History of the
University of the State of New York
and the
State Education Department
1784 - 1996

CONTENTS

I. UNIVERSITY OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK

Board of Regents and the Development of the University
Unification of the University and Department of Public Instruction

Legal Foundations of the Department and the University
Department Organization, Management, and Planning
Patriotic and Moral Education

The Free Common School System
Origins of the High Schools
School Aid Quota System
Fiscal Crisis of the 1920s; Rural School Centralization
Boards of Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES)
New York City and Other City School Districts
State Aid since the 1960s

General Supervision of Schools
Universal School Attendance
Regents Examinations and Curricula
Challenges of Urban Education
Statewide Standards for Students and Schools
Vocational and Adult Education
Physical and Health Education; Nutrition Programs
Education for Non-English Speakers

Vocational Rehabilitation
Special Education
Schools for the Blind and Deaf

Teacher Training and Certification
Higher Education Oversight and Planning
Proprietary School Supervision
Scholarship and Opportunity Programs

New York State Library
Statewide Library System Development
New York State Archives
New York State Museum
Educational Television

APPENDIX A

Chancellors of the Board of Regents, 1784-1996
Superintendents of Common Schools, 1812-1856
Superintendents of Public Instruction, 1856-1904
Commissioners of Education, 1904-1996

Operating school districts in New York State, 1905, 1935, 1965, 1995

I. University of the State of New York

Board of Regents and the Development of the University. The Regents of the University of the State of New York were created by statute May 1, 1784. The Regents were a corporation empowered to act as trustees of Columbia College (originally chartered as King's College in 1754 and closed during the Revolutionary War) and of every other college and academy incorporated in the state thereafter. The Regents originally consisted of the governor, other state officers, and the mayors of New York and Albany, ex officio, plus twenty-four persons appointed for life. This unwieldy body soon got involved in the day-to-day administration of Columbia. In 1786 a Regents' committee recommended that colleges and academies have their own trustees, and that the Regents be given broader responsibilities for overseeing education in New York. Legislative bills to that end were introduced in the Assembly by Regent Alexander Hamilton, and in the Senate by Regent Ezra L'Hommedieu, in 1787. A compromise bill became law. The act empowered the Regents to "visit and inspect all the colleges, academies, and schools" in the state, award higher academic degrees, hold and distribute funds, and exercise other powers of a corporation. Until the board was reorganized under the unification act of 1904, nineteen Regents were elected for life terms by joint ballot of the Legislature; in addition, the governor and lieutenant governor served as Regents. Since 1894 the University of the State of New York has been continued by the Constitution, which states that its corporate powers "may be increased, modified, or diminished" by the Legislature.

The Regents' protean power to "visit and inspect" member institutions of the University has taken various forms. During the nineteenth century the Regents exercised oversight by reviewing statistical reports from academies and colleges; only occasionally did Regents actually visit an institution. The Regents adopted standards for incorporating private academies (1801) and colleges (1811), and required academies to offer acceptable programs in order to receive aid from the Literature Fund, established in 1801. The Legislature made the Regents trustees of the State Library and the collections of the State Museum in 1844 and 1845, respectively. During the later nineteenth century the Regents developed educational standards for academies and high schools statewide, through use of the Regents examinations and syllabi. These innovations were discussed and promoted by the University convocations, meetings of educators held annually starting 1863. The scope of the University expanded significantly in 1889 and 1892, when the Regents obtained legislation giving them the right to incorporate and supervise libraries, museums, correspondence schools, and other educational institutions. The Secretary to the Board of Regents had long administered the affairs of the University. Starting in 1890 the Secretary (then the redoubtable Melvil Dewey, also head of the State Library) supervised full-time inspectors of secondary schools, libraries, colleges, and other institutions reporting to the Regents.

Unification of the University and Department of Public Instruction. New York State also developed a statewide system of public schools, under the common school law of 1812. Gideon Hawley, the first Superintendent of Common Schools, organized the system, distributed school aid from the Common School Fund, and prodded local officials to set up school districts and submit reports. Hawley was dismissed in 1821 for political reasons, and thereafter the Secretary of State served as the Superintendent of Common Schools. In 1854 the Legislature created a Department of Public Instruction, headed by a Superintendent elected jointly by the Senate and Assembly for a three-year renewable term. The new Department had a small staff which carried on the work of advising local school authorities, allocating state aid, and preparing reports to the Legislature.

The responsibilities of the Regents and the state officials in charge of the common schools overlapped. The Regents had a vague statutory authority to oversee all education in the state. After 1842 the Superintendent of Common Schools was a member of the Board of Regents, as was the Superintendent of Public Instruction after 1854. The latter official shared with the Regents the responsibility to inspect and report on academies. The rapid development of public high schools after the 1850s caused administrative confusion. The high schools were operated by union free or city school districts, which the law made subject to visitation and inspection by the Superintendent of Public Instruction. However, the academic programs of all secondary schools were under general supervision of the Regents. Unification of elementary, secondary, and higher education under one administration was considered and rejected by the constitutional conventions of 1867 and 1894, and proposed in legislative bills from time to time. Outright competition between the Regents and the Department of Public Instruction became intense and public during the 1890s, when the Superintendents of Public Instruction lobbied to have all secondary education placed under their control. But during the same decade the University's activist program under Secretary Melvil Dewey won the Regents many new supporters.

In 1899 the annual University convocation requested Governor Theodore Roosevelt to name a special commission to study unification. The commission's report proposed that a new department of education succeed the Department of Public Instruction and include the University, and that the Regents be appointed for fixed terms by the Governor with consent of the Senate. A joint legislative committee in 1904 recommended that elementary and secondary education be entrusted to a three-member commission, consisting of one Regent and two other members appointed by each of the two major parties in the Legislature. Governor Benjamin Odell and a Republican legislative caucus drew up their own, very different unification bill. This bill became law, establishing an Education Department, effective April 1, 1904. The new Department was headed by a Commissioner of Education, appointed by and responsible to the Regents. Andrew S. Draper, who had previously served two terms as Superintendent of Public Instruction, was named the first Commissioner of Education. Regents were to be elected by joint ballot of the Legislature to serve fixed terms, initially eleven years; some of the sitting Regents were continued in office. The board consisted of one Regent from each Supreme Court judicial district. Later on members-at-large were added (three after 1909, four after 1965). Regents' terms were set to equal in years the total number of Regents, resulting in one vacancy annually (the term reached fifteen years in 1969, when the twelfth judicial district was established). The Legislature reduced the (renewable) terms of office to seven years in 1974, and to five years in 1994, citing a need for increased accountability of the Regents.

Today the University of the State of New York embraces all the elementary, secondary, and higher education institutions in the state, the latter including libraries, museums, and other institutions of learning. The Board of Regents is the only state board of education having authority over all educational activity at all levels, including private and public, non-profit and for-profit institutions. The board does much of its work through its standing committees, four of which correspond to the major offices of the Department, plus committees on professional practice; administration, law, and legislation; and ethics. The full Board of Regents meets monthly (except August) and since 1994 has held some meetings outside of Albany. The board has slowly become more diverse in its composition. The first woman Regent was appointed in 1927, the first Italian-American in 1948, the first African-American in 1966, the first Puerto Rican-American in 1975.

II. State Education Department

Legal Foundations of the Department and the University. The unification act of 1904 made the Commissioner the "executive officer" of the Regents. He was given the power to organize the Department and appoint deputies as needed, and to supervise elementary and secondary education (a 1910 law extended this responsibility to higher education as well). The Regents retained their existing authority, including the legislative power to adopt rules and regulations to implement the laws relating to the University. Commissioner Draper believed that "bodies legislate, individuals execute," and under his strong leadership the University, in effect, became part of the Department. After Draper's death in 1913, a rewriting of the Regents rules by Regent Pliny T. Sexton tended to make the University the primary administrative unit. However, the constitutional and statutory reorganization of state agencies in 1925-27 reestablished the Education Department as the administrative embodiment of the University of the State of New York. The Commissioner of Education is "president" of the University, that is, chief executive officer of the state's education system. However, the Constitution and the Education Law make the Regents the "head" of the Department. The Board of Regents elects a chancellor, who presides over its meetings and appoints its committees. The Regents appoint the Commissioner, who is "chief administrative officer" of the Department. They also appoint an executive deputy commissioner and approve the Commissioner's appointments of deputy, associate, and assistant commissioners; they may divide the department into divisions and bureaus, as recommended by the Commissioner.

The legal framework for education in New York is established by the state Constitution and by statutes passed by the Legislature. However, state law vests in the Regents and the Commissioner important legal functions. The Regents act as a quasi-legislative body to implement state law and policy relating to education. Their early "instructions" to academies and colleges began to be printed for distribution in 1830 and were compiled periodically as the "University Manual." Statutes relating to the Regents and institutions overseen by them were codified as the "University Law" in 1889. In a revision of the Regents rules in 1928, a clear distinction was made, for the first time, between those (general) rules and Commissioner's regulations, which are administrative rules for executing and enforcing the Regents rules and the statutes relating to education. Since 1942 the Commissioner's regulations have been published in book or loose-leaf format. The laws relating to education have been recodified only three times in the past century (1892-94, 1909-10, 1947), but the Education Law has been amended more often than any other title in the Consolidated Laws.

The sovereign authority to grant a charter of incorporation is ultimately vested in the Legislature. In 1784 the Legislature empowered the Regents to incorporate academies and colleges. This statutory authority was strengthened in 1853 and 1882, and extended in 1889 to libraries, museums, and other non-academic institutions of higher education. Since 1926 the Regents have also approved the incorporation, under general laws, of entities having an educational purpose. The Regents exercise a quasi-judicial function when they issue decisions and orders in professional discipline cases heard by the various professional boards.

