Expansion (1945 - 1965)
Academic Programs
The central task of public secondary education has never been the nurturing of academic achievement. Rather, the typical American high school has built a very broad, but seldom deep, curriculum in an attempt to meet a great variety of social and economic needs.
Robert Orrill
"Grades 11-14: The Heartland or the Wasteland of American Education?"
The need to find and nurture talented students became a heightened concern among educators in the 1950s. In part, this was because of three things.
The manpower shortage (the shortage of educated people for professional and technical jobs) fueled educators and others to attempt to educate young people into appropriate vocational roles.
The Cold War heightened concerns, especially after the 1957 launching of the Soviet satellite Sputnik, that American youngsters were not being prepared by American schools as well as Soviet youth and that this gap in academic achievement was perilous for the United States.
The criticism of progressive education created the societal perception that progressive education lacked academic rigor.
The College Board began to play a vigorous role in curricular revision in the 1950s with three initiatives: the Advanced Placement Program (or APP), the Commission on Mathematics, and the Commission on English.
The College Board's testing programs had always reflected some issues about the high school curriculum. In earlier years, the Board attempted to act as a standard setter for the curriculum.
Before the creation of the Educational Testing Service (ETS), the College Board's functions revolved primarily around the administration of examinations. In 1947, some College Board officials thought that the Board should not try to determine the curriculum but should just act as an impartial assessor of student ability.
The College Board's more aggressive character in relation to the curriculum in the 1950s and 1960s was reflective of a number of things. The creation of ETS freed the College Board to pursue issues outside of testing. At the same time, changes in the secondary curriculum in response to criticism of progressive education and to the national manpower crisis placed more emphasis on academic knowledge.
College Board officials noted, in particular, the changing secondary curriculum and its effects on the Board's programs of testing. The College Board wondered what the changing curriculum meant to national testing programs. College Board official Sam Kendrick stated as late as 1962 that the Board needed to decide if it was participating in curricular revision and what activities it would support if it did.
Given these changes, therefore, it is not surprising that the College Board initiated programs and studies on the high school curriculum.
