subjects. Committees of recognized experts in many fields meet (sometunes for years) in the hope of agreeing on a national curriculum. In the US, however, that can only consist of suggested guidelines, because states control educational programmes. Consensus has not been very difficult to achieve on the canon of mathematics or science. But in 1996 heated debate prevented agreement on the required content of history curricula, not least because they concern deciding who and what are the essential parts of the nation's heritage and identity. Meanwhile, the views accepted in many districts and states have caused publishers to redesign basic textbooks in history and most core subjects for all school levels.

Private elementary and secondary schools

Pluralism means not only permitting great variety in the public schools but also allowing a wide variety of private schools. About 12 per cent of the school-age population attends one of the nation's more than 24,000 private schools. Private educational institutions show even more variety than the public schools; four of five are parochial schools (run by religious groups). By far the largest number of these are Catholic institutions, but fundamentalist sects, a range of other Protestant denominations, orthodox Jews and some Asian religious groups also run parochial schools. Non-sectarian private schools have a weak religious allegiance or are entirely secular. They are quite diverse but frequently promise a high standard of academic excellence, adherence to a particular theory of education, the ability to instil discipline and maturity, or some combination of these qualities. The Montessori schools offer a specific method of learning. Elite college-preparatory boarding schools (so-called 'prep schools') have exceptionally well-qualified faculties whose goal is to help the children of the wealthy gain admission to prestigious universities like those in the Ivy League, and eventually take their place in the country's upper class. A variety of military academies specialize in dealing with 'problem children' whose parents can afford to reform their habits by subjecting them to the rigours of a regimented life away from home. Private schools depend heavily on endowments (private donations), investments and income from fee-paying students to meet their expenses. Public funding amounts to less than 10 per cent of their budgets. The courts have limited the public funding available to parochial schools to programmes that benefit school pupils in general, rather than particular institutions. Thus, all children can receive government aid for some medical services, nutrition supplements and transportation to school, but not grants to pay tuition. Some private educational institutions offer financial aid to attract students from a variety of social backgrounds, while others follow a restrictive admissions policy to maintain a more homogeneous student body. Exclusivity has always been an important attraction of most private schools. Busing programmes to end segregation contributed to increased enrollment at all-White private institutions. The Supreme Court's ban on group prayers and religious instruction in general in the public schools has caused others to turn to private education. Dissatisfaction with the public schools' academic standards, lax discipline, drug abuse, or crime has convinced yet other parents to pay for private education. These problems are certainly more avoidable in private schools, since the expulsion of pupils who cause them is much simpler for private institutions.