The Commissioner of Education has the extraordinary power, not often employed, to issue an order withholding state aid or removing a school district officer or board, when there has been a wilful neglect of duty or violation of the law. The Commissioner regularly acts in a judicial capacity when he hears and decides appeals arising from official acts or decisions of school district meetings, boards, or officers. The Legislature first conferred this authority on the Superintendent of Common Schools in 1822, and the current statute dates essentially from 1864. The intent of the law is to provide a relatively simple administrative method of resolving disputes over fine points of school law, and relieve the courts of this business. During the nineteenth century appeals to the Superintendent often concerned issues such as school district boundaries, conduct of district meetings, and teacher contracts. Appeals could also involve civil rights. For example, in a number of cases the Superintendents of Common Schools, starting in 1837, barred sectarian religious exercises in public schools. Commissioner Draper in 1913 upheld the right of a woman to return to her teaching job after giving birth (the New York City Board of Education had charged her with "gross negligence by being absent to have a baby"). During recent years appeals to the Commissioner have typically concerned placement orders for children with disabilities, disciplinary proceedings against teachers or students, and irregular actions of school boards and district meetings.

The statute governing appeals originally declared that the decision was final and conclusive. However, the courts repeatedly held that this remarkable power was not unlimited, and that an appeal to the courts was possible if the decision was arbitrary or contrary to law. In 1976 the Legislature, displeased with several school integration decisions by Commissioner Nyquist, amended the law to explicitly permit appeals to the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court from Commissioner's decisions, under Article 78 of the Civil Practice Law and Rules. Decisions of the Commissioner have been published since 1913. The separate volumes of Education Department Reports commenced in 1962.

During the mid-nineteenth century the Deputy Superintendent of Public Instruction served as legal counsel. There was a staff attorney ("law clerk") after the 1880s. A law division was set up in the Education Department in 1904. During the 1920s and '30s the Counsel generally served as Deputy Commissioner. The Counsel's office provides legal advice and services regarding Commissioner's regulations, orders, and appeals; Regents' actions and rules; and pending legislation, contracts, court proceedings, and Department operations.

Department Organization, Management, and Planning. The great monument to Commissioner Andrew S. Draper is the Education Building, completed in 1912, whose funding he secured. Draper organized the Department in ways that had a lasting impact. As established in 1904, the Department had three assistant commissioners, for elementary, secondary, and higher education. There were seven divisions -- accounts, compulsory attendance, examinations, inspections, law, records, and statistics. (The Library and Museum and the professional boards reported to the assistant commissioner for higher education.) Despite its new organization and new building, the Department continued old practices developed during the later nineteenth century. Inspections and examinations were the means by which the Regents had strengthened their authority over secondary schools and higher education. The examinations division (established 1889) and the inspections division (1890) continued their work with little change. The Department became known for an authoritarian attitude toward the "field." Statistical reports and Regents examination papers received minute scrutiny in Albany. Department inspectors regularly visited high schools, libraries, colleges, and "special schools" serving Indians, juvenile delinquents, the retarded, and the insane. In 1911 the school inspectors were designated as specialists in academic subject areas, though they continued to visit and inspect high schools in assigned regions of the state. In 1915 most of the inspections division was merged into the examinations division, increasing further the already strong emphasis on high school programs. The Department had few experts on elementary education until the later 1930s, and the imbalance in favor of secondary education persisted into the 1950s.

The administration of Commissioner Frank P. Graves (1921-1940) may be termed the "golden age" of the State Education Department. It was an era of remarkable change in elementary and secondary education: state aid to rural and city school districts more than doubled; thousands of rural school districts were consolidated and their one-room schools closed; standards for teacher education and certification were elevated; vocational education rapidly expanded; programs for special education and vocational rehabilitation for the handicapped initiated; and secondary education extended to the point where nearly half of students graduated from high school. However, the Department itself did not change as fast as the programs it oversaw. During the 1930s and '40s two major management studies of the Department pointed out systemic problems in its organization and operations. Some of the problems were resolved, others were not.

The Regents' Inquiry into the Character and Cost of Public Education (1935-38) was funded by a major grant from the General Education Board and chaired by Regent Owen D. Young, chief executive officer of General Electric. Numerous consultants collected data on public education programs outside New York City and also on Department operations. The Inquiry's major contributions were to endorse and promote the movement toward comprehensive education, and to effect a reorganization of the Department's management. In 1937 the Regents approved a new layer of managers -- associate commissioners in charge of public instruction (administratively linking elementary and secondary education), higher and professional education, and finance and administration. Over the next few years services to schools were improved by establishing new divisions of elementary and secondary education, each with its own bureau of curriculum development; a separate examinations division; a single bureau for education of mentally and physically handicapped children; and bureaus for school district centralization, school business management, and pupil guidance. The Inquiry's consultants urged the Department to "reduce service and regulatory activities to a minimum, and eliminate dictatorial administrative policies completely, particularly in dealing with local educational problems." (In 1946 a review of the Regents' Inquiry's recommendations noted that the Department had "sincerely tried during the past ten or more years to break down its authoritarian attitudes and to approach the schools with helpful consultative services.") The Regents' Inquiry declared that "leadership based on research" should be the Department's aim. Accordingly the Department's research division (established in 1928) was expanded. This research unit designed some important new programs, such as the BOCES in the late 1940s, and the regional library systems in the '50s. Until it was discontinued in the mid-1960s, the division also conducted general research on pupil performance and school administration.

Between 1947 and 1951 a Temporary Commission on Coordination of State Activities (Wicks Commission) made an exhaustive survey of the Department. The commission found some of the same serious operational inefficiencies identified by the Regents' Inquiry (for example, in the examinations division, the State Library's cataloging unit, and the Regents' then-numerous committees). These problems were eventually corrected, but the Department did not reduce the number of its major program areas from eleven to four, as the Wicks Commission urged. During the 1950s the Department's administration focused its attention on the challenges of growth -- building schools and recruiting and paying teachers in an era of rapidly-rising enrollments.

The 1960s brought new organizational problems as a result of the Department's rapid expansion. A steady increase in federal aid, particularly under the National Defense Education Act of 1958, the Manpower Training Act of 1962, and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, brought a near doubling of the Department's staff (1,989 in 1960, 3,847 in 1970). A ten-story annex to the Education Building was completed in 1960. The Department acquired additional space in the One Commerce Plaza ("Twin Towers") office building in 1970. (These facilities brought together Department staff formerly scattered in several locations around downtown Albany.) After a major reorganization in 1963, four new assistant commissioners reported to the associate commissioner for elementary, secondary, and continuing education. New associate commissioners were appointed for cultural education (1958), research and special studies (1961), and finance and management services (1964). Deputy commissioners began to be added to the administrative hierarchy in the late 1960s, eventually replacing the associate commissioners.

The first sign of fiscal stringency appeared in 1969, when the Governor's budget proposal recommended a five per cent cut for all agencies. The state's fiscal crisis burgeoned in the mid-1970s; between 1975 and 1980 the Department's work force dropped by over one thousand positions, about 30 per cent. Since the early 1980s the Department has had around three thousand employees. The smaller Department has a simpler organizational structure, resembling that of the 1950s. With the growth in state appropriations slowing, more and more Department staff have been shifted to federal funding, which itself was jeopardized by the mid-1990s. During the period 1985-90 several significant Department programs -- professional licensure and discipline, teacher certification, proprietary school supervision, tuition and maintenance for handicapped children in the Rome and Batavia state schools and state-supported private schools, records management services, and certain State Museum activities -- began to be funded from special revenue accounts.See footnote 1

The Department's administrative and support functions such as personnel, payroll, accounting, auditing, public relations, printing, building and grounds were originally located in a division of accounts. It was renamed the division of administration in 1907, relieved of its fiscal responsibilities in 1921, and headed by an assistant commissioner after 1932. A separate public relations office was set up in 1948. Most Department employees were (and are) civil servants, tested and appointed under rules of the Civil Service Commission (established 1883). The Education Department, like other agencies, was responsible for setting its own rules on employee conduct, attendance, and leave. (The rules varied from agency to agency, causing much confusion.) The Legislature passed appropriation bills for salaries and other expenses. The state had no budgeting process until 1928, when the governor first presented an annual budget proposal to the Legislature. Department officials complained that salaries for many of its job titles were set lower than for the same titles in other agencies, or for jobs in urban schools and libraries. This situation was improved in 1937, when the Legislature enacted a revised, standardized title, grade, and salary structure for all state agencies.

The Depression years of the 1930s brought pay cuts for employees in higher salary grades, but no layoffs. The war years of the early 1940s saw many Department employees leave for military service. The later 1940s and '50s were an era of slow but steady growth in most areas of the Department. During the mid-1960s the Department of Civil Service delegated to the Department's Office of Business Management and Personnel, as it did to other agencies, new responsibilities for recruiting employees and developing examinations. During the 1960s it was difficult to fill all of the Department's many new professional positions; in some fiscal years the Department did not expend all of its personal service funds (much of which now came from federal aid). In 1967 the Public Employees' Fair Employment Act (Taylor Law) authorized public employees to organize unions to negotiate the terms and conditions of employment. The Civil Service Employees Association was formed to represent state workers. In 1979 the Public Employees Federation became the collective bargaining agent for professional, scientific, and technical employees formerly represented by CSEA.

