William B. Thomas

Reconsidering the Power of the Superintendent in the Progressive Period

Raymond E. Callahan’s Education and the Cult of Efficiency advanced the widely accepted notion about superintendents being extremely vulnerable to myriad pressures and criticisms of various special interest groups. To test this vulnerability thesis, we followed the career path of a single school executive in three cities between 1914–1922. As an active and long-time influential member of the Department of Superintendence of the National Education Association, Ernest Clark Hartwell typified a stalwart, modern-day, career-bound superintendent who consistently controlled school affairs during his administration. More than merely surviving as a school executive, he built an educational empire by aligning himself with managerial elites and fellow career-bound superintendents. In our study of this first-generation progressive, we show how he won the right to dominate the affairs of schools, systematically applied a business ethos to his work, adopted antilabor practices to dash militant teachers’ hopes for democratic control, and enlarged a state-sanctioned school bureaucracy to shield himself from public criticism in different institutional settings.

The Stratification of School Knowledge through Extracurricular Activities in an Urban High School.

School clubs and schools teams, as well as school classes, offer or limit opportunity.

Mental Testing and Tracking for the Social Adjustment of an Urban Underclass, 1920-1930

This essay examines the mechanisms used by the public school for socially adjusting an underclass of Italian, Polish, and southern black children who immigrated to Buffalo, New York, in the 1920s. It describes in some detail the activities and goals associated with the institutionalization of mental testing and tracking programs in those public schools serving these young members of an underclass. This essay suggests that as a tool of social control, testing and tracking into special education classes may have discriminated against the unassimilated newcomers who teachers and administrators feared were destined for a life of crime. Finally, the essay illustrates the reactions of interest groups to the schools tracking program, in order to show that members of and advocates for this underclass did not all passively accept the schools treatment of these pupils.

Social Stratification of School Knowledge in Character Training Programs of South Buffalo, New York, 1918-1932.

This essay shows how policy makers and teachers in Buffalo, New York designed and implemented a stratified curriculum as an outgrowth of the school districts character training program. They differentiated by socio-economic status the knowledge type they disseminated to their pupils in the early 1900s, emphasizing academics in elementary schools which higher- and middle-status pupils attended. In contrast, they emphasized character training at the expense of academics in lower-status schools.

WOMEN TEACHER MILITANCY IN THE WORKPLACE 1910‐1922

On October 11, 1920, a school superintendent in Buffalo, New York (U.S.A.) dismissed a woman elementary school principal and suspended seven women teachers for their political activities against the school department. Against the backdrop of a post war xenophobia, an enlarging educational bureaucracy, the centralization of school board powers, and a nation‐wide struggle by teachers to achieve professional status, these women orchestrated an unprecedented challenge to the local school authorities. They formed an alliance with working class ethnics and eventually affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers to wrench power from the hands of a male‐dominated group of managerial elites. Typical of most teacher uprisings in early twentieth century America, those who did not embrace the school bureaucracy lost.

Urban Schooling for Black Migrant Youth: A Historical Perspective, 1915-1925.

Like other large northern cities, Buffalo slighted the education of black newcomers.