Higher education

High school graduates enter higher education through a process of mutual select ion in a system that is decentralized, diverse and competitive. Colleges and universities select a student body according to criteria set by the individual institution rather than by a central authority. The federal government has only an indirect influence on these standards through equal educational opportunity programmes, civil rights laws and constitutional rights. State approval is necessary for institutions of higher learning to operate and grant degrees, but once that is gained, state involvement is usually minimal. This large degree of institutional independence has encouraged grass-roots experiments and innovations in higher education and the resulting diversity is enormous. The public sector includes The national military academies, fifty state university systems and hundreds of local technical or 'specialty' schools, community colleges, and city universities. In the private sector there are thousands of institutions, ranging from specialty schools to small church-related colleges to major universities with separate undergraduate, graduate and professional schools. Thus entrance criteria reflect the particular character of the institution and the competition it faces from institutions of a similar sort. High school graduates try to gain admission to a school that suits their individual needs. Students' requirements also vary greatly because the population is so heterogeneous, and secondary schools so different in type and quality. In such a system, devices are needed to help institutions and students make informed choices in the selection process. There is no battery of nationally designed and evaluated examinations that pupils must pass to receive a high school diploma. That fact and the great variation in the programmes and quality of US secondary schools make evaluating applicants' academic achievement difficult for colleges. To provide a basis for comparing pupils' skills, private agencies have developed competitive college entrance examinations that are given all over the country on the same day. Almost all colleges and universities require applicants to lake the best known of these, the Scholastic Achievement Test (SAT), and many prestigious schools also require pupils to submit their scores on other national tests. In addition, institutions have admissions departments that visit and evaluate secondary schools, interview applicants and review pupils' application forms. Secondary schools have guidance departments with counsellors who evaluate colleges and universities for students and recommend programmes suited to their abilities and test scores. Regional organizations called accrediting bodies monitor the quality of secondary schools and institutions of higher education. A closer look at some of these institutions of higher learning illustrates the choices students have. Post -secondary technical or 'specialty' schools offer training for specific occupations, such as accounting, computer programming, laboratory work, or business management. These institutions have become particularly numerous since the Second World War because of rapid changes in technology. Today, a few specialty schools are as prestigious as well-known universities. Community colleges give courses covering the usual requirements for the first two years of college, at little or no cost to the student. After that, students may graduate with an associate in arts (AA degree) or transfer into the third year of a full college or university programme and continue towards a bachelor of arts or science (BA or BSc degree). Community colleges are run by local authorities and offer many shorter certificate programmes suited to the occupational needs of a local area. As a result, many of their students are mature adults who study part-time. Community colleges first appeared in the 1930s but did not become commonplace until around 1970. One of the more important recent developments in American higher education, community colleges fulfil a number of public expectations. They give reality to the consensus view that a basic college-level education should be available to the general population virtually free of charge. They satisfy the nation's commitment to 'life-long learning', the belief that retraining and continuing education artvital to the individual's and the nation's international competitiveness. Finally, they reflect public opinion that currently favours even more local control of education. Community colleges have opened the possibility of almost unlimited local control over courses of study and have also proved particularly adept at organizing cooperative programmes with local businesses and labour unions. Although a clear majority of colleges and universities in the US are private, four-fifths of high school graduates choose public institutions. One important reason for this situation is that tuition (the cost of instruction) at city and state universities is often a small fraction of the fee charged ar a private institution. Location also reduces the cost. City or state residents pay much lower tuition rates than students who come from other places. Some public systems have purposely built campuses in many parts of the city or state so that students can live at home while they study. Public systems also attract more students because many have open admissions policies or minimal acceptance requirements for area residents. The majority of secondary school graduates who have average grades can thus avoid rejection in the intense competition for acceptance at more selective schools. Most of those are private, but city and state systems also have an enormous range of standards and programmes. Many 'branch' campuses of public universities are much like community colleges, but some concentrate on excellence through advanced courses in a limited number of fields. State university systems usually have a main campus that maintains higher overall standards. The best of these, the Berkeley campus of the University of California and the Madison campus of the University of Wisconsin, for example, have reputations that equal those of such elite private universities as Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Stanford. Private higher education in the US is typical of American pluralism, the belief in allowing many alternatives and centres of decentralized power. A private sector that educates a fifth of university-level students is large compared to that in other Western nations. Yet private institutions could expand their size greatly if they wished. On average, private colleges and universities accept only one in ten applicants. There is no single or simple reason for this restrictive admissions policy. Inability to pay school costs is rarely the main reason for turning down an applicant. Good private institutions have little difficulty finding enough fee-paying students. Stipends, scholarships, low-interest loans, part-time work-study programmes, or a combination of these are made available to people the institution wants. Private colleges and universities recruit as much as a third of their students among well-qualified poor, minority, and foreign groups. Even the most prestigious institutions offer some of these recruits extra help (so-called remedial courses) as a form of affirmative action, because they believe studying with people of varied backgrounds is a vital part of a good education. The reasons most private institutions have for remaining relatively small are related to their concept of a quality education. A few concentrate on high academic standards as their single definition of quality. Many more combine that goal with the ideal of a special community of learning. The ideal of community is often served by requiring students to live on campus and by having relatively few students per teacher to encourage the close contacts between students and faculty. A sense of community is also often established by bringing together staff and students who share a religious or ethnic background or socio-political orientation. Most American racial, nationality, and religious groups have founded at least one private college or university. Some institutions are common to both public and private higher education. The four-year liberal arts college, which about two thuds of American students attend, is the most important of these. One of several units in a university or an independent organization, its purpose is to provide basic courses in a broad range of humanities and sciences. Liberal arts students usually do not specialize until their third year. That 'major', the capstone of their undergraduate education, is a requirement for the BA or BSc degree. A primary goal of the liberal arts college is making its graduates so-called 'well rounded' individuals (generally well informed and cultured people). By requiring a core curriculum, these colleges help maintain a common culture in the US. Until around 1980 few questioned this canon of study and research, which aimed to expose students to the fundamental values of American and Western culture. Since then, the definition of the canon has conflicted with the ideal of pluralism. Debate over the canon has become so intense in the academy and educated public that Americans speak of the 'culture wars'. Nothing less than a redefinition of American identity or realizing cultural equality has been attempted. By the late 1990s, many scholars had successfully argued that the canon of many subjects must be widened to include the work of women and the non-Western cultures of many Americans. Debate continues, but the core curriculum is already much changed. A liberal arts degree is required before students can enter graduate schools. These may be professional schools, such as law or medical schools, or advanced liberal arts schools that offer masters degrees (the MA or MSc) and doctorates (the PhD). To be admitted to graduate schools, students must normally take a competitive examination, either an entrance test for the professional school or graduate record exams (GREs) in liberal arts subjects. A hallmark of the best universities, America's high quality graduate schools are internationally famous centres of research. Higher education in the US is a competitive struggle. Over 60 per cent of high school graduates (some 12 million people) entered colleges or universities each year in the 1990s, but only half of these students completed a degree. City and state universities normally 'weed out' one-third to one half of the freshman class through tough introductory courses and exams that must be passed if a student is to stay enrolled. All American institutions of higher education use the system called continuous evaluation. It requires students to take mid-term and end-of-term examinations, write essays and term papers, and complete additional tasks the instructor chooses to give. Course grades result from a weighted average of the student's marks on these assignments. A minimum overall grade average is necessary to continue one's studies.

