Episode 6.2: High Schools in Hard Times

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From the course by University of Pennsylvania

American Education Reform: History, Policy, Practice

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University of Pennsylvania

American Education Reform: History, Policy, Practice

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Discover what shapes how we talk about schools today by exploring the history of U.S. education reform. Engage with the main actors, key decisions, and major turning points in this history. See how social forces drive reform. Learn about how the critical tensions embedded in U.S. education policy and practice apply to schools nationally, globally— and where you live.

From the lesson

The Depression Era

This module looks at the New Deal’s contribution to the education of American youth; the impact of the Great Depression on education; social reconstruction and the schools; schools as social centers, community centers, and community schools; the Nambé School, New Mexico; the Arthurdale School, West Virginia; and Benjamin Franklin High School, East Harlem.

Episode 6.1: The Great Depression and a New Deal for America's Youth5:26

Episode 6.2: High Schools in Hard Times6:21

Episode 6.3: Social Reconstruction and the Schools7:50

Episode 6.4: Antecedents to America's Community Schools: Social Centers and Community Centers9:54

Episode 6.5: The Nambé Community School5:53

Episode 6.6: Arthurdale6:01

Episode 6.7: Leonard Covello's Community High School in East Harlem11:18

Meet the Instructors

Dr. John L. Puckett
Professor of Education
Graduate School of Education
Dr. Michael Charles Johanek
Senior Fellow
Graduate School of Education

Welcome to our episode on the nation's high schools in hard times.

The Great Depression was a period of enormous growth for

the comprehensive high school.

Regarding this great expansion, we're interested in the following questions.

What factors explain the dramatic acceleration

of high school enrollments between 1930 and World War II?

What was the situation of African American youth in the high schools of the South?

In the 30s, America's high schools experienced an unprecedented surge

in enrollments from about 4.8 million in 1930 to more than 7.1 million in 1939.

As the youth labor market collapsed in the depression, more and

more youths of working class and

poor backgrounds turned to the high school as an alternative to the bread line.

They were hardly welcome here, as school leaders across the country recoiled at

this onslaught of young people who were deemed unfit for the high school.

And leading educators and professional organizations were clamoring for

curriculum reforms to accommodate this army of presumed incapables.

>> By the end of the 1930s, about 70% of 14, 17 year olds were

attending high school, up from 50% at the start of the depression.

Increasingly they came from Italian, Jewish, Slavic, and

other immigrant backgrounds.

High school educators struggled to Americanize these new students and address

the challenges of what many referred to as the second generation problem.

Confident in the capacity of the new science of education to identify and

address distinct mental abilities, educators strongly influenced by

social efficiency ideology also sought to adjust the high school curriculum

to the perceived talents and destinies of children with different backgrounds.

>> Hm.

>> The arrival in high schools of so many immigrant children changed the face of

secondary education in the large cities.

The comprehensive high school advocated in the 1918 Cardinal Principles report

was now firmly entrenched.

As more youth entered high school and stayed longer, the schools were called

upon to play a greater role in what was called the youth problem.

With severe unemployment and more employers demanding more years of

schooling, high schools also took on a custodial function,

holding youth out of labor markets and off the streets.

>> And, and nowhere was the youth problem more pressing than in New York City,

which boasted the world's largest school system.

To serve the enormous diversity of its school aged population including,

since the turn of the century, a flood of newly arrived immigrants from southern and

eastern Europe, a surge that flowed unabated until the 1920s.

The city built a variety of special schools alongside the regular elementary,

junior, and senior high schools.

So by 1930, New York had a three tier system of elementary, junior high, and

high schools.

The high schools, now comprehensive, offered a differentiated curriculum,

including academic and vocational tracks.

The city also had specialized vocational high schools.

Between World War I and the mid 1920s, New York's high school

enrollments more than doubled, from 61,000 to 125,000.

By 1931, as the depression deepened, citywide enrollment

in the regular day high schools reached 178,000,

an increase of 22% since 1925-26.

By 1934, enrollments had increased another 54,000 or 30%.

>> In the south, the black struggle for educational parity with whites continued

unabated from the 1910s to the Great Depression.

In southern cities of 20,000 or more inhabitants in 1915,

the ratio of white to black public high schools was more than eight to one.

By 1930, whites of all classes had access to public high schools.

This was not the case for blacks although the situation was improving.

Between 1920 and 1930 some 877,000 blacks left the South.

Facing a rural depression that started in the early 1920s, other

blacks abandoned the agrarian economy to take their chances in southern cities.

Since the 1910s,

the population of black youths in southern cities had expanded rapidly.

Faced with large numbers of out of work, potentially delinquent urban black youths,

white-dominated school boards built black high schools in the 1920s,

supported by northern philanthropists biased toward industrial education,

with the Julius Rosenwald fund in the lead role.

>> Hm.

The historian James Anderson's meticulous research

suggests that local black leaders, educators, and

families were able to forge compromises with the Rosenwald Fund,

other industrial philanthropists, and urban school boards that

gave industrialization the status of a track in black comprehensive high schools.

These institutions included a liberal arts-based college preparatory track.

The Great Depression sharply cut the flow of blacks leaving the South,

as job opportunities for blacks dried up in the Northeast, Midwest, and West.

In cities across the South, out of work whites claimed the so-called negro jobs,

menial and semi-skilled employment that they had once spurned,

leaving even high school educated blacks without work.

The stage was being set for the 20th century's second great migration

of African Americans to the North, during and after World War II.

In our next episode,

we turn to a new strand of progressive education that appeared in the 1930s,

to take up the cause of social justice in capitalist America.

These educators were called social reconstructionists.

[MUSIC]

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