The Changing Meaning of a Continuing Challenge
This is a discouraging moment to be writing about access to education in the United States. In a rush to raise standards, colleges and high schools seem to be pushing students out their doors rather than bringing them in. For the first time since such statistics have been collected, the United States has fallen behind most other industrialized countries in its high school graduation rates. How could we have allowed that to happen?
The meaning of access to education has, of course, changed over time. During the early history of this country, really until the late 19th century, access to education meant little more than acquiring the right to attend a public school. For white Americans, increasing access to education had primarily to do with hiring enough teachers and building enough schools so children could go to school relatively easily. White women were generally barred from formal education after the early years, but many of them surmounted the constraints of gender through informal means. For free African-Americans in the North, schooling was available usually in segregated schools. For enslaved black Americans, however, there simply was no access to formal schooling until after the Civil War. Then, with an energy that bespoke a people's long-suppressed hunger for education, local groups within African-American communities in the South, supplemented by aid provided by Northern Protestant missionary groups, began to establish the facilities that would begin to offer access to education to all students of color.
Eliot did not merely advocate that schools assume a selection function they had not previously fulfilled; he also worked diligently and effectively to institutionalize that view. Losing the National Education Association as an effective medium thanks to challenges mounted by women teachers, Eliot and other college presidents instead sought to advance their cause through newly created philanthropic foundations like the Rockefellers' General Education Board and the Carnegie Foundation for...
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