It's the Brian Lara Show. I'm Tiffany Hanson in for Brian today, and we continue now with our WNYC Centennial series. We are, of course, celebrating our 100 years, and so we are looking at 100 years of 100 things. We are on thing number 86, 100 years of public education, meaning publicly funded education, and mostly the compulsory part. So elementary school through high school. We're going to look at how schools are funded, who controls that funding, why they are funded. A bit of an echo here from our conversation earlier in the program. What those factors as well mean for civil society as we go through the decades. Joining us again here on the Brian Lairn Show is

Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor of history of education at the University of Pennsylvania.

You might remember that he took us through the hundred years of school culture wars earlier in

our centennial series. So welcome back, Professor Zimmerman. Good to be here again. Thanks for having me.

Well, let's start at the beginning. Why not? You know, American public education back in the colonial days

started out very community-based, often church-based. But if we zip forward to the 1920s,

schools were starting to get organized at the state level, which is essentially how it

happens now. So just take us through that evolution a little bit.

Well, actually, the key juncture is a little bit before the period you talked about.

It's in the antebellum era, the 1830s and 1840s. When figures like Horace Mann created these state school systems,

at that time they were called common school systems, and the effort was to try to stitch

together all of these tiny little schools, most of them one room, into something like a system.

But to your point, it was a threadbare one. Horace Mann envisioned a system where everyone had the

same curriculum and the school was open for the same amount of time and teachers had the same

level of education or certification. And none of that actually happened until the turn of the

century. That's when these state systems got actual teeth. And what do we mean when we say teeth?

Well, it means, for example, to your earlier point, that there was actual compulsory education,

meaning compulsory education that was enforced, and that there were real teacher standards

that were also enforced.

You had to have certain degrees.

You had to have certain certifications and so on.

And this is what we see in the 20s. Really, starting in the 1890s, going through the 1920s, which is something we call the progressive era.

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