The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education 9780674251120

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THE ONE BEST SYSTEM

THE ONE BEST SYSTEM A History of American Urban Education

DAVID B. TY ACK

Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England

C Copyright 1974 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved library of Congress Catalog Card Number 74-77184 ISBN 0-674-63782-8 (paper) Printed in the United States of America

To my students-past, present, and future

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Over the course of the seven years that I have spent researching and writing this book so many people have assisted me that thanking each one here would fill many pages. In the notes I have tried to acknowledge my gratitude to a multitude of individual scholars, and the dedication honors those who have most directly shaped this book, my students. To colleagues at the University of Illinois and Stanford University I am most grateful for those extended conversations, exchanges of papers, hallway arguments, and friendships that constitute an essential part of intellectual community. Several historians elsewhere have given me invaluable counsel and criticism: in particular, Lawrence Cremin, David Hammack, Carl Kaestle, Michael Katz, Marvin Lazerson, Robert McCaul, and Selwyn Troen. By naming them I in no way wish to impute guilt to them by association with my errors (indeed, so diverse are their viewpoints that no doubt they would pick different parts of this book to disagree with). For generous grants underwriting this research I am most grateful to the Carnegie Corporation and to the United States Office of Education. To my research assistants also I owe a special debt: Mobilaji Adenubi, Michael Berkowitz, Paul Chapman, Larry Cuban, Robert Cummings, Deborah Daniels, Toby Edson, Judy Rosenbaum, and Aphrodite Scarato. Dorothy Farana not only typed an early draft of the book but also has been a helpful colleague at Stanford in myriad ways. I am much indebted to Nancy Clemente for her great editorial skill. It is customary for academic authors to testify about the contributions their wives made to their work. My wife has pursued a career of her own, much to the delight of her family, her students, and her readers. Three friends, perceptive members of the species "general reader," have given me candid and useful appraisals of the manuscript: Linda Dallin, Ricka Leiderman, and Susan Lloyd. In this book I have used revised versions of studies I published

VII

Acknowledgments

elsewhere: "Bureaucracy and the Common School: The Example of Portland, Oregon, 1851-1913," American Quarterly, 19 (Fall 1967), 475-98. "Catholic Power, Black Power, and the Schools," Educational Forum, 32 (Nov. 1967), 27-29. "City Schools: Centralization of Control at the Turn of the Century," in Jerry Israel, ed., Building the Organizational Society (New York: Free Press, 1972), 57-72. "From Village School to Urban System: A Political and Social History." Final report of U. S. Office of Education Project no. 0-0809, Sept. I, 1972. Available through ERIC Document Reproduction Service, order number ED 075 955. "The 'One Best System': A Historical Analysis," in Herbert J. Walberg and Andrew Kopan, eds., Rethinking Urban Education (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1972), 231-46. "The Tribe and the Common School: Community Control in Rural Education," American Quarterly 24 (Spring 1972), 3-19. "Victims without 'Crimes': .Some Historical Perspectives on Black Education," written with Robert G. Newby,]ournal of Negro Education, 46 (Summer 1971) 192-206.

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CONTENTS

PROLOGUE 3 PART I THE ONE BEST SYSTEM IN MICROCOSM: COMMUNITY AND CONSOLIDATION IN RURAL EDUCATION 13 I. The School as a Community and the Community as a School IS 2. "The Rural School Problem" and Power to the Professional 2I

PART II

FROM VILLAGE SCHOOL TO URBAN SYSTEM: BUREAUCRATIZATION IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 28 I. 2. 3. 4. 5.

