From Social Movement to Professional Management: An Inquiry into the Changing Character of
Leadership in Public Education
Author(s): David Tyack and Elisabeth Hansot
Source: American Journal of Education, Vol. 88, No. 3 (May, 1980), pp. 291-319
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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From
Movement
Social
Professional
An
Inquiry
Changing
Leadership
to
Management:
into
the
Character
in
of
Public
Education
DAVID TYACK
Stanford University
ELISABETH HANSOT
Kenyon College
In this exploratory essay the authors interpret changing forms of leadership in public education by locating them within the context of developing values, institutional structure, and broad social, political, and
economic change. They advance two basic propositions. The first is
that, during most of the nineteenth century, leadership in public education primarily took the form of guiding a decentralized social movement. In that era, they argue, the chief task of leaders was to create
common schools across the nation through mobilizing opinion and effort at the local level. In stressing the importance of the rural, mostly
unbureaucratized mainstream of public education, they depart from
much recent historical literature which has focused on cities, growth of
state power, responses to industrialization, and bureaucratization.
Their second proposition is that at the turn of the twentieth century
much of the direction of the educational system devolved upon university experts and professional managers. These new leaders sought to
depoliticize decision making by shifting power inward and upward in
buffered systems. This change gave private individuals at the top of
professional hierarchies an awesome power: the ability to define what
was normal or desirable in educational thought and practice. The ear? 1980 by The University of Chicago. 0036-6773/80/8803-0001$02.28
May 1980
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lier task of creating the common school increasinglygave way to the
work of establishing new structures and processes of schooling that
would enable public education to mesh smoothly and efficientlywith a
corporate society. The authors stress, however, that there was overlap
between the two modes of leadership. In a brief epilogue they suggest
that in the last generationnew challengeshave arisen both to the public
philosophyof education fostered by the common school crusade and to
the ideal of leadership by buffered experts.
In 1903 the British educator Michael Sadler observed that "the American school is radiant with a belief in its mission, and it works among
people who believe in the reality of its influence, in the necessity of its
labors, and the grandeur of its task" (Sadler 1903; Cohen 1967). He
was writing during a major turning point in the history of American
educational leadership when a new ideal of social efficiency was
gradually displacing an older Protestant-republican ideology of
schooling. The central task of nineteenth-century crusaders had been
to establish the common school and to spread it across the nation. A
large proportion of them had been lay people or part-time educators
who used the characteristic methods of social movements to accomplish their purposes. To a large degree they shared a similar
concept of nation building which assigned a millennial role to public
schooling in creating a righteous society.
At the turn of the twentieth century the earlier evangelists were
replaced, for the most part, by full-time professional managers who
saw their careers as building on the foundations laid by Horace
Mann's generation but who held somewhat different views about the
functions of schooling. Equally millennial in their own way, they believed that they stood at a point in history when experts could and
should control the course of human evolution. The newer rhetoric of
reform shifted from religious to scientific language. They saw business efficiency as a social panacea. Instead of trying to mobilize local
citizens to act in a broad-based social movement, the twentiethcentury managers sought to "take the schools out of politics" and to
shift decision making upward and inward in hierarchical and buffered systems. This apparent depoliticization of policy making and
DAVIDTYACKis professor of education and history at Stanford
University. He is author of The One Best System:A History of American
Urban Education (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974).
ELISABETHHANSOT is associate professor of political science at Kenyon College. She is author of Perfection and Progress: Two Modes of
Utopian Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1974).
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Tyackand Hansot
this stress on expertise gave an awesome power to "hidden hierarchies" of individuals in the new university departments of education,
in the foundations, in professional associations, and in key superintendencies: the power to define what was normal or desirable in educational thought and practice. Believing that the basic structure of
society was just and progressive, the new leaders thought that they
knew how to bring about a smoothly running, socially efficient, and
stable society in which education was the major form of human engineering. Professional management would replace politics, science
would replace religion and tradition as sources of authority, and experts would adapt the schools to the vastly changed conditions of
modern corporate life (see Cubberley 1916; Welter 1962, chaps. 14,
16, 17; Gilbert 1972; Noble 1977; Spring 1972).
