The history of education in New York City includes schools and schooling from the colonial era to the present. It includes public and private schools, as well as higher education. Annual city spending on public schools quadrupled from $250 million in 1946 to $1.1 billion in 1960. It reached $38 billion in 2022, or $38,000 per public school student.See Independent Budget Office of the City of New York, "Education Spending Since 1990" (2023) For recent history see Education in New York City.
Colonial
There was limited public education during the British colonial period especially in the South and in rural areas.
Prior to the American Revolution, Columbia University, then called King's College, was the only institution of higher education in New York City. It was one of 9 Colonial colleges founded before the Revolution.
1776 to 1898 New York was one of the last major cities to set up a public school system. State funds were available, but they were distributed to private organizations running private schools. Families that could afford it hired tutors for their children. In the early Republic, various elite societies emerged to promote education among marginal groups.Carl F. Kaestle, The Evolution of an Urban School System: New York City, 1750-1850 (1973) p. 75.
The New York Manumission Society was established in 1785 by antislavery activists, including John Jay and Alexander Hamilton. Its stated goals were to alleviate the injustices of slavery, protect the rights of Blacks, and provide them with free educational opportunities. In 1787 it set up the African Free School. This school expanded over time, enrolling over 700 students by 1815. It received support from the city and the state.
In 1805 the Free School Society, organized by philanthropists, was chartered by the state legislature to teach poor children. It received grants from the city and the state and, starting in 1815, funding from the new State Common School Fund. By 1826 it was renamed the Public School Society and operated eight schools with 345 pupils, with separate departments for boys and girls. They were taught reading, writing, arithmetic, and religion. Although a private organization, the Public School Society dominated the educational scene, enrolling thousands of pupils in a system that grew to 74 schools.
By 1834, its schools were integrated into the Public School Society.John L. Rury, "The New York African Free School, 1827-1836: Community Conflict over Community Control of Black Education," Phylon 44#3 (1983) pp. 187–197 online. In 1801, the city's Quakers formed the Association of Women Friends for the Relief of the Poor, hired an educated and moral widow as an instructor, and opened the first free school for poor white children. It grew to 750 students by 1823 and received some financial aid from the city or state.William H. S. Wood, Friends of the City of New York in the Nineteenth Century (1904) pp. 28-31.
In 1853 the Free School Society became part of the new public school system when it was absorbed by the New York City Board of Education.William W. Cutler, "Status, values and the education of the poor: The trustees of the New York Public School Society, 1805-1853." American Quarterly 24.1 (1972): 69-85 online
In 1829 there were 43,000 children ages 5 to 15 in a city of 200,000. About half were poor and did not get any formal schooling. About 14,000 paid tuition to attend one of the many nonsectarian private schools. Some 4,000 attended church-sponsored schools, such as the Collegiate School, founded by the Dutch in 1628). And 5,000 attended public elementary schools. (There were no public high schools. Working-class youth who had some schooling seldom stayed after age 14, when they started work or became apprentices.Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, (1999), p. 501. The "Free Academy of the City of New York", the first public high school, was established in 1847 by a wealthy businessman and president of the Board of Education Townsend Harris. It included both a high school and a college. There was no tuition; one goal was to provide access to a good education based on the student's merits alone. The conservative Whig Party denounced the school, while Tammany Hall and the Democrats endorsed the plan, and voters gave it 85% approval in a referendum. The Free Academy later dropped its high school and transformed into City College of New York. Other cities had moved much sooner to establish high schools: Boston (1829), Philadelphia (1838), and Baltimore (1839).Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, (1999), p. 781.Mario Emilio Cosenza, The Establishment of the College of the City of New York as the Free Academy in 1847 (1925) online
The Catholic issue The Catholic bishop of New York, John J. Hughes in 1840-1842 led a political battle to secure funding for the Catholic schools. He rallied support from both the Tammany Hall Democrats, and the opposition Whig Party, whose leaders, especially Governor William H. Seward supported Hughes. He argued Catholics paid double for schools—they paid taxes to subsidize private schools they could not use and also paid for the parochial schools they did use. Catholics could not use Public School Society schools because they forced students to listen to readings from the Protestant King James Bible which were designed to undermine their Catholic faith. With the Maclay Act in 1842, the New York State legislature established the New York City Board of Education. It gave the city an elective Board of Education empowered to build and supervise schools and distribute the education fund. It provided that no money should go to the schools that taught religion, so Hughes lost his battle.Martin L. Meenagh, Archbishop John Hughes and the New York Schools Controversy of 1840–43 American Nineteenth Century History (2004) 5#1, pp. 34-65, 10.1080/1466465042000222204 online
Catholic parochial system Bishop Hughes turned inward: he founded an independent Catholic school system in the city. His new system included the first Catholic college in the Northeast, St. John's College, now Fordham University. By 1870 19 percent of the city's children were attending Catholic schools.Ravitch (1975) pp 3–76.Joseph McCadden, "New York's School Crisis of 1840–1842: Its Irish Antecedents." Thought: Fordham University Quarterly 41.4 (1966): 561-588.