PART III

Swollen Villages and the Need for Coordination Creating the One Best System 39 Teachers and the Male Mystique 59 Attendance, Voluntary and Coerced 66 Some Functions of Schooling 72

30

THE POLITICS OF PLURALISM: NINETEENTH-CENTURY PATTERNS 78 l. Critics and Dissenters 80 2. Configurations of Control 88 3. Lives Routinized yet Insecure: Teachers and School Politics 97 4. Cultural ConAicts: Religion and Ethnicity I 04 5. A Struggle Lonely and Unequal: The Burden of Race I09

I X

Contents

PART

IV CENTRALIZATION AND THE CORPORATE MODEL: CONTESTS FOR CONTROL OF URBAN SCHOOLS, 1890-1940 126 I. An Interlocking Directorate and Its Blueprint fi:>r Re-

form 129 2. ConAicts of Power and Values: Case Studies of Centralization 147 167 3. Political Structure and Political Behavior

PART V

INSIDE THE SYSTEM: THE CHARACTER OF URBAN SCHOOLS, 1890-1940 177 I. Success Story: The Administrative Progressives

2. 3. 4. 5.

182 Science I 98 Victims without "Crimes": Black Americans 217 Americanization: Match and Mismatch 229 "Lady Labor Sluggers" and the Professional Proletariat 255

EPILOGUE THE ONE BEST SYSTEM UNDER FIRE, 1940-1973 269 NOTES 295 BIBLIOGRAPHY 317 INDEX 345

X

ILLUSTRATIONS

I. "Lifting American Social and Economic Life..-A School Board Perspective. Edgar Mendenhall, The City School Board Member and His Task: A Booklet for City School Board Members (Pittsburg, Kansas: College Inn Book Store, 1929) 2. School and Community-A Rural Transaction. Ellwood P. Cubberley, Rural Life and Education (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1914), facing p. 92 3. A Class in the Condemned Essex Market School, New York, early 1890s. Jacob Riis Collection, Museum of the City of New York 4. A New York School Assembly, c. 1880. New Yor.k City School Buildings, 1806-1956 (New York: Board of Education, 1956), cover (originally in Leslie's Weekly, Sept. 5, 1881) 5. A New York School Assembly, c. 1880 (see Fig. 4) 6. An Arithmetic Class at the Turn of the Century. Documentary Photo Aids, Florida 7. "The Sword of Damocles in the Schoolroom ..-A Teacher's Perspective. American School Board journal, 52 (May 1916), cover 8. The Carrie Steel School for 170 Black Children, Atlanta, Georgia, 1920. George D. Strayer eta!., Report of the Survey of the Public School System of Atlanta, Georgia (N.p.: 1921-22), I, 131 9. School Politics in Philadelphia, 1907, as seen by Cartoonists. American School Board journal, 34 (April 1907), 9 10. A New York Elementary Classroom, 1942. All the Children: New York City School Report (1942-43), p. 22 II. A New York High School Classroom, 1938. All the Children: New York City School Report (1938-39), p. 61 12. A Critical View of School Surveys. American School Board journal, 47 (Dec. 1913), cover 13. Adult Naturalization Class in a Public School. Library of Congress 14. Italian Father and Son at Table. Jacob Riis Collection, Museum of the City of New York 15. Saluting the Flag in the Mutt Street Industrial School, New York, c. 1889-90. Jacob Riis Collection, Museum of the City of New York 16. Americanization Class in Milwaukee, with Golda Meir as the Statue of Liberty. State Historical Society of Wisconsin 17. "Be Sm·e to Give Mine Special Attention ... Herbert Block, Herblock's Special for Today (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1958), p. 108

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2 18 46 52 53 56 99 Ill 138 183 184 187 234 238 246 247 271

Illustrations 18. The View from the Schoolhouse Window: New York, 1935. All the Children: New York City School Report (1935-36), p. 10 19. "What the Students Wanted." The Teacher Paper (n.d.), Portland, Oregon