The one-room country school, with its steeple-like bell tower, was
the prototypical symbol of the common school movement, reflecting
its primarily rural character, its unbureaucratic nature, and its
Protestant-republican ideology of creating a nation in the hearts and
minds of the individual citizen. In contrast, the urban high school of
the early twentieth century, often looking like a factory with pilasters
and symbolizing the union of an attenuated traditional culture with a
dominant utilitarianism, became the archtype of the new educational
ideal of social efficiency and differentiation. As the specifically
theological content of the older millenarianism became muted, it became increasingly possible for educational leaders to think of evolution as a model of cosmic efficiency. They regarded science and new
organizational forms as new means of managing social progress toward "ever nobler ends"-purposes often compatible with elements
of the older providential ideology but suffused with a vision of a
unified but functionally specialized society (see Krug 1964, chap. 11;
Drost 1967).
Crusaders and managers employed somewhat different forms of
leadership to build and organize the schools despite some overlap in
their assumptions and methods. How can we explain this divergence
of leadership styles in the history of one institution? Most scholars
agree that leadership results from an interaction between person and
environment. Jacob Getzels has recently observed that "the findings
of academic research on leadership have been thin and . . . often
contradictory [because] we neglect the social context of leadership
and the effect of changing patterns of values on alternative patterns
of leadership behavior" (Getzels 1973, p. 20).1 We agree, and we seek
in this exploratory essay to build an interpretive framework which
analyzes changing forms of leadership in public education over long
periods of time within the larger context of developing values, inMay 1980
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stitutional structures, and broad social, politial, and economic change.
People lead in many ways: by mobilizing sentiment, generating new
ideas, mediating between factions, defending old traditions, using the
sanctions and rewards generated by bureaucratic authority, responding to crises, or establishing standard operating procedures that survive the death of the individual. In this essay we concentrate primarily
on the people who created and ran schools at the local level, those who
did the ordinary and important work of building and managing public education. We are more interested in broadly held ideologies-that
meeting ground between social and intellectual history-than in the
invention of new theories by leaders of thought like John Dewey. By
"ideology" we mean, following John Higham, an "explicit system of
general beliefs that give large bodies of people a common identity and
purpose, a common program of action, and a standard for selfcriticism" (Higham 1974, p. 10; see also Button 1975; and Mattingly
1975). We ask how institutions and routines arose, how spokespeople
used ideologies to arouse citizens or justify their actions, and how
leaders sought to change schools as objective conditions altered.
There are other stories to tell, and other conceptions of leadership,
but we believe that this type of analysis is important and has been
neglected.
We advance two basic propositions. The first is that, during most of
the nineteenth century, leadership in public education largely took
the form of guiding a decentralized social movement because the
chief task was the creation of common schools through the mobilization of opinion and effort at the local level. This was a common mode
of institution building in a nation with a strong tradition of voluntarism, minimal government apparatus, and only rudimentary professionalization and specialization of leadership. Public schooling
spread with amazing rapidity. It was an institution that was overwhelmingly rural, very simple in structure, supervised mostly by lay
people, and staffed by young untrained teachers. Only in the larger
towns and cities did salaried administrators appear, and even there
lay school board members took an active part in running the system.
State controls over local communities were weak, as were professional
associations and standards of pedagogical training. Persons who led
the social movement to create public education were often lay reformers or part-time educators who pursued multiple occupations;
for only a relatively small percentage was education a lifelong career.
The chief task of educational leaders of mid-century was to persuade
their fellow citizens to build and support schools and to send their
children to them, and this they did by the characteristic method of
social movements: mobilization of public opinion through persuasion,
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through appeal to a common ideology (see Higham 1974, pp. 12-16).