Starting in 1904 a division (later bureau) of statistics manually collected and tabulated data on school district enrollments and finances, and used the data to calculate state aid. A bureau of apportionment processed claims for state aid (including, after 1925, transportation and building aid) and certified them to the Comptroller for payment from monies appropriated by the Legislature. The later 1920s brought massive increases in state aid to school districts, and a complex new system of equalizing and allocating that aid. The Department's fiscal and state aid operations were accordingly reorganized. A division of finance, including the accounting and auditing functions, had been set up in 1921. As a result of an outside audit done in 1928, a reorganized finance division was headed by a new assistant commissioner and included the bureaus of apportionment and statistics. The Division was also made responsible for preparing Department budget requests. The fiscal units remained stable for decades (the Wicks Commission report of 1951 found the apportionment bureau to be "efficient and well- administered").

The increasing complexity of education finance during and after the 1960s required major changes in state aid, budgeting, accounting, and auditing. Separate state and federal aid units were set up in 1965, with the influx of federal aid under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. In 1966 the Department instituted a new accounting system (promoted by the governor and developed by an inter-agency group) for budgeting, appropriating, and accounting of funds on the basis of programs as well as objects of expenditures. Heads of major program areas became responsible for managing their expenditures. A budget coordination unit was established in 1970. A cost-accounting system was developed by the end of the decade in order to charge federal funds for overhead services. After 1983 a centralized administrative audit unit for external programs was set up, including the audit function from the Office of Vocational Rehabilitation. In the late 1980s an internal audit section was created.

The Department has adopted management planning only in recent years. In 1966 Commissioner James E. Allen, Jr., initiated an agency-wide planning process, made urgent by the influx of new federal funds. A consultant analyzed customer and staff views, and the assistant commissioners compiled briefing books on their programs. No plan appeared, probably because of the New York City school decentralization crisis. During the 1980s the Department was required to report quarterly to the Budget Division key statistical indicators of agency activities (what use was made of the data is unclear). Major program planning started in 1984 in the Office of Cultural Education, using various processes and formats. VESID adopted an overall operational plan in 1990; significant planning and operational improvements have occurred in some other areas. Following a critical review by the Rockefeller Institute in 1995, newly-selected Commissioner Richard P. Mills committed the Department to developing an overall strategic plan to clarify the agency's mission and improve services to its many customers.

Automated office equipment -- first mechanical, later electronic -- has transformed the Department's work, both in support and program functions. A central stenographic and typing pool using mechanical equipment functioned from 1925 to about 1968. The Department's first central mail room, complete with postage meter, was opened in 1935. Dial telephones were installed in 1938. That same year the Department acquired IBM punch card and tabulating machines to produce school district statistical reports. Several other functions were automated during the 1940s and '50s. A division of electronic data processing was established in 1962, and two years later the Department acquired a General Electric 225 mainframe computer with 8 kilobytes of system memory (the present Unisys A16 has 201 megabytes). By 1972 electronic data processing was in use in the areas of state aid, school statistics, vocational rehabilitation, professional licensing, Regents scholarship exams, and the State Library. Personal computers arrived in the early 1980s. The State Education Department Network (SEDNET) now includes mainframe, mini- and micro-computers, file servers, terminals, and other devices connected by routers on a "backbone" of fiber-optic cable. By 1995 the Department offered several "homepage" access points on the Internet.

Paper forms and files remain voluminous. The Department has had its own printing facilities since 1921. The plant in the basement of the Education Building received modern offset equipment in the mid-1960s. Today the central printing plant in the Cultural Education Center produces Regents and other examinations and Department forms and publications, altogether several million items each year. Publications services and forms design are provided by Department staff.

Patriotic and Moral Education. At various times the Legislature has passed laws committing the Regents and the Department to programs in support of patriotism, morality, and/or religion. Quite noncontroversial are the laws requiring schools to display the American flag (1898), hold patriotic exercises (1918), and use a pledge of allegiance to the flag (1956). Other laws were or became very controversial. A 1917 statute required the dismissal of a public school employee committing treason or sedition. Another law passed during World War I directed the Commissioner to ban textbooks containing matter "disloyal" to the United States. A law briefly in force during the post-war "Red Scare" required that teacher certificates be issued only to those who could show they were "loyal and obedient" to the state and federal governments (the Regents unanimously opposed this legislation). A more lasting legacy of the Red Scare was state censorship of motion pictures, which began in 1921. The Regents were given this responsibility in 1926. The Department's motion picture division licensed all commercial films shown in the state and edited or rejected films found to be "indecent, inhuman, tending to incite to crime, immoral or tending to corrupt morals, or sacrilegious." This program ended in 1965, after the U.S. Supreme Court declared New York's film censorship violated the constitutional guarantee of free speech and expression.

The 1930s, '40s, and early '50s, an era of competing political ideologies worldwide, brought recurring efforts to safeguard public education from perceived political threats from the left or right. After 1934 school teachers and administrators were required to take a loyalty oath. A 1939 law mandated the dismissal of any educator in a public school or college who advocated the violent overthrow of lawful government. This act was aimed at the New York City school system, where a communist faction had taken control of the small teachers' union in 1935. (The rival Teachers' Guild later became the United Federation of Teachers.) The Feinberg Law of 1949 declared that "subversives" had "infiltrated" the public schools; it required the Regents to list subversive organizations and adopt rules to enforce the 1917 and 1939 acts. The Regents established a procedure for reporting disloyal school employees and provided a modicum of due process for the accused persons. The Feinberg Law was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1952. Over the next few years several hundred New York City teachers resigned or were dismissed, after they refused to implicate persons involved in organizations deemed subversive. In 1956 Commissioner Allen issued an order in an appeal case, in effect permitting former (but not current) members of subversive organizations to hold professional jobs in the public schools. During the 1960s New York's teacher loyalty acts of 1917 and 1939 were declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court.

The "Blaine Amendment" to the state Constitution (1894) forbids use of public monies to support religious schools, except for the expenses of state "visitation and inspection." However, an amendment adopted in 1938 permits public support for transportation costs for pupils attending non-public schools. That same year the Board of Regents split its vote on the issue of "released time" for public school children to attend religious instruction and observance. During the 1950s the Regents countenanced the practice, and even approved a brief "non- denominational" prayer to be used in schools.See footnote 2 The Constitutional Convention of 1967 proposed the repeal of the Blaine amendment, a proposal endorsed by the Board of Regents. (Largely because of this provision, the proposed Constitution was rejected by the voters.) In 1970 the Legislature authorized spending public monies for non-public (mostly religious) schools, for testing, reporting, pupil services, building maintenance, and some tuition costs for poor children. These provisions were declared to violate the constitutional separation of church and state, but the courts upheld a more limited act which authorized reimbursement of the actual cost of tests and reports required by the state.

III. SCHOOL DISTRICT ORGANIZATION AND STATE AID

In 1805 the Legislature set up a fund for the support of the common schools, allocating to the fund the proceeds from state land sales and other assets. In 1812 a landmark law established a statewide system of common school districts and authorized distribution of interest from the Common School Fund. See footnote 3 Town and city officials were directed to lay out the districts; the voters in each district elected trustees to operate the school. State aid was distributed to those districts holding school at least three months a year, according to population aged 5-15. Revenue from the town/county property tax was used to match the state school aid. While the 1812 act authorized local authorities to establish common school districts, an 1814 amendment required them to do so. After 1814, if the cost of instruction exceeded the total of state aid plus local tax, as it generally did, the difference was made up by charging tuition, or "rates," itemized on "rate bills." By mid-century New York had over ten thousand common school districts. The typical district had a one- or two-room schoolhouse where children learned reading, writing, spelling, arithmetic, and geography. The 1812 common school act shaped the future of public education in New York by establishing that 1) common schools are a state function under state control; 2) funding of public schools is a joint state-local responsibility; 3) the school district -- not the county or the town -- is the primary administrative unit for public education.

Rate bills kept many poor children out of school, and for years concerned teachers and parents lobbied for free common schools. An 1849 statute provided for a combination of state and local funding for tuition-free common schools, if the voters approved; and voters endorsed the free school law in two successive statewide referenda. The Court of Appeals then declared the extraordinary referenda to be illegal. In 1851 the Legislature repealed the free school law, but instituted a statewide property tax for schools to augment revenues from rate bills, the Common School Fund, and local property tax levies. (The 1849 law had given school districts the power to levy property taxes for instructional expenses, not just for school construction; this authority was continued.) Superintendent of Public Instruction Victor M. Rice now led the battle for free schools, and victory was finally achieved in 1867. The guarantee of a free primary and secondary education was embodied in the state Constitution in 1894: "The Legislature shall provide for the maintenance and support of a system of free common schools, wherein all the children of this State may be educated."

Origins of the High Schools. Beyond the "3 R's" (readin', 'ritin', 'rithmetic) offered by the common schools, more advanced instruction was available in private high schools known as "academies" or "seminaries." The Regents monitored these schools and provided them modest amounts of aid from the Literature Fund. After 1827 aid was designated for students in all academic courses, not just Latin and Greek, thereby encouraging academies to broaden their programs beyond that of the classical grammar school. By the 1850s about 165 academies around the state provided secondary education (very few youths went on to college). However, the modern high school developed not from the academies, but from free public high schools in consolidated school districts. By the 1840s the small common school districts were obviously inadequate for growing urban areas. Ward or district schools within cities were unified by special statutes into city-wide districts. See footnote 4 Several of the larger villages were empowered to set up "union" school districts.

In 1853 a general law authorized one or more common districts to form a union free school district. This law and the special laws for city school systems permitted the new districts to establish "academic departments," or high schools, which were to be overseen by both the Regents and the Superintendent of Public Instruction. Boards of education managed the property and finances of the city and union free districts, and hired superintendents to administer systems with several schools. Budgets were approved by the municipal board in a city or village; elsewhere, by the district voters. The Legislature abolished rate bills in union free districts in 1864. The private academies could not compete with free high schools, and most soon merged with the union districts or simply closed down. The Regents at first doubted the need for public high schools, but later they promoted them by providing aid from the Literature Fund. In 1890 they hired full-time inspectors to visit and inspect high schools throughout the state. During that decade the Secretary to the Regents, Melvil Dewey, coordinated a successful drive to organize more high schools in rural areas, with the inducement of additional state aid. (Most of the union free districts later became the nuclei of central school districts.) High school enrollments would expand greatly during the 1920s and '30s, leading the Department to promote the comprehensive high school.

