Source Document: City of Philadelphia Board of Public Education, Ninetieth Annual Report, (Philadelphia: 1909), 128-129.

Interpretation:

The source replicated below is taken from the 1908 annual report of Philadelphia's board of education. The full document consists of a series of reports from senior school system administrators, in which they documented the progress made, and challenges faced in their respective areas of responsibility. A major contributor to the annual report was the president (not principal) of what was, in 1908, Philadelphia's oldest and most prestigious senior high school: Central High School.

The fact that the head of Central High School was titled president, rather than principal, and that its faculty members were referred to as professors, and not as teachers, not only reflects the institution's status within the city but also its extraordinary legal standing. In contrast to virtually every other high school of its time. Philadelphia's Central High School had been specifically authorized by the Pennsylvania legislature to award collegiate degrees, not merely secondary diplomas. In refusing to authorize the upward extension of Central High's curriculum, the Philadelphia school board was not merely rejecting the wishes of a possibly ambitious administrator, but what appears to have been the will of the state legislature.

It is not clear from the text whether Robert Ellis Thompson, Central High School's president, was proposing that his school append a two-year degree program terminating in the award of an associate's degree, as had developed at the University of Chicago under William Rainey Harper, or a three-year program leading to the baccalaureate, along the lines proposed by Harvard's Eliot and instituted by New York's City College in 1907. The first model was already in place in Goshen, Indiana, in the form of a "six-year high school," while the second approach could have been accomplished through the adoption of an 11-year grade school curriculum (following the design developed by Greenwood at Kansas City some years before), to which would have then been appended a three-year baccalaureate course. That Thompson may have favored the second approach could be inferred from the fact that he cites Harvard's Eliot as one of his authorities, but fails to mention Harper and the University of Chicago.

Those familiar with J. Stanley Brown's 1905 School Review article, "Present Development of Secondary Schools According to the Proposed Plan," might wonder whether Thompson was being entirely forthright with the school board, in that, at least as described by Brown, it would appear that Central High School had been offering some collegiate-level courses, and possibly even a full program, even before 1908. What is more likely is that Brown misrepresented -- very likely unintentionally -- the true character of Central High School's enrollment of high school graduates. What is known, from the Philadelphia school board's 1908 annual report, is that Central High had enrolled over 220 high school graduates in postgraduate studies in 1905. However, no evidence suggests that these students were taking college-level courses as part of a degree program. More than likely, and consistent with the common practice of the time, these students were enrolled in secondary-level courses that they had simply not taken during their standard, four-year high school course.

That Central High School's postgraduate students were enrolled in secondary-level courses seems all the more likely because, if their courses had been of collegiate-grade, Thompson would have almost certainly argued (as, for example, Brown frequently claimed) that his postgraduate students were already receiving advanced standing at colleges and professional schools upon transfer, and that the school board would only be legitimating existing practice, and not breaking entirely new ground, by adopting his proposal.

What we can deduce from Thompson's general line of argument are two important insights into the relationship of secondary and higher education at the opening of this century. The first is that there was an honest difference of opinion as to the better strategy for expanding educational opportunity. Whereas some, such as Thompson and his Alumni Association, held that lack of access to low-cost college-level courses in Philadelphia posed a serious threat to the social mobility of the school's graduates, others saw the greater good being served by devoting all available public school funds to the expansion of the public high school. Thompson was correct to point out that many of his graduates were simply in no position financially to meet the cost of attending either the University of Pennsylvania (which likely charged a tuition of $200 a year) or a residential college outside the city (where attendance costs, including room and board, could approach $400.) At a time when a physician would do well to earn $1500 a year, such costs could be prohibitive for all but the most affluent students, and, as Thompson also points out, scholarships were few in his city (in contrast, notably, to Boston and New York.) But the counter to this argument was that public school funds were extremely scarce, and that these limited funds were best spent on first providing all youth with access to a full public high school course before expanding the high school upward to include collegiate-level instruction to the benefit of the relative handful of students with aspirations that went beyond the high school diploma. The Philadelphia school board was far from alone in holding to this view.

