For much of its early existence, therefore, the United States had a schooling system that was locally funded and locally controlled, free to all, nonsectarian, and increasingly professional. Schools opened the door widely to opportunity. And there were many schools. Between 1800 and 1915, hundreds of thousands of common schools were set up and controlled by communities.22 By 1860, the average years of schooling across the population in the United States was far in advance of any other industrializing country in the world, and it would stay so for nearly a century.23
TECHNOLOGICAL PROGRESS AND SCHOOL CONSOLIDATION
The common school answered the needs of the early- to mid-nineteenth century United States. However, with the onset of the Second Industrial Revolution in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, many more jobs emerged in new, more technically demanding industries like chemicals or iron and steel. Department stores such as Marshall Fields or Wanamaker looked for educated women to help their customers. Small firms searched for bookkeepers and managers as banks demanded transparency and professionalization in the firms they financed. Banks and insurance companies also needed vast numbers of clerical staff to manage their own exploding paperwork. The demand for better-educated workers increased, as did the demand for well-qualified teachers to impart that education. The high-wage premium for the better educated made many more students and their parents look beyond the common school. The stage was set for the second big wave in US education, the public high school movement.
At that time, it was not obvious that education beyond the common school ought to be free. After all, arguably, the public benefits of a literate and civilized citizenry could be had in the late nineteenth century with the six to eight years that students spent in the common school. Nevertheless, the small emerging middle class saw tremendous personal benefits in a free high school. They emphasized it would be open to all, satisfying the widespread desire for upward social mobility into well-paying jobs. In practice, though, in the late nineteenth century, a high school primarily catered to the much smaller group that could afford to keep their children studying and not working. For this reason, the high school certificate in those years attested as much to the holder’s middle-class status as it did to her educational attainments.
Despite the narrowness of the population segments that had use for it, the high school was made free for all by the Michigan Supreme Court in Kalamazoo (1874), which ruled that local funds could be used to support high schools. It believed no one ought to be deprived of a broad liberal education, and therefore high schools should not be foreclosed to anyone who could not afford it—they should be free.24
Someone had to pay the taxes that supported the schools. An early argument to persuade the propertied to pay was that property prices would be enhanced if the property owner could advertise “free transportation to a good graded school.” Another persuasive argument was that even those who had no children must necessarily rely in their old age on someone in the community who had studied in the public schools, so their “only safeguard lies in giving the best advantages possible to all.”25
The free public high school offered students a general education—the United States has typically resisted streaming students into vocational training early—so that graduates had the flexibility of joining any industry, where they would get specific training. The rising tide of immigration in the latter half of the nineteenth century also helped to push native-born children into high school. Immigrants had substantial work experience in “older” trades such as baking, cabinetmaking, or blacksmithing.26 The high school turned from being an escape for the few to being an economic passport for the many, enabling them to bypass the sectors crowded by experienced immigrants, and to obtain jobs in sunrise white-collar industries, technology-intensive manufacturing, or in the emerging construction sector.
In short, in the same way as the common school seemed to be the minimum aspirational level for American society in the early nineteenth century, the high school became the minimum from the beginning of the twentieth century. Free and open access unlocked the doors to opportunity to many. Around the end of the nineteenth century, the median American had only a common school education; by the early 1940s, the median American had a high school education.27
THE WEAKENING OF LOCAL COMMUNITY CONTROL
The expanding market and its demands hit at community control. Small communities had the resources to fund and staff the common school. The high school was a different matter. In order to teach the wide variety of subjects in the depth and width required, the high school needed many teachers, an administrative staff, large buildings, a library, scientific laboratories, a gymnasium, and so on. With the large minimum scale required to provide education of the requisite quality, any new high school had to draw a large number of students to be economically viable.
This had a number of implications. First, communities, especially the smaller and the more remote rural ones, often had to come together to found high schools. This immediately meant a weakening in each community’s sense of ownership and responsibility for the school. Second, the greater complexity and professionalization of high school administration created the possibility that parental control might not be adequate to the task of monitoring the school, which gave education professionals an excuse to distance parents from school governance whenever possible. Third, the greater resources needed by even rudimentary high schools, coupled with the historic emphasis on local funding, meant that high school quality depended to a much greater extent on local wealth. Students in different areas had vastly different life opportunities because the quality of high schools varied so much. Poorer and rural communities were obviously worse off.