School Aid Quota System. Between 1812 and 1851 state aid to schools came from two dedicated revenue sources, the Common School Fund (for common schools) and the Literature Fund (for academies). The funds' return did not keep pace with the needs of the schools, and between 1851 and 1901 a modest statewide real property tax provided additional revenue for school aid. After 1901 almost all state aid to school districts came from the state's general fund, until the lottery fund was set up in 1966. Starting in the 1860s more and more state aid was allocated by an increasingly complex system of "quotas," fixed amounts of money regardless of district size or wealth. There were quotas for teachers (1864), city superintendents (1864), high schools (1887, 1895), village superintendents (1889), non-resident high school pupils (1903), vocational teachers (1908), agriculture teachers (1917), etc. By 1929 there were forty different quotas, including those for the new central school districts. After quotas were figured, the rest of a district's aid was calculated according to its school-age population and average daily attendance (the sole factor after 1894). ADA was abandoned as an aid factor in 1902 (it was reintroduced in 1925), and for the first time an equalizing formula was adopted -- a district quota on a sliding scale of $125-$200, depending on assessed valuation.

The general expansion of city and village school facilities and programs in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was financed mainly by local taxes. Between 1870 and 1900 total state aid increased about 50 per cent, while local school taxes increased by 240 per cent, in an era of gradual currency deflation and rapid growth in urban population and wealth. The increasing power and prestige of the state's public education system was achieved not by increasing state aid, but by raising and enforcing educational standards, most notably through the famed Regents examinations.

Fiscal Crisis of the 1920s; Rural School Centralization. One large segment of the public school system was in deep trouble. Most of the rural schools had declining enrollments and tax bases. For decades state school officials had called for consolidation of small country districts. In 1917 the Legislature abolished all the thousands of common school districts and formed them into "township units." Because there was no equalizing formula, school taxes shot up, taxpayers protested, and a year later the township system was abandoned. However, wartime inflation and the post-war agricultural depression caused a crisis in school finance. The quota system of state aid could not respond to rapid inflation and deflation, and it did little to help poor districts. The rich city districts were constrained by the constitutional limit on municipal indebtedness. During the 1920s several major studies of public school facilities, programs, performance, and finance were carried out by the Joint Committee on Rural Schools, the Friedsam Commission, and other groups. These studies concluded that state aid must be increased, and must be equalized to relieve poor districts and provide equal educational opportunity.

The Governor and the Legislature resolved the crisis. During the 1920s state aid to public schools increased dramatically, from under 10 per cent to about 27 per cent of total costs. (In the 1990s it is about 38 per cent.) The old quota system was mostly abandoned in 1930. The Cole-Rice Law of 1925 established equalization aid to bring per pupil expenditures up to minimum statewide standards (initially $44 for an elementary pupil, $73 for secondary). As recommended by the Friedsam Commission, legislation in the later 1920s provided even more state aid for both urban and rural districts. While the new aid formula still favored rich districts willing to pay for better schools, it governed the allocation of state aid until 1962, when a revised formula took effect. After 1945 secondary school aid was given for pupils in grades 7-8, encouraging the organization of junior high schools (promoted by the Department since the 1920s and registered starting 1925).

The Cole-Rice Law also provided financial incentives for the formation of "central rural school districts," first authorized by a 1914 statute. The generous 50 per cent transportation aid and 25 per cent building aid prompted a steady growth in the number of centralizations, especially during the economic depression of the 1930s. The Department's bureau of rural education worked with the District Superintendents to promote centralization of rural schools. The Regents' Inquiry into the Character and Cost of Public Education (1935-38) criticized the Department's piecemeal approach and the small size of many central schools. In response, centralization procedures were improved, and a Temporary State Commission on the State Education System (Rapp-Coudert Commission, 1941-47) developed a "master plan" for school consolidation (1947, updated 1958). Statutes passed in the 1950s permitted consolidation of common school districts with smaller city districts, and by the 1960s centralization was essentially complete. (A number of union free districts in suburban areas continue to operate schools.)

Boards of Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES). During the 1930s educators envisioned a comprehensive high school that would educate all children for work and life in a democracy. However, most central schools were not big enough to offer a full array of academic and vocational courses. In 1944 a Council on Rural Education, funded by farm organizations, recommended a "new type of rural supervisory district," responsible to school districts and responsive to needs of rural people. The result was the intermediate district law of 1948. No such districts were ever formed. The act provided for temporary boards of cooperative educational services (now called BOCES), which the Department hoped would "get people working together across district lines" and provide shared educational services in rural areas.

Nearly half a century later, the thirty-eight BOCES are major educational enterprises in their own right. A BOCES is formed by the Commissioner at the request of the school boards in one or more supervisory districts. The BOCES is headed by the district superintendent; school board representatives collectively elect BOCES members and approve the BOCES budget; and the Education Department approves BOCES service contracts. Concern that this structure insulates a BOCES from public scrutiny prompted legislation requiring the Commissioner, starting 1996, to submit an annual report to the Governor and the Legislature on BOCES finances and pupil performance. In the early years the typical BOCES service was travelling teachers for specialized subjects. After 1967 BOCES were authorized to own and operate their own facilities, and BOCES now offer vocational and special education programs as well as many administrative services for member districts.

New York City and Other City School Districts. The New York City public school system began to take shape under private control. In 1805 a group of Quakers and civic leaders organized and endowed the Free School Society to educate children not served by private academies or charity schools. After 1825 the renamed Public School Society received all the city's state school aid. It built up a system of "monitorial" schools which employed the regimented methods of instruction devised by Joseph Lancaster in England. Catholics protested the Society's Protestant leanings, and in 1842 the Legislature established a parallel system of publicly- operated schools for New York City, to be governed by ward trustees and overseen by a city board of education. The city system absorbed the Public School Society facilities in 1853. A large Catholic school system developed in the later nineteenth century. By the 1920s about ten per cent of the state's school-age population attended private academies, most of them urban Catholic schools.

After consolidation of the City of Greater New York (1898), the city rapidly established a public high school system throughout the five boroughs. For a few years each borough had its own appointive school board, and there was also a city-wide board of education. The revised city charter of 1902 established a single school board appointed by the mayor. The powers of the New York City superintendent of schools were considerably increased by the general city school law passed in 1917. However, the Board of Estimate and the City Council retained many fiscal controls over the schools. About thirty assistant or field superintendents oversaw operations of the city schools, and there were advisory local school boards. Studies of the New York City school system by the State Education Department (1933) and the Rapp-Coudert Commission (1944) found massive administrative inefficiencies, and no great improvement occurred in following decades. After the New York City school decentralization crisis of 1967-68, the Legislature established some new players: in place of the superintendent, a strong chancellor of the city school system; new community school districts, now thirty-three in number, whose elected boards and appointed superintendents have substantial authority over their public schools (except for the high schools); and an interim city school board, later made permanent. Since 1969 New York City school board members have been appointed by the Mayor and the borough presidents.

The 1917 city school law repealed hundreds of obsolete statutes relating to city school districts and established a uniform system of school administration in city districts statewide. As permitted by a 1949 constitutional amendment, statutes passed in 1950 and 1952 gave smaller city school districts (under 125 thousand population) fiscal and political autonomy from municipal government. The smaller city districts became fiscally "independent," having their own taxing power, like the central and union free districts. However, the five largest cities (over 125 thousand population, i.e. New York, Yonkers, Syracuse, Rochester, Buffalo) continue to be "dependent" school districts; their budgets are part of the regular city budgets, and city and school taxes are levied together. School budgets in city districts have been adopted without voter approval, though public budget hearings are held. Legislation passed in 1996 authorizes smaller city districts to hold votes on school budgets.

State Aid Since the 1960s. The national movement for school finance reform has touched, but not yet transformed, the state school aid system in New York. As recommended by the Diefendorf Commission, a new state aid formula was enacted in 1962, providing relatively more aid for less wealthy school districts, with a roughly even split between state and local financing for schools statewide. Aid was to be given in four main expenditure categories: operations, buildings, transportation, and size correction. The equalizing effect of the Diefendorf formula was diminished by new special aids for disadvantaged and disabled students, and by minimum aid levels for all districts, including "save-harmless" provisions guaranteeing stable aid in case of declining enrollments or increasing property values.

The Fleischmann Commission of 1969-72 criticized New York's inequitable school finance system and called for a complete state takeover of financing of public schools, to be supported by a statewide real property tax. A revised, interim state aid formula was enacted in 1974; it added a second tier of compensatory aid for under- performing and handicapped students. In 1978 the Supreme Court declared, in the Levittown v. Nyquist case, that New York's entire school finance system was unconstitutional because it did not afford pupils equal protection under the law. The Court of Appeals reversed this decision in 1982, deferring to the Legislature's responsibility to finance public education. The highly complex state aid system has continued basically the same since, despite several studies and numerous technical changes. General aid to school districts is calculated using "resident weighted average daily attendance" (RWADA), an equalizing aid ratio, and a district growth index. There is also state aid for pupil transportation and for capital construction and debt service; generous incentive aid for school district consolidation; excess cost aid for pupils with handicapping conditions (1976, 1980); supplemental school aid to districts having low personal income (1980); aid for pupils with compensatory needs (1974) or limited English proficiency (1982); and various other aids for specific programs.

