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New educational system
Thomas Jefferson proposes a two-track educational system, with different tracks in his words for "the laboring and the learned." Scholarship would allow a very few of the laboring class to advance, Jefferson says, by "raking a few geniuses from the rubbish." -
Land Grant Universities
The Continental Congress passed a law calling for a survey of the Northwest Territory. The law created townships, reserving a portion of each township for a local school. From these, "land grants" eventually came the U.S. system of "land grant universities," the state public universities that exist today. In order to create these townships, the Continental Congress assumed it had the right to give away or sell land that is already occupied by Native people. -
First juvenile reform school
Massachusetts Reform School at Westboro opens, where children who have refused to attend public schools are sent. This begins a long tradition of "reform schools," which combine the education and juvenile justice systems. -
Indian Education
Congress made it illegal for Native Americans to be taught in their native languages. Native children as young as four years old are taken from their parents and sent to the Bureau of Indian Affairs off-reservation boarding schools, whose goal was to "kill the Indian to save the man." -
Plessy v. Ferguson decision
The U.S. Supreme Court rules that the state of Louisiana has the right to require "separate but equal" railroad cars for blacks and whites. This decision means that the federal government officially recognizes segregation as legal. One result is that southern states pass laws requiring racial segregation in public schools. -
Smith-Hughes act
provides federal funding for vocational education. Big manufacturing corporations push this, because they want to remove job skill training from the apprenticeship programs of trade unions and bring it under their own control. -
Racial Wage Gap
The NAACP brings a series of suits over unequal teachers' pay for Blacks and whites in southern states. At the same time, southern states realize they are losing African American labor to the northern cities. These two sources of pressure resulted in some increase of spending on Black schools in the South. -
World war 2 Effect
At the end of World War 2, the G.I. Bill of Rights gives thousands of working-class men college scholarships for the first time in U.S. history. -
Brown v the board of education
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. The Supreme Court unanimously agrees that segregated schools are "inherently unequal" and must be abolished. Almost 45 years later in 1998, schools, especially in the north, are as segregated as ever. -
End of forceful indian education
The federal Tribal Colleges Act establishes a community college on every Indian reservation, which allows young people to go to college without leaving their families.