The second point made clear in Thompson's comments is that the relationship of public high schools and professional schools of law and medicine was undergoing a fundamental change at the turn of the century. Until this time, admission to a school of law or medicine required nothing more than a high school diploma, if that. But as Thompson observed, by the first decade of this century most credible professional schools were demanding somewhere between 6 and 12 credit hours of relevant college-level study of their applicants. Moreover, and this clearly troubled Thompson, the trend for professional schools was clearly in the direction of requiring even more collegiate preparation of their applicants. Indeed, a select few had even increased their minima to 24 credit hours, including, as Thompson noted, Philadelphia's own colleges of law and medicine (both affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania.) This trend, when combined with the cost considerations noted above, effectively precluded many of his school's graduates from admission to either school. In the absence of a non-denominational, low-cost collegiate institution in Philadelphia, many of Thompson's graduates might well be able to achieve success in some commercial enterprise (where academic degrees had yet to establish themselves as a barrier to advancement), but they were effectively precluded from entering the two most prestigious and lucrative professions.

Although the Philadelphia school board would reject Thompson's proposal to expand the Central High School curriculum several times over the next decade, much as would Baltimore public officials in the late 1920s when faced with a similar proposal, other school boards turned to the public junior college because, in part, it provided the best available means to give local high school graduates access to the college-level courses required for admission to professional schools of law and medicine, just as they saw a local junior college as the means to provide other local high school graduates with access to the courses required for an elementary teaching credential. It would only be during the 1930s, as professional schools increasingly required a baccalaureate degree as a prerequisite for admission and state normal colleges secured a virtual monopoly over access to the teaching profession, that the "university parallel" function of the junior college took on the importance it would retain until the 1970s.

Source

[p.128] REPORT OF THE PRESIDENT OF THE CENTRAL HIGH SCHOOL.

The results of our work as a school are tested by the records our graduates are making in the universities and the technical schools. They are to be found in Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Yale, Cornell, Princeton, Lehigh, Pennsylvania, Haverford, Dickinson and the State College of Pennsylvania. Their record is everywhere among the first, and their increased attendance is desired. More than half the last graduating class proceeded to some university, or to an advanced technical school, such as Jefferson and the Medico-Chirurgical colleges. For the first time a fairly large representation entered what is really our state university, the Pennsylvania College in Centre County, to take advantage of its excellent courses in chemistry, engineering, agriculture or forestry.

The want of such an institution in the eastern part of the state, for the free instruction of young men like our graduates, is greatly felt. Every year we have those who have stood high in their classes through four years of strenuous work, who are unable to carry their education farther because of their inability to pay the fees demanded by even richly endowed institutions, some of whom are asking for state aid but offer no equivalent in the free education of the state's children.

[p.129] REPORT OF THE PRESIDENT OF THE CENTRAL HIGH SCHOOL.

It would be a great relief of the difficult situation if our school's course were lengthened to six years, as has been asked again by the Associated Alumni. This would restore the school to the relative position it held when the state authorized the Board of Control to confer academic degrees upon its graduates. It would equalize the advantages enjoyed by the young men of our city with those enjoyed by the same class in the city of Baltimore and the city of New York through their city colleges. At present, in spite of the handful of scholarships given by our city – eight or ten to a graduating class of two hundred and fifty – boys born in Philadelphia of parents who cannot afford both to support their children at college and to pay their fees for instruction, are worse off than they are in any other northern city of great population.

The new requirements for admission to the schools of law and of medicine in the University of Pennsylvania, make this increasingly urgent. The School of Law will not admit students who are less than twenty years of age, unless they can show a degree from some recognized college. The average age of our graduates is 18 years and 5 months. The School of Medicine has raised its requirements in chemistry and physics, and announces a farther yearly increase for two years, with a final demand for two years in college. We are not able to meet the increase already made in the four years of our present course. And what this university has done, other schools of law and medicine are certain to do within a few years. With a six years' course we could cover all the properly college subjects, and fit our graduates to proceed with the properly university subjects of study.

It is the general opinion of those who occupy a position in the educational world, from which they speak with foresight and authority, that this change must come generally. I may instance Dr. Charles W. Eliot, the retiring president of Harvard University; Dr. Thomas M. Balliet, the very able dean of the New York School of Pedagogy; Dr. William T. Harris, the late National Commissioner of Education; and Dr. Nathan C. Schaeffer, our state's Superintendent of Instruction. Dr. Balliet's very able and interesting address at our City Institute last Easter, was devoted largely to the necessity of this advance in city education.

Contributor: Robert Pedersen

Last Updated: June 4, 1999