More Is More | Emanuele Corso
Emanuele Corso -- World News Trust
Feb. 10, 2015
When immigrants and refugees from Eastern and Southern Europe immigrated to the United States in the late 1800s and early 1930s, after they found work and could provide for a family, the education of their children became the first priority.
These people knew the value of education from experience and provided it sometimes at great sacrifice. In fact, they demanded it and insured that their children understood its importance.
All of these people had felt the inequality imposed by inherited wealth and property. The social capital of the ruling classes in Europe was an intolerable burden for the rest of society to bear and that’s why my grandparents and millions of other American’s grandparents and great-grandparents fled Italy, Poland, Ireland and nearly every other European country.
For these immigrants education was liberation, it was freedom, it was dignity, a path to a life as middle-class families. Enormous sacrifices were made to put kids through college and university where they became professionals in medicine, law, education, and science. It was the “New World” indeed. It was the embodiment of the “American Dream.”
Here we are a century and a half later facing a relentless political battle to deny that dream, to denigrate public schools, to destroy the education system that made attaining the dream possible. Empty arguments like third-grade retention are employed to mask the real intent of the so-called reformers.
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http://worldnewstrust.com/more-is-more-emanuele-corso
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and happy they (and then we) obtained first education in New York City, where the new mayor appears to recognize the history, and importance of education.
Thanks for this, Tace. 
There wasn't universal education for much of that time. Drop out rates were fairly high. Standards were uneven--and often quite high, which accounted for the drop-out rates.
Even the idea of "public education" is a bit late. My county got its first elementary school in 1888. Its first high school came a couple of decades later, in 1908, with one teacher who also provided janitorial services. If you grew up in my neck of the woods, you'd have to wait a couple of decades after that for a high school or you'd have to travel > 10 miles to get to one. "My" high school was the fifth established in the county, mostly because it was a working class area ... with a lot of immigrants. I grew up surrounded by Polish- and Italian-Americans.
"Compulsory education" was a nice law, but after it was enacted in Maryland something like 30% of the kids still didn't have easy grammar school access. High school? Much less.
Up in the city the public schools were established a bit earlier. But the private schools beat them by many decades. The city public schools still had a fairly high drop out rate, except for the prestigious flag-ship campus (which pulled the best and brightest from all the other schools). High school wasn't for everybody, but the mythos that all immigrants wanted to have their kids go to college is an alluring one, but often a fantasy. High school graduation rates for the general population finally topped 50% around 1940. That's decades after this author's assumption that rates were uniformly high before that. Yes, the more prosperous families had high high-school graduation rates. Where do you think that left immigrant kids? Yup: Average would have been less than 50% for a short while after 1940.
This varied depending on where you lived. Large cities in the NE were ahead of much of the country, since their Puritan heritage pushed education more than the old immigrant stock in other parts of the country. Cities had earlier, better schools--but also larger poor populations.
Industrialization was pushing more education in the 1920s and 30s. That's the real incentive juicing more schooling. And high school graduation rates increased with prosperity ("kids don't need to work", "school is the kid's job"
throughout the '40s and '50s and '60s, esp. after 12 years became the legal requirement instead of just grammar school.
Education figured prominently in many family narratives. But not even all my father's older siblings graduated from high school, and he graduated in '44. Those in which high school and college didn't figure tend to be fairly invisible, unless there's some injustice lurking there; and families tend to remember and recount the tales from those antecedent nuclear families (grandparents, great-grandparents) that were more successful, not the losers.
The reason teachers are under fire is because for the first time there's such a steep $ amount attached to college and no real way for mere high school grads to do well, in general. All those kids who would have been drop outs or content with HS now need to be pre-college or CTE trained, and given demographics there's a higher percentage of them now than at any time in the last 80 years. The ed system in the 1920s didn't care about the drop outs as much, and the parents viewed it not as society's problem but their own. Nowadays we externalize our responsibilities: Somebody else is responsible for any problem we have, not us. Our kids fail school? Don't do homework. Would rather work at McDonald's than focus on their senior or even junior years in high school? Not my fault. And it can't be the kids' fault. So it's somebody else's.