Though Reconstruction legislatures in the south had been moved to establish public schooling for blacks, the subsequent decades locked the population into a rigidly segregated system where their schools received only a pittance. As industrialization reshaped the nation, schools came increasingly to be understood as the handmaiden of the emerging corporations. Finally, there was pressure for schools themselves increasingly to resemble factories in the emerging industrial, urban order. Thus, through the 20th century, the trend has been toward larger and larger schools. Curricula have become increasingly fragmented, with students moving from room to room each hour.
Teachers have less and less contact with individual students.
In such a setting, most students experience failure. The evidence suggests that for most immigrant groups through the 20th century, economic mobility came largely as a result of access to entry level industrial jobs where individuals could advance through seniority systems over time, not through formal schooling. The debate is about who to blame. On top of the long-developing problems of urban schools, moreover, the migration of both black and white middle class residents to the suburbs in the 1970s left central city school districts in often desperate straits. Middle class taxpayers were increasingly unwilling to fund school improvements.