Access, Outcomes, and Educational Opportunity
It is one of America's great triumphs, the 20th-century enrollment of vast numbers of children, adolescents, and, increasingly, adults in schools for ever-increasing periods of time. Yet access has also been a moving target: Near-universal attendance has been paralleled by failures and changing expectations, so that frustration with the outcomes of schooling has often dominated the public mood.
In the 19th century, the goal of access was to place schools in proximity to children and to enroll as many as possible. At the turn of the century, that goal was supplemented by a focus on providing a range of curricular choices, especially vocational options to retain students in school, justified as a means of converting access into equality of educational opportunity. Between the New Deal and Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, access as educational opportunity was connected to the removal of legally enforced racial and, to a lesser extent, economic barriers to schooling. With the Great Society and its aftermath, access and educational opportunity were again redefined to include egalitarian educational outcomes.
Secondary education, too, was beginning a period of spectacular growth. Nineteenth-century high schools were small and unstandardized, sometimes little more than grades added on to a local elementary school. With most children leaving school by age 13, the high school was of little importance. Between 1900 and 1930, however, high school enrollment of 14- to 17-year-olds went from about 10 percent to more than 50 percent of the age group, as changes in the labor market reduced economic opportunities for young teenagers and colleges began to require high school graduation as a condition of admission. Growth in enrollment itself had a snowballing effect. With a peer-group adolescent culture flourishing within the school buildings, high school became the place...
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