through common patterns of development.
___.Values in Conflict: The University, the Market-
place, and the Trials of Liberal Education.Montreal:
McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002. Argues
that in the race for riches, schools and universities
are forced by government policy to narrow their
educational vistas.
Manzer, Ronald.Public Schools and Political Ideas: Ca-
nadian Public Educational Policy in Historical Perspec-
tive. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994.
Argues that educational politics and policies are
constituted by consensus and difference in an on-
going dialogue about political principles.
Anh Tran
See also Canadian Charter of Rights and Free-
doms; Minorities in Canada; Multiculturalism in ed-
ucation.
Education in the United States
Definition Policies, practices, and cultural trends
affecting academic instruction in the United
States, from preschool through graduate and
professional schools
Through rising educational attainment, an increasing
portion of Americans went through U.S. schools in the
1980’s, although falling birthrates in earlier years meant
that school enrollments dropped. Although attainment in-
creased, this was a decade of concern over school achieve-
ment. This concern was one of the reasons that, although
the decade began with political beliefs that federal involve-
ment in education should be lessened, the 1980’s saw major
federal educational initiatives.
Over the course of the twentieth century, U.S. edu-
cation levels incereased significantly. During the
1980’s, this trend continued, as Americans were edu-
cated in higher numbers and at greater levels than in
previous decades. The percentages of Americans
with high school and college diplomas had in-
creased, particularly after 1960, until in 1980 69 per-
cent of adult Americans were high school graduates.
A decade later, that figure had risen to 78 percent.
Percentages of adult Americans who were college
graduates also rose during the 1980’s, from 17 per-
cent to more than 21 percent.
While the average level of U.S. education contin-
ued to increase over the 1980’s, the number of en-
rolled students changed little. The unusually large
baby-boom generation, born roughly between 1946
and 1964, had largely reached adulthood by 1980 and
had begun to move out of most levels of the school
system. The new generation was smaller, so there
were fewer minors in need of education during the
1980’s. Indeed, the number of students enrolled in el-
ementary and secondary schools actually decreased
between 1980 and 1985, from 46,208,000 to
44,979,000. By 1990, enrollments had returned to
just above the 1980 level, at 46,451,000. Most of the
growth during the decade occurred among institu-
tions of higher education, since students enrolled be-
yond the high school level grew by more than 1.7 mil-
lion, from 12,097,000 in 1980 to 13,819,000 in 1990.
Increasing Diversity Racial and ethnic minority stu-
dents became a larger proportion of the U.S. student
population during the 1980’s. According to U.S. cen-
sus data, 73 percent of public school students were
white non-Hispanics in 1980. Some 16 percent were
African American, 9 percent were Hispanic, and 2
percent were classified as “other.” A decade later, the
percentage of white non-Hispanic public school stu-
dents had fallen to just over 67 percent, while 17 per-
cent of students were African American, 12 percent
were Hispanic, and 4 percent were “other.” The no-
table increase in Hispanic students and students of
other races (primarily Asians) was largely due to an
increase in the enrollment of students who were im-
migrants or children of immigrants.
Efforts to desegregate schools continued in the
1980’s, but there were fewer new incidents of court-
ordered busing to achieve racial desegregation than
there had been in the 1970’s. In addition, more
school districts that had been under desegregation
orders were declared unitary, meaning that they had
eliminated the vestiges of desegregation and were
no longer under court control. In a case that was his-
torically notable, the parents of seventeen children
in Topeka, Kansas, in 1979 petitioned the courts to
reopen the 1954Brown v. Board of Educationcase, on
the grounds that the Topeka school board had not
yet eliminated the heritage of discrimination that
had been that case’s impetus. In April, 1987, U.S.
District Judge Richard Rogers closed this chapter of
American educational history, when he ruled that
Topeka had ended school desegregation.
The Department of Education For much of Ameri-
can history, elementary and secondary education312 Education in the United States The Eighties in America