A Comparison of Rational and Institutional Explanations for Acceleration of Student Enrollment, 1870–1920

• In Event: AERA Graduate Student Research in Progress Roundtable Session Two
  In Roundtable Session: Historical Perspectives on Education: Accelerated Enrollment, Colonialism, Police in Schools, and Asian American Academic Achievement (Table 9)

Abstract

The growth of public education in the 19th and early 20th century was a pivotal development in American society and culminated with the rapid acceleration of school enrollment between 1870 and 1920. Though the effects of bureaucratization, urbanization, industrialization, and other societal changes on educational expansion during this period have been discussed at length, the root forces that produced this drastic and dramatic increase in enrollment has received limited attention. This study uses a neo-institutionalist theoretical framework and historical data to quantitatively analyze potential explanations for this pattern of enrollment. Specifically, this study addresses two potential explanations. Rational explanations suggest parents increasingly chose to send their kids to school for the services or advantages that school provided. Institutionalist explanations suggest that schooling rates increased due to the increasing legitimacy of education and the resultant isomorphic forces produced by this institutional inertia. Additionally, this study also seeks to address the potentiality that rational forces were important early in this period and later gave way to isomorphic forces. Early results show very weak support for an overarching rational explanation, and future analyses will test the role of institutional explanations. This work promises to contribute to a deeper understanding of both the historical and contemporary processes that govern institutional development and which caused education to quickly become a dominant institution in modern society.

Author

• Alexander Bittel, University of Kansas
  Presenting Author