The first U.S. public high school opens in Boston, Massachusetts. 1890s 1894 Educational reformer John Dewey establishes the Laboratory School at the University of Chicago. Educator Horace Mann asserts that schools can prevent poverty, a view echoed 70 years later by President Lyndon Johnson. The high school graduation rate for high school seniors is 6.4 percent, with 106,000 students enrolled in public secondary schools. Pedagogical progressives begin to challenge traditional instruction's emphasis on rote learning, and call for lessons structured around student interest.
Some states begin to institute teacher certification programs and standardize curricula.
The Stanford-Binet Intelligence Test is published and soon becomes the most widely used test of its kind in the United States. The Supreme Court rules that school attendance is compulsory for students 16 and under. The Scholastic Aptitude Test is given for the first time. The test's author, Carl Brigham, later expresses doubts about the ways in which the results are sometimes interpreted. There are still 130,000 one-room schools operating in the United States.