ACADEMIC EXCELLENCE IN AN EARLY U.S. HIGH SCHOOL

This paper explores the orientation toward academic excellence in high schools in the United States during the 19th century. Through a study of the first 80 years of Central High School in Philadephia, I find several factors which encouraged academic excellence: a meritocratic ideology, voluntary enrollment, competitive selection of students and faculty, and the structure of public education at the time. In comparison, modern public high schools have only a limited commitment to merit, compulsory attendance, automatic acceptance of all students, less competitive selection of teachers, and a different structure of public education. In 1983 a series of high-level panels charged that education in the United States had lost sight of its once dominant objective, the pursuit of academic excellence. The gloomiest assessment came from the national Commission on Excellence in Education (1983:5) which warned, "the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a nation and a people." Blame for this decline in excellence has been placed at all levels of the educational system: from the elementary schools, which are accused of failing to ground students sufficiently in basic skills, to colleges, which are charged with failing to provide the necessary degree of advanced training. But it is the public high school which has received the greatest critical attention, and for good reason. The cumulative academic deficits of lower levels of education become more visible in high school; and since the latter is the highest level of schooling at which attendance is nearly universal, these deficits affect a broader spectrum of the population than do the failings of colleges. Perhaps the most frequently cited evidence of the decline in achievement at U.S. high schools is the 40 to 50 point drop in average scores on the College Board's Scholastic Aptitude Test since the early 1960s (Commission on Excellence, 1983:8). However, this is not the most compelling proof that could be offered, since this decline in scores was accompanied by a nearly 200 percent increase in the number of students enrolled in college during the same period (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1982:Table 259). Thus, at least part of the drop in test scores may be the result of an expansion of educational opportunity rather than a reduction in student achievement. This same caveat applies to another favorite example of growing mediocrity in U.S. high schools. The Commission on Excellence (1983:8) noted that U.S. students scored low on achievement tests compared with students from other industrialized countries; but as Husen (1983) has pointed out, this difference is the result of differences in the selectivity of the various systems of secondary schooling. In the United States nearly everyone attends high school and threequarters of the students graduate, while in European countries high school is limited to a small number of the better students. If much of the evidence about low levels of achievement among U.S. high school students is unconvincing, the evidence about the failure of U.S. high schools to promote academic achievement is stronger. As an institution, the modern high school is less academic in orientation and less rigorously academic in application than it once was. The growth of electives in the high school curriculum has permitted students to avoid the more difficult academic courses, with the result that only 31 percent of high school graduates took intermediate algebra, 13 percent took