These differences in access to education exhibited themselves in different ways. For instance, in the enormous induction into the military in World War I, rural American youth were found to be far less prepared than urban youth for a modern army, primarily because of poor health stemming from inadequate diets as well as their shocking levels of illiteracy and innumeracy.28 The rising inequality in the provision of education was a red flag for Progressives in the early twentieth century. Something had to be done, and the response was greater state government intervention in schooling and in its funding.
Even as state governments provided more funding to help school districts that were too poor to afford quality schools, departments of education sprang up in state capitals, insisting on school consolidation to reduce costs, and setting minimum requirements for school size, teacher qualifications, and curriculum. Of the over two hundred thousand one-room schools in 1915, only twelve hundred were open in 1975.29
Progressives were not just concerned about the inequality in funding but about educational outcomes in general. Reformers like John Dewey, who founded the University of Chicago’s Laboratory School, believed that with industrialization and the growing divide between labor and capital, as well as the increasing ethnic and religious fragmentation of American society, the social distance between groups would tend to increase. The primary school brought together students from diverse backgrounds, while the high school drew students from a still larger geographic area. A rounded school education would give students the experience of interacting with a more diverse population, draw them into civic participation, and inculcate a more democratic attitude toward debating differences. Progressives therefore saw in the school a lever with which to change society, to get students to go beyond the parochialism introduced by their own narrow communities.
Some went further and thought parental control was really parental interference, and therefore not part of the solution. As Woodrow Wilson, who was president of Princeton University before he became president of the United States, stated while speaking of his students, “Our problem is not merely to help the students to adjust themselves to world life. Our problem is to make them as unlike their fathers as we can.”30 Such attitudes could not help but diffuse through the professional educational
bureaucracy. As parent-staffed school boards competed with professional state government superintendents of education for influence over the school, local control diminished further. The gap in views between parents and the professional bureaucracy widened.
Even while schools lost local involvement and support, the efforts to make school quality more uniform through centralized funding fell significantly short. State government aid in Massachusetts was supposed to be distributed based on an equalizing formula that gave more to poor districts than rich districts. Even as late as the 1960s, a study found that the correlation between state support and local need was so slight that the state government could have done as well if it had “distributed its largesse in a completely random fashion, as by the State Treasurer throwing checks from an airplane.”31
SCHOOLING IN FRANCE
What did other countries do? An especially different approach was that of France, which underwent its own revolution in 1789 soon after the American Revolution. Instead of revolting against foreign domination, the French revolted against their nobility and the clergy. So right from the outset, widespread public education was seen as a way to reduce the advantages of the privileged. Furthermore, since the clergy could shape young minds against the revolution, and inculcate narrow religious factionalism rather than a broader national spirit, the state thought it important to get the clergy out of education. Also, because France was soon surrounded by enemies who wanted to restore the monarchy, the schools became seen as an important instrument to create national unity.
The French education system, as envisioned by Napoleon, would train students to be loyal to the state. The state would have a monopoly over instruction, there would be an administrative hierarchy supervising schools, and there would be a sequence of central exams intended to sort students into schools, from the most technically demanding downward. At lower levels, all state schools would resemble one another so that everyone got an equal chance. It was as different from the decentralized American schooling system as one could get in that it was state-funded, centrally designed and managed, and ostensibly equitable. Its uniformity made it rigid, though, and the hierarchy was unforgiving of students who tripped up in their studies and did not pass central exams.
In the early 1880s, the Third Republic passed laws that made public education free, compulsory between the ages of six and twelve, and secular. Most teachers and university professors became civil servants, and the state’s control over examinations meant that even when it relented to allow private participation in education, the private schools had to mirror public education. Today, in any given grade in schools across France, the curriculum is the same. Nevertheless, the French too have not achieved their goal of uniform access to school education. As is common in centralized systems, the teachers who are assigned to schools in the most difficult neighborhoods are often the ones who have the least power to wangle preferred assignments from the bureaucratic establishment. They are typically the most junior and least experienced. The quality of such schools is lower—in large part because of differences in early childhood learning among the student body and in community support—increasing the desire of any good teacher who is assigned to them to escape as soon as possible.
So while the school system in the United States evolved from one that was totally decentralized, and had substantial community involvement in design, to one that has significantly more central direction in parts than at the outset, the French system has had central control for the last two hundred years. The advantage of a decentralized system is the community can shape it toward its needs; the advantage of a centralized system is that it offers more uniform instruction across the populace. Each system has its problems and fails to prepare people in a variety of communities for the market. As we will see in later chapters, the demands of the market for higher levels of education have increased once again in the twenty-first century, exacerbating these problems.
