Comprehensive High Schools

American secondary schools, free and open to all, enroll the bulk of the country's adolescents. Nearly every student who finishes the primary grades enters a high school, usually around age 13 or 14, and more than 70% who begin high school graduate within 4 years. About half of the dropouts eventually return and finish, or earn the diploma's equivalent by examination. Although policymakers often urge educators to raise the graduation rates, American high schools seek and hold numbers unimagined a century ago. Most of those students attend schools where the curricular options are so vast that they are called comprehensive high schools. Their success in enrolling and graduating so many youth has also triggered reform initiatives ranging from modest tinkering to wholesale restructuring.

Throughout the 19th century, most American children left school after 6 to 8 years of elementary education. Few jobs required secondary education, and only a small fraction sought college admission. Even after the percentage of 17-year-olds in high school tripled between 1870 and 1900, less than 1 in 10 enrolled. Yet 50 years later, high school attendance and graduation were the rule, not the exception, especially for White middle-class youth.

What caused the expansion? Rising elementary school graduation rates and the expansion of colleges exerted a strong push from below and pull from above. Enactment of compulsory attendance laws corralled some otherwise absent youth (but in most states enrollments had already soared before those laws took hold). Also crucial were labor market changes, particularly the growth of white-collar jobs—clerk, sales person, bookkeeper—available to high school graduates. Another reason attendance rose was the new notion of adolescence as a time of tumultuous change best resolved apart from and before entering the workplace, where more and more youth were excluded by child labor laws and, later, the economic debacle of the 1930s. And peer pressure kept some teenagers in school simply because more of their friends stayed there.

The surge would not have been so dramatic if educators had not welcomed and thus accelerated the expansion. Manifestos such as the influential Cardinal Principles Report of 1918 envisioned the ideal high school as able to offer something useful and interesting for all but the severely handicapped. To that end, not everyone had to take the same portions of classical languages, mathematics, and other rigorous fare required for college admission. Practical academic coursework designed for business careers attracted students in 19th-century high schools, and by the early 20th century, the curriculum had more options. Vocational preparation for skilled and semi-skilled trades was very popular, as were commercial courses for girls training for secretarial jobs. Students unsure of their plans could select the general track, a medley of introductory and survey courses. The differentiation of the curriculum pleased Progressive reformers, who believed that individual differences among adolescents were great enough to justify the larger array of offerings.

A comprehensive high school offered the array of programs within the same building. In smaller communities, the motive was usually financial. It would have been prohibitively expensive for most [Page 201]villages to support more than one high school (although some states had county and regional vocational schools). In larger towns and cities, the rationale went beyond money. Future lawyers and laborers should get to know, like, and respect each other regardless of their vastly different course-work. Invidious class distinctions could be minimized if students appreciated the “equality of status of all forms of honest labor,” in the words of James Conant, former president of Harvard University and influential advocate of comprehensive high schools as the wellspring of a truly democratic society. Students would become loyal citizens by taking cross-track courses titled U.S. History and Problems of Democracy. In homeroom periods, sports teams, extracurricular clubs, and informal contacts during the day, friendships rather than rivalries would develop.

...