Chapter 1 HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES ON EDUCATIONAL REFORM by David B. Tyack Stanford University We live today in a time of deflated hopes. Is effective reform of schooling possible? Despite the money and thought that have gone into new curriculum projects and new teaching arrangements, many thoughtful observers claim that few real changes have taken place behind classroom doors. Although large sums have been funneled into "compensatory education," many studies indicate that such programs have failed to alter the achievement levels of the children for whom they were designed. At the same time a number of critics have attacked the assumptions on which programs for the "disadvantaged" have been based. The kaleidoscope of changing prescriptions for the education of minority groups--integration, compensation, and selfdetermination among others--itself expresses a crisis of authority in the familiar ideology and practice of the common school. In such a period it is natural to look to the past and to ask whether the touted reforms of earlier times really took place, indeed made a difference. One rapidly discovers that historians of education disagree among themselves in their answers to such questions. In the traditional interpretation the history of American education told of triumphant battles for public taxation for free schools, for standardization of supervision and curriculum, for professional training of teachers, for upward extension of the system to include the public secondary and higher education, and for differentiation of schooling to meet the needs of a vastly expanded student population and an altered social and economic order. It was a tale of reform and progress, marred here and there by "politics" or blocked temporarily by backward-looking teachers and laymen. It was an insider's view, seen from the top of the educational system down. From that perspective the narrative was fairly accurate. Most would agree that in comparison with 1850 or 1900, teachers today are better trained, school buildings more commodious, classes smaller, methods of teaching more varied, and students retained in school far longer. Recently, however, a number of revisionist historians have questioned whether there have been significant changes in the ways schools have functioned during the last hundred years. They have also claimed that schools never performed the egalitarian and democratic purposes which their rhetoric proclaimed. For example, Michael Katz has given his new book on Class, Bureaucracy and Schools the subtitle "The Illusion of Educational Change in America." (Emphasis added.) Colin Greer's 1972 historical appraisal of public education is called The Great School Legend; it attacks the belief that the schools have successfully educated the masses in the past and its corollary that the present failures of schooling to cope with poverty are somehow new. Revisionists like Katz and Greer have done a service in calling attention to persisting issues of class, race, and power and in dissipating the fog of wishful thinking that often enshrouded earlier accounts of educational history. In attempting to understand earlier instances of educational change, however, we believe that neither the traditional nor the revisionist interpretations are adequate guides. Henry David Thoreau once sardonically described a reformer who had written "a book called 'A Kill for a Blow, '"' and who "behaved as if there were no alternatives between these. . That seems to describe many books about schools. We submit that educational change has been neither illusory nor part of a triumphant evolution; the motives for reform of schools have been mixed and the consequences often unintended. But in our view significant changes have taken place. Because the same social reality appears quite different to diverse groups and individuals, any historical interpretation necessarily oversimplifies the blurred surface and hidden dynamics of everyday life. Despite these difficulties, we believe that it is important to try to understand the past, for the way Americans think about history profoundly shapes choices today. Accordingly, we will discuss three critical periods of change in American education: (1) the common school crusade of the mid-19th century, when (2) the turn of the 20th century--roughly 1890 to 1920-- (3) responses during the last generation--roughly since the Brown decision of 1954--to the problem of providing genuine equality of opportunity to dispossessed groups, notably the poor and the people of color, and the resulting crisis of authority in public education. One might easily designate other periods of educational reform, but we believe that these three are particularly significant with regard to the issues addressed in this book. Each of the periods coincided with large-scale changes in the character of American social and economic life; in different ways reformers in each case tried to adapt schooling to these larger shifts in the society; in each case both successes and failures created new problems for future reformers to cope with. The Common School Crusade Most historians agree that the common school revival at the mid19th century constitutes the major turning point in the history of public schooling in this country. It is important to note, however, that this movement was hardly the beginning of concern for the education of the public; rather, what the crusade achieved was to persuade American citizens that they should channel their generalized esteem for education into a particular institution with a particular ideology: the common school, an agency that was to be public in control and support, free, mixing all social groups under one roof and offering education of such quality that no one would desire private schooling. Because the common school was designed for all children, the leaders believed that it should be nonsectarian in its moral instruction and nonpartisan in its political teaching. In order to promote such republican virtue the reformers believed that they must create system where they saw chaotic diversity. To unify the people, public education itself must be unified and efficient. Hence, most reformers wished to standardize curriculum, to classify students into grades, to train teachers in approved methods, and to improve regulation and supervision of schools. The common school reform, then, had two phases: (1) persuading the public of the validity of the common school ideology; and (2) creating pedagogical order within the public school system. Well before the common school crusade Americans had displayed great enthusiasm for education. Most State constitutions before 1800 proclaimed the value of diffusing learning broadly among the people. Like Alexis de Tocqueville, many foreign visitors commented on citizens' zeal for schooling. It has been estimated that in 1830, 35 percent of children