Certain standards [electronic resource] : how efforts to establish and enforce minimum education standards transformed American schooling (1870-1980)
Keywords: Education.

This study attempts to place the current standards-based accountability movement in historical perspective by understanding it as the latest attempt in a century of effort to define the appropriate outcomes of public education. Approaching this topic from the vantage point of legal history, I examine three specific cases—compulsory school laws in the 19th century, the creation of the GED in the 1940s, and the minimum-competency testing movement of the 1970s—to develop an argument about the cyclical quality of the development, enforcement, and outcomes of the continual search for workable education standards. Drawing on evidence from a wide variety of sources including archival materials, legal records, and print media, I argue that this cycle is driven by moments of crisis brought about by the uncertainty inherent in mass public education and disagreements about the purpose of schooling. These crises are followed by a search for a new standard that can bring certainty and stability to the task of enforcing minimum standards. The solutions that are forged in these moments—created through legislative action or judicial ruling—achieve the necessary certainty at the price of narrowing the goals of schooling. Each of the minimum standards considered in this study—compulsory schooling laws; the GED; and exit examinations—were a byproduct of the complexity of a mass public education system and the tensions between the public and private value of schooling. Even as public schools produced advantage for individual students, the public at large had to be reassured that schools were also producing at least minimally educated citizens. The standards under examination in this dissertation were each a necessary part of convincing the public that schools were upholding their presumed responsibilities for producing the socially beneficial aspects of schooling. In the late nineteenth century, compulsory schooling laws were an important part of reassuring the public that all children received the benefit of the education system that had been provided at great public expense. After World War II, the GED allowed colleges and employers to have confidence that returning veterans had 'earned' their diplomas through a rigorous examination rather than as a handout for their military service. During the 1970's the implementation of minimum competency testing allayed fears that the quality of schools was slipping and that diplomas were too frequently given for "time served" rather than knowledge learned. The need to develop metrics that could be easily measured and monitored from afar had a significant impact on each of the cases examined in this study: it led judges in the late 19th century to define the purpose of compulsory schooling as requiring a number of days of attendance rather than an amount of learning; it convinced policymakers in the 1940s to accept a GED that measured only the schooling outcomes that were easily captured by a standardized test; and it allowed judges to validate policies that made diplomas contingent on passing "exit exams" on the assumption tests could serve as the sole measure of "minimum competence" and were more reliable than "subjective" teacher grades. In all three instances, the adopted measure did not address subjective skills, like reasoning, synthesizing, formulating conclusions, but rather strictly objective, fact-based knowledge that could be measured and seen through scores on multiple choice tests. Examining this history, then, provides insights into our ongoing effort to shore up confidence in public schooling through the development and enforcement of minimum standards. In fulfilling the effort to establish both an educational standard and a legal standard of enforcement, the legislators and judges had to find a balance between confronting the messy realities of the education process and providing a credible standard that could be reliably enforced. These were the sacrifices required to achieve certain standards. Understanding the trade-offs inherent in these kinds of efforts is crucial, not only to understanding the historical development of public education, but also for understanding the full implications of contemporary policy that seeks to expand greatly the role of standards and tests in American education.