Path Dependence and the Emergence of Common Schools: Ohio to 1853

An investment of upward of three millions of dollars in permanent structures, and an annual expenditure of nearly three millions of dollars—nine tenths of which sum last named is produced by taxation—is a financial fact of great significance; while the application of so munificent a provision, under the administration of thirty thousand school officers and twenty thousand teachers, to the education of eight hundred thousand youth, is a fact transcending all material considerations by its relation to the moral and political welfare of the people.

—Ohio commissioner H. H. Barney’s introduction to James W. Taylor, The Ohio School System and School Laws in Force (Cincinnati, 1857)

In the decades between the American Revolution and the Civil War, American voters developed publicly funded and publicly run school systems. This would have been impossible to conceive in 1776, when states lacked the taxing and institutional capacity to run complex institutions. Yet, by the Civil War, many northern and Midwestern states had established free common schools for their children.

We do not fully understand why Americans chose to invest tax dollars on education. Most historians have pointed to external factors such as industrialization and immigration. Schools, from this perspective, were a political response to new economic and social contexts.¹ Scholars of municipal reform reach similar conclusions: the expansion of city services, especially agencies for poverty, crime, and fire, were part of a broader response to industrialization and immigration.² Students of urban public education bring the pieces together, suggesting that urban schools resulted from elite concerns about diversity and a desire for social control.³

There is no doubt that concerns about industrialization and diversity animated reformers and policymakers. This perspective, however, is incomplete. It can neither account for the popularity of public schools among a broad range of taxpayers nor why it was possible for leaders to imagine in the 1830s a fully-fledged public system. To answer these questions, we need to account for developments that happened earlier in the century, well before industrialization and immigration became major political concerns.

As we turn our lens to the decades prior to the 1830s, we must also understand how, in those decades, the schools themselves served to foster public commitment to education. By incorporating new perspectives on political development into education history, this article explores why the common schools gained popular support and public funding and also integrates education into the broader history of the American state.⁴ Institutions do not simply respond to external contexts; sometimes they are the context themselves.⁵ In the case of schools, early decisions to expand access to education in the decades after the Revolution set northern states on a path toward greater public investment in education. When new issues emerged in the 1830s, they reinforced preexisting momentum.

To understand this process, I turn to the idea of path dependence. The idea of path dependence originated among economists who discovered that an early decision to pursue a particular technology gave that technology a market advantage even if, under a “pure” market, a newer, better technology should have been victorious.⁶ Political scientist Paul Pierson extends this idea to politics: early policy decisions, often made for their own reasons, can lead states down a path from which it becomes hard to diverge.

Policies form their own context through what Pierson calls “positive feedback”: “each step in a particular direction makes it more difficult to reverse course.” While path dependence is not intractable, where positive feedback exists, “the probability of further steps along the same path increases.”⁷ Pierson identifies four factors vital for positive feedback. First, there must be large setup or fixed costs. Second, people learn to use and become committed to the existing policies and institutions. Third, coordination effects, in which the pursuit of a particular direction creates externalities, make it difficult to shift. Finally, adaptive expectations emerge in which people’s ideas about the future are framed around the existing structures.⁸

All four factors played a role in Ohio. Early decisions inspired by Revolutionary ideals established pathways that proved...