Recent problems and policy debates

'State of the nation' evaluations have become a regular part of public debate about American education. Federal commissions and the US Secretary of Education, associations of the states, organizations of educators and private foundations regularly identify problems and suggest policy changes. Concern over the quality of schooling at all levels is the common theme in expert reports and public opinion polls in the 1990s. Efforts at reform in the previous decade appear to have stabilized falling test scores on national public school tests and college entrance examinations but have not raised them significantly. Average achievement levels in language skills, mathematics and science remained lower in the US than in many other developed nations, according to comparative studies of secondary pupils, which also show that American students spend less time doing homework. Reports on the condition of higher education lament a steady decline in the basic skills of college graduates. The causa of unsatisfactory quality in education are a matter of much debate. Some commentators on public elementary and secondary schools claim that only the achievement levels of inner-city districts are a problem and that their poor results skew the national averages. There is agreement, however, that continued White flighr to the suburbs and private schools produce increased racial segregation and inadequate funding in urban areas. Others think the problem of quality is nearly universal in the public schools. Polls show that the public link lowered quality to drug abuse and the lack of discipline. At all levels, analyses of the causes of decline focus on curriculum changes. Some critics assert that students neglect basic skills because they are allowed to choose too many excessively vocational or undemanding electives. Such criticisms provoke heated responses, especially when they are linked with allegations that pluralism, the introduction of women's or non-Western 'multicultural' components, has weakened the core curriculum in schools. Revision of the academic canon is ongoing, as many institutions adjust their sense of the essential, evaluate suggested national curricula, add remedial programmes and implement stricter standards of proficiency. Proposals for policy changes in public elementary and secondary schools show conflicting attitudes towards decentralization. In Gallup polls, large majorities support requiring local schools to follow a standardized national curriculum and conform to national achievement standards. But the same polls reveal strong support for school choice programmes, which often involve further decentralization. School choice allows families, rather than school authorities, to select the schools their children attend. Choice programmes began with the decentralizing of school districts by giving individual schools the autonomy to design their own curricula. The first autonomous public schools were so-called magnet schools in inner cities. These institutions were allowed to specialize in particular subject areas (such as the fine arts or science) and were given the funds and staff that, it was hoped, would bring voluntary desegregation by attracting students from other districts. By the 1990s, magnet schools had multiplied, especially in large urban school systems, and school choice programmes now and to maintain high standards by putting these schools in competition with each other. In increasingly large areas, universal choice completely breaks the connection between place of residence and the public school a pupil attends. School choice advocates say the increased number of high quality programmes give students more chances to develop their abilities and point to reductions in racial segregation. Opponents argue that school choice relegates most start and pupils to institutions that are weaker than ever before because they lack leadership and positive role models. They also criticize the concentration of the best faculty and pupils in magnet schools as an elitist approach that contradicts the ideals of American democracy. In the late 1990s, around a million children in the US were being taught at home because their parents had decided to opt out of institutional schooling altogether.

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