Public schools were unknown in the colonial era, although several New England colonies established “subscription schools” for those who could afford to pay the fees. Harvard, the first institution of higher learning in North America, was founded in 1636 in Massachusetts and, like all early colleges, focused almost exclusively on religious scholarship and classical languages — Latin and Greek.

The “Common” School
The Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which encompassed the present-day states of Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, and Michigan, mandated that every new township set aside one parcel of land out of every 36 for a public — or what was then termed a “common” — school. These were often simple one-room buildings topped with a steeple, celebrated in U.S. history as the iconic “little red schoolhouse.” In 1820 Congress authorized the collection of state education funds through the sale of public lands.

In the first half of the 19th century, reformer Horace Mann of Massachusetts launched an influential campaign for using state taxes to improve and support free common schools for all children. According to writer Lawrence Cremin, “The fight for free schools was a bitter one, and for 25 years the outcome was uncertain.”

By 1860, however, most states had adopted the idea, mollifying protests against higher taxes by giving local communities control over their schools. The principle of publicly funded free education under local control had taken root in American society.

Land for Colleges
The Morrill Land Grant Act, enacted during the U.S. Civil War in 1862, employed the same mechanism of selling public lands to establish colleges for agriculture and industry. Today these land-grant schools, constituting some of the largest and most influential state universities in the country, offer a full range of liberal arts and professional programs at both undergraduate and graduate levels.

Today there are 106 land-grant colleges.

On the western frontier, settlers sought to build schools almost as soon as they established new towns. Congress, in fact, required territories to offer free public education to all before they could be considered for statehood. “Schools became important civic amenities that could draw settlers,” says historian Kathryn Sklar in the book School.

But frontier schools faced far different challenges than urban schools, chief among them an acute lack of teachers. Catherine Beecher, sister to Uncle Tom’s Cabin author Harriet Beecher Stowe, led a successful campaign to promote women teachers as a “civilizing force” in the West. These women faced the hardships of the frontier equipped with little more than their belief in the calling of education and a series of popular textbooks tailored for western schools, called McGuffey Readers. These textbooks interspersed lessons in reading and arithmetic with “moral tales” designed to build character.
 

A new citizens’ naturalization ceremony in San Jose, California.
 

Urban Immigrants
Public schools grew with the steady influx of immigrant schoolchildren, largely from Europe, but with significant populations of Chinese and Japanese on the West Coast and Mexicans and Latin Americans in the Southwest. Each of the successive waves of immigrants challenged not only the capacity but the aims and organization of the American educational system as it coped with unprecedented numbers of new students.

 
The challenge of assimilating and educating children from vastly different backgrounds and languages was especially acute in the major destination cities for immigrants — whether Irish, Germans, and Scandinavians in the mid-19th century, or eastern and southern Europeans in the peak immigration years of the 1890s through the 1920s.
 
Urban schools could be grim and overcrowded places, but as recounted in the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) book School, “So powerful was the lure of education that on a day after a steamship arrived, as many as 125 children would apply to one New York school.”
 
Even so, estimates are that, with unrestricted child labor, only about 50 percent of children attended school at all, and the average period of time was five years.
 
The growth of public schools in this period was enormous— from 7.6 million students in 1870 to 12.7 million by the end of the 19th century. The United States, according to the book School, “was providing more schooling to more children than any other nation on earth.”
 
As scholar and educational historian Diane Ravitch writes in School: “The American school system’s readiness to provide social mobility to low-income students was truly remarkable; its efforts to assimilate newcomers into American society were largely successful. ... These were the enduring accomplishments of the American public school.”