In just his first few months as Education Secretary, it is clear that Cardona’s priorities will look much different. His boss’s agenda is the opposite of divestment. President Joe Biden has laid out a vision that involves historic investments in public education. For starters, he wants to provide an additional four years of free public education – adding two years of free preschool classes for 3- and 4-year-olds and, at the other end of the standard American K-12 education, adding two years of free community college classes.
Biden also has made it clear that his administration will confront historic inequities head-on – and that’s historic as in way back. A quick review of this country’s education policies reveals systemic discrepancies that are a shock to 21st century sensibilities.
In 1779, Thomas Jefferson – the same fellow who a few years earlier had penned the Declaration of Independence – advocated for a two-tiered educational system: one designed for an elite learning class, and the other providing more prosaic instruction for the working class. It was possible, Jefferson conceded, that intensive application by students in the laboring class might yield “a few geniuses from the rubbish.” (That’s hardly a ringing endorsement of the self-evident truth “that all men are created equal.”)
Even before the U.S. Constitution was ratified, ideas about what public education might look like were being bandied about throughout the nascent nation.
When the Continental Congress authorized a survey of the Northwest Territory, it authorized a provision that for every township developed therein, a school would be established. This set the precedent for land-grant universities – although those didn’t come into existence until the second half of the 19th century.
In New York, business leaders formed a society of public schools to train students in basic educational concepts – not unlike the Jeffersonian idea of schooling for the working class.
Pennsylvania lawmakers, meanwhile, wrote free public education for poor students into their state constitution. Well-to-do families still had to pay.
In 1827, Massachusetts led the way in universal education by passing a law that made a public school education open and free to all pupils.
But as the nation expanded in territory, as well as population size and diversity, there were many roadblocks to that concept.
In the South, with the slave trade importing large numbers of Africans and selling them into enslavement, most southern states tried to impose tight control on the lives of Black people, and forbade them from learning how to read. In 1831, the rebellion led by Nat Turner, a literate enslaved man, further reinforced white Southerners’ determination to bar Black people from access to any education.
And across the West, as U.S. troops clashed with the tribes that were standing in the way of what white folks perceived as their manifest destiny, a new kind of racially-motivated educational oppression was imposed. Congress passed a law in 1864 that made it illegal for Native Americans to pass their culture and their language along to their children. As tribes were subjugated and reservations were established, Native children were removed from their homes and taken to off-reservation boarding schools run by the Bureau of Indian Affairs so that they could learn English, and be inculcated in white cultural traditions.
Following the Civil War, as the Union reincorporated the Confederate states during the Reconstruction era, Black Americans worked with white Republicans to push for state constitutions that guaranteed free public education for all. At the federal level, Republicans strove to fund public schools according to illiteracy rates, which would have guaranteed schools for poor Black students. But that bill was vetoed by President Andrew Johnson. Lincoln’s successor was a Democrat from the South who never had acquired a formal education himself.
Johnson did, however, sign legislation that created the first official Department of Education. With a staff of four and a budget of $15,000, the Department was charged with gathering information from schools across the country to give