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Have We Underestimated the Extent of Antebellum High School Attendance?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Maris A. Vinovskis
Maris A. Vinovskis*
Affiliation:
Department of History and the Center for Political Studies, Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan
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Extract

Public high schools were relatively rare in antebellum America. The first public high school in the United States opened in Boston in 1821, but it was not until the late 1840s and 1850s, when there was a rapid expansion of public high schools throughout the commonwealth, that they became more common in Massachusetts. Most communities in other states, especially those outside of New England, did not provide public high schools for their teenagers.

Type
Articles
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 28 , Issue 4 , Winter 1988 , pp. 551 - 567
Copyright
Copyright © 1988 by the History of Education Society 

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References

1 Vinovskis, Maris A., The Origins of Public High Schools: A Reexamination of the Beverly High School Controversy (Madison, Wis., 1985).Google Scholar

2 Duncan Grizzell, Emit, Origin and Development of the High School in New England before 1865 (New York, 1923).Google Scholar

3 Krug, Edward A., The Shaping of the American High School, 1880–1920 (Madison, Wis., 1969), 11.Google Scholar

4 Katz, Michael B., The Irony of Early School Reform: Educational Innovation in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Massachusetts (Cambridge, Mass., 1968), 39. Katz drew a 10 percent random sample of Massachusetts communities with public high schools in 1860 and found that less than one out of every five eligible children attended. He used this estimate to argue that few children ever attended one of these institutions. However, as we shall see in our later discussion, the procedures he employed for estimating high school attendance in those communities are problematic.Google Scholar

5 Katznelson, Ira and Weir, Margaret, Schooling for All: Class, Race, and the Decline of the Democratic Ideal (New York, 1985), 230 n.1.Google Scholar

6 Labaree, David F., The Making of an American High School: The Credentials Market and the Central High School in Philadelphia, 1838–1939 (New Haven, Conn., 1988), 26–27. Labaree does not attempt to estimate exactly what proportion of male or female adolescents ever enrolled in a high school, but the inference clearly is that very few of them attended; see also Joel Perlmann, “Who Stayed in School? Social Structure and Academic Achievement in the Determination of Enrollment Patterns, Providence, Rhode Island, 1880–1925,” Journal of American History 72 (Dec. 1985): 588-614; Ueda does not attempt to estimate the proportion of children attending the Somerville High School before the Civil War, but observes that few children from the lower classes attended at that time. By the late nineteenth century, however, his figures suggest a substantial minority of children in Somerville were attending high school. Reed Ueda, Avenues to Adulthood: The Origins of the High School and Social Mobility in an American Suburb (New York, 1987). Mark Stern reports a relatively high rate of high school attendance in post–Civil War Erie County, New York, but it is based on the incorrect assumption that anyone ages 15-19 designated in the federal censuses as attending school was enrolled in a high school. Mark J. Stern, Society and Family Strategy: Erie County, New York, 1850–1920 (Albany, N.Y., 1987), 93-114.Google Scholar

7 For a preliminary essay on the project on death and dying, see Maris A. Vinovskis, “Have Social Historians Lost the Civil War? Some Preliminary Demographic Speculations,” Journal of American History (forthcoming).Google Scholar

8 Vale Smith, E., History of Newburyport from the Earliest Settlement of the Country to the Present Time (Newburyport, Mass., 1854); Currier, John J., The History of Newburyport, Massachusetts, 1764–1909, 2 vols. (Newburyport, Mass., 1906–9).Google Scholar

9 Thernstrom, Stephan, Poverty and Progress: Social Mobility in a Nineteenth-Century City (Cambridge, Mass., 1964). Other useful monographs on early Newburyport are Benjamin W. Labaree, Patriots and Partisans: The Merchants of Newburyport, 1764–1815 (Cambridge, Mass., 1962); Susan Grigg, The Dependent Poor of Newburyport: Studies in Social History, 1800–1830 (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1984).Google Scholar