Administering general and special state aid to schools (currently about $10 billion a year) is a critical Department function. Separate teams administer general state aid and categorical aid to schools. Automation has transformed the complex tasks of maintaining school statistics and calculating aid. The Basic Educational Data System (BEDS), developed during the mid-1960s, produces fiscal, enrollment, program, and personnel reports for both public and private elementary and secondary schools. The System to Account for Children (STAC), developed in 1983-85, is used to allocate special aid to school districts, state agencies, and counties for educating children who are disabled, in an institution, or homeless. Since 1989 the Regents have been required by law to submit to the Legislature an annual statistical report on the condition of the state's education system -- including a statewide profile and statistics on individual school districts, using data from BEDS and other sources.

IV. ELEMENTARY, MIDDLE, SECONDARY, AND CONTINUING EDUCATION

At the urging of farm groups, the office of School Commissioner was replaced in 1912 with the District Superintendent of Schools, appointed locally but paid by and responsible to the Commissioner of Education. Before 1942 the District Superintendents served five-year, renewable terms; since then their terms have been indefinite. There were originally 207 District Superintendencies statewide; today there are 38. The duty of the District Superintendents, as Commissioner Draper wrote in 1912, was not "visitation" of the rural schools but rather "intelligent supervision." Between the 1920s and the 1950s the Superintendents were the Department's local agents in the intensive campaign to centralize rural schools. The Department continues to supervise occasional consolidations (and also, since 1945, annexations) of smaller central school districts; the Commissioner issues the order laying out the new district, prior to the final vote. In recent decades the District Superintendents have served as administrators of Boards of Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES), and have also continued to represent the Commissioner.

School districts in cities and the larger villages have had their own superintendents since the mid-nineteenth century and were never under the jurisdiction of the School Commissioners or District Superintendents. See footnote 5 Schools under city and village superintendents had considerable autonomy. In 1921-22 the Board of Regents made Regents exams optional in those schools, providing that they used tests of the College Entrance Examination Board or local exams approved by the Department. In later years many urban high schools prided themselves on giving exams that were more challenging than the Regents exams. City school superintendents, principals, and teachers were active in the Department's curriculum planning. However, Department inspectors spent almost all their time in the field visiting the smaller high schools or, by the 1920s, speaking at conferences of administrators and teachers. The Department's "hands-off" policy toward the city schools would change dramatically during the 1960s.

The Department's school "inspectors" were retitled "supervisors" in 1926, and by the 1930s consultative services to schools were being emphasized. Starting in 1931 the finance division provided advice on accounting, auditing, and budgeting to newly-organized central rural school districts. By the end of the decade this service was offered to all districts, and new uniform accounting forms were adopted. The Department continues to provide various business services (including management studies) to school districts and the BOCES. The Department also reviews and approves plans for school construction so that they meet all local, state, and federal code requirements. The School Commissioners began approving school building projects in union free districts in 1864. This responsibility was given to the Commissioner in 1904. The function was first carried out in the Department's old inspections division, in a separate division after 1915. School construction reached new peaks during the mid- and later 1930s, because of district centralization and federal Depression aid, and again during the 1950s and early '60s, because of the post-war "baby boom." School building standards were completely revised in the early 1950s, giving schools the "long, low" look they now display. The Department's school facilities unit also has general responsibility for the health, safety, and accessibility of schools statewide.

Transporting rural children to school became possible with the coming of automobiles, paved roads, and snow plows. Transportation of students in union free and central districts was required by a 1925 statute. A much disliked, often challenged 1930 law mandated common districts to pay half the cost of transporting their high school pupils. After 1929 District Superintendents approved the terms of transportation contracts, and the Department checked and filed them. Since 1942 the Department has formally approved bids for transportation contracts, reviewed school bus routes, and established standards for drivers and vehicles. Today, in all but the largest cities, school districts provide or contract for transportation of pupils if they live at a distance from their school.

Since the 1920s the state, not the federal government, has been legally responsible for education of Indians in New York. State support began in 1846, when the Legislature appropriated money to help build reservation schools. After 1864 these schools got regular state aid. Since 1954 adjoining central school districts have taught reservation students on contract with the Department.See footnote 6 In the late 1930s the Department began encouraging (rather than discouraging) the teaching of aboriginal languages and culture. A Native American education unit was set up in 1972.

Universal School Attendance. Attendance figures were used to calculate all or part of Regents' aid to private academies starting in 1847. The advent of free public education in the 1860s provided the opportunity to promote, or to compel, regular attendance in the public schools. Decades passed before success was achieved. Average daily attendance was used to compute part of general school aid starting 1866, in the hope of encouraging attendance. An 1874 law required most children to attend school at least 70 days a year, but there was little means of enforcing this law. Growing public concern about child labor in factories and sweatshops helped persuade the Legislature to pass a strong compulsory attendance law in 1894. The law required children aged 8- 12 to attend the full school year of 130 days; employed children aged 13-14 had to attend at least 80 days. The school year was increased to 160 days in 1896, 180 days in 1913, and has not changed since. The official school- leaving age was increased to 15 in 1916, 16 in 1936, and the end of the school year in which a person turns 16, in 1994. The 1894 attendance law required city and village districts to appoint truant officers, who could and did arrest truant pupils (over 25,000 arrests in 1903-04). To assist the truant officers, a biennial school census in the larger cities and villages was mandated in 1895; an annual census was required in all other districts with more than eight teachers starting in 1909. The Department's compulsory attendance division received monthly attendance data from every district (except cities) and could withhold state aid from districts with poor records. By the 1920s the Department stopped trying to coerce regular attendance. It now emphasized the child's right to an education and urged schools to cooperate with social workers and the courts. The old attendance and child accounting division was dismantled in 1937, and attendance and census functions were grouped with other school administrative services.

Since the 1920s the Department has promoted early childhood education. A five-year project funded by the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Foundation reported in 1933 that "the time has come for the integration of the primary school, kindergarten and nursery school into one comprehensive program for young children." A new bureau of child development and parent education organized modest-sized programs of care for pre-school children of poor families during the Depression and World War II. The emergency Federal aid for these programs was not continued. Kindergartens dated from the 1880s and were common in city school systems by the 1920s, but state aid for them was not authorized until 1942. The vision of widened services to young children persisted. In 1966 new legislative funding permitted some districts to begin pre-kindergarten programs for children from poor households. This state-funded program (separate from federally-supported day child care) continues successfully to the present.

Regents Examinations and Curricula. From the beginning the Regents tried to maintain high standards in secondary schools. Grants from the Literature Fund were intended to support academic instruction. In 1817 and again in 1828 the Regents specified the texts or subjects that academies must teach to qualify for aid. Aid was restricted to those students who had passed local entrance examinations in the "common branch" subjects of reading, writing, grammar, arithmetic, and geography. Unfortunately, many academies lowered their standards in order to attract students and get state aid. Free high schools in the large cities experimented with uniform examinations. In 1864 the Regents, encouraged by Chancellor John V. S. L. Pruyn, decided to require public examinations of all students who sought admission to academies and high schools. A year later the Regents distributed the first "preliminary" examinations.

Colleges were calling for higher standards in secondary schools, and an 1877 statute authorized the Regents to give "academic" examinations as a standard for high school graduation and college admission. The Regents exams were quickly adopted because they embodied high scholastic standards, and because academies and high schools had to use them to qualify for aid from the Literature Fund. Strict security measures -- including the famous sealed envelopes and locked boxes -- were in place by 1890. At their high point, in 1925, Regents high school exams were given in 68 different subjects. For many decades all higher-level Regents exams were rated, and diplomas issued, in Albany. See footnote 7

The Regents exams were (and are) unique in the nation. The Department was proud of studies done in the 1920s and '30s which indicated that high scores on the exams were good predictors of success in college. However, steps were taken to reduce the complexity and expense of the exam system. After 1906 Regents exams were not offered in first- and second-year language courses. In 1927 one third of the high school exams were discontinued. The Department even proposed eliminating the preliminary exams, given in the seventh and eighth grades. Many school administrators objected to the proposal, and the preliminary exams continued to be offered until 1959. The Regents in 1937 approved the proposal of the State Examinations Board and the Department for comprehensive Regents examinations. The first of these were given in foreign languages, followed by English (1951). Consolidation of Regents exams approached its practical limit by the end of the 1960s. The Board of Regents in 1972 accepted, with some dissents, the Commissioner's recommendation to continue the Regents high school exams and the Regents diploma, pending the development of alternative student assessment programs. In 1996 the Regents designated the exams as the general testing standard for high school graduation, and the less demanding high school competency exams (given since 1978) were scheduled to be discontinued.

The Regents exams were accompanied by curricula, outlined in published syllabi and teacher's guides. The first Regents high school syllabus was issued in 1880. After a decade of experimentation, the program of Regents exams, certificates, and diplomas was stabilized in 1890. Semi-official course outlines for elementary schools were first prepared by School Commissioners during the 1880s; the Department of Public Instruction issued an official version in 1896. Revised, expanded syllabi for elementary and secondary education followed every few years, with a trend toward integrated course sequences in particular subject areas. After 1910 separate syllabi were issued for each subject. The early curricula emphasized learning and reciting of facts, lots of them, with the aim of instilling "mental discipline" (if nothing else). A significant acknowledgement of the value of learning from experience was the institution in 1905 of formal laboratory work in high school science courses.

