The Evolution of K-12 Education: Part 1

02.05.21

When Thomas Jefferson first proposed the idea of free public education, he was dismissed as a dreamy radical who spent too much time sympathizing with farmers. Who needs Shakespeare when you have a plow? Contrary to popular perception, the right to a free grade-school education was not engraved in the Constitution, much less universally embraced by the Founding Fathers: Jefferson’s pet project would bring him much headache and grief for over forty years.

Despite its reputation as a conservative industry slow to innovate, K-12 education is an unusually resilient market and has managed to survive dozens of reform efforts since its inception. Today, some laud public education as a national jewel worthy of preservation and rehabilitation. Others regard it as willful form of child abuse that should have been abolished a century ago. Regardless of where you fall, the coronavirus stands poised to change education once more: in 2020, U.S. EdTech startups raised over $2.2. billion in capital across 130 deals, offering both students and teachers a new menu of nontraditional learning options.

This article is the first of a two-part series on the K-12 public education system. This week, we focus on the evolution of American public education and investment until the early 21st century. Next week, we will focus on the increasing digitization of education and growing investment opportunities in the EdTech sector.

Public School: Save it for the Aristocrats

Even Jefferson’s idea of a “universal” education was limited. As best-selling author and journalist Nicholas Lemann describes it, “Jefferson’s idea was to give a little bit of universal education for two purposes. One, to give people the democratic basics, and two, to give a staging area or audition site for [a] small group of natural aristocrats who would then be given a full university education, and then, serve the country as he had done.”

Jefferson proposed plucking one bright child from twenty primary schools across the country to receive scholarships each year. “By this means,” he reasoned, “twenty of the best geniuses will be raked from the rubbish annually, and be instructed, at the public expense, so far as the grammar schools go.” Of course, there were no geniuses to be found among girls or slaves. Girls were to receive enough education to outfit them for marriage and motherhood (three years), and slaves were to receive none.

This bill was defeated three times between 1779 and 1817. Not many could rationalize sending farmers to school on the government’s tab. Congress cited many of the complaints that still haunt public education today: it increases the tax burden, it expands the function of government, and it encourages state regulation. “There is a snail-paced gate for the advance of new ideas,” concluded Jefferson. “People generally have more feeling for canals and roads than for education.”

The Common School, 1840–1900

Public school remained a rag taggle enterprise taken up by select towns and education enthusiasts until the 1840s. At this point, Horace Mann, the “Patron Saint of Public Education,” stepped onto the scene and made it his life’s mission to transform public schooling into an American birthright.

The first item on his agenda was a grueling tour of 1,000 Massachusetts public schools over six years. Mann traveled by horseback from Cape Cod to the Berkshires documenting the state of education. His conclusion? Livestock fared better than children. “You crowd from 40 to 60 children into that ill-constructed shell of a building, there to sit in the most uncomfortable seats that could be contrived, expecting that with the occasional application of a birch they will come out educated for manhood or womanhood?” wrote Mann in one report.

Mann’s critique wasn’t limited to infrastructure. He also condemned the use of corporal punishment on children and the Puritanical tendency to breed an environment of fear. Consider an excerpt from the New England Primer, the most popular schoolbook of the time, that children recited daily:

“What will be your condition in hell? I shall be dreadfully tormented.
What company will be there? Legions of devils and multitudes of sinners in the human race.
If you should go to hell, how long must you continue there? Forever and ever.”

Mann’s withering assessment galvanized reformers to champion the Common Schools Movement, which sought to fund schools in every community through public investments. In 1837, Massachusetts became the first state to authorize school districts to tax themselves for the purchase of school goods and libraries. Many of the classroom objects so familiar to us today — chairs with backs, blackboards, standardized textbooks, etc. — are a direct hand-me-down from the personal efforts of Mann. By 1900, 34 states had adopted compulsory schooling laws.

Private Investment and the Gary Plan, 1900–1920

“In 1909 a factory inspector did an informal survey of 500 working children in 20 factories. She found that 412 of them would rather work in the terrible conditions of the factories than return to school.”
— Helen Todd, “Why Children Work,” McClure’s Magazine, April 1913

Despite Mann’s work, conditions in public schools remained so unpleasant in 1909 that 80% of children would still prefer sweating in a factory to sitting in a classroom. Prior to vaccines, urban schools were a hotbed for disease. Industrialists, alarmed at rising labor riots and the huge influx of unschooled immigrant children in cities such as New York, came to regard school as the ideal mechanism for “Americanizing” and integrating immigrant families. By 1916, the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations had committed over $250,000,000 to education and social services — more than twice the amount of the federal government.