from 5 to 19 were enrolled in some school and that about 90 percent of white adults were literate in 1840, placing the United States in the forefront of education at that time together with Scotland and Germany. Until the success of the common school crusade in the years following 1840, however, the common attitude of the public toward schooling rather resembled the prevalent 20th-century American attitude toward organized religion, namely, that it was beneficial both for the individual and for society if a person attended the school of his choice. In the early 19th century there were few sharp lines between "public" and "private" education. States liberally subsidized "private" academies or colleges since they were assumed to be in the public interest, and towns and cities supported charity schools controlled by churches and self-perpetuating boards of trustees. In "public" schools parents often paid tuition (called "rate-bills"). Schools commonly reflected the pluralism of the society and perpetuated differences of religion, ethnicity, social class, or occupational purpose. In 1832, Abraham Lincoln expressed a characteristic American attitude toward schools when he declared himself a candidate for the State assembly: "Upon the subject of education, not presuming to dictate any plan or system respecting it, I can only say that I view it as the most important subject which we as a people can be engaged in . . . I . . . should be gratified to have it in my power to contribute something to the advancement of any measure which might have a tendency to accelerate the happy period when educational opportunity should become more general." Lincoln represented a common view: he was committed in principle to education, but nonchalant about means. In the next few decades the evangelists for public education would attempt to persuade Americans that a general faith in education was not enough, for the health of the republic depended upon common schools. From the clash of new social conditions and old articles of faith, interpreted by eloquent and determined reformers, came the American public school. So clear were the outlines of this institution after the Civil War that an English educator could talk confidently about "the free school system of the United States." Who were the common school reformers, what were their major concerns, and how did they operate? Here it is useful to distinguish the campaign for public education in the urbanized East from the creation of common schools in the sparsely settled regions of the Western States. In the eastern cities the men who led the common school revival were mostly members of professional and business groups, joined by leading schoolmen. They saw public education as the key answer to troubling new problems created by urbanization, industrialization, immigration, and the democratization of the suffrage. Poverty, crime, intemperance, violence, and human suffering were increasingly visible in the manufacturing centers and crowded and heterogeneous commercial cities. Such conditions contradicted articles of faith cherished by the reformers: the perfectibility of man, the need for orderly selfgovernment, the doctrine of equality of opportunity through self-help, the responsibility of men for the welfare of others in their community. Basically conservative, these reformers believed that the common school offered the most humane form of social control and the safest form of social renewal. In frontier settlements, on the other hand, a large proportion of the common school evangelists were ministers--often joined by other professional leaders--who were bothered by the disintegration of standards of behavior and learning on the individualistic frontier and sought to recreate the kinds of integrative institutions and patterns of education they had known in the East. They wished to create communities around the core institutions of school and church. In both settings the crusaders for public education agreed that social stability and individual welfare alike required a uniform public school that could assure common standards of literacy, morality, and republican citizenship in the rising generation. The old hodgepodge of schools could not accomplish that; only an efficient common school would suffice. To reformers like Horace Mann in Massachusetts, industrialization brought both curse and promise. Machines created enormous wealth and possibilities of communication and interdependence undreamed of in earlier times, but at the same time they destroyed links between home and work, between ownership and employment, between traditional norms and modern patterns of human behavior. Articulate spokesmen of "workingmen's" groups--mostly artisans and others in the upper reaches of the labor force--feared downward mobility as industrialization invaded their crafts and as a new class of dependent factory operatives emerged; they especially deplored the employment of thousands of unschooled children in the mills and called for public education to prevent "the sacrifice of the . . . rising generation of our country, to the cupidity and avarice of their employers." Both "workingmen" and employers mostly agreed, however, that free and universal schooling could foster equality of opportunity amid the threats posed by the factory system. As universal white male suffrage became increasingly the rule in eastern cities, and as immigration from Ireland and Germany swelled in the 1840's, the common school crusaders argued that the foreign masses must be Americanized and the common man taught how to exercise citizenship intelligently. The Whig Governor of Massachusetts pointed out that when every man might vote, or be elected to office, or carry a gun in the militia, or serve on a jury, every man must be properly educated. Religious and ethnic riots and political disorder especially alarmed reformers who still regarded the American republic as an experiment in self-government--fears reinforced, for example, when militia called out to quell riots fraternized instead with the rebels. Worry about social disintegration also bothered common school crusaders in the new settlements in the West, but there the task was to create rather than to reinvigorate and redirect educational institutions. The greatest increase in pupils in schools took place in these States in the Midwest and Far West. Many of the founders of public school systems in the West were ministers sent by missionary bureaucracies or denominations to Protestantize and civilize the Huck Finns who had lit out for the territories. They founded journals and teachers' associations to promote schools, served as county and State superintendents of instruction, provided teachers through organizations like the Board of National Popular Education, and often were the only persons with the time or sense of mission to try to establish public schools. 551-373 - 74 - 2 |