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277 286

THE ONE BEST SYSTEM

"Lifting American Social and Economic Life"-A School Board Perspective

Prologue

This is an interpretive history of the organizational revolution that took place in American schooling during the last century. It deals with the politics of education: who got what, where, when, and how. It explores some of the changes in institutional structure and ideology in education and what these may have meant in practice to the generations of Americans who passed through classrooms. And it attempts to assess how the schools shaped, and were shaped by, the transformation of the United States into an urban-industrial nation. I intend this study to be exploratory and tentative. In a sense this synthesis is premature since a new generation of talented scholars is directing its attention to monographic studies of urban schooling and will enrich our knowledge of how schools actually operated. I am deeply indebted to this contemporary scholarship, much of it still in unpublished form. But there is also a mass of earlier empirical investigation of the character of urban education-gathered for purposes other than historical interpretation-that yields useful insights when subjected to new analytic questions and value perspectives. What I am attempting here is a dovetailing of old and new scholarship, together with my own research, into a general interpretive framework. If the book prompts others to contest or refine its explanations, to make its periodization more precise, to describe missing dimensions, so much the better.

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Prologue

I am addressing this study not only to specialists but also to citizens curious and concerned about how we arrived at the present crisis in urban education. We stand at a point in time when we need to examine those educational institutions and values we have taken for granted. We need to turn facts into puzzles in order to perceive alternatives both in the past and in the present. The way we understand that past profoundly shapes how we make choices today. Any historical writing perforce does violence to the kaleidoscopic surface and hidden dynamics of everyday life. The same "reality" may appear quite different to diverse groups and individuals. That fact alone destroys the possibility of a single objective account of the meaning of events to various people. Much of the written history of schools has revealed the perspective of those at the top of the educational and social system. We need as well to try to examine urban education as students, parents, and teachers saw it and to understand the point of view of clients who were victimized by their poverty, their color, their cultural differences. Accordingly I have tried to look at urban schooling from the varying perspectives of several social groups. 1 At the same time, I am attempting to analyze a system of schooling that by and large did not operate in haphazard ways. When I began this study I wanted to tell the story of urban education from the point of view of those who were in some sense its victims, the poor and the dispossessed. I soon realized, however, that what was needed was not another tale of classroom horror, for we have a plethora of those, but rather an attempt to interpret the broader political process and the social system of schooling that made such victimization predictable and regularin short, systematic. Behind slogans that mask power-like "keep the schools out of politics"-and myths that rationalize inequality-like the doctrines of ethnic inferiority-lie institutional systems called schools that often reinforced injustice for some at the same time that they offered opportunity to others. In trying to interpret how these systems operated, what were the patterns of communication and decision-making, what were the various political fields of forces influencing the schools, I have drawn heavily on the work of sociologists and political scientists. Historians, I suppose, have increasingly become cuckoo-

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Prologue

birds who lay their scholarly eggs in the nests of other disciplines. One reason is that some theories in social science lead us to new sorts of data, to kinds of interpretation that are more open to proof or disproof than the traditional narrative. While most historians still enjoy, as I do, the colorful, complex reality of specific episodes, the explanatory models of social science theory help us to distinguish what is general and what is particular in historical events-and sometimes even why. 2 Another way to put particular developments into a broader frame is through comparison-over time, or place, or social or economic status. The history of urban education is rich in such contrasts: of size and location; of the same community at different periods; of different ethnic groups and classes; and of similar organizations and occupational groups, such as welfare or police bureaucracies. Some writers imply that urban education is New York or Boston writ large; but any resident of Portland, Oregon, could testify that such is riot the case. The city school does not exist, and never did. 3 Through using a variety of social perspectives and modes of analysis, I have sought to illuminate the transformation from village school to urban system. I am using "village" and "urban" as shorthand labels for the highly complex changes in ways of thinking and behaving that accompanied revolutions in technology, increasing concentrations of people in cities, and restructuring of economic and political institutions into large bureaucracies. Thoughtful educators-men like Horace Mann, William T. Harris, John Dewey, among others-were aware that the functions of schooling were shifting in response to these "modernizing" forces. As village patterns merged into urbanism as a way of life, factories and counting houses split the place of work from the home; impersonal and codified roles structured relationships in organizations, replacing diffuse and personal role relationships familiar in the village; the jack-of-all-trades of the rural community came to perform specialized tasks in the city; the older reliance on tradition and folkways as guides to belief and conduct shifted as mass media provided new sources of information and norms of behavior· and as science became a pervasive source of authority; people increasingly defined themselves as members of occupational groups-salesmen, teachers,