Our second proposition is that at the turn of the twentieth century
much of the direction of this established system devolved upon university experts and professional managers. Schools, like other organized sectors of society, became more and more structured into
hierarchical bureaucracies. Educational administration became a specialized occupation with its own training programs, professional associations, and career hierarchies. Educators and lay elites sought to
"take the schools out of politics" by centralization of control of urban
schools, state regulation of standards, and consolidation of rural
schools. They tried to turn political issues into administrative ones. As
in other domains-business and government, for example-organizational structures became more hierarchical and complex, the
number of salaried managers grew enormously, and decision making
increasingly was turned over to experts. As this "managerial revolution" proceeded in American society, the earlier task of creating the
common school gave way to the work of establishing new structures
and processes of schooling that would enable public education to
mesh smoothly and efficiently with a corporate society. Planning and
directing became more and more the province of experts and designated leaders who occupied the tops of organizational pyramids. Lay
leaders on school boards, of course, still retained formal authority.
Various outside groups like the business-labor-social reformer coalition that pushed for vocational education still exerted important influence. But the new organizational and political developments gave
much greater power to the insiders, the new experts and professional
managers (Strayer 1930).
As we shall indicate, the two modes of leadership were not so
sharply distinct as our brief characterizations above suggest. We do
not mean to argue for a "first A, then B" pattern. Recent historians
have frequently portrayed a shift from the local orientation, religious
values, and voluntaristic and individualistic character of life in the
nineteenth-century "island communities," on one hand, and the national perspective, scientific values, and bureaucratic ethos of urban
groups in the Progressive era, on the other (see, e.g., Galambos 1970,
p. 270). While we see much to commend such an interpretation, our
understanding of educational leadership in the two periods suggests a
significant overlap between the two eras. A large proportion of the
common school crusaders of the nineteenth century were cosmopolitans, in touch with currents of thought and action beyond the local
communities in which they worked. Linked to reform networks by
voluntary associations of regional and even national scope, they
looked beyond their immediate surroundings for guidance and
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tended to share the class culture of an emerging American
bourgeoisie. By giving children in remote communities the skills of
literacy and numeracy, exposure to knowledge about other cultures, a
strong sense of national identity, and exposure to a unifying, rulegoverned institution, the promoters of the common school may have
provided rural people with a kind of anticipatory socialization for
participating in an urban-industrial society of great geographical mobility and increasing occupational diversity.2
The mere fact that schools relied on local voluntary action did not
mean that they lacked coercive potential or necessarily represented
the values of the whole community. Initially, voluntaristic movements
like temperance and the common school crusades drew support from
particular segments of the society and readily turned to government
to achieve their ends (Gusfield 1966). Similarly, most public programs
for dependent or deviant children had their origins in voluntary
groups of the Victorian era. No categorical line should be drawn
between modes of leadership in decentralized social movements and
in the large formal organizations that became dominant at the turn of
the twentieth century. It is clear that many of the new captains of
education of the Progressive era retained many of the evangelical
values they had learned growing up in a small towns in the late Victorian period, a sense of continuity with the ideology and achievements
of Horace Mann's generation, though their memory of that past was
often selective (Tyack 1977).
In both periods leaders were drawn from groups that based their
claims on a form of certainty: in the first wave, the belief of an aristocracy of character that they understood America's providential destiny; and in the second, the conviction of experts that science and
business efficiency gave them a sure template for reform. What made
the work of the builders and shapers important in their own eyes was
not so much the heroism of great deeds but the sense of cosmic
significance they attributed to their tasks. They often saw themselves,
in different ways, as managers of the millennium.
Educational leaders faced opposition, to be sure, for they represented class, religious, political, and ethnic interests that were not
universal, whatever their hopes and claims. What is perhaps most
striking about their work was the degree of public agreement about
the nature of the common school that they reflected and created.
Without a strong federal government or even powerful direction by
the individual states, Americans created similar public schools across
the nation during the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century
local systems gradually converged on similar reforms advocated by a
"hidden hierarchy" of experts, many of whom were clothed with no
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public power.3 Unlike many industrializing countries where the educational system was primarily an instrument of state power, public
schools in this country were created and elaborated to a significant
degree as a product of private initiative and private power.