One of the most notable models of the time was the Gary plan, a vocationally focused school system that was built to service the children of U.S. steel workers. The “work-study-play” system featured lavish buildings, a forge, a zoo, a lagoon, animal husbandry classes, and nature classes. Open on nights and weekends, school became a panacea to provide everything that parents couldn’t (or wouldn’t) give their children, a mentality that still persists today.

But when New York tried to adopt the model, it ignited widespread hostility before ultimately being abandoned. Unions felt that “the entire system was designed to train the children of steel workers to be efficient cogs in the industrial machine.” First generation immigrants, insulted at the idea that their children were predestined for vocational work, objected loudly: “We want our kinder [children] to learn with the book, the paper, and the pencil, not with the sewing in the shop,” protested one Brooklyn mother.

The “Innovations” of IQ Testing, 1910–1930

In conjunction with the growing vocational movement, the IQ test — then considered an example of cutting-edge technology — became a troubling and subjective means for sorting students onto educational tracks. Consider the bizarre questions of a 1927 exam:

“True or false: we seldom desire food when we are very sad.”
“True or false: a large man is always braver than a small one.”

Elwood Coverly, a leading IQ proselytizer at Stanford, rejected the egalitarian nature of earlier schools. “We should give up the exceedingly democratic idea that all are equal and that our society is devoid of classes,” urged Coverly. “The employee tends to remain an employee. The wage earner tends to remain a wage earner. One bright child might easily be worth more to the national life than thousands of those of the old mentality.”

By the 1920s, over two million children were being tested a year, with their fates generally decided in under twelve minutes by the age of ten. Girls were disproportionately shuffled into household arts classes while minorities went to industrial tracks. John Taylor Gatto, America’s most formidable educational critic, considered testing a strategic tactic for dividing children.

“Modern, industrialized, compulsory schooling was to make a sort of surgical intervention into the prospective unity of these underclasses,” wrote Gatto in Weapons of Mass Instruction. “Divide children by subject, by age-grading, by constant rankings on tests, and by many other more subtle means, and it is unlikely that the ignorant mass of mankind, separated in childhood, will ever re-integrate into a dangerous whole.” That laundry list doesn’t even include racial segregation, which persisted well into the 1980s.

A Nation Shocked By Sputnik, 1940–1960

The vocational aspirations of the Gary system eventually devolved into the Life Adjustment Movement, a vague curriculum centered around imparting “life skills” to the 60% of students who demonstrated no particular talent. “Life adjustment education centered on teaching students on how to date and kiss, how to select their dentist, and what to do with their zits,” said Joel Spring, a global educational policy academic.

Critics began to notice the decline in educational standards, and in 1953 historian Arthur Bestor published Educational Wastelands, a cry against the regressive and infantilizing nature of schools. “The West was not settled by men and women who had taken a course in how to be a pioneer,” said Bestor. “I, for one, do not believe that the American people have lost all common sense and native wit so that they now have to be taught in school to blow their nose and button their pants.”

Politicians paid little heed until Soviet Russia launched Sputnik in a humiliating victory over American engineers. The event triggered a national identity crisis and led to frenzied federal investment towards improving public schools. In 1958, President Eisenhower signed the National Defense Education Act, which siphoned over a billion dollars towards improving American science curricula. One student recalled being forcibly redirected from art and literature classes into math and science. “A teacher pointed at me in math class and said, ‘There’s Ivan in the Soviet Union studying math, and you’re studying math, and if you don’t do well, we’re going to lose to Communism.’”

Privatization and School Choice, 1980 — present

Despite greater public investment, a controversial government report — “A Nation At Risk” — provoked a similar administrative meltdown in the 1980s. The report claimed that schools were plagued by a “rising tide of mediocrity,” and led to the rise of the school standards movement, mass testing initiatives, school vouchers, school choice, and the continued privatization of schools that persists today.

If parents are discouraged, teachers are ready to throw in the towel. Jess Gartner, a former Baltimore City middle school teacher and founder of EdFinTech firm Allovue, believes public education could disappear entirely.

“The perpetuity of public education is not a foregone conclusion,” Gartner wrote in an op-ed this past December. “New choices are popping up for parents every day: charter schools, virtual schools, micro schools. The status quo is failing far too many children. Parents, teachers and administrators are voting with their feet; their exodus from traditional public schools is destructive to the system but ultimately rational behavior. Public schools cannot rely on martyrdom and self-sacrifice to keep staff and students.”

While some share her tragic sentiment, others hope for a new model entirely that comes with less baggage.

Will public schools survive? Check back in with us next week for Part II in this series.

About Colbeck: Colbeck is a strategic lender that partners with companies during periods of transition, providing creative capital solutions to meet their evolving needs. You can reach the team at inquiries@colbeck.com.