In the early 1900s, the nation’s civic leaders launched a full court press to make secondary education — previously offered to an elite few — available to the many. They compelled communities to build high schools and sought to convince the populace that a diploma was their ticket out of a life of hard labor, as well as society’s chance at unprecedented economic expansion. But how to assess the validity of what was being taught?
Simultaneously, philanthropist Andrew Carnegie hoped to kick-start the expansion of higher education by donating $10 million to bankroll pensions for college professors. This posed a parallel dilemma: How to decide whether a scholar had put in enough time to earn the annuity?