It would be possible, of course, to portray the development of
American education as the result of vast impersonal forces, or
alternatively, as the creation of great men and women. We have attempted to relate leadership to changing political, social, and economic contexts and to pay some attention to individuals. But here we
have focused on general patterns of leadership which gradually
changed over a long period of time. As we shall suggest in our
epilogue, in the last generation new challenges have arisen both to the
public philosophy of education fostered by the common school
crusade and to the ideal of leadership by professional managers.
Hence an understanding of this history may be of use in formulating
conceptions of leadership appropriate to the 1980s.
The Common
School Crusade as a Social Movement
Americans live today in an urban-industrial society in which important decisions and the management of everyday life have been delegated increasingly to specialized leaders in complex organizations.
The apparatus of government has expanded enormously until it directly or indirectly affects almost every domain. Because of these
changes-which are often taken for granted-it requires an effort of
imagination to conceive of the very different conditions which shaped
the creation of public education during the nineteenth century and
which provided settings for educational leadership.
The rapid expansion of the public school across the United States in
the years from 1840 to 1890 is the most impressive case of institution
building in American history, yet it took place with minimal direction
from the federal or state governments, with only rudimentary bureaucratization, and without strong guidance from a corps of career
professionals. The United States Office of Education was miniscule
and had little influence (see Warren 1974, chap. 5). As late as 1890 the
median size of state departments of education was two, including the
superintendent, an average of one official for every 100,000 pupils.
As state officers frequently complained, they had little power to compel compliance with laws if local communities balked (see National
Education Association 1931, p. 6; U.S. Commissioner of Education
1899, pp. 470-531; Messerli 1971, chaps. 12-14). The mainstream of
public education was rural and relatively unbureaucratized. In 1860,
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80 percent of Americans lived in communities classified by the census
as rural; in 1890, over 70 percent. The model rural educational institution was the one-room school. In 1890 there were more than
twice as many schoolhouses than there are today, despite the vast
increase in students (U.S. Bureau of the Census 1975, pp. 1, 11-12;
Blodgett 1893, p. 45; and Fishlow 1966). Most teachers were young,
poorly paid, with slight training (usually only graduates of elementary
schools), and were hired by lay trustees. Turnover of teachers was
very high (Ellsbree 1939). Professional associations were small and
had little power (Wesley 1957, p. 397; Mattingly 1975). Both teachers
and administrators in cities had longer tenure than those in the countryside, but there was greater mobility in and out of educational
careers. Of 14 leaders identified by Lawrence Cremin and Ellwood
Cubberley as key school reformers, nine were at some time lawyers,
11 were elected to state office, six were college professors or presidents, and four were ministers.4
Under such conditions, the people responsible for creating and
running this enormous, scattered network of common schools were
hundreds of thousands of lay people and short-term educators, aided
by a small contingent of career professionals.
Most of the recent historical literature on nineteenth-century education focuses on cities, bureaucratization, professionalization, growth
of state power, and responses to industrialization (see, e.g., Katz 1968;
Troen 1975; Bowles and Gintis 1976; Tyack 1974). These are important themes, especially for explaining the origins of twentieth-century
education, but they leave many gaps in our understanding of how and
why public education spread during the Victorian era. We believe that
the growth of public education at that time can best be understood as
the product of a broad-based, decentralized, institution-building social movement. These promoters shared a similar ideology and relied
heavily on local persuasion to achieve their ends, especially in scattered rural communities that could easily dodge the minimal power of
a minimal nineteenth-century state. The result of their labors-the
common school-was similar in different places partly because the
promoters shared a Protestant-republican ideology and similar economic and social interests. In like manner, Baptists or Methodists
created similar churches in widely scattered communities because
they, too, shared similar belief systems.5
Joseph Gusfield has defined "social movements" as "socially shared
activities and beliefs directed toward the demand for change in some
aspect of the social order" (1974, p. 2). A nineteenth-century school
reformer might have added that the socially shared beliefs were not
accidental but were the reflection of God's providential plan for his
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people. The common school crusade was a deliberate attempt to
create social change through mobilizing opinion and action. "Deliberate" because promoters relied heavily on consciously shared
values and on the force of human volition. "Mobilizing opinion and
action" because the leaders depended more on the fusing of common
purpose with their followers than on strong governmental apparatus
or the sanctions of bureaucratic authority. Because the common
school movement relied on partially shared values, much of the work
of leadership was to remind men and women of what they already
knew: that literacy and an upright character led to success and were
pleasing to God. The movement made use of voluntary associations to
advance its cause, but the crusade was far more extensive than membership in these groups.
