Public Regulation and the Origins of Modern School-Choice Policies in the Progressive Era

Modern school choice, as defined by the existence of systematic alternatives to public education, is not a late twentieth-century phenomenon. Rather, it arose during the late nineteenth century as a consequence of surging Roman Catholic immigration into urban areas and the resulting mass attendance in parochial schools. By 1900, nearly one million American children were enrolled in Catholic parochial schools. In cities such as Cleveland, Milwaukee, Cincinnati, Buffalo, Boston, and Pittsburgh, approximately 40 percent or more of children attended Catholic institutions.¹ Catholic school systems represented the first large-scale alternative to public schooling, providing new educational choices for millions of Catholic parents. The existence of two distinct, competing urban education systems was impossible to miss.

With the rise of Catholic schools, educational choices proliferated, along with new, unanticipated problems. By the early twentieth century, tens of thousands of Catholic children in large American cities by and large attended neither public nor Catholic schools exclusively. Instead, pupils often transferred between them, creating unregulated and competing school systems in which two educational challenges, in particular, arose: first, that public officials were unable to track Catholic children’s attendance across the different systems, and second, that instructional standards between public and private schools were unaligned. As reformers witnessed millions of Catholic parents exercising monthly and annual choices over their children’s schooling, they sought ways to rationalize how parents chose schools and how children transferred between them.

Cities and states responded to growing numbers of parochial schools by regulating the increased educational choices that Catholic parents faced. By the 1920s, new regulations and urban administrative bureaus had arisen to govern otherwise dizzyingly chaotic, competing school systems. State legislators crafted new regulations forcing parochial schools to coordinate their attendance systems with local public schools. In addition, urban school boards constructed vast bureaus of attendance to manage transfers between school systems, tying together public and parochial school governance in ways unthinkable during the nineteenth century. School boards, meanwhile, began accrediting primary parochial schools, allowing students from these approved institutions to be admitted to public high schools without taking an entrance examination.

Far from hindering parental choice, these new regulations enhanced it by standardizing attendance procedures and curriculum standards across the dueling systems. Students moving between different school systems no longer could use their transfers to evade attendance requirements. Accreditation, meanwhile, ensured that public high schools would recognize graduates from private elementary schools. Over the first two decades of the twentieth century, Catholic parents and administrators willingly, even happily, complied with state laws that required them to report attendance information to public officials. By giving private choices the backing of public authority, regulation spurred educational marketization. School choice in the Progressive Era thrived precisely because of public regulation.

The relationship between public power and private markets has long been a theme in American historical writing. Historians now recognize that municipal and state governments actively regulated local markets in manifold ways throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century.² Indeed, public regulations did not simply intervene in markets; they often constituted them. Daniel Carpenter has described how nineteenth-century public marketplaces were “literally made by state regulation and government rules.”³ Because historians of education focus on public and private schooling in isolation from one another, and generally in isolation from the literature on American political economy, they only recently have begun to explore how states and municipalities managed and constituted education markets: how schools themselves competed with one another for students and resources, and how governments responded to that competition.⁴ This article, in addition to exploring the origins of modern school choice policies in the Progressive Era, describes how education markets, much like other areas of private enterprise in American history, have been structured by public policies.

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Mass Catholic schooling in the United States originated as a response to the rise of public education in the mid-nineteenth century. Powerful Roman Catholic bishops were skeptical of the rapidly expanding public (then frequently called “common”) school systems in the United States. Public school systems had arisen out of the...