The origins of free high school: Why Kalamazoo is partially to thank

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

69% : "The Kalamazoo Case changed the landscape of public education in Michigan and served as a landmark for educational reform across the United States," reads a plaque at 714 S. Westnedge Ave.
60% : But multiple historians have cited the case as a "landmark" in the development of public education and influenced "all subsequent decisions in other states," Starring and Knauss wrote.
57% : In 1859, shortly after the school opened, an act in the Michigan Legislature allowed for the creation of Kalamazoo's school board, according to "The Michigan Search for Educational Standards," a book published in 1969.
56% : Some residents "believed that such education should be paid for by the parents of the students who desired it," wrote Charles R. Starring and James O. Knauss in "The Michigan Search for Educational Standards.
56% : Judge Thomas M. Cooley wrote the state of Michigan had a general policy beginning in 1817, prior to the adoption of the state constitution, "in the direction of free schools," so education was "within the reach of all the children.
49% : Knauss and Starring wrote: "It may be that thoughtful persons in many states had already accepted the tax-supported high school as a desirable and inevitable extension of the primary schools, so that the Kalamazoo decision, written in clear and eloquent terms by one of the nation's foremost jurists, may have appeared at the right moment to formulate decisively an already prevailing opinion among those who were shaping the public school systems of the country.

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