Angus, David L. & Mirel, Jeffrey E. (1999). The Failed Promise of the American High School, 1890-1995. Reviewed by Robert L. Hampel, University of Delaware

Angus, David L. & Mirel, Jeffrey E. (1999).The Failed Promise of the American High School, 1890-1995. New York: Teachers College Press 261 pp. + x $26.95 (Paper) ISBN 0-8077-3842-5 $58.00 (Cloth) ISBN 0-8077-3843-3 Reviewed by Robert L. Hampel University of Delaware April 18, 2000 Many "unspecial" students are poorly served by the modern American high school. It is easy to be overlooked without the unmistakable abilities and disabilities that command the resources devoted to varsity athletes, Advanced Placement stars, special education students, the vocationally skilled, and even, whether they want it or not, the truant and the troubled.1 The unspecial can attend, pass, and graduate without acquiring substantial vocational or academic skills. As long as they show up, behave decently, and exert some effort, they will probably get the diploma. A wide range of courses enables them to pick and choose undemanding fare, and within those classes teachers rarely insist on strenuous intellectual exertions. Most of the unspecial students lack advocates, such as parents or counselors, who could push for more and better services, and some students, unfortunately, don't want allies—they feel special by virtue of a part-time job, a steady girlfriend, or other out-of-school pursuits, and don't resent being lost in the crowd in school. Although the recent spate of stiffer graduation requirements and exit tests imposed tougher standards on the unspecial, and some districts and states declared war on the "general" track where many unspecial dwell, the problem is still with us. Its roots lie beyond laws and regulations, so the current mandates don't get at the most important sources. The Failed Promise of the American High School helps us understand why so many students have been able to graduate without significant academic or vocational proficiency. David Angus and Jeffrey Mirel stress two of the three legs of a tripod that Powell, Farrar, and Cohen (1985) first sketched in The Shopping Mall High School. Educators believed that the vast majority of the hordes of students pouring into high schools early in the century—and particularly in the 1930s—could not do serious academic work. They simply were not bright enough. At best the newcomers might be able to learn general math, not geometry; basic science, not chemistry; business English, not Shakespeare. Furthermore, the untalented students need not acquire very much knowledge. In their later lives, when would they ever need or use geometry, chemistry, or Shakespeare? For those bound for work immediately after school, they would hold unskilled jobs or else be trained by their employers (a depressing leitmotif of this book is the persistent weakness of vocational education—the modest enrollments overall, the small fraction in training for specialized trades, and the inability or unwillingness to fight the labor market constraints on adolescents, especially in the 1930s and 1940s). The third leg of the Cohen/Powell tripod is not explored by Angus and Mirel: the widespread belief that many youngsters would not exert themselves. Even if they could and should undertake serious academic work, a sizable number were uninterested in learning, or, worse, hostile and belligerent. Even the heroic efforts of charismatic teachers might not motivate the apathetic and the ornery students. The various distractions of adolescence—friends, work, pop culture, recreation of all sorts-compounded the problem of motivation, and after the late 1960s, growing up seemed to be harder than ever, especially with the American family undergoing nontrivial changes. Angus and Mirel spotlight a "custodial" mission in the American high school since 1930. Custodial is a strong word, suggesting dreary confinement in prisons, hospitals, asylums, and the like. I wish the authors had defined this word, especially because it is at the heart of the argument of the book. At one point custodial seems to mean "meet[ing] the immediate needs of youth while keeping young people separate from the adult world" (p. 69) which is not necessarily a dreary mission (nor is it one the high school truly achieved—many "immediate needs" were slighted or ignored before the rise of extensive social services in the 1970s, and the electronic media gave youth more access to adult lives from the 1950s on). At most points in the book, custodial seems to mean the absence of rigorous academic and vocational preparation. Because the authors devote approximately half of the book to their thoughtful analyses of enrollment data, custodial becomes synonymous with courses outside the rigorous academic and vocational enclaves within the high school curriculum.2 There are several problems with their claim that custodialism was the primary concern (p. 57) of secondary education after 1930. Their vocational/academic/custodial tripartite division of the curriculum overlooks at least three areas where students were not badly served. Whether offered for credit or taken after school, various extracurricular activities gave students clear standards and frequent opportunities to show off their hard work. Whether varsity sports, journalism, chorus, or band, the students in those pursuits received more than custodial care. What they got included many