United States of America

Abstract

Prior to the 1980s, children’s education in the United States was the near-exclusive domain of the individual states and not of the federal government. The Constitution of the United States made no mention or provision for the public or private education of the country’s children. The consequence of this exclusion is that for most of US history there had been considerable variability in the content of educational instruction from state to state. The issue of ‘states’ rights,’ which entails an on-going conflict between the states and the national government and which was not resolved following the American Civil War (1861–1865), has led to nuanced applications of federal programs for schools and lawsuits against the federal government by coalitions of states. Only since the 1980s has the federal government intervened in the content of instruction in the public schools. Prior to that time the role of the federal government was to protect the civil rights of citizens under the aegis of the ‘Due Process clause’ of the XIV Amendment to the Constitution, and there in terms of the abolition of racial segregation in the school (Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 1954). In the absence of a Constitutional guarantee of public education and the saliency of states’ rights, the operation, curricula, and even the structure of public education in the USA continues to display considerable variability.KeywordsSocial CapitalPrivate SchoolWhite StudentAfrican American StudentCharter SchoolThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.