10 Newburyport School Committee, Report of the School Committee of the City of Newburyport, 1859–1860 (Newburyport, Mass., 1860); A Catalogue of the Trustees, Instructors and Students of the Putnam Free School, 1861 (Newburyport, Mass., 1861).Google Scholar

11 For a more detailed discussion of the pattern of high school attendance, see Maris A. Vinovskis, “Patterns of High School Attendance in Newburyport, Massachusetts in 1860” (Paper presented at the American Historical Association Annual Meeting, New York, December 1985). The age-specific rates for high school attendance were initially examined for all persons ages 8-24 in Newburyport in 1860, but the focus on children ages 11-16 was made after an inspection of those data as well as an analysis of the ages at entry into the three high schools. The decision to confine the analysis to children ages 11-16 was dictated in part by the fact that individual-level information on high school attendance was restricted to the period 1857–63. Some children above age 16 in 1860, for example, were attending high school in that year, but one could not be certain from this data-set if others of that age-group had attended high school before 1857. In other words, since this individual-level analysis attempts to ascertain the percentage of children who ever went to high school at some point in their lives, it is necessary to look only at those age-groups for which we are certain that we have complete data on who did or did not attend high school.Google Scholar

12 The influx of adolescents into Newburyport from other communities in order to work undoubtedly leads to an underestimation of the percentage of native Newburyport youths receiving a high school education. If we look at children ages 11-16 in 1860 living with at least one parent, 33.9 percent of them attended one of the high schools.Google Scholar

13 While about one-third of Newburyport children ages 11-16 in 1860 enrolled at some point in high school, many others attended grammar schools at those ages without ever going to high school. More than three-fourths of children ages 11-16 living with at least one parent were enrolled in some school in 1860, but only a fraction of these continued on to high school. For more details about those going to grammar schools, see Vinovskis, “Patterns of High School Attendance.”Google Scholar

14 A multiple classification analysis was done to see what predicted graduation from high school. The most important determinant of high school graduation was not the personal characteristics of the student or their parents, but the school which they attended. Whereas only 20 percent of the male students at the Brown High School and 14 percent of the male and female students at the Putnam Free School graduated, 55 percent of the female students at the Female High School graduated. Unfortunately, there is no simple explanation for this pattern. For a more detailed discussion, see Vinovskis, “Patterns of High School Attendance.”Google Scholar

15 Newburyport School Committee, Annual Report of the School Committee of the City of Newburyport for the Year 1867 (Newburyport, Mass., 1867), 8–9.Google Scholar

16 Grizzell, , Origins and Development of the High School; Alexander James Inglis, The Rise of the High School in Massachusetts (New York, 1911).Google Scholar

17 Katz, , Irony of Early School Reform.Google Scholar

18 The percentage of males and females who ever attended high school in Newburyport was almost identical (34 percent vs. 33 percent). After controlling for the effects of the other variables, males were slightly more likely to attend than females (the adjusted means in an MCA analysis were 35.1 percent vs. 32.8 percent), but it was the weakest predictor of high school attendance. Vinovskis, “Patterns of High School Attendance.”Google Scholar

19 For details of the multiple classification analyses upon which these statements are based, see Vinovskis, “Patterns of High School Attendance.” Thernstrom underestimated the extent of school attendance among children whose fathers were unskilled laborers. Thernstrom, Poverty and Progress. There is growing evidence that a significant number of children from families whose fathers were in blue-collar occupations, particularly those in skilled-jobs, attended public high schools. David L. Angus, “A Note on the Occupational Backgrounds of Public High Schools Prior to 1940,” Journal of the Midwest History of Education Society 9 (1981): 158–83.Google Scholar

20 One might well ask how typical was Essex County in terms of high school attendance compared to Massachusetts as a whole. While we do not have readily available data for the state as a whole in 1860, we do have information on high school attendance in 1875. At that time, high school attendance in Essex County was just slightly below that for the state as a whole. I am now in the process of doing a detailed community-level analysis of high school attendance in 1875.Google Scholar

