The Importance of Being Urban: Designing the Progressive School District, 1890-1940
352
The Importance of Being Urban: Designing the Progressive School District, 1890-1940
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226634685 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 07/08/2019 |
| Series: | Historical Studies of Urban America |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 352 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
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CHAPTER 1
The Race for Urban Status
There was nothing wrong with the American city that could not be fixed with what was right about the American city. At least that was how Progressive Era urban educators saw it. In a country that had long seen itself as quintessentially rural, the urban turn that accompanied the advent of the twentieth century was psychologically disruptive, especially as public figures increasingly linked the fate of cities to the fate of the nation. Educational reformers began to radiate an infectious faith that the urban school district was poised to usher in a new educational epoch. One of the true believers was Professor Ellwood P. Cubberley of Stanford University. In an era already characterized by vigorous social reform, Cubberley believed that the early twentieth-century city school system was on the vanguard of progressive educational innovation, perfectly situated to build a stronger, more democratic nation.
In the minds of many progressives, the city became a novel instrument for social improvement and national uplift. "Nearly all of the important progress which has been made in education in America in the past quarter century has been made in our cities," proclaimed Cubberley in 1915. Urban school districts, he believed, were the true laboratories of progressive educational experimentation. "It is the cities which have perfected their administrative organization and developed an administrative machinery capable of handling educational business on a large scale," he wrote a year later. "It is in the cities, too, that the large problems of public school organization and administration have been worked out and the fundamental administrative principles we now follow have been established." Cubberley predicted that "the decade or decade and a half which is just ahead" would be a "great period of application for the principles now formulated." The city, it seemed, offered a fertile environment for realizing the dream of universal democratic education in the United States.
Cubberley was hardly alone in his enthusiasm. "The school systems of our cities present one of the most inspiring aspects of our municipal advance," wrote historian Charles Beard in 1912, "and recent tendencies seem to show that we are on the eve of a new era." From the 1890s through the 1930s, civic leaders and academics heralded the rising status of the modern urban school system. Educators and laypeople alike pointed to a "new movement in education" and a "new science of education" that went hand in hand with the broader social reform and experimentation already afoot. Cities had serious problems to be sure — overcrowded housing, inadequate sanitation, and hazardous factories — but a new generation of public figures believed they also contained the resources and institutions necessary to address these problems. The city's advantages could be used to outweigh its disadvantages.
The early decades of the twentieth century marked the ascendancy of the urban school district in America. If the urban moment in the history of American political progressivism was, as Daniel T. Rodgers has argued, "sliced thin enough to be sandwiched between the Populist revolt and Theodore Roosevelt's reformation of the presidency," then we might say that the urban moment in educational progressivism started later and lasted longer, ultimately persisting beyond most conventional types of urban progressivism. The delayed onset of educational progressivism was especially characteristic of schooling in the metropolitan centers of the American West. Just as western educational leaders like Cubberley and his Stanford colleagues believed that urban school systems pointed the way to the future, other western municipal reformers and urban-minded politicians understood that, in turn, good schools symbolized strong cities. "There is no better constructive publicity for a city than to be known over the entire country as a city of good schools," one member of the Portland, Oregon, school board confidently stated in 1915. Local leaders recognized that a strong city school system signaled the accumulation of civic and cultural capital. Whenever the editors of western newspapers like the Portland Oregonian highlighted "modern" developments across their city — modern shipbuilding, factories, bank buildings — they consistently praised urban schools for utilizing the "best modern methods" of instruction and for constructing educational facilities that ranked "high in comparison with those of other American cities of the same size."
Urban leaders regularly took stock of their stature in relation to other comparable cities in their region, for they appreciated that perception was often more important than fact. Development of the urban West, historian Bradford Luckingham argues, depended on civic "boosterism" — an attitude of competitiveness combined with active promotion. "To neglect to boost growth and development for a city and its hinterland," he writes, "was to deny progress and risk decline and defeat." Cities succeeded, Luckingham says, not only because of natural advantages "but also because of aggressive, ambitious leaders who were intent on seeing their particular urban centers emerge as winners in the race for urban status."
"There is an art of municipal as well as business advertisement," asserted the Denver Chamber of Commerce committee in 1915, "and it should be the continuing endeavor of all of us so to elevate Denver's name and fame as to assure, speedily and forever, its proper destiny as the inland metropolis of Western America." Aware of the vibrancy of this increasingly urban frontier, municipal leaders often connected urban health to school quality as an important path to future success. A certain amount of civic pride, combined with a clear sense of the value of robust educational indicators, contributed to the spirit of competition, especially in the swiftly growing cities of the West.