elements of what today we celebrate as "authentic instruction" or "exhibitions of mastery:" coaching, teamwork along with solo performances, unambiguous measures of competence, and much more. They did not learn calculus, to be sure, and for some their time would have been better spent elsewhere (in his field notes for his landmark 1959 book, The American High School Today, James Conant despaired whenever he heard of talented students taking music rather than foreign language). The other two areas where students fare well are not as easily captured by the enrollment statistics Angus and Mirel mined. There is only one reference in this book to special education (in Grand Rapids in the 1980s), and I could find no references to programs for the troubled and the truant. Many of those students, who at one time might not have entered or finished high school, have received, at least since the early 1970s, reasonably good treatment in most schools. They have advocates inside and outside the school. They benefit from well structured and individualized programs, unlike the hodgepodge found in the general track. Their teachers often feel special by virtue of their affiliation with those programs. As with the extracurriculars, these "specialty shops" within the "shopping mall high school" offer more than custodial care. Furthermore, not all vocational and academic courses are noncustodial. The authors recognize that some vocational coursework was not demanding (typing) but within the academic domains the booming enrollments in higher education, coupled with the steady growth of Honors and Advanced Placement sections, meant that the so-called college prep courses, by the 1960s if not earlier, were often no more rigorous than a general track course 30 years earlier. There is a second central argument throughout Failed Promise, linked to but not identical to the custodialism argument. The authors claim that "differentiation" of the curriculum went on decade after decade, notwithstanding the recurring crusades to revamp the curriculum (p. 159). Until the 1980s, the course enrollment figures make clear that there was greater and greater variety in most high schools. This is not a new finding, but the authors demonstrate it with unprecedented detail by examining national, state, school and student level data. I consider what the authors call custodialism to be part of that differentiation—yet another mission, one of many accepted by educators, undertaken with remarkable faith in the benefits of secondary schooling. I would also note that enrollment statistics miss several important aspects of that ceaseless expansion of institutional purpose. The astounding growth of social services in the last 30 years is an important chapter in the story, as is the difficulty faced by periodic reform efforts to introduce "core" courses spanning two or more subjects (both of those topics deserved a few pages in this book). And so is the attitude of educators: by the early 1970s the old prescriptive tone and directive style of teachers and administrators was waning (as a book not cited by the authors vividly recounts: Grant's [1988] The World We Created at Hamilton High). Educators become less willing to tell students how to act (including what courses to take). A differentiated curriculum overseen by self-assured educators in 1955 looked but did not feel like a differentiated curriculum in 1975 when many scared and fragmented faculties let students choose more freely than ever before. The sturdy old structures persisted and grew; how life felt in and around those familiar places changed considerably. But the social history of the high school is not the authors' topic, and it is not fair to ask them to write the book I would have written by drawing more fully on the history of 20th century adolescence (on the assumption that much of what drives secondary education stems from what it means to be a teenager in America). The book they wrote rests on an impressive array of enrollment statistics, and my remaining comments focus on that material. By including national, state (Michigan), and local (Grand Rapids and Detroit) data across 90 years, the scope of the evidence is vast. Similarities are highlighted across those jurisdictions, with careful explanations of the occasional discrepancies, and trends over time are sketched. The 30 pages of tables include several based on 1,445 student transcripts from Grand Rapids (1900-1940). The rich files of the University of Michigan accreditation officers contribute to the tables on Detroit and Michigan. All of the major federal enrollment studies have been used. If breadth of coverage is the strength of the quantitative material, the depth of exploration could have been stronger. For instance, there is no methodological appendix to explain the construction of new data sets or the interpretation of existing ones. The occasional footnotes devoted to methodology are useful but they don't address some knotty problems within the federal studies. For instance, the 1949 survey reported separately enrollments for schools spanning 9th-12th grades and schools encompassing 7th-12th grade (only English is disaggregated by grade level). How then did Angus and Mirel compute the 9-12 enrollments they report throughout their tables? In the next federal survey, the data is broken out under four headings (junior (high], Junior/Senior, 4 year, and 3 year) with several