Increasingly American-born Irish women attended high schools and normal schools in preparation for a teaching career. The supply allowed the diocese to create many new Catholic elementary schools. After 1870 20 percent of the teachers in the city's public schools were Irish.Hasia Diner, Erin's Daughters in America: Irish Immigrant Women in the Nineteenth Century (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983) pp. 96-99.Ravitch, p. 102 Teaching "had status,” explained a teacher whose parents were immigrants from Ireland. “[You were] looked up to...like a doctor.”Quoted in Janet A. Nolan, Ourselves Alone: Women's Emigration from Ireland, 1885-1920 (University Press of Kentucky, 2021) ch. 5.
Many of the young immigrant or American-born women joined religious orders. French Catholic orders also established branches in the United States. The nuns were assigned to teach in parochial schools or to work in hospitals and orphanages.George C. Stewart, Marvels of charity: History of American sisters and nuns (1994) pp.174–180. One prominent leader was Mother Marie Joseph Butler (1860–1940), an Irish-born Catholic sister who dedicated her life to establishing schools and colleges. In the early 20th century she founded 14 schools, including Marymount School and College in Tarrytown, New York, a suburb of New York City. She established 14 schools, 3 of them colleges, in the United States. Her conviction of the educational value of international experience led her to establish the first study abroad program through Marymount College.Kathleen A. Mahoney, "Butler, Mother Marie Joseph" in American National Biography (1999).
Progressive era, 1890s to 1920s
By 1860, elementary teaching was a female role, especially in the Northeast with rates of 80% of more females in both urban and rural areas, reaching 89% statewide in New York in 1915. A high school education was the normal requirement. In 1860, about 90% were under age 30, and half were under 25.Joel Perlmann, and Robert A. Margo, Women’s Work? American Schoolteachers, 1650-1920 (U of Chicago Press, 2001) pp. 22, 37, 90. By 1930, nearly all had started college and 22% had a college degree.Edward S. Evenden, et al. National Survey of Education of the Education of Teachers. Bulletin, 1933, No. 10. Volume 2: Teacher Personnel in the United States (Office of Education, United States Department of the Interior, 1935) p. 46-47
Immigration from Eastern Europe soared after 1880, as did enrollments of Jews, Italians and others. Enrollment in the elementary schools soared from 250,000 in 1881 (including Brooklyn) to 494,000 in 1899, and 792,000 in 1914, when immigration ended. While the number of schools held steady at about 500, the number of teachers doubled from 9,300 in 1899 to 20,000 in 1914. High school enrollment soared from 14,000 in 1899 to 68,000 in 1914.Berrol pp 145-146. One immigrant from Germany in 1857 was Felix Adler (1851–1933). Adler returned to Germany for a PhD from Heidelberg University; at a time only Harvard had a PhD program. He served as a professor of philosophy at Columbia University, 1902–1933. His Society for Ethical Culture promoted numerous educational reforms in the city. They founded a high school for gifted youth, and a teacher training school. They promoted vocational schools that taught basic manual trades. Adler was a national leader in the battle against child labor, and organized advanced studies of children.Ellen Salzman-Fiske, Secular religion and social reform: Felix Adler's educational ideas and programs, 1876-1933 (Columbia University Press, 1999).
Hunter College was founded in 1870 as the Female Normal and High School, to train young women as teachers in elementary schools. The Industrial Education Association, formed in 1884, promoted manual training courses in the new high schools, and it emphasized the need for more advanced teacher training. It helped found a Teachers College, which became a unit of Columbia University in 1898. It gained a national and international reputation in pedagogy. John Dewey was a highly influential professor there from 1904 until 1930.Ravitch, The Great School Wars p. 112.F. M. McMurry, et al. "Theory and practice at Teachers College, Columbia University." Teachers College Record 5.6 (1904): 43-64. online A smaller institution was the Bureau of Educational Experiments, an independent, graduate education school that opened in 1916 and became an experimental site for innovation under the leadership of Lucy Sprague Mitchell (1878–1967). It became the Bank Street College of Education in 1950.Patricia Fisher, and Anne Perryman, A brief history: Bank Street College of Education (2000) online.
Conflict over the Gary Plan
In 1914, New York City hired William Wirt superintendent of schools in Gary, Indiana since 1907 as a part-time consultant to introduce the work-study-play system in the public schools. The plan involved teacher hiring standards, the design of school buildings, lengthening the school day, and organizing the schools according to his ideals. The core of the schools' organization in Gary centered upon the platoon or work-study-play system and Americanizing the 63.4 percent of children with parents who were immigrants.Weiner, 2010, p. 35. The theory behind the Gary Plan was to accommodate children's shorter attention spans, and that long hours of quiet in the classroom were not tenable.