Spain ruled Puerto Rico as a colony for 490 years and set up a very limited educational system, which restricted access to learning to the local elites and limited the curriculum to mainly religious subjects. The long period of Spanish domination ended when the United States gained control of the island in 1898, but the legacy of Spanish customs, social structure and language created a cultural divide, which American policymakers and educators have never been able to overcome.
Puerto Rico's dominant language is Spanish; English is the island's second official language. Only a small percent of the residents speak it fluently even though it is a required subject in all schools from kindergarten through high school. This sets the commonwealth's educational system apart from mainland U.S. schools, where English is the dominant language and Spanish is taught as a foreign language.
Puerto Rico's public schools are organized very differently from most of their U.S. counterparts. There are two different groups of elementary schools in the commonwealth: urban schools in the cities and larger towns and rural schools in the countryside. Urban schools offer language courses in Spanish and English, as well as a curriculum that includes home economics, health and nutrition, physical education, agricultural studies and craftsmanship courses. Rural schools offer the equivalent of the first four grades of primary education, followed by a prevocational phase in which students are taught skill sets geared toward agriculture, manufacturing, social work, industrial arts and handcrafts.
In Puerto Rico, the commonwealth's Department of Education distributes funding for the island's 1,600 public schools, with a small amount of Title IX monies added by the U.S. government. The amount of federal aid to Puerto Rican schools in 2007 averaged $6,000 per citizen a year, which was far less than the $$9,266 per citizen spent annually in the 50 states. This is a result of the island's politically-ambivalent status as a commonwealth instead of being a full state of the Union.