courses disaggregated by grade level. Same question. I don't dispute the authors' right to make reasonable approximations to derive their figures; an explanation of how they did it, and what assumptions they made, is what is missing. The author of the 1961 federal survey of enrollments added other cautions: The reader is warned that the historical conclusions to be gleaned from the survey are occasionally precarious. Titles of courses do change; a new title may or may not mean new content. Differences in some instances may not be statistically significant. Also, the method of combining course titles for expediency in reporting data, as is done in each survey, differs slightly from survey to survey. (Wright, 1965, p. iii) Another significant methodological (and substantive) issue is how to use the surviving evidence on course offerings and graduation requirements. How many schools offered various subjects? How many districts and states required the subject for graduation?3 Compiling that data set would be a Herculean task, to be sure, but without it we cannot answer some of the most important questions about enrollments. To what extent did new requirements drive the enrollment changes over time? When students and parents chose electives, what did they pick? The authors have bits and pieces of that information for Grand Rapids and Detroit but much more analysis could have been done. Historians also need to know what types of students took particular courses. For the 40 years before 1940, the authors look carefully at gender and social class (especially in Grand Rapids) and for later decades they focus on race (especially in Detroit). I wish they had also tried to gauge how many academically talented students took nonacademic courses. Perhaps custodialism was a serious problem not only for the thin fare it served general track students but also because it lured, or even compelled, too many of the brightest students to its table. State by state variations also deserve more attention. Angus and Mirel compare Michigan to the nation as a whole, but what of the striking state by state variations in some electives (for instance, in 1934 five states accounted for 60% of the enrollments in military training, and 18 states didn't even offer the course) (Jessen & Herlihy, 1938). What accounts for those variations, and how much did they shift over time? It is noteworthy that Conant, early in his research for The American High School Today, told one professor that "with the great differences that I see in regions of the country, and in individual high schools, in this matter of enrollment in tough courses, I question the meaningfulness of national averages."4 Were there flagship states in the sense that we often refer to lighthouse suburban districts in the postwar years? My emphasis on additional topics for research should not diminish the valuable spadework Angus and Mirel performed in exploiting a wide range of evidence on course enrollments. It is astonishing that so few historians in the past used those wonderful sources. Let's hope that more will do so in the future. Notes 1. See Powell, Farrar, and Cohen (1985), Chap. 4. 2. Another option is to define custodial in terms of size. Huge classes cannot offer the individual attention and personal connections that define non-custodial courses. Some of the great growth areas at mid-century were in those large classes, according to one study of high schools with more than one thousand students. Of all classes with more than 50 students, 59% were physical education (but note that only 4.5% of the schools' classes had 50+ students). The other most common 50+ classes were, in order, chorus, band, study hall, health, and music. Faced with soaring enrollments and limited budgets, these were the areas that could take more students at little or no extra cost. It is no wonder they boomed in size (Tompkins, 1949). 3. Another dimension would be the entrance requirements at state universities. With the rapid expansion of higher education, it was easier to be admitted at one or another branch of the burgeoning state systems, including community colleges. It is often said that the weaker entrance requirements undermined the high schools' graduation requirements, but that assertion has not, in my opinion, been thoroughly examined. 4. James Bryan Conant to Professor Harold Hand, April 16, 1958 (Illinois File, Education Series, Box 5, Conant Papers, Harvard University Archives). References Grant, G. (1988). The world we created at Hamilton High. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Jessen, C. A., & Herlihy, L.B. (1938). Offerings and registrations in high-school subjects. U.S. Office of Education Bulletin, No. 6. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. Powell, A.G., Farrar, E., & Cohen, D.K. (1985). The shopping mall high school. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Tompkins, E. (1949) Class size—The larger high school. U.S. Office of Education Circular No. 305. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. Wright, G.S. (1965). Subject offerings and enrollments in public secondary schools. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. About the Reviewer Robert L. Hampel is Professor of Education and Interim Director of the School of Education at the University of Delaware. He is author of The last little citadel (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1986).