Recommended curricula and teaching methods changed dramatically after the 1920s, as part of the nationwide movement to fit education to the child's social and intellectual development. The new approach was proposed by the assistant commissioner for elementary education and the association of school superintendents in 1927, and outlined in the Department's "Cardinal Objectives of Elementary Education," issued in 1929. The unit-organized, activity-centered teaching methods recommended by the "Cardinal Objectives" were widely adopted by schools during the 1930s. A new manual for rural school teachers (1933) was the Department's first major guide to what was termed "progressive education." In 1940-41 the Department reviewed and applauded the results of a six-year experimental "child-centered" curriculum in selected New York City elementary schools. The "social studies" -- an amalgam of history, geography, civics, and economics -- were given a central place in a new secondary school curriculum approved by the Regents in 1934. Unified syllabi for the social studies were completed by the mid-1940s. An outline for secondary school social studies praised the "democratic way of life" and aimed to prepare young people for harmonious participation in the society and economy in which they found themselves.

After World War II the Department's curriculum and teaching experts emphasized conceptual understanding and the tools and skills of learning. However, political and intellectual trends also renewed educators' interest in curriculum subject matter. Social studies programs placed special emphasis on citizenship education in the 1940s and '50s, international affairs in the 1960s and '70s, and cultural diversity in the 1980s and '90s. From 1964 until the mid-1980s the Department ran a center for international programs to help educators understand non-western cultures. The secondary school science curriculum was revised in the late 1940s, after a generation of relative neglect. The first science syllabus for the elementary grades had been issued in 1931, and teaching of science on that level was finally mandated in 1958, because of public concern over Soviet successes in space technology. Revised biology syllabi incorporated new knowledge in genetics and ecology; physics syllabi took account of discoveries in the sub-atomic realm. By the 1950s algebra, geometry, and trigonometry were being merged into integrated mathematics courses. In the 1960s "new math" came and went. Around 1970 some special projects attempted "the humanization of the curriculum and the school as a whole," stressing social and environmental problems. Summer schools for the arts, established in 1976, gave instruction to students with special talents in music, drama, dance, and art.

Today the Department issues a catalog listing nearly three hundred curriculum publications, almost all of them produced or revised since the Regents Action Plan to Improve Elementary and Secondary Education was adopted in 1984. The State Examinations Board (first organized in 1906) appoints committees of teachers to prepare questions for Regents exams and to advise on development of syllabi. Curriculum development is a multi-step process involving needs assessment, project planning, research and drafting, and field review and testing. Curricula are implemented with the help of a network of advisers, set up in 1985.

Challenges of Urban Education. Huge numbers of newcomers from the countryside and from abroad crowded into New York's cities between the 1820s and the 1920s. During that century, economic and social conditions increasingly favored the cause of mass elementary education -- basic literacy and numeracy. Though the gap between rich and poor was increasing, cities over the long term grew in size and overall wealth. They could and did tax themselves to build and staff public schools, even though those schools were often overcrowded. Family ties were strong, though many families were broken up -- by death, seldom by divorce. Schools, churches, synagogues, fraternal lodges, union halls, and neighborhoods offered family-like social bonds that promoted, rather successfully, positive codes of behavior. The crime rate steadily declined (from the 1860s through the 1940s), increasing safety and security for the young.

Since the 1940s urban education has faced increasingly serious obstacles. The cities have lost population and wealth, relative to the inner and outer suburbs. The general increase in personal wealth has stalled since the 1970s, and New York is losing its economic preeminence in the United States. Urban crime rates climbed sharply from the 1950s through the '80s, endangering public safety. Family ties and private social networks appeared to be less strong everywhere, not just in the inner cities. Yet the schools and colleges are expected to teach the young much more, for more years, than ever before, to supply skilled workers for a highly competitive labor market. And the cities and schools of New York have received a large influx of new immigrants from the American South, from Puerto Rico, and from many other countries. The children of those newcomers need to be educated to become productive, responsible citizens -- a task for both the school and the community.

Racial separation had long been present in New York's public school system. Schools for African-Americans had existed in a few places since the eighteenth century, and such schools were specifically authorized by statutes passed in 1841 and 1864. A couple dozen communities operated "colored" schools during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Laws of 1873 and 1900 (passed at the urging of blacks) forbade discrimination in access to schools on account of race. However, state courts held in 1883 and 1900 that the separate schools for "colored children" were constitutional if they provided facilities equal to those for whites. The statute permitting separate schools for blacks was repealed in 1938. In 1944 Commissioner George D. Stoddard ordered the closing of the state's last all-black school, in Rockland County.

From a small presence in the later nineteenth century, New York's City's African-American population increased steadily during and after the two World Wars. See footnote 8 The black population also grew in Rochester, Buffalo, and other larger cities. The 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education established a constitutional principle that racially segregated schools are inherently unequal. Commissioners James E. Allen, Jr., and Ewald B. Nyquist led the Regents and the Department in a twenty-year long campaign to desegregate and integrate New York's urban school systems. In 1957 the Department set up a division of intercultural relations to administer New York's anti-discrimination legislation (the Educational Practices Act of 1948) and to help school districts achieve "racial balance." A Regents' policy statement of 1960 condemned racial segregation in the public schools and praised "equal educational opportunity." A statewide survey counted 307 elementary schools in New York City (59 outside the city) in which the enrollment was over half Negroes. A Commissioner's advisory committee recommended integrating schools across entire districts, without regard to neighborhood boundaries.

In June 1963 Commissioner Allen directed every school district to report its policy and plan for eliminating racial imbalance. When progress was unsatisfactory in several New York City suburban districts and the Buffalo district, the Commissioner ordered them to implement plans for school desegregation; the courts upheld his authority to issue these orders. By 1968 twenty-two districts had programs to achieve racial balance. However, in 1969 the increasingly skeptical Legislature barred the assignment of pupils to particular schools "for the purpose of achieving equality in attendance . . . of persons of one or more particular races," without the approval of the local board of education. During the early 1970s Commissioner Nyquist ordered several more urban districts to desegregate their schools. The Department reviewed applications for federal grants to overcome "minority group isolation." Staff also assisted Buffalo in desegregating its schools, under a federal court order issued in 1976. However, after more than a decade of effort and controversy, school desegregation had not produced any definite overall improvements in pupil performance in inner-city schools.

In 1968-69 public and Department attention largely focused on the demands for "community control" of New York City schools. In 1964 Commissioner Allen had recommended a "4-4-4" plan for New York City's public schools, with integrated middle schools and new comprehensive high schools in campus-like settings. The city was very slow to implement this plan. In 1967, three experimental community school districts were set up in New York City, with support from the Ford Foundation. In the Ocean Hill-Brownsville district an extra-legal local board of education became engaged in a bitter controversy with the United Federation of Teachers regarding teacher transfers. Three city-wide teachers' strikes occurred in the fall of 1967, and Commissioner Allen worked with the city authorities to bring the union to an agreement that protected teachers' rights and temporarily turned the Brownsville district over to a state-appointed trustee. In 1968 the Legislature passed a compromise New York City school decentralization law which abolished the temporary districts; provided for permanent community school districts to run elementary and middle schools; replaced the city school superintendent with a chancellor having increased powers; and continued a city-wide board of education.

Commissioner Ewald B. Nyquist shared Allen's commitment to mandatory school desegregation. At first a majority of the Regents were willing to support him, though they much preferred voluntary integration. However, by the early 1970s the political climate for education was definitely changing. The Taylor Law (1967) permitted both school teachers and state workers to unionize. The New York State Teachers Association merged with the United Federation of Teachers to form the powerful New York State United Teachers in 1972. Legislative redistricting enabled the Democrats to take control of the Assembly in 1975, and for the first time in generations that party had the deciding vote in the election of new Regents. (The Board had been strongly Republican.) Legislative and Budget staff became increasingly involved in negotiating state aid for schools, and the Governor and the leaders of the Senate and Assembly made the crucial budget decisions. The old Education Conference Board, consisting of the School Boards Association, Council of School Administrators, New York State Teachers Association, and other groups, lost the influence it had wielded since the 1930s.

By the mid-1970s the Regents and the Department were under intense political and fiscal scrutiny. In 1973 the Governor made a controversial proposal for an independent "inspector general" to oversee the public education system. He did establish an Office of Education Performance Review (abolished by a new administration in 1975). A majority of the Legislature disliked mandatory busing of children to accomplish school integration. In 1974 the Legislature reduced Regents' terms of office, with the avowed aim of replacing pro-busing incumbents. The internal balance of the Regents changed, and in 1976 a majority of the board voted to dismiss the Commissioner, the first time this had ever occurred. However, new state and federal programs to assist disadvantaged children were by now well established; the emphasis of education policy had shifted from "equal opportunity" to "equal outcome."

Experimental state programs for urban education in the early 1960s included Project ABLE, helping school staffs to identify and assist talented minority students; and the School to Employment Program (STEP), combining work and school for potential high school dropouts. The Department's concern for the cities was emphasized in the Regents' policy and plan for urban education, adopted in 1967. A center on innovation in education, supported by federal money, promoted educational programs to achieve integration and educational opportunity regardless of race or class. An ambitious Urban Aid program was authorized by the Legislature in 1968 to "revitalize" city school systems, through programs of special instruction and community involvement. Urban aid for special projects was based on numbers of pupils with low reading scores or from poor families. This aid supplemented the fast-growing federal aid for educationally disadvantaged pupils, under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. Urban Aid was replaced in 1974 by aid for pupils with special educational needs (PSEN). PSEN aid was based on the number of students with low scores on reading and math tests, and was available to any district, urban, suburban, or rural. The Department was required to report to the Legislature on the impact of compensatory education programs. Auditors severely criticized some aspects of state and local administration of PSEN aid, but PSEN aid did target and reach schools with under-performing students. PSEN aid was later administered jointly with Federal aid under ESEA Title I, and eventually was replaced by aid for pupils with compensatory educational needs (PCEN).