21 The communities that had a high school were determined by consulting an unpublished list for 1859–60 compiled by the Massachusetts Board of Education which asked each town: “Is there a High School supported by Taxation, in which the Latin and Greek languages are taught?” In addition, the published annual school reports for thirty-one of the thirty-four communities were surveyed. Finally, the list of high schools in Massachusetts provided by Inglis was used. Inglis, The Rise of the High School in Massachusetts. Private academies such as the Phillips Academy or the Bradford Academy were not included. Furthermore, although the town of Beverly had a high school in 1859 and 1861, it did not have one during 1860 because the town meeting temporarily abolished it. Therefore, Beverly is not included among those with a high school in 1860. Katz, Irony of Early School Reform; Vinovskis, Origins of Public High Schools. Google Scholar

22 Data on both the total number of different students and the number enrolled in a particular session are available for five Massachusetts communities—Chicopee (1860), Fall River (1860), Gloucester (1874, 1875, 1876), Marblehead (1877, 1878, 1879, 1880), and Millbury (1860). In all, we have information on both items for eleven different situations (Chicopee had two high schools in 1860 and therefore provided two different cases for our purposes). From these data we can estimate how much the highest semester attendance figures in these high schools would have to be increased to approximate the total number of different students enrolled in those high schools during that year. For the eleven different situations, an average increase of approximately 25 percent was necessary to convert the highest semester enrollment into the total number of different students ever attending during that year; but there was some variation among the individual cases in what adjustment factor had to be employed. Therefore, while the 25 percent adjustment rate is probably a reasonable figure overall, it may introduce some small errors in estimating high school attendance for any particular community. Of the fourteen Essex County communities with high schools in the period 1860–61, half of them provided information on the number of different students attending during the year and therefore did not require any adjustment.Google Scholar

23 Using the total number of different students in high school during the year in the numerator already takes into consideration the annual rate of student turnover. Since high school programs were designed for more than one year, differences in student dropout rates from one year to the next will also affect the total number of students ever attending a public high school at some point in their lives.Google Scholar

24 Based upon actual high school attendance data and the census information on children in 1860, we know that 31.9 percent of Newburyport children in 1860 attended high school at some point in their lives. For most communities, however, we only have the number of different students attending high school in a given year and the aggregate number of children ages 10-19 from the published federal census for Massachusetts. Therefore, we need a way of approximating the rate of attendance from those two figures. This can be done by placing the number of different children in a high school in the numerator and by using the detailed Newburyport data to calculate what adjustment needs to be made in the denominator of the number of children ages 10-19 to arrive at the proportion of children ever attending high school. In Newburyport, 288 different students were enrolled in one of the three high schools in 1860, there were 2,505 children ages 10-19 according to the federal census, and we have estimated from the more detailed data that 31.9 percent of children attended a high school at some point. Therefore, we want to solve for x, where x is the proportion of children ages 10-19, which would yield an approximate estimate of the proportion of children who ever attended a high school in a particular community, given information on the number of different students attending during that year.Google Scholar

Solving for x, we find that it equals 36 percent, or to use a more rounded number, 35 percent. Katz makes a very good estimate of this correction factor without the benefit of a detailed individual-level study of high school attendance. He used an estimate of 40 percent of those ages 10-19 in his denominator to estimate the proportion ever attending high school (which would have yielded an estimate of 28.5 percent for Newburyport children ever attending high school). Katz, Irony of Early School Reform, 270.Google Scholar

25 We can now use our finding of 35 percent to estimate the proportion who ever attended high school in Essex County based only upon the aggregate number of different high school students in 1860 and the number of children ages 10-19 in that year. There were an estimated 1,586 different students who attended an Essex County public high school in 1860 and 31,011 children ages 10-19. Applying our formula of multiplying 31,011 by 35 percent and dividing that into the 1,586 different students attending a public high school yields an estimate of 14.6 percent who ever attended such an institution.Google Scholar

