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The first Latin Grammar School (Boston Latin School) is established. Latin Grammar Schools are designed for sons of certain social classes who are destined for leadership positions in church, state, or the courts.
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Harvard College, the first higher education institution in what is now the United States, is established in Massachusetts.
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The first printing press in the American Colonies is set up at Harvard College.
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The Massachusetts Bay School Law is passed, requiring that parents ensure their children know the principles of religion and the capital laws of the commonwealth.
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The General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony decrees that every town of fifty families should have an elementary school and that every town of 100 families should have a Latin school. The goal is to ensure that Puritan children learn to read the Bible and receive basic information about their Calvinist religion.
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The first New England Primer is printed in Boston. It becomes the most widely-used schoolbook in New England.
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The College of William and Mary is established in Virginia. It is the second college to open in colonial America.
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Benjamin Franklin helps to establish the first "English Academy" in Philadelphia with a curriculum that is both classical and modern, including courses like history, geography, navigation, surveying, and modern as well as classical languages. The academy ultimately becomes the University of Pennsylvania.
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Thomas Jefferson proposes a two-track educational system, with different tracks in his words for "the laboring and the learned."
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The Continental Congress passes a law calling for a survey of the "Northwest Territory." The law created "townships," which made schools for each township. From these "land grants" eventually came the U.S. system of "land grant universities," the state public universities that exist today.
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The University of Georgia becomes "America's first state-chartered university."
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Pennsylvania state constitution calls for free public education but only for poor children. It is expected that rich people will pay for their children's schooling.
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A petition presented in the Boston Town Meeting calls for establishing of a system of free public primary schools.
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First public high school in the U.S., Boston English, opens.
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Massachusetts passes a law making all grades of public school open to all pupils free of charge.
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African Americans move to bring public education to the South for the first time. After the Civil War, thy rewrite state constitutions to guarantee free public education.
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Inspired by a Kinetoscope exhibition in Paris, another pair of brothers, the Frenchmen Auguste and Louis Lumiere, would invent their own motion-picture projector, the cinematographe, by the end of 1895.
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Joliet Junior College, in Joliet, Illinois, opens. It is the first public community college in the U.S.
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The U.S. Supreme Court requires California to extend public education to the children of Chinese immigrants.
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Smith-Hughes Act passes, providing 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.
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The Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) is first administered. It is based on the Army Alpha test.
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The overhead projectors were invented in the early 1960s by Roger Appledorn.
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A survey of 150 school districts shows that 3/4 of them are using intelligence testing to place students in different academic levels.
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The computer age begins as the Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer (ENIAC), the first vacuum-tube computer, is built for the U.S. military by Presper Eckert and John Mauchly.
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In the case of McCollum v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court rules that schools cannot allow "released time" during the school day, which let students participate in religious education in their public school classrooms.
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The Supreme Court unanimously agrees that segregated schools are "inherently unequal" and must be abolished.
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The ACT Test is first administered.
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The Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) is passed on April 9. Part of Lyndon Johnson's "War on Poverty," it provides federal funds to help low-income students, which results in the initiation of educational programs such as Title I and bilingual education.
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Project Head Start, a preschool education program for children from low-income families, begins as an eight-week summer program.
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The Bilingual Education Act becomes law. After many years of controversy, the law is repealed in 2002 and replaced by the No Child Left Behind Act.
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Michael Hart, founder of Project Guttenberg, invents the e-Book.
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Texas Instruments introduces the first in its line of electronic hand-held calculators, the TI-2500 Data Math. TI becomes an industry leader known around the world.
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Scantrons are used to automatically grade multiple choice tests.
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Apple introduces the Apple II, one of the first successful personal computers. It and its offspring, the Apple IIe, become popular in schools as students begin to learn with computer games such as Oregon Trail and Odell Lake.
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ARPANET adopted TCP/IP on January 1, 1983, and from there researchers began to assemble the “network of networks” that became the modern Internet.
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Microsoft Windows 1.0, the first independent version of Windows, is released, setting the stage for subsequent versions that make MS-DOS obsolete.
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Laptops are introduced and later used as teaching tools.
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The University of Phoenix establishes their "online campus," the first to offer online bachelor's and master's degrees. It becomes the "largest private university in North America."
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World Wide Web invented by Tim Berners-Lee
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The smart board (interactive white board) is introduced by SMART Technologies.
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Proposition 187 passes in California, making it illegal for children of undocumented immigrants to attend public school.
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CompuHigh Whitmorte is founded. It claims to be the first online high school.
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Smartboards find their way into U.S. classrooms in increasing numbers and begin to replace the whiteboard.
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Georgia becomes the first state to offer preschool to all four year olds whose parents choose to enroll them. More than half of the state's four year olds are now enrolled.
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Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin set up a workplace for their newly incorporated search engine in a Menlo Park, California garage.
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The Higher Education Act is amended and reauthorized requiring institutions and states to produce "report cards" about teacher education
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The controversial No Child Left Behind Act is approved by Congress and signed into law by President George W. Bush on January 8, 2002. The law, which reauthorizes the ESEA of 1965 and replaces the Bilingual Education Act of 1968, mandates high-stakes student testing, holds schools accountable for student achievement levels, and provides penalties for schools that do not make adequate yearly progress toward meeting the goals of NCLB.
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The Common Core State Standards Initiative, "a state-led effort coordinated by the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices (NGA Center) and the Council of Chief State School Officers," is launched. It is expected that many, perhaps most, states will adopt them.
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1.5 million iPads are used within schools.
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90% of students under the age of 18 have accessibility to mobile technology.
