The 1990s Education: Chronology

1990:     March 5 Channel One, a commercially sponsored television news program designed for use in high school classrooms, makes its formal debut in four hundred schools across the country.

1990:     December 7 Astronauts onboard the space shuttle Columbia beam a classroom lesson on star formation and celestial radiation from space to forty-one middle school students gathered at NASA centers in Alabama and Maryland.

1991:      The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) releases a report based on a 1990 survey that found that almost one in five American high school students sometimes carried a gun, knife, or other weapon to school.

1991:     November 1 A University of Iowa physics graduate student, distraught over his failure to win an academic award, shoots and kills five people and critically injures another.

1992:     January 18 A seventeen-year-old high school student shoots and kills an English teacher and a janitor and holds classmates hostage in Grayson, Kentucky.

1992:     June 24 With a 5-4 majority vote, the U.S. Supreme Court rules that prayers delivered at a public high school graduation violated First Amendment principles separating church and state.

1993:      Tensions rise at the University of Pennsylvania when five black sorority sisters charge a white student with racial harassment after he called them "water buffalo."

1993:     September 8 The Boston Teachers' Union votes in favor of a new contract that would directly tie teachers' pay to improvements in student performance.

1993:     November 3 The school board in Minneapolis, Minnesota, votes unanimously to hire a consulting firm to run the city's schools.

1994:     April 12 A ten-year-old shoots and kills an eleven-year-old classmate on their elementary school playground in Butte, Montana.

1994:     June 5 Michael Kearney, a ten-yearold boy, becomes the youngest American to graduate from college when he receives a bachelor's degree with a major in anthropology from the University of South Alabama in Mobile.

1995:     March 3 The Cleveland, Ohio, public school system is put under state control by a federal judge because of its $125 million debt.

1995:     August 12 Shannon Faulkner becomes the first woman to attend The Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina, as a member of its Corps of Cadets. She drops out of the school six days later.

1996:     August 15 Three professors are killed at San Diego State University when a graduate student opens fire with a handgun at the defense of his engineering thesis. His thesis had been rejected once before.

1996:     November 15 The public school system in Boston, Massachusetts, announces it will stop using racial preferences in its admissions process after a lawsuit brought by the father of a white girl who was denied admission to the elite Boston Latin School. The prospective student's entrance exam scores were higher than 103 black and Hispanic students who were granted admission to the school.

1997:     February 8 President Bill Clinton announces the Department of Education will issue grants to public schools to help them connect to the Internet.

1997:     December 1 A fourteen-year-old boy opens fire on his classmates at Heath High School in West Paducah, Kentucky, killing three girls and injuring five others.

1998:     March 24 Two youths, ages thirteen and eleven, embark on a fatal shooting spree at their junior high school in Jonesboro, Arkansas. Five people—four students and a teacher—are killed in the gunfire, and ten others are wounded.

1998:     October 22 President Clinton signs a bill expanding federal aid to charter schools while also setting stricter standards the schools must meet to qualify for federal funding.

1999:     April 20 At Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, two boys shoot and kill twelve fellow students and a teacher, and seriously wound more than twenty other classmates before committing suicide.

1999:     August 11 The Kansas State Board of Education decides that the state will no longer test students on evolutionary theory, though it may still be taught.