Secondary Curricular Reform

Beginnings

One of the first high schools to be established was the Boston English Classical School. Public high schools were not a reality in the early 1800s. Secondary education was delivered through private academies, and most of the early secondary schools that did exist charged a tuition fee. By the mid-1800s there were several thousand private academies throughout the United States. No single curriculum existed across these schools or academies. Some prepared students for college and others offered a more general curriculum. Clearly, paying tuition represented a significant problem for many students. The Kalamazoo Court Case in 1874 was significant because it ruled that taxes collected to support public schools represented a legal way of delivering secondary education. In many respects the modern secondary school was a result of the Kalamazoo decision. Once it became possible to fund secondary schools with taxes, it then became possible for communities around the United States to find ways to educate their older youth. Still, the evolution of the modern high school occurred slowly and it was not until the 1930s and 1940s that public high schools became widespread across the United States.

Conant, the SAT, and the Committee of Ten

One of the chief architects of the modern public secondary school was James Bryant Conant. He was a strong advocate for public school reform, and he assertively argued that with enhanced and redesigned educational structures the United States would become a better and safer place for everyone to live. That is, democracy could be preserved. Conant was also instrumental in implementing the use of the SAT as a way of removing some of the historic favoritism that had been granted to those who came from privileged backgrounds. Specifically, colleges and universities needed a better and fairer means of determining which students could succeed in and should be admitted to college. Conant was able to articulate through his leadership the way in which children should be educated from the earliest grades through college. He wanted to create a seamless educational process that would allow all of America's youth to explore their full potential and that would essentially sort students according to their academic abilities. The SAT was a part of that sorting process. Conant wanted the best and brightest to be prepared for the most responsible positions within communities, but he wanted all young people to be educated so that they could be full participants in the maturing democratic experience.

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