Statewide Standards for Students and Schools. For decades the Regents syllabi and examinations were the means by which the Department set standards for secondary schools and assessed pupil achievement. However, a parallel, non-Regents secondary school program emerged. Starting 1906 high schools were authorized to issue a local diploma to students who had not taken and passed Regents exams. After 1922 high schools in city and village superintendencies could substitute other tests for the Regents exams. The first Regents rules setting basic and elective courses of study in secondary schools (grades 7-12) were adopted in 1934. (English, social studies, health, and physical education were the only courses required of all students.) Minimum course requirements for the local high school diploma were somewhat strengthened in 1947. During the 1950s and '60s integrated course sequences for grades K-12, the first ever, were developed.

Interest in new statewide pupil assessment tools grew during the 1920s and '30s, and in 1940 the Department began to issue standardized reading and math progress tests for general use in the middle and upper grades. Schools also employed national standardized tests. Falling student test scores became a statewide concern by the later 1960s and '70s. New state tests measured the extent of the problem and helped set minimum standards. Federal aid (ESEA Title I) enabled the Department to develop Pupil Evaluation Program (PEP) tests to measure reading, writing, and math skills in grades 3, 6, and 9, starting in 1965-66. After 1978 new basic competency tests in reading, writing, and math were given to all high school students, and passage of the tests became the minimum standard for the local high school diploma in 1979-81. (Critics asserted that the tests were either too hard, or too easy.)

The Department also increased its oversight of schools. Since 1955 there had been a program to review and re- register new secondary schools after their initial registration. In 1975 this process was extended to older, permanently-registered high schools, and all high schools were to be visited twice every ten years. In 1961 the Department started a cooperative, voluntary review service to assess a district's educational program and remedy deficiencies (New York City was the first district to be reviewed). The Department had an increased presence in New York City's new community school districts, established in 1968. Urban aid programs of the early 1970s were coordinated by an office of urban school services. In 1970 the Department established a unit to visit and assist private and parochial schools, who now received some state aid for state-required tests and reports.

Beyond improved assessment and increased oversight came initiatives to reform schools. In the later 1960s the short-lived center on innovation in education sought to develop the "capabilities of school administrators and teachers for inducing change." Commissioner Nyquist's "Redesign in Education" program of 1968-72 gave a few pilot districts some extra resources and relief from regulation, in order to encourage the school and community to find ways to improve student achievement. After 1978 the Department's Resource Allocation Plan coordinated the delivery of federal, state, and local resources to selected school buildings where pupils performed poorly in the new Regents competency tests. Department staff cooperated with school building administrators and teachers in a common effort to raise pupil achievement by identifying problems and developing solutions to them.

Commissioner Gordon Ambach brought the three streams of tests, standards, and school review and improvement into the Regents Action Plan to Improve Elementary and Secondary Education, approved in 1984. The stated purpose of the Action Plan was to provide all students with the opportunity to acquire the skills and knowledge they would need for "their 21st century lifetime." The Action Plan increased academic course loads and required high school graduates to demonstrate competency in English, mathematics, science, global studies, and U.S. history and government. Students who failed in these subjects received remedial instruction. See footnote 9 School districts were required to prepare and make available to the press and the public a yearly comprehensive assessment report (CAR) for each school building, giving data on enrollment, attendance and dropout rates, and student performance in state tests. After 1987 a new system of school registration review targeted schools having unfavorable assessment reports or other signs of failure. Schools placed under registration review (SURR), virtually all of them in New York City, prepared comprehensive school improvement plans, with help from teachers and parents. Schools failing to improve were warned that they could have their registration revoked, although none were. In sum, the Regents Action Plan and the ensuing regulations and programs were the most comprehensive articulation of the Regents' power to establish standards for elementary and secondary education, since the original high school registration and examination system had matured in the 1890s.

The New Compact for Learning, developed by Commissioner Thomas Sobol and adopted by the Regents in 1991, built on the Action Plan of 1984. The New Compact was the Regents' broadest statement of educational philosophy since the Regents' Inquiry reports of the late 1930s. It embraced a number of themes, all of them aimed at raising school standards and performance: statewide goals for schools; a challenging program for all students; mutual responsibility of local school administrators, teachers, parents, and the community for school and pupil performance; Department support for school initiatives, and intervention when schools were in danger of failing. A Commissioner's regulation requiring "participation of parents and teachers in school-based planning and shared decisionmaking" embodied a key principle of the Compact, and was implemented in 1994.

The Office of Elementary, Middle, Secondary, and Continuing Education has been reorganized to provide increased, direct services to schools. In 1988 a new, short-lived Office of School Improvement and Support was set up to administer special aid and advisory programs for under-performing schools and students, with an emphasis on family and community relations. In 1991-92 the requirements of the New Compact brought a more drastic reorganization: the divisions and bureaus were abolished, and new staff "teams" for policy, central services, and regional services were assembled. Many employees believed that staff specialties were ignored and team responsibilities uncertain; schools found the new organization confusing. Another, partial, reorganization in 1995 has retained the regional services teams but restored three program clusters: 1) curriculum, instruction, assessment, and innovation; 2) finance, management, and information services; and 3) work force preparation and continuing education. These three groupings continued older functional groupings dating back to the 1950s. The New York City and regional services teams are responsible for the current programs of direct support and technical assistance for local educational programs: conducting school quality reviews, assisting schools under registration review, implementing shared decision-making, coordinating health and family programs, and general monitoring and technical assistance.

Vocational and Adult Education. Academic subjects dominated the secondary school curriculum during the nineteenth century, although some rural academies had courses in surveying and bookkeeping. Vocational education developed first in the big city school systems. An 1848 law required the New York City board of education to offer free evening schools for apprentices and others who could not attend day school. By the 1860s "night schools" were well established. During the 1870s and '80s many city high schools added courses in drawing and "manual arts." Introductory "industrial arts" and vocational "industrial training" courses were authorized by an 1888 statute. During the 1890s "home science" and "commercial" subjects were added to the high school curriculum. Starting 1898 Regents exams were offered for commercial, "manual training," and "domestic science" courses.

Business and farm interests and labor unions all lobbied for more vocational education. Statutes passed in 1908- 09 provided state aid for vocational teachers and authorized city and union free districts to set up "general industrial schools" and more specialized "trade schools," with advisory boards. Evening schools in many cities offered free elementary and/or secondary instruction in vocational subjects (including homemaking for girls) for pupils over age sixteen. After 1918 technical high schools, offering a more academic curriculum, were established in the largest cities. The Wilmot Law of 1913 required youths aged 14-16 who quit school to go to work to attend part-time "continuation schools"; all the big cities had these schools during the 1920s and '30s. The federal Vocational Education Act (Smith-Hughes Act) of 1917 made monies available to state boards of vocational education (in New York, the Board of Regents) to train young men to work in war factories. The federal support for vocational education has continued and increased to the present.

Before 1920 enrollments in vocational schools and courses were small, because the system was developing and because school administrators had a strong preference for college entrance programs. During the 1920s, '30s, and '40s enrollments in industrial arts and business courses, part-time continuation schools, two-year trade schools, and industrial and technical high schools increased greatly. The Department's efforts were led by Lewis A. Wilson, long-time assistant commissioner for vocational and extension education and later Commissioner. The first four-year syllabus for business subjects appeared in 1925, and distributive education was introduced with federal funding in 1937. Every central rural school district was required to offer home economics; many also offered courses in agriculture. High school industrial arts courses were broadened to include materials and technologies beyond woodworking. A 1935 statute made all the industrial and technical schools full high schools, and increased industry presence on advisory boards. The larger cities had many adult occupational extension classes. Apprentice training programs were particularly active in New York, Rochester, and Buffalo.

The Department developed new types of adult education. In the 1920s it began helping businesses and industries across the state to develop their own employee training programs. Around 1940 the Department organized extensive training programs for state and local government employees. During the Depression years the bureau of adult education cooperated with state and federal relief agencies to offer emergency adult education courses statewide. During World War II the same Department staff worked with the State War Council to organize job training for 750,000 men and women working in war factories. General high school education for young adults was first provided in evening high schools established in New York City before World War I, and in Rochester, and Buffalo during the late 1920s. High school equivalency (GED) exams began to be offered in 1947, initially to help World War II veterans obtain their diplomas. Between 1945 and 1962 special state aid was provided for adult secondary education programs.

After 1945 growth in the vocational education programs in the cities resumed, but statewide needs became more apparent. Federal and state aid did not keep pace with costs. Attempts to extend adult industrial education to smaller communities did not succeed very well. Decreases in state aid caused a rapid decline in the adult industrial education programs in the later 1950s. Rural high schools generally offered only basic shop and office courses. Just a few counties had established vocational education and extension boards (VEEBs, authorized under a 1926 law) to teach occupational courses. The boards of cooperative educational services (BOCES), authorized by a 1948 law, were intended to help fill this gap by offering vocational and other instruction that smaller districts by themselves could not provide. After 1967 the BOCES constructed and operated occupational education centers. The rise of community colleges and the expansion of the SUNY agricultural and technical institutes during the 1950s and '60s provided, for the first time, a wide range of post-secondary vocational education opportunities outside the large cities.

