THE PEOPLE\u27S COLLEGE: A SOCIOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF THE CENTRAL HIGH SCHOOL OF PHILADELPHIA, 1838-1939 (PENNSYLVANIA)

Studies of the origins and development of public school systems in the United States have tended to focus on aggregates rather than on individual schools. In contrast, this study focuses on the first 100 years of the earliest and most prominent high school in Philadelphia, examining both its inner workings and its external relations. Sources include annual reports of the school\u27s presidents, faculty meeting minutes and alumni histories. In addition a sample of 2,000 students was drawn from student records over the period 1838-1920, and when possible these students were linked to census manuscripts. Chapter one examines the critical role played by Central High School in the organizational development of the Philadelphia school system, providing informal leadership in the early days of formal decentralization and then falling victim to an ascendant educational bureaucracy. Chapter two traces the transformation in the character of the school\u27s internal governance from collegial to quasi-bureaucratic and the change in the status of its teachers from autonomous to subordinate. The third chapter draws on the student sample to reveal both the consistently middle class origins of Central students and the strikingly meritocratic pattern of rewards within the school. The fourth chapter focuses on the reasons for Central\u27s long-standing dedication to a uniform and practical curriculum and for its sudden shift toward a differentiated college-preparatory curriculum before the turn of the century. At the most general level this study concludes that Central High School was founded as an expression of class concerns (bourgeois beliefs in meritocracy and practicality) but that its subsequent development was the result of status concerns (the ability of educational credentials to help fortify social position). The school\u27s original business orientation based on class was eventually subordinated to an academic orientation as a result of status-group demands for a form of currency which could be used to buy positions of relative advantage. Initially valued for its ability to reproduce class, Central was later valued for its ability to confer status. Ideology explains the first pattern, credentialism explains the second