Comprehensive Exam Study Guide
The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education – David Tyack (1974)
Part I: Village and Community School to Consolidation
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Teachers were young, inexperienced, and poorly trained
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When a principal in Oregon got into a fistfight with an unruly student, he was placed on probation by the school board – not for fighting, which was a common occurrence, but for losing the fight and demonstrating that he was unable to control his students.
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School was voluntary and incidental and served all ages, from toddlers to young adults in the one-room school; attendance varied from season to season; it was similar to an extended family
 Teachers needed to be submissive to the “folkways” of the town: their roles were strictly defined, as “brother, suitor, hunting companion, fellow farm worker, boarder, and cousin”; teachers were accountable to school trustees, taxpayers, parents, and children
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The curriculum was whatever text lay at hand; yet for some, the McGuffey Reader and other books offered the only exposure to outside world and the only escape from the
“baseness and vulgarity” and harshness of the farm life
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The NEA Committee of Twelve on Rural Schools in the 1890s attempts to address the
“Rural School Problem” by “turn[ing[ the schools over to the professionals” and transforming it into a consolidated and bureaucratized institution with expert supervision and professionally trained teachers
Part II: From Village School to Urban System
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Reformers were impressed with organization and precision of the factory, railroad, and businesses
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Horace Mann and John D. Philbrick in Boston, John Dore in Chicago, William T. Harris in St. Louis, Andrew Draper in New York sought to systematize urban schools: to create new controls over teachers, students, and administrators, to de-politicize schools, to make people accountable to a set of standards at all levels, to establish a uniform course of study and standardized exams – to provide uniformity and precision through a hierarchical system
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In the ideally ordered schools, children moved in unison and/or kept their faces straight ahead, even when passing papers to their neighbors: The student “learned the meaning of obedience, regularity, and precision. [They] learned to ‘toe the line,’ to stand on the line, perfectly motionless, their bodies erect, their knees and feet together, the tips of their shoes touching the edge of a board on the floor.”
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Corporal punishment and humiliation were deemed appropriate means of discipline
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Before 1900, most high school teachers had attended only high school themselves
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Women outnumbered men as teachers after 1900, in some cities by as much as 10:1; they were thought more docile, perceptive, content with subordination to authority, and they made anywhere from 1/2 to 1/3 of a male teacher's salary
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Men were considered to be more earnest, devoted, and effective teachers
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By 1900, 31 states had passed "coercive education" laws making education from ages 8-
14 mandatory; these laws were often sponsored by labor unions eager to eliminate

competition from child labor. They were impossible to enforce and thousands of children were turned away from school each year for lack of space.
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One assessment of 19th century schools is that they "did more to industrialize humanity than to humanize industry" -- by teaching a daily and weekly schedule, how to perform segmented tasks, how to follow orders, schools transformed children into industrial workers more than anything else
Part III: The Politics of Pluralism
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A struggle ensured between laymen in wards and professional educators
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Critics attack: school bureaucracies, power of superintendents, mechanical and rigidly oppressive nature of schooling and dullness of teachers and classes
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Tension between supporters of schools as transmitters of Protestant culture and Germans
+ Catholics who establish their own schools
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Heterogeneous structures of school governance, indiscriminate division of power among central and ward school boards, unequal authority among superintendents in power struggles with administrators
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Political machines invited graft, patronage, and corruption
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Bribery, graft, and collusion of textbook companies to gain contracts
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Arbitrary hiring, firing, and examining of teachers, caught in power struggles
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Clash between nativist WASP interests and immigrants
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Race issues: Blacks saw schools as an equalizing power, but segregation became the norm even where prohibited by law and few Black teachers were hired in the public schools; yet Blacks made strides -- from 1870 to 1900 school attendance for Black children rose from 9.9% to 31% and illiteracy dropped from 80% to 44.5%.
Part IV: Centralization and the Corporate Model, 1890-1940
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Administrative Progressives seek centralization by turning to business leaders and elite patrician university heads from Harvard, Columbia, and others and using a business model as a basis for reform
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Superintendents should be learned professionals, appointed rather than elected, "captains of education" and commanders and school boards should be gentlemanly and businesslike, filled with disinterested, unpaid, members in service to the public good; these men should be joined by their wives, society women
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The corporate model was "modern and rational" and its proponents waged campaigns across the country into the 1920s, which were opposed by teachers' associations, labor unions, Catholics and immigrants, and "common men" who resented government by the elite.
Part V: The Character of Urban Schools, 1890-1940
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Touching stories to illustrate the state of school reform: o When Helen Todd, factory inspector asks 14 year old girls lacquering canes next to furnace in attic factory, "How can you stand it here, children? Why don't you go to school?" one cries, "School! School is the fiercest t'ing youse kin come up

against. Factories ain't no cinch, but school is worst." and of 500 children asked if they didn't need money would they rather work in a factory or go to school, 412 would take the factory. o In the basement of a building in the stockyards, a 13 year-old boy wept bitterly when told he'd have to go to school, sobbing, "they hits ye if yer don't learn, and they hits ye if ye whisper, and they hits ye if ye have string in yer pocket, and they hits ye if yer seat squeaks...if yer late...if ye forget the page..." but that no one hits you in the factory o Thousands of frenzied parents rioted to a school where the principal had brought in a surgeon to remove adenoids, thought to cause mental retardation, from 150 children after parents had refused to do it earlier; parents thought the school was cutting their children's' throats
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The new reformers sought to approach their work "scientifically" and enlisted IQ tests to devise tracks
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Successes: o by 1930, 73% of those 14-17 were in school and by 1940, the graduation rate was
51% o differentiated education proliferated for the disabled and the gifted and tracks for vocational students o specialized and more rigorous training and certification for counselors, librarians, and administrators, as well as for elementary/middle/high school teaching
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In 1922, Dewey protested the reforms, calling the school system "a vast filtering system." of a "mechanized, industrialized" society which valued "constant testing categorizing, and competition"
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Other critics of IQ testing and the reforms voiced their concerns
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Though Blacks continued to suffer institutionalized racism and segregation, literacy rose to 90% by 1940
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A movement to "Americanize" foreign students and their parents met with protest
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At the turn of the century, Margaret Haley organizes the Chicago Teachers Federation mainly to help women teachers, and teachers' unions gain power, to fight for higher salaries, pensions, tenure
Epilogue:
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Our faith in education has become a surrogate for other kinds of needed social justice: income redistribution, adequate housing, medical services for all
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"[T]he reform scene today is a kaleidoscopic confusion of contending interests, of different assessments of need, of rhetorical panaceas, and jarring hopelessness"
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Tyack sums up the goal of American educators today: "To create urban schools which really teach students, which reflect the pluralism of society, which serve the quest for social justice..."
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It seems that effective improvement of the education of the urban poor will occur within the public schools if it is to happen at all