26 The estimating procedure assumes, of course, that the rate of turnover from one year to the next in other Essex County high schools is similar to that of Newburyport. While we do not have good data on turnover for those communities, it is likely that the 30 percent graduation rate for Newburyport is high. Therefore, our estimating procedure probably understates the actual number of students receiving some high school education in the other communities.Google Scholar

27 If we had not adjusted the attendance estimates upwards for those institutions that did not provide data on the total number of different students attending, the proportion of school-age children who ever attended high school in Essex County would have been 13.1 percent instead of 14.6 percent. Similarly, the percentage of those who attended in communities with high schools in 1860 would have been 17.2 percent instead of 19.2 percent.Google Scholar

28 Georgetown had 40.9 percent attending; Manchester had 55.5 percent attending.Google Scholar

29 Amesbury had 22.9 percent attending; Ipswich had 26.7 percent attending; Rockport had 25.5 percent attending.Google Scholar

30 Danvers had 21.2 percent attending; Haverhill had 24.8 percent attending; Marblehead had 22.6 percent attending; South Danvers had 17.7 percent attending.Google Scholar

31 Gloucester had 20.5 percent attending; Newburyport had 31.9 percent attending.Google Scholar

32 Lawrence had 8.0 percent attending; Lynn had 11.3 percent attending; Salem had 15.1 percent attending.Google Scholar

33 Georgetown School Committee, Report of the School Committee of the Town of Georgetown for the Year Ending March 1861 (Salem, Mass., 1861), 13.Google Scholar

34 Lawrence School Committee, Lawrence School Committee, Fifteenth Annual Report of the School Committee of the City of Lawrence Embracing Reports of Superintendent and Sub-Committees, 1861 (Lawrence, Mass., 1861), 11.Google Scholar

35 For a very useful discussion of what courses were being offered in the Massachusetts public high schools, see Inglis, The Rise of the High School in Massachusetts. Google Scholar

36 School Report of the Town of Amesbury for the Year 1863–4 (Amesbury, Mass., 1864), 9. Abner J. Phipps, agent for the Massachusetts Board of Education, observed that: “When visiting the cities and towns in which these schools [high schools] are maintained, I usually spend some time in inspecting them, as from such an inspection one can better judge of the kind of education, in its quality and extent, which the children receive in the several grades of schools through which they have passed, and what further advantages this highest grade affords them. Of a large number of these schools I can speak in terms of the highest commendation…. About one-third of the High Schools of Massachusetts are of this class. Another third embraces schools of much excellence, giving a very fair English education, and a passable preparation for College. The remaining third is of a much lower order, being but little in advance of the average Grammar School.” Fortieth Annual Report of the Massachusetts Board of Education, 1875–76 (Boston, 1877), 46.Google Scholar

37 Although much research has been focused on the abolition of the Beverly High School in 1860, little attention has been paid to the complaints about the excessive cost and infrequent use of these institutions in other communities. In Danvers, for example, there are frequent references to the opposition of taxpayers to the maintenance of high schools. “There are people in this town who think that the High School is of but little consequence, and from what we hear sometimes we are almost led to believe that there is lurking in their busoms a wish to destroy it, and blot it out.” Annual Report of the School Committee of the Town of Danvers for the Year Ending April 1861 (Danvers, Mass., 1861), 12. In his recent analysis of Somerville public high schools, Ueda points out that “the unanimity of the town-meeting vote to found the Free High School was probably a consensual affirmation of the decision-making authority of the selectmen and school committeemen, rather than an expression of total support for educational innovation. If the vote reflected pervasive communal enthusiasm, it quickly waned when parents and students began to take advantage of new employment opportunities generated by Somerville's expanding economy and by its linkage through commuter travel with the job market in Boston and Cambridge. The Free High School's enrollment grew sluggishly, and graduation rates were very low. In the 1850s and 1860s, popular participation in public education was achieved only at the elementary levels of schooling.” Ueda, Avenues to Adulthood, 57-58.Google Scholar

