The high school movement was a set of trends and events in the United States that produced an explosive rise in enrollment in secondary schools across between 1910 and 1940. This increase in educational opportunities for young people had far-reaching implications for the U.S. economy. Most importantly, it contributed to the substantial diversification, expansion, and financial improvement of the labor force, which helped drive the growth of the American economy in the twentieth century.

At the start of the twentieth century, secondary schooling in the United States was not the norm. In the South, even primary education was uncommon. In the rest of the country, most children attended school until they were 14. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, however, white-collar employment (office work rather than factory jobs) soared and demand for better-educated workers increased accordingly. The disparity between the supply of and the demand for educated workers meant that wages for white-collar occupations were much higher than those for blue-collar occupations (physical labor). In response to this opportunity for higher wages, the American public began to call for more secondary schools in the early twentieth century.

Because of the federal government's limited role in regulating and funding the U.S. educational system, it was up to the country's thousands of highly diverse and independent local school districts to respond to these calls. As the economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz have shown, the independence of school districts was an important factor in the rapid increase in the number of high schools in the United States. According to Goldin and Katz, local communities that were competing for population and economic growth saw the establishment of high schools as a means of attracting people and businesses. Competition drove the rapid building of schools and the openness of these schools to broad student populations.

The growth of high schools began in 1910 in New England, then spread west and south. Secondary schools

The number of high schools in the United States grew rapidly between 1910 and 1940. The exterior of Little Rock Central High School, built in 1927 in Little Rock, Arkansas, is shown here. WALTER BIBIKOW/GETTY IMAGES

proliferated quickly, and the number of American high school graduates grew from about 9 percent of young people in 1910 to more than 50 percent in 1940. The schools young Americans attended during this period were designed to train students not just in preparation for college but for work and general success in their lives. To this end, they featured diverse academic curricula, vocational training, and electives, all offered in short class periods that divided the school day. In general, these schools were free and were open to all students who had completed eighth grade.

There were important exceptions to the general openness of these schools, however. In the South, for example, racial discrimination meant that African American students attended separate and typically substandard schools. Still, the high school movement led to increased education and wages for a wide swath of the American population. It also helped lead to a marked increase in the number of women in the U.S. labor force.

The long-term economic effects of the increase in secondary education were substantial. As the population became better educated, the U.S. economy grew dramatically. Though the ascendance of the American economy during the twentieth century cannot be tied directly to the high school movement, the period between 1910 and 1940 saw a rapid growth not only in high school graduation rates but also in the income of educated Americans and of the national economy at large. The increase in secondary education in the first half of the twentieth century also made possible the subsequent growth of college graduation rates after World War II.