Barry M. Franklin

Progressivism and Curriculum Differentiation: Special Classes in the Atlanta Public Schools, 1898–1923

Addressing the Atlanta Board of Education at its January 1898 meeting, Superintendent William F. Slaton called for the adoption of a regulation to “prevent children of dull minds and weak intellects from remaining 3 or 4 years in the same grade.” Their presence, Slaton stated, was leading “to the annoyance of the teacher and detriment of the grade.”1 This call to deal with low achieving students was not the only recommendation to alter existing school policies and programs that the city’s Board of Education heard that year or the next. In his annual reports for both 1898 and 1899, Slaton called on the Board of Education to introduce vocational education into Atlanta’s course of study to meet the needs of high school students who, as he put it, “are bread-winners early in life and subsequently heads of families.”2 And during May 1899, the Board of Education received proposals urging it to introduce physical education into the curriculum and to establish kindergarten classes in several of the city’s schools.3 Here were the first stirrings of Progressive educational reform, which would lead in Atlanta, as in other urban school systems, to a differentiated program, including vocational education and guidance, kindergartens, junior high schools, and special classes for handicapped children.4

Educational Ideas and School Practice: A Response to Kieran Egan and Maxine Greene

At first glance, the articles by Professors Egan (1983) and Greene (1983) appear to be quite different. Where Egan presents a detailed critique of one segment of the modern school curriculum, the social studies, Greene offers an historical overview of the issue of equality in American educational thought from the colonial period onward. Despite this difference, however, the two papers touch on a common theme. Egan and Greene both examine what they maintain have been certain defects in that period of early twentieth century educational reform known as the social efficiency movement and the consequences of these defects for schooling in contemporary North American society. My comments in this response will examine their similar interpretations of the social efficiency movement. Egan argues that the social studies, which has been the most enduring legacy of efficiency-oriented educational reform, has failed to meet either of its historical goals. The social studies, he maintains, has succeeded neither in its commitment to educate children about the world in which

From Backwardness to L.D.: Behaviorism, Systems Theory, and the Learning Disabilities Field Historically Reconsidered.

This article examines the approaching dominance of behaviorism and systems theory in the contemporary learning disabilities field in light of the conventional historical interpretation of the fields origins to which most learning disabilities theorists subscribe. From this perspective, which locates the origins of the field in the work during the 1930s on brain-injured children, behavioral and systems management procedures appear as new innovations in our understanding and treatment of learning disabilities that direct the field toward progressive and humanistic ends. A more accurate history of the field locates its origins in the work of American educators from the turn of the century through the 1920s on the problem of backwardness. From this historical perspective, behavioral and systems management procedures turn out to be long-standing practices of American educators. They also turn out to be directed to profoundly conservative social and political ends that belie the progressive and humanistic orientation claimed for them. This revised history of the origins of the learning disabilities field can temper the willingness of contemporary theorists to accept behaviorism and system theory and thus retard the emerging dominance of this twin perspective.