38 School committees were worried during the Civil War that taxpayers might try to abandon the high schools in the name of economy. While the school committees usually reluctantly accepted that expenditures had to be cut, at least temporarily, they insisted that the high schools should not be eliminated. Report of the School Committee of the Town of Georgetown for the Year Ending March, 1862 (Georgetown, Mass., 1862), 13; Report of the School Committee of the Town of Ipswich for the Year Ending March, 1862 (Salem, Mass., 1862), 9.Google Scholar

39 Even in the 1870s, however, there were some complaints of the high cost of public high schools. Phipps noted that “it is not to be disguised that here and there a few individuals, not in sympathy, for various reasons, with the common people in the higher education of their children in these Free High Schools, have recently endeavored to create a prejudice against them by maintaining that the education of our Public Schools should be restricted to the most common elementary branches of study.” Fortieth Annual Report of the Massachusetts Board of Education, 46.Google Scholar

40 Katz, , Irony of Early School Reform, 39, 270.Google Scholar

41 Based upon the information on population size, Katz's sample includes Sherborn (1,129—population in 1860), Bolton (1,348), Webster (2,912), Millbury (3,296), Plymouth (6,272), Chicopee (7,261), Fall River (14,026), Taunton (15,376), Lynn (19,083), and Worcester (24,960). He also lists a community of 3,333 people which is difficult to identify because no town in the commonwealth in 1860 seems to have that exact population. The town probably was either Holliston (3,339) or Uxbridge (3,133) since each of them had a high school and they are close in population size. As the two high schools in question are similar, it does not make too much difference which one is chosen. I selected Uxbridge as the most likely candidate because of its general similarity to Katz's estimates.Google Scholar

42 Katz, , Irony of Early School Reform, 39.Google Scholar

43 Some scholars have mistakenly cited Katz as saying that about 20 percent of eligible adolescents attended high schools in those communities that had such institutions. Robert L. Church, Education in the United States: An Interpretive History (New York, 1976), 182. In fact, Katz only states that “in the samples as a whole under twenty percent of the estimated eligible children went to high school.” Katz, Irony of Early School Reform, 39. However, by not stating more precisely what percentage of eligible children in his overall sample attended high school and mentioning the 20 percent figure, Katz may have unwittingly contributed to the confusion.Google Scholar

44 Katz, , Irony of Early School Reform, 270.Google Scholar

45 Report of the School Committee of the Town of Taunton (Taunton, Mass., 1861), 38. The same problem remains even if one uses the average attendance figures. Average attendance in winter was 92 students and in the fall was 110 students.Google Scholar

46 Report of the School Committee of the City of Fall River for the Year 1860–61 (Fall River, Mass., 1861), 16. Again, even the average attendance is higher in the summer than in the winter session.Google Scholar

47 Report of the School Committee of Chicopee for the Year Ending March 1st, 1861 (Springfield, Mass., 1861), 31.Google Scholar

48 As Katz had originally observed, the smallest communities had the highest rates of enrollment. Our recalculated figures show that towns with population under 2500 had a high school attendance rate of 66.7 percent; those 2500–4999 had 33.2 percent attending; towns with a population 5000-9999 had 28.9 percent attending; those 10,000-14,999 population had 10.7 percent attending; and cities with 15,000 or more population had 13.5 percent of their children receiving some high school education.Google Scholar

49 The private school catalogs examined were the Abbot Academy (Andover), Bradford Academy (Bradford), Chauney Hall School (Boston), Dummer Academy (Byfield), Lawrence Academy (Groton), Phillips Academy (Andover), Philips Exter Academy (Exter, New Hampshire), and the Putnam Free School (Newburyport). This certainly underestimates the total number of children of Essex County parents who attended a high school-level private academy since the catalogs for several such institutions could not be located and some children undoubtedly went to other private schools outside of Essex County.Google Scholar