Boston Latin School was founded in 1635, one year before Harvard College, making it the oldest public school in the United States. Its students included future Founding Fathers Samuel Adams and John Hancock, as well as Benjamin Franklin, who attended but did not graduate. The school continues to educate Boston students today.

William Holmes McGuffey published the first of his graded readers in 1836. The McGuffey Readers combined reading lessons with stories, poems, and moral instruction and became a fixture of the one-room schoolhouse era. By some estimates, more than 100 million copies were sold over the following century.

In Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court unanimously held that state-mandated racial segregation in public schools violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The decision rejected the "separate but equal" doctrine established in Plessy v. Ferguson as it applied to public education.

When the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the world's first artificial satellite, in October 1957, many Americans worried that the United States was falling behind in science and technology. Congress responded in 1958 with the National Defense Education Act, which expanded federal support for science, mathematics, foreign languages, teacher preparation, and student loans.

President Jimmy Carter signed the Department of Education Organization Act in October 1979. The law separated federal education functions from the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, and the new Cabinet-level department began operating in May 1980.