Education Reform

Before the mid-1800s, there was no uniform education policy in the U.S. Massachusetts and Vermont were the only states before the Civil War to pass a school attendance law. In the 1830s, Americans increasingly began to demand tax-supported public schools. Within three years, about 42 percent of the elementary-school-age children in Pennsylvania were attending public schools. By the 1850s every state had provided some form of publicly funded elementary schools.

A school in the 1850s