5

Prologue

engineers-as they became aware of common interests that transcended allegiance to particular communities, thus constituting what Robert Wiebe calls "the new middle class." 4 The change from village to urban ways of thinking and acting was by no means linear or unbroken. Citizens might have one standard of behavior for the public world of job and interaction with strangers, quite another for the private world of kinship, neighborhood, and religious associations. In the midst of large cities in the mid-twentieth century one might find people whom Herbert Gans calls "urban villagers," just as in small towns in the nineteenth century one might encounter cosmopolitan individuals totally unconcerned with local affairs and standards of morality. In the twentieth century, in particular, it became clear to many observers that small towns were becoming intertwined with the networks of influence that emanated from the centers of mass society, the cities, while cities continued to recruit citizens from isolated rural areas where the traditional folkways were still strong. The important point is that increasingly the changes in the means of production, in the forms of human association and decision-making, and in ways of thinking and acting that I have labeled "urban" became central in the lives of most Americans. 5 Schools reflected and shaped these changes in various ways. In the governance of education, lay community control gave way to the corporate-bureaucratic model under the guise of "taking the schools out of politics." Educators developed school systems whose specialized structures partly reflected the differentiation of economic roles in the larger social order. As employers and occupational associations placed ever greater reliance on educational credentials for jobs, schooling acquired a new importance as the gat~way to favored positions. And increasingly the school developed a curriculum, overt and implicit, that served as a bridge between the family and the organizational world beyond-that is, helped to create an urban discipline. 6 This book begins with an analysis of "community control" versus "professionalism" in the rural and village school. Why examine rural education in a study which focuses mostly on urban education? In the first place, during the mid-nineteenth century the pattern of school governance in many cities followed a village or rural model. Therefore, understanding the transaction of

6

Prolo[fUe

school and community in the countryside helps us to look afresh at decentralized decision-making in cities of a century ago. Second, the bureaucratic models developed to reform city schools became educational blueprints for consolidation of rural education in the early twentieth century. Hence the process of corrsolidation of rural schools illustrates in microcosm many of the shifts occurring in cities and sketches in sharp relief the values underlying the transfer of power to the professionals. In Parts II and III I trace the complex contest between educational leaders who sought to develop the "one best system" of urban education during the nineteenth century and those dissenters and political interests that often conflicted with their efforts. Gradually schoolmen developed ideological and organizational consensus in their search for educational order, but heterogeneous values among the urban populations and diffusion of power in school governance frequently complicated their task. Part IV deals with the campaign of reform from the top down that characterized urban education during the years from 1890 to 1920. At that time an interlocking directorate of urban elites-largely business and professional men, university presidents and professors, and some "progressive" superintendents-joined forces to centralize the control of schools. They campaigned to select small boards composed of "successful" people, to employ the corporate board of directors as the model for school committees, and to delegate to "experts" (the superintendent and his staff) the power to make most decisions concerning the schools. Part and parcel of urban "progressivism" generally, this movement glorified expertise, efficiency, and the disinterested public service of elites. Case studies of four citiesNew York, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and San Francisco-offer variations on the central theme and analyze the opposition to centralization. Of course, actual political behavior under the new arrangements often departed sharply from the norms justifying the structural reforms. Part V presents some of the m~or changes in urban education during the half-century from 1890 to 1940 as perceived by educators and the public they served. During these years the structures of school systems grew complex and often huge, new spe-

7

Prologue

cializations appeared, conceptions of the nature of "intelligence" and learning shifted, and schools occupied a far larger place in the lives of youth (partly because child labor laws eliminated jobs and more and more employees required certificates and credentials). Schoolmen developed new ways to channel and teach students at the very time when schooling began to matter most in the occupational world. Such transformations of traditional ideas and practices were perceived quite differently by people occupying diverse positions in the social structure. Consequently, in this section of the book I have at times explored these private meanings