While Denver dreamed of itself as the great inland metropolis, other cities envisioned coastal dominance. "Four cities," wrote Seattle school administrator Fred Ayer in 1924, "are now striving for the commercial supremacy of the west coast of the United States: Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle. The story of the encouragement of railroads and steamship lines, of the creation of harbors and the building of docks, of the dredging of channels and the building of lighthouses, of the spanning of rivers and the digging of canals," noted Ayer, "is one that is familiar to commercial circles. Less familiar, but no less important," he said, "is the story of the aggressive utilization of the educational facilities of these western cities for the purposes of city building and the attraction of prospective residents."
Ayer understood the importance municipally minded leaders placed on schools. In city after western city, urban planners folded improved school systems into their blueprints for comprehensive urban development. When Oakland hosted the 1923 National Education Association (NEA) annual meeting — an important national honor — Mayor Davie proudly proclaimed that his city was distinguished as having one of the "best-known school systems in the United States of America." He touted the achievements of the Oakland schools alongside other municipal accomplishments that made the city "progressive" and "attractive to the manufacturer seeking a western location." Oakland had recently completed a $5 million school construction program, he said, and was about to embark on another. The Oakland school system, Davie happily concluded, was "one of the most progressive" in the United States. These were all attributes he hoped would be sufficient to coax families and factories to his city.
Spirited comparisons between cities became critical and commonplace for cities west of the Rocky Mountains as they competed for new inhabitants. Populations in the western urban centers skyrocketed in the fifty years after 1890 as the amount of farmable land began to shrink. Historian Walter Nugent pinpoints 1913 as the year after which farms and farm populations stopped expanding in the United States. By 1913, Nugent says, Frederick Turner's 1893 pronouncement about the close of the settlement frontier finally fit the facts. Along with the shift from farms to factories and rural life to urban life, says Nugent, came a significant "shift in lifestyles and worldviews, one that required decades to complete." To immigrants, migrants, and progressives alike, the future of the West was increasingly metropolitan.
The shifting demographics of the West had an immediate impact on cities and schools, as well as on innovation therein. In 1890, for example, Oakland's population was 46,682; by 1940, it had increased sixfold to 302,163. Portland and Seattle experienced very similar growth rates during the same years (see table 1). Meanwhile, Denver's population, already topping a hundred thousand by 1890, more than tripled over the following fifty years. Of course, many cities throughout the East and Midwest had simultaneous spikes in their populations, but western cities experienced some growing pains more acutely. Moreover, the great distances that many westerners had to travel to attend professional meetings not only limited their interactions with eastern counterparts but also curbed their contact with one another, and western school administrators began to demand recognition for the specific challenges they faced.
"The industrial and educational problems of the West" are unique, announced Salt Lake City's superintendent in 1912, and other educators concurred. "There are many problems, distinctively western in character, which ought to be thrashed out among our educational people," said the superintendent of schools in Berkeley, California. "The time is ripe for the formation of a great Western Teachers' Association to include all the Pacific Coast and Rocky Mountain States," declared the Salt Lake City school chief, who believed that such an organization would boost the "professional spirit and professional standards which, with us, are still altogether too crude." The Sacramento superintendent agreed, arguing that a new western educational association would form "a connecting link" between the state educational associations and the NEA, adding that "we will marvel at our own neglect in not establishing it sooner." This hint of cultural inferiority was commonplace among western educators up until World War I. Their solution, typically American, was to create new professional organizations that could serve as conduits for the dissemination of educational ideas.
All in all, westerners believed that a regionally based educational association was a prerequisite to future success. Western superintendents had another motive for their flurry of activity around 1912: they intended their plans to reach a dramatic culmination in 1915, when two international expositions were to be held in California — the Panama-Pacific in San Francisco and the Panama-California in San Diego. If successful, these two fairs would offer western leaders an opportunity to brandish their accomplishments. "The West is one great new territory," one leader proclaimed, "educationally plastic, and with infinite possibilities for future growth."
