Administrative progressives sought changes in two key areas, governance and
schools operations.
As early as the 1850s,
northern cities had established boards of education to govern their public schools.
By the last decade of the 19th century,
these city boards were swollen structures whose trustees were
representatives elected by each ward in the city, one trustee per ward.
The city school board's trustees were accountable not to the city at large, but
rather to their individual wards.
This made for quite a lot of bickering and
administrative dysfunction at the level of the city.
At the turn of the last century,
to cite one example, Philadelphia was divided into 42 wards.
Each ward had it's own school board.
The total number of ward board trustees across the city was 504.
Now, each ward sent a representative to the city wide school board.
Add 504 trustees at the ward level to 42 trustees at the city level, and
you have a total of 546 school board members in the city of Philadelphia.
Now, the ward trustees were,
no doubt, responsive to the needs of their constituents.
And, down to the block level, including parceling out teaching and
custodial jobs to locals who usually paid a fee for their appointment.
Urban school reformers,
taking a cue from muckraking journalists who decried the story, sorry state of
urban schools, saw this as a chaotic way to manage a city school system.
>> The reformers were university presidents and
their allies in business and the profession.
Given their power and easy access to state legislatures,
they were able to secure new city charters that reorganized urban school governance.
In the Progressive Era, cities centralized their school systems,
making them accountable to a small city wide board, elected or appointed.
Citywide elections were shaped by city newspapers, controlled by business leaders
in cahoots with the reformers and out of sorts with the ward leaders.
The boards of some cities were appointed by the mayor, of the local courts.
On the eve of America's entry into World War I,
major city school boards were dominated by business men.
Yes, they were overwhelmingly male.
A key component of urban school governance reform, perhaps,
the essential factor, was the appointment of a strong superintendent.
By the 1920s, this individual, almost always a man,
would typically hold a doctorate from a leading school of education.
Teachers College at Columbia University, the leading institution, Harvard, Chicago,
Stanford, Michigan, and have executive authority for the city schools.
School policy, the capital budget, and
personnel policies remain the responsibility of the board.
Though, in some cases at least, school boards were rubber stamps for
their superintendents.
The reform of urban school governance was the first phase in
the administrative progressive's battle to transform urban education.
The next phase was to restructure the daily operations of urban schools, their
organizational structure, their curricula, then their expectations for teachers.
As we'll see in a later episode, the impetus to impose this major restructuring
was the pressure put on city schools by an enormous influx of immigrants
around the turn of the 20th Century, and their increasing presence in the schools.
More and more schools had to be built.
>> Right. In each city,
this transformation entailed the construction of a multi-layered,
hierarchically controlled school bureaucracy.
It included hiring professionally credentialed teachers,
principals and supervisors.
And, the adoption of school surveys and detailed templates for
managing the daily minutia of school efficiently and economically.
These surveys and templates were designed by powerful professors at
the leading schools of education,
who formed interlocking directorates with big city superintendents.
The professors' former doctoral students.
Also, with the state accreditation agencies, and foundations.
Other education powerhouses, such as Stanford, Chicago, and
Harvard emulated teacher's college.
From the 1910's to World War II, leading education professors presided over
placement baronies, placing their graduates in administrative positions
within the interlocking directorate, an old boy's club of great power.
The quid pro quo for the professor was both power and money.
The professors enhanced their status, and they were paid handsomely as consultants.
David Tyack and
Elizabeth Hanson call this progressive era old boys club the educational trust.
>> No school of education had a greater impact on the public schools in
the first half of the 20th century than Teachers College,
Columbia University, under the leadership of a formidable dean, James Earl Russel.
Russel's most enduring appointment, in terms of the continuing influence and
dominance of Teachers College into World War II, was a psychological theorist and
statistician Edward Lee Thorndike, also known as Ted, Ned, Ed.
Appointed as a Professor of Educational Psychology at the age of 25 in 1898.
Thorndike, in an extraordinary career from 1899 to 1940,
left an indelible mark on American education.
Both, by virtue of his own research, and
his cultivation of a generation of PhD students, who played pivotal roles in
creating the field of educational psychology and educational administration.
These two fields dictated the reorganization of
secondary schooling in the U.S..
In our next two episodes, we look at the development of these two fields.
The problems their members aim to solve, and
their reshaping of the American high school.
[MUSIC]