William J. Reese

Power and the promise of school reform : grassroots movements during the progressive era

Now published by Teachers College Press, this classic text includes a new Introduction by Jeffrey Mirel as well as new photographs and references that bring the book up to date. Power and the Promise of School Reform remains the foremost volume to examine how grass-roots movements operated during the early twentieth century to shape urban education in the United States. Carefully researched and elegantly written, this volume moves effortlessly from impassioned Socialist party meetings to smoky union halls, from fervent gatherings of urban radicals to quiet teas with upper-class women reformers. Reese explores the ways in which these diverse community groups struggled to make local schools responsive institutions in a time of dramatic change.

Public Schools and the Common Good

In the early twentieth century, numerous educational reformers had an expansive vision of the purposes of public education. Some lobbied for additional high schools to meet the exploding demand among adolescents for more secondary education; others as a result of this growth sought more vocational education programs for the less academically talented; and still other activists called for public funding for new social programs and services for children, from playgrounds to free breakfasts and lunches, especially for the urban poor. Another popular reform was the opening of schools in the evenings as neighborhood social centers. As part of this trend, schools served as polling centers on election day. Once contested reforms, these innovations remain a familiar and uncontroversial feature of local school systems.

Rethinking the history of American education

Introduction: A Multifaceted and Changing Field W.J.Reese & J.L.Rury Literacy, Common Schools, and High Schools in Antebellum America M.Vinovskis & G.Moran The History and Legacy of the Savannah Education Association J.Jones Children in American History N.R.Hiner Historical Perspectives on African American Education M.Fultz Immigration and Education in American History M.Olneck Womens Education in the United States M.A.Nash Higher Education in American History C.Ogren Teacher Education and Teaching in 20th Century America K.Sconzert Curriculum History and Its Response to Revisionism B.Franklin Bridging the Gap between Metropolitan and Educational History J.Dougherty The Evolving Federal Role in American Education A.Nelson On Policy Relevant Knowledge: From the War on Poverty to the War of Ideas E.Lagemann Epilogue: Looking to the Future W.J.Reese & J.L.Rury

Why Americans Love to Reform the Public Schools

Americans from all walks of life espouse the cause of school reform. The past generation has witnessed the rise of education governors and education presidents. The CEOs of major corporations, big-city mayors, private sector entrepreneurs, inner-city parents, the heads of teacher unions, and every politician under the sun have often found the mantra of school reform irresistible. Public Broadcasting System documentaries, B-movies starring heroic teachers (sometimes armed with clubs) battling ignorance and the streets, and editorials in local newspapers about this or that educational crisis have kept the problems and promise of public schools visible, though the public’s attention span is often about as long lived as morning glories.

In search of American progressives and teachers

Over half a century ago Lawrence Cremin set in motion a historical debate about educational progressivism, a movement, if it was one, that meant ‘different things to different people’ and roused passions for and against. Personified in many individual and institutional initiatives, it appeared to resonate with individual liberty, political democracy and social reform. Historians since, including Roy Lowe, have joined in the debate. Did it succeed and what were its effects? Perfecting or pernicious? Cohesive or divisive? Models for reforming pedagogy were found in Pestalozzi and Froebel, but translating ideals into practice was the challenge. Laboratory and model schools lent weight to advocacy of reform, but were often private or privileged in their constitution. Dewey and his daughter in Schools of Tomorrow publicised a selection of these. Against this backdrop, historians have subsequently sought to explain why traditional pedagogic practices remained so powerful. Cuban drew on a wide-ranging set of primary sources to reconstruct classroom practices and explore the conservative practice of the public schools. Exceptions can be explained by a confluence of factors, local demographic, school and district leadership, paradoxical exercise of authority and control in the implementation of progressive practice.

Hoosier Schools: Past and Present.

Introduction Acknowledgments Chapter 1 OAwakening the Public MindO: The Dissemination of the Common School Idea in Indiana, 1787-1852 Scott Walter Chapter 2 Urban School Reform in the Victorian Era William J. Reese Chapter 3 Curricular Reform in an Industrial Age Ted Stahly Chapter 4 Civic Education in Indianapolis During the Progressive Era Alexander Urbiel Chapter 5 Community and Control in the Development of the Extracurriculum: Muncie Central High School, 1890-1930 Laurie Moses Hines Chapter 6 Gymnasium or Coliseum? Basketball, Education, and Community Impulse in Indiana in the Early Twentieth Century David G. Martin Chapter 7 Urban Schools in Post-War Indiana William J. Reese Chapter 8 The Challenge of Racial Equality Maureen Reynolds Chapter 9 School Reform in Indiana Since 1980 Barry Bull

Introduction: An Evolving and Expanding Field of Study

The history of education is an old and venerable field, whose origins as an area of scholarly interest date to at least the early nineteenth century. Like other specialized historical domains, it has experienced interpretive debates and changing schools of thought on a range of issues.1 The history of American education underwent a major upheaval during the 1960s and 1970s, when a number of scholars challenged long standing views regarding the role of schools in society. While historians had traditionally viewed schools as engines of social and economic development, and as reliable sources of social mobility for every generation of Americans, the so-called revisionist scholars—particularly the “radical” revisionists—argued that the schools reinforced existing patterns of discrimination and inequality. Historically, the schools had delimited and not enhanced opportunity for most children, especially the poor and racial minorities. Not surprisingly, this vividly revisionist interpretation of American educational history proved quite controversial, attracting considerable attention to the field. Not every scholar in the history of education was a revisionist, of course, and every generation, as the saying goes, seems destined to write its own history, which certainly happened in the years that followed the heyday of radical revisionism in the early 1970s.

Changing Conceptions of “Public” and “Private” in American Educational History

Something rather remarkable has occurred in the recent history of American education: a rediscovery of the public benefits of private education. The idea is an old one in the nation’s history but has not been seriously entertained by mainstream political leaders or policymakers since the early nineteenth century. When dissenting Protestants, nonsectarian private school leaders, and Roman Catholics in particular protested against the monopolistic nature of public schooling in the mid-nineteenth century, they were loudly criticized and defeated in their efforts to divide the school fund for their competing systems of education. In effect, public schools became a virtual monopoly, and private networks of schooling existed without direct state aid. The public school, and not its private counterpart, became for most Americans the symbol of an indigenous democracy. And, until the final decades of the twentieth century, the majority of citizens and elected officials generally believed that the expansion and proliferation of tax-supported, compulsory public schools best served the common good.

Sociology for the Future Historian

Imagine it is 2050, and you are nearing retirement. You are a historian, mostly interested in the history of education generally and public schools specifically. You finally feel enough distance from the passions of the first two decades of the twenty-first century to consider writing about it. You have waited this long for good reasons. Your mentors in graduate school always insisted that you should never write about your own time and place. Let journalists and social scientists, concerned with the here-and-now, do their job and you do yours. A historian’s job is to understand the past, not the present. The passing of time will provide perspective.

Story Telling and History

I am looking at a digital image of a photograph shot on November 22, 1958 at the American Legion Post 585, in Duryea, Pennsylvania. I was then six years old, and I have no memory of this particular photograph. But similar ones, capturing the same event, later appeared in the Pittston Dispatch, a weekly newspaper. I remember those quite well, and the blow ups they caused at home. Pittston was the biggest town between Wilkes-Barre and Scranton in the anthracite region of northeastern Pennsylvania. It had a movie theater and a few stores and restaurants downtown, though like every nearby community it never recovered from the collapse of the mining industry. With a population of a few thousand, Duryea did not have its own newspaper, or library, or many amenities.