Educators became infected with the spirit of civic competitiveness as easily as had business leaders and politicians, recognizing the importance of the dynamic link between urban rivalry and school strength; indeed, they often exploited it. Superintendents published charts measuring the achievement of their students, placing them side by side with the results from other cities. The data for these comparisons took multiple forms, often student test scores, especially as the new technology of the standardized test became more widely available after 1910; but districts also published comparative tables of students' height, weight, sense of color, or spelling prowess — any evidence that demonstrated superiority, no matter how minute or seemingly insignificant, was used as an indicator of dominance or, at least, competitiveness.
Outsiders could also serve to intensify the competition. A. E. Winship, the peripatetic editor of the Journal of Education and a vigorous champion of public education who visited city school systems across the country, dashed off his impressions of local educational improvements as he went. Winship's assessments, printed as columns and editorials in the journal, elicited pride from locals or envy from rivals, thereby contributing to fresh cycles of civic competition. After a visit to Portland, Oregon, in 1914, for example, Winship proclaimed: "If left free to work out plans and realize ideals, Portland will give all other cities a lively race for first place." The contenders in this race — according to reformers like Winship, Oakland's Davie or Seattle's Ayer — were not individual schools but the large urban school systems associated with rapidly growing American cities, districts that became increasingly connected to municipal identity.
One result of the collective western attention devoted to education was a rapid increase in school funding. Some estimates indicate that the West spent more per capita on education than any other region between 1880 and 1920. In his 1920 comparative analysis of the "efficiency" of state school systems as they developed between 1890 and 1918, Leonard Ayres, director of education and statistics for the Russell Sage Foundation, was startled when his data indicated that the school systems of the western states had made the greatest progress of any region during this twenty-eight-year period (see fig. 1.1). The West's gain came at the East's loss: the average national rank of the eastern states had fallen from eleven to nineteen, while the western states, with an average rank of twenty-one in 1890, had moved up to thirteen by 1918. Easterners began to take notice.
The relationship between municipal reformers, academics, and educational practitioners could be mutually reinforcing. Professors in schools of education praised innovative urban districts and designated them as models for smaller districts to emulate, often to the annoyance of hard-working rural educators. Local leaders in many city school systems enthusiastically implemented the designs developed by faculty at institutions such as Stanford, Harvard, Teachers College, or the University of Chicago, all the while effusing confidence in their ability to repair the perceived defects of nineteenth-century education. Business leaders and school boards lobbied locals for increased financial support, successfully raising funds through school taxes and school bonds. City social clubs helped pay for visiting lecturers who painted compelling portraits of progressive experiments being conducted in other cities. On the whole, progressives seeking school district change tapped into a momentum of municipal reform that helped sweep educational innovations along in a larger wave of social progress. However, definitions of what constituted "social progress" varied a great deal; therefore, deeper exploration of reformist tendencies is vital.
* * *
Students of history have long recognized the zeal of turn-of-the-century social critics and reformers, but standard textbook narratives of the Progressive Era often depict the more gruesome and revolting problems of city life. The Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire of 1911, smudged and weary child laborers, Upton Sinclair's sausage factories, and Jacob Riis's street children — these are the images that populate the collective vision of Progressive Era America. Therefore, it is often easy to overlook the boundless optimism many progressives had for the promise of urban institutions, especially for the role of education in building a stronger society. At the same time that they decried corruption, filth, and poverty, progressives also emphasized the vitality of urban centers. Cities were the "hope of democracy" declared Frederic Howe, adviser to Cleveland's reformist mayor Tom Johnson in 1906. "The modern city marks an epoch in our civilization," he wrote. "Through it, a new society has been created." William Munro, professor of government at Harvard, told his students that cities were becoming the "controlling factor" in American life, and he reiterated Henry Drummond's aphorism, "He who makes the city makes the world."
Progressives thought that the city, problems and all, provided a unique opportunity for working out the challenges of modern American democracy in a new industrial age. Turn-of-the-century civic reformers, historian Paul Boyer points out, sought to bring about "the fundamental restructuring of the urban environment." School reformers endeavored to accomplish no less than the concomitant fundamental reorganization of the urban educational environment. The key to progress was to be as urban as possible.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: District Progressives and the Progressive School District
1 The Race for Urban Status
2 The Plans and Principles of District Progressivism
3 Educating Efficient Citizens in Oakland, California
4 Pioneering Practice in the Public Schools of Denver, Colorado
5 Competing Visions for a Progressive Portland, Oregon
6 Evolution Not Revolution in the Public Schools of Seattle, Washington
7 Conclusion: Designing the Democratic School District
List of Archives, Libraries, and Collections Consulted
Notes
Index