Academic Excellence in an Early U. S. High School

Abstract

This paper explores orientation toward academic excellence in high schools in United States during 19th century. Through a study of 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 structure of public education at 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 United States had lost sight of its once dominant objective, pursuit of academic excellence. The gloomiest assessment came from 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 educational system: from elementary schools, which are accused of failing to ground students sufficiently in basic skills, to colleges, which are charged with failing to provide necessary degree of advanced training. But it is public high school which has received greatest critical attention, and for good reason. The cumulative academic deficits of lower levels of education become more visible in high school; and since latter is highest level of schooling at which attendance is nearly universal, these deficits affect a broader spectrum of population than do failings of colleges. Perhaps most frequently cited evidence of decline in achievement at U.S. high schools is 40 to 50 point drop in average scores on College Board's Scholastic Aptitude Test since early 1960s (Commission on Excellence, 1983:8). However, this is not most compelling proof that could be offered, since this decline in scores was accompanied by a nearly 200 percent increase in number of students enrolled in college during same period (U.S. Bureau of Census, 1982:Table 259). Thus, at least part of drop in test scores may be 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 result of differences in selectivity of various systems of secondary schooling. In United States nearly everyone attends high school and threequarters of students graduate, while in European countries high school is limited to a small number of better students. If much of evidence about low levels of achievement among U.S. high school students is unconvincing, evidence about failure of U.S. high schools to promote academic achievement is stronger. As an institution, modern high school is less academic in orientation and less rigorously academic in application than it once was. The growth of electives in high school curriculum has permitted students to avoid more difficult academic courses, with result that only 31 percent of high school graduates took intermediate algebra, 13 percent took