The Assault on the Carnegie Unit

By Gene I. Maeroff

The Carnegie unit, which helped put secondary education on a solid footing in the early decades of the 20th century, has increasingly transformed itself into a restraint on teaching and learning. At the same time, the sense of quality assurance that the Carnegie unit once lent to courses now sometimes is little more than a chimera.

Yet school reformers, by and large, seldom concern themselves with this product of the formative years of the American high school, a period when higher education demanded that the schools create a standard that colleges could use to assess courses taken by applicants.

It was an era when the college-going population increasingly included students besides those from the relative handful of preparatory schools that once dominated the enrollments of the elite...