210 Charles Abner Howard rect, for the report of 1900 lists The Dalles as offering only two years work above the eighth grade. 19 The report of 1900 gives the first complete tabulation of public high school statistics for Oregon to be found. 20 It includes fifty-nine schools which claimed to be doing at least one year of high school work. However, in twenty-nine of these, the school year was less than nine months, so the amount of high school instruction was probably negli- gible. Of the remaining thirty, Astoria, Baker, Eugene and Portland were the only ones having at least nine month of school and a high school course of four years. It has already been pointed out that up to the year 1900, Astoria, Baker City, Pendleton, Portland and Salem were the only cities that came under the high school law of 1878. Portland had established a high school in 1869 and each of these other cities with the exception of As- toria had installed advanced classes before the school census had reached the thousand mark as called for in the law. These larger cities as well as all the smaller ones listed in the 1900 report as having high schools, had gone beyond the law in this matter. They were con- stantly subject to attack as having no legal foundation. Their situation was thus made unstable in spite of the fact that the courts would undoubtedly have upheld a school district in levying a tax for high school purposes if a case had been brought before them. In the famous case of Kalamazoo, Michigan, this point had been tested out and such a tax had been declared constitutional, though there had been no specific high school law author- izing such a tax. 21 The court's decision that a tax for high school purposes was constitutional was later concurred in by the supreme courts of Illinois and other states. 22 Such 19 Fourteenth Biennial Report of the Superintendent of Public Instruc- tion of Oregon. 1900. p. 44. 20 Fourteenth Biennial Report of the Superintendent of Public Instruc- tion of Oregon. 1900. pp. 42-44. 21 30 Michigan. 69. 22 H. D. Sheldon—State Systems of High School Control, p. 6.
