The public system of education in the United States is a government-controlled, agegraded, hierarchically structured, free and often compulsory system composed of groups of schools administered by full-time experts and staffed primarily by state-certified teachers. During the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century, industrialization, urbanization, the development of a working class, the shift in the definitions and role of the family and the state’s assumption of responsibility for certain aspects of social welfare all contributed to the establishment and standardization of state systems of education designed to achieve specific public policies and, ostensibly, to give all children access to educational opportunity and thus to social and economic advancement.

Within each state, public schools are generally organized into districts, originally intended to allow for local control within state systems of education, but which also lead to inequity of educational opportunity because a district is only as wealthy as the homeowners within it (see financial aid). Each school district is governed by a local school board, composed of community and business people, as well as an administrative hierarchy, These governing bodies choose leaders, collect school taxes, select curricular materials and hire teachers—all within parameters dictated by the state.

The administrative hierarchy of public schools includes, at the top, superintendents, whose primary role is to supervise classroom instruction and assure curricular uniformity and continuity across the elementary schools (kindergarten through 5th or 6th grade, for children ages five to twelve), middle schools (6th or 7th grades through 8th grade, ages twelve to fourteen) and high schools (9th to 12th grades, ages fourteen to eighteen) which compose a district. Next in the hierarchy principals are responsible for administering school policy within their individual elemen-tary, middle or secondary schools. School-board members, superintendents and principals—the three most powerful contingents in public-school systems—tend to be white, professional males. Teachers, however, tend to be primarily female, particularly at the elementary level.

Teachers in public schools must adhere to strict, district- and state-mandated policies and curricular guides. Throughout the history of public schooling there have been debates about curricula—what students study in school (which texts written from whose perspectives and including whom) and what they and teachers may and may not talk about (e.g. abortion, religion and other controversial issues may be defined but not discussed)—and pedagogical approaches, which range from conservative, highly structured and highly standardized models to critical, constructivist pedagogies which draw on and attempt to develop the active, creative capacities and diversities of learners.

(See education and society for an extended discussion of these last two points.) Questions of who has access to quality education have also been central to conceptualizations and reforms of public education. Segregation in public schools in the United States has often correlated with the maintenance of a cheap labor force.

Immigrants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—first Japanese, Chinese and Korean immigrants, who worked for low wages on railroads, in factories and on farms, then African Americans in the South, who worked for industrialization and the maintenance of agriculture, and then Mexican farm workers in the early twentieth century—were segregated in public schools and received an inferior education to that of their European American counterparts. There were numerous “separate-but-equal” rulings in the courts regarding segregation in the public schools, and it was not until 1954 that the US Supreme Court ruled, in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, that separate schools were inherently unequal and that school desegregation was necessary. This decision legitimated education and public schooling as an appropriate arena for societal issues and conflicts; the classroom became the context of social issues, with teachers in loco parentis, and the state with its agenda for its ward. While institutional segregation has been challenged by law, unofficial segregation remains in the form of attendance patterns across schools (most students are assigned to neighborhood schools) and tracking within schools, which critics suggest often reinforces racial and socioeconomic inequities.

Just after the Second World War, the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers—the two largest teachers’ unions in the United States—made several unsuccessful attempts to elicit more federal aid for schools. But it was only after the launching of Sputnik in 1957, when schools were criticized for failing to produce enough scientists and engineers, that the federal government stepped in to try to assuage the distrust in educators, and it did so with the National Defense Education Act of 1958. This Act provided money for specific educational categories, including science, mathematics, foreign languages and counseling and testing programs (see standardized testing). Its passage signified that the federal government would not simply supply monies to states, but would attempt to influence the curriculum taught in schools.

The appropriation of curricular choices from educators continued as a theme, as state departments of education as well as local governing bodies of schools became increasingly composed of politicians and business people—neither educators nor representatives of the majority of the population whom schools serve. After the Sputnikinspired focus on math, science and foreign languages in the late 1950s, the 1960s and 1970s saw first a swing towards more progressive and alternative forms of education (see education: values and beliefs) and then a back-to-basics movement in the schools, with an emphasis on reading, writing and arithmetic.

The 1980s and 1990s ushered in a proliferation of options within the American publicschool system. Among these are charter schools, which are public schools operating under a contract or charter granted by a school district, university state education board, or some other public authority, depending on the state. Organized by teachers, business people and/or other interested parties, charter schools are generally non-selective, tuitionfree, non-sectarian and based on choice. There are also vouchers and other schoolchoice plans that aim to offer parents and students the opportunity to select and receive public monies for where children attend school, regardless of geographical or financial status.

None of the reforms to public schools, however, has changed the reality of inequitable resources, support and access among the school children of the United States. Even in its new diversified forms, the public-school system seems to continue to reinforce social inequity sorting students by race, ethnicity, social class, gender and special interest through curricular choices, pedagogical approaches, counseling and standardized testing—the gate-keeping mechanisms which regulate educational access and advancement.