Private, nonpublic, or independent schools do not receive governmental funding and are usually administered by denominational or secular boards; others are operated for profit. Before the advent of public education, all schools were private. During the eighteenth century private academies for boys such as Phillips Andover (1778), Phillips Exeter (1778), and Deer-field (1799) pioneered the teaching of modern and practical subjects, from astronomy to trigonometry. Religious schools were opened by the Quakers, Episcopalians, and Lutherans in the various colonies. A group of Jews opened a school in New York City in 1731, and Roman Catholic schools were under way later in the eighteenth century.
The Free (later Public) School Society opened and operated private schools (1806–1853) that were taken over by the New York City Board of Education. An independent Catholic parochial school system took shape in the late nineteenth century, especially after the Third Plenary Council at Baltimore (1884). Some of the most innovative schools could be found outside the emerging public school system, such as John Dewey’s laboratory (1896) schools, noted for their progressive ideas and practices; the first kindergarten (1856); and female academies and seminaries.
The Magna Carta of the private school was the decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1925), which upheld the constitutionality of private and parochial schools. The parochial schools experienced great financial difficulty after 1945, partially as a result of judicial bans on public support, and many Roman Catholic institutions were forced to close. Enrollment in private elementary and secondary schools in the United States rose to nearly 6.4 million students in 1965, fell to 5 million during the 1970s, and since then has fluctuated between 5 and 5.7 million (approximately 10 to 13 percent of the total school population). Much of the decline was in inner-city Catholic schools, many of which closed as Catholics migrated to the suburbs. A growing number of non-Catholic religious schools, 11,476 by 1990 (46 percent of private schools), offset the Catholic school decline. Still, they enrolled only 31 percent of private school students. Nonsectarian schools served the rest. Preparatory schools, military academies, and Waldorf and Montessori schools addressed particular educational concerns. The increased number of non-Catholic religious schools came largely from the growth of evangelical Christian academies. These academies responded to the perception of moral decline, which some critics attributed to an advancing secular humanist ideology in the public schools. For similar reasons, a rapidly increasing number of families—estimated in the 1990s at about 300,000—engaged in home schooling.
Private preschools also experienced a boom in the late twentieth century. These centers responded to the increased demand for child care created when growing numbers of women entered the labor force out of economic necessity or personal preference.
Critics of the public schools proposed such reforms as tuition tax credits and school vouchers to enable private schools to compete for government funds, thereby pressuring public schools to operate more efficiently. President George H. W. Bush included “school choice” in the America 2000 Excellence in Education Act that he introduced in 1991. The religious nature of many private schools led to protests that school choice, besides undermining public education, would violate separation of church and state. President Bill Clinton consequently excluded school choice measures from his educational proposals. Nonetheless, several states—including California, Minnesota, New York, and Wisconsin—adopted or tested school choice programs.
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