COMMUNITY AND STATE BUFFERS AGAINST MARKET VOLATILITY
We have been discussing what might be deemed pre-market support, that is, help in preparing the individual to enter the market as a worker or a producer. Let us now turn to what could be labeled post-market support—help to those who are hit by adverse economic conditions, or who, because of disability, misfortune, aging, or technological change, are incapable of earning a living. In a sense, both pre-market support and post-market support could be thought of as substitutes. The more people have the capabilities to participate in and benefit from the market, the less need there is of a safety net, and vice versa. Indeed, the historical US embrace of markets despite the holes in its safety net, may well be due in large measure to its high-quality and widely accessible schooling system. Today, its schooling system is no longer adequate, hence more weight falls on post-market support, which the United States is ill structured to provide, for reasons we will come to shortly.
Worker lives in the early years of industrialization were very difficult. They were, on average, much poorer than today. Wages were barely enough to put food on the table and secure shelter for the family in a noxious urban slum, let alone build a buffer of savings. Indeed, informal workers in many developing countries face similar conditions today; sickness means a loss of pay and skipped meals; and the death of the main wage earner may leave the family destitute, with few alternatives to begging or prostitution. With many workers living at the margin, a safety net is needed in such circumstances at the best of times, let alone in periods of mass economic dislocation.
WHO SHOULD HELP? WHEN? AND HOW?
When are we, as individuals, most impelled to help the unfortunate? We are more predisposed to help when the needy are socially or physically close, so that we can put a familiar human face to them. Moreover, as we discussed earlier, helping someone nearby strengthens the social contract, so that they too are willing to help when we are in need. Moreover, pure self-interest comes into play, for if we help them, they are less likely to riot in the street or burn down our property.
We are also more likely to help when someone looks like us, motivated by two powerful sources of empathy—our genes pushing for their own survival and the notion that “there but for the Grace of God go I.” Conversely, population diversity has been an important barrier to mutual assistance. Even today, studies find that countries with high levels of ethnic or linguistic diversity among their people tend to have significantly lower levels of redistribution by the government as a share of GDP.32 In other words, countries with very different communities opt to live with greater inequality and insecurity.
These are reasons why assistance has historically been provided within the community. Physically proximate communities consist, typically, of homogenous groups of people, with similar ethnicity, language, religion, and class. It is easier to build group solidarity and empathy within such groups. This makes them the appropriate units through which to provide a safety net for their members.
There is another reason for community-based assistance. It is straightforward to identify some who cannot help themselves, such as the very old, the infirm, the mentally unstable, the visually disabled, and children. Such human conditions are hard, or very costly, to simulate. In contrast, the worry with any assistance to able-bodied adults has always been that it might go to “undeserving” malingerers rather than the truly needy. In addition, unconditional assistance might deter the assisted from ever working, and incentivize low-paid workers to drop out and join them, leading to a growing mass of able but lazy loafers sponging on those who labor honestly. The modern embodiment of these fears is the apocryphal welfare queen, who takes advantage of every form of public assistance even while driving in her limousine to buy intoxicants. It is hard to know how quantitatively important freeloading has been, but it is an argument that has always been used against assistance. Given the public’s concerns, the advantage of funneling assistance through the community is that it may be best informed to weed out potential malingerers.
As economic volatility increased, British and American parishes or counties set up poorhouses and workhouses. These frightening establishments, aptly described by Charles Dickens, made inhabitants live and work in terrible conditions, so that only the truly incapable or desperate would opt for such assistance. At the same time, where it was clear that the supplicant was not a malingerer, communities also offered outdoor relief, a term for sums of money or supplies given directly to the poor household in situ, out of the door of the poorhouse. Outdoor relief was often cheaper and much more humane, and did not dislocate or break up poor families. The community had the information to ensure outdoor relief was not misused. For instance, county supervisors in the United States argued they were not unduly harsh in their decisions on whom to send to the poorhouse, because any time someone “deserving,” such as a poor widow with many children, or an injured family man unable to work, came for assistance, their neighbors rallied behind them and pushed for outdoor relief.33 Essentially, support for relief was crowdsourced.
COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT AND THE ELBERFELD SYSTEM
Germany was a leader in community provision of assistance in the industrializing world. Its Elberfeld system, adopted in a number of cities, recognized that poverty was a changeable condition, and drew the community into managing it. In the mid-nineteenth century, 10–20 percent of Elberfeld’s population received poor relief regularly, which was proving to be beyond the city’s capacity to sustain.34 A group of the city’s businessmen devised the eponymous system to bring spending under control, and to ensure that poverty did not become a permanent condition.
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