Major federal support for student and adult programs now comes through the Vocational Education Act of 1963 See footnote 10 and the Adult Education Act of 1966. During the 1970s the Department oversaw programs under the Manpower Development and Training Act and the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA). After 1968 the federal aid for vocational education programs included special allotments for disadvantaged and handicapped students. The state plan for vocational education was revised, and the advisory council was reorganized to better serve groups with special needs. During the 1980s the Department developed new occupational education proficiency exams and completely rewrote syllabi to reflect economic and technological change in business, industry, and health care. State funds support the General Education Development (GED) testing program and the related Employment Preparation Education (EPE) program for persons over twenty-one seeking a high school diploma. Adult Centers for Education and Support Services (ACESS) combine education and job training for adults. Special aid for adult literacy programs was authorized in 1962 and augmented by federal funds after 1966. State-funded work place literacy programs have been functioning since 1987. The Education, Social Services, and Labor Departments cooperate in job training and development for welfare recipients, through the Education for Gainful Employment (EDGE) program. The federal Job Training Partnership Act of 1982 provides funds for training unskilled, needy youths and adults, while Even Start is a unified family literacy program for children and adults. The federal School-to-Work Opportunities Act of 1994 links state agencies, local schools, colleges, businesses, organizations, and unions in a major effort to achieve a "universal, high-quality school-to-work transition system."

Physical and Health Education; Nutrition Programs. After 1884 schools were required to teach human physiology and hygiene, and the Department became responsible for annual medical inspections of pupils in 1913. A 1916 statute required that all students receive physical training (including "elementary marching") as recommended by the State Military Training Commission. Permanent pupil medical inspection and (civilian) physical education programs were set up in the 1920s. After 1950 health services were grouped with other pupil services such as guidance. Recent decades have seen increasing illegal drug use and sexually-transmitted diseases among school pupils. New York has obtained federal monies for drug abuse control programs in schools since 1973. A statewide HIV-AIDS awareness program began in 1987, in cooperation with the Department of Health. A consultant panel advises the Commissioner on medical, health, physical fitness, and nutrition needs of school pupils.

The first statewide school nutrition program was the distribution of surplus foods from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, during the early 1940s. The National School Lunch Act of 1946 provided for federal-state-local funding of a general school lunch program. Federally-funded breakfast programs for poor children began in 1969 and were expanded in 1976. The Department oversees school cafeteria business operations and nutrition planning, and approves and audits payments to schools. Major federal funding for these programs comes to New York under the School Lunch, School Milk, and Child Nutrition Act.

Education for Non-English Speakers. New York City schools began offering English language classes for immigrants in the 1880s. By the turn of the century these classes enrolled tens of thousands of men and women. A 1910 law authorized city and village districts to offer free evening English language classes for adults. Moved by the widespread anti-foreigner hysteria during and after World War I, the Legislature required city and larger village districts to offer night school classes for immigrants and illiterates and to compel eligible youths aged 16-21 to attend. The Department took direct control of this program in 1919. These "Americanization" classes were returned to local control in 1921, and some state aid was provided for them. Starting 1923 the Department administered Regents literacy exams and each year issued thousands of literacy certificates to naturalized citizens, qualifying them to vote. These literacy and citizenship programs now became part of general adult education.

The first modern state aid for educating children who did not speak English was authorized in 1955. The Bilingual Education Act (1968) provided federal grants for bilingual and English as a second language (ESL) instruction. New York statutes of 1968 and 1970 authorized instruction in a native language other than English, declared state policy of insuring "the mastery of English by all students in schools," and specifically authorized bilingual instruction, for up to three years, for pupils with limited English proficiency. Department policy on bilingual education was established by a Regents' position paper in 1972. The Department developed new LEP regulations and curriculum in 1982. A bilingual education unit, established 1969, coordinates programs for the two hundred thousand school children in New York who have limited proficiency in English.

V. VOCATIONAL AND EDUCATIONAL SERVICES FOR INDIVIDUALS WITH DISABILITIES

Vocational Rehabilitation. Nationwide concern about the employment of handicapped World War veterans led to passage of the Vocational Rehabilitation Act (Smith-Fess Act) of 1920. Under the act the federal government reimbursed 50 per cent of the direct cost of vocational rehabilitation services (guidance, training, medical exams, prosthetics) provided by a state to physically handicapped individuals. New York added funding for a living allowance. A Bureau of Rehabilitation, headed by Dr. Riley M. Little, a national leader in the field, was set up in the Education Department in 1921. Through the 1930s caseloads numbered a few thousand. Amendments to the federal act of 1943 made mentally retarded and emotionally disturbed individuals eligible for rehabilitation and provided one hundred per cent of a state program's administrative costs. By the early 1950s New York's rehabilitation caseload totalled 20,000 individuals; most of the disabilities resulted from accidents, polio, tuberculosis, and "mental" conditions. Most of these individuals were referred for rehabilitation by the Department of Health or the Workman's Compensation Board. After 1944 vocational rehabilitation was headed by a division director, and after 1956, by an assistant commissioner -- signs of the growing size and scope of the program.

Federal support for rehabilitation services has increased greatly since the 1950s. Federally-aided grants to community agencies to develop rehabilitation facilities began in 1955. A new Vocational Rehabilitation Act of 1965 increased the federal share of rehabilitation costs to 75 per cent (80 per cent after 1968 and 78.3 per cent after 1993, though New York generally paid more than its legally-required share). In 1968 controversial amendments to the federal law declared that a socially or culturally "disadvantaged" individual might be eligible for rehabilitation; in OVR there was much sympathy for this approach. Federal acts passed in 1973 shifted the national program focus to severely disabled persons (that population had been the main focus of New York's rehabilitation program for many years). An "individualized written rehabilitation program" became standard for OVR clients. Federal law protected persons with disabilities against discrimination in the work place.

New York has started some innovative rehabilitation programs. Professional rehabilitation services in sheltered workshops, the first in the nation, were funded in 1963. Inter-agency cooperation grew during the 1950s and '60s. The Office of Vocational Rehabilitation (OVR) and the Department of Mental Hygiene agreed in 1968 to offer cooperative rehabilitation services at facilities for mentally ill and retarded persons. (The program expanded greatly after the Willowbrook consent decree of 1975, when "deinstitutionalization" became state policy.) A 1969 statute established a program of long-term sheltered employment for mentally retarded persons who had been OVR clients (the program was transferred to the Office of Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities in 1989). Starting in 1971 OVR worked closely with the Department of Social Services to rehabilitate persons with disabilities receiving social services. Vocational rehabilitation programs were also extended to eligible persons in prisons and substance abuse programs. In 1978-80 OVR used federal funds to establish a statewide network of Independent Living Centers (ILCs), community-based organizations run by individuals with disabilities to help their peers lead independent lives.

The rapid growth in OVR's caseload (40,000 in the early 1970s, over 100,000 by mid-decade) brought serious administrative problems, fostered by the decentralized case-counsellor method of service. In 1977 the State Commission of Investigation reported instances of waste, neglect, abuse, fraud, and laxity in OVR operations. A Division of the Budget study found deficiencies in organization, communications, and operations; OVR needed better internal and external auditing, service monitoring, and program planning -- in short, an improved administrative superstructure. Vocational rehabilitation services were reorganized by 1982, and audit functions were assumed by the Department's main audit unit. However, OVR remained under scrutiny. Groups of service recipients and service contractors complained about poor coordination and communication in OVR. For other reasons, each year the Governor's office proposed setting up an independent office of rehabilitation services in the Executive Department.

After more studies of OVR, the Commissioner and the Regents decided in 1989 to give the program new leadership, a new organization, even a new name -- the Office of Vocational and Educational Services to Individuals with Disabilities (VESID). Changes followed quickly. The old divisions and bureaus disappeared, replaced by new functional units. The Education Department was designated, in 1992, as the lead state agency in providing regular, rather than sheltered, employment opportunities to individuals with severe disabilities. Reform efforts led to formation of counselling teams which improved productivity in the district offices. "Quality management" principles and processes have been applied to help VESID serve the 57,000 adults who currently receive rehabilitation services.

Special Education. The 1894 compulsory attendance law brought many handicapped children into the classroom for the first time. Around 1900 Buffalo and New York City established the first special classes for retarded or crippled children. Statutes passed in 1917 required city and union free school districts to identify children with "physical defects" or "retarded mental development" and to provide special classes for groups of ten or more; in 1923-24 state aid was authorized for such classes. Districts with smaller numbers of handicapped pupils were authorized to contract with other districts or with private schools, or to provide "home teaching or transportation to school." After about 1915 some New York educators used newly-developed standardized tests to identify pupils needing special help. At the request of schools, a bureau of "educational measurements" was set up in 1923 to promote educational and psychological testing, conduct studies of educational methods and needs, and assist teachers of the mentally handicapped. By the mid-1930s there were over one thousand special classes for the "mentally subnormal" across the state, mostly in cities. After a legislative commission in the mid-1920s investigated the plight of young victims of polio and other diseases, the Regents established a bureau for physically handicapped children (1926). The Commissioner chaired a new inter-agency advisory commission for the physically disabled. By 1930 there were over six hundred classes for physically handicapped children. After 1941 education of both mentally and physically handicapped children was directed from one bureau (a division after 1962, an office after 1976).

Policies were clarified and redirected, emphasizing New York's national leadership in special education programs. A 1944 law declared that the Education Department should "stimulate all private and public efforts designed to relieve, care for, cure or educate physically handicapped children," and coordinate its efforts with other governmental programs. This policy statement was extended in 1957 to include mentally retarded children as well. Ten years later the "handicapped child" was legally, and more flexibly, redefined as an individual who "because of mental, physical or emotional reasons, cannot be educated in regular classes but can benefit by special services and programs." This definition summarized state policy, which since the early years of the century had favored removing handicapped children from regular classrooms and schools, and placing them in "special classes," home teaching, or private schools.

In the 1950s and '60s this policy slowly began to shift toward "inclusion." Public schools were authorized to hold special classes for severely mentally handicapped children starting 1955, and required to do so after 1961. During the 1960s the Department encouraged efforts to place multi-handicapped or brain-injured children in public schools. Some BOCES started offering instruction to the handicapped in the later 1950s, and BOCES centers offered full special education programs after 1967. Special aid to schools for education of handicapped children, abolished in 1962, was restored by legisla