Our interpretation-that the campaign to create common schools
was a form of social movement-differs
somewhat from usage in
recent scholarship on social movements.6 We argue that the promoters were mainstream leaders who affirmed what they regarded as
shared values through the building of institutions, rather than, as in
the example of social protest movements of the 1960s, campaigns by
disaffected people directed against an indifferent or hostile social
order. We see the common school crusade as one form of the evangelical outreach. A clue here lies in the observations of foreign visitors of
the time. Many of them called attention to the consciousness-raising
(or conscience-pricking) activities of local or state promoters of educational reform, often lay people, who sought to rouse their fellow
citizens to create institutions (see Siljestrom 1853, pp. 11, 39-42, 47).
These crusaders were customarily respectable citizens-at or near the
social apex of their local communities-who had great confidence in
their own ideology and who wished to persuade their contemporaries
to build institutions which would express and perpetuate those values,
often amid changing social or economic conditions. They saw themselves as an aristocracy of character more than as professionals. As
Paul Mattingly has said, they often proceeded in this institutionbuilding task as ministers did in promoting religion: they sought to
remind people of shared moral commitments and self-interest and to
point out the actions needed to realize those values and needs. Indeed, as we have suggested, both the common school movement and
the vast expansion of Protestant church membership during the
mid-nineteenth century draw on much the same pervasive millennial
ideology of Protestant republicanism (see Higham 1974, pp. 9-14;
Mattingly 1975, chap. 2).
John Higham points out that ideology was an important source of
unity in a nation characterized by institutional decentralization in
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church and state and prone to fragmentation because of religious,
ethnic, regional, and class diversity. He notes that a pan-Protestant
ideology gave to competing sects two common principles and a sense
of unified civic purpose: "the conviction that no compulsion should
rule the choice of faith," and a millennial faith that God had selected
America as a redeemer nation. The republican ideology that emerged
from the revolutionary experience subtly fused with this Protestant
ideology, Higham argues:
By giving the millennium a temporal and secular character, the
Protestant clergy identified the Kingdom of God with the American Republic; and the Protestant ideology thereupon attached
itself to American nationalism. In principle and in origin the two
were different. The national ideology was primarily political and
secular. It was born in the struggle for, and dedicated to the
defense of, an independent Republic. It drew heavily on nonChristian sources, notably the Enlightenment and the tradition of
classical humanism. The Protestant ideology, for all its entanglement with American culture, was supranational. It subordinated
all political structures and all territorial communities to the will of
God. Still, each came to supplement the other. Together, they
forged the strongest bonds that united the American people during the nineteenth century. [Higham 1974, pp. 14-15; see also
Tuveson 1968]
This Protestant-republican ideology found expression on the Great
Seal of the Republic in the motto Novus OrdoSeclorum("A New Order
for the Ages"). It provided an underlying unity to the leaders of the
common school movement. Indeed, the public school, like the
churches and other instruments of the Protestant paideia, was to be
the means of instilling that sense of mission and righteous character in
the rising generation. Thus the nation was to be created not so much
in the agencies of government-for Americans distrusted centralized
power either in church or state-as it was in the hearts and minds of
individual citizens. Aware that partisan disputes in politics and other
domains were splintering the polity, school reformers like Mann
dreamed that a common school might inculcate a moral and political
common denominator for a lasting Christian republic (see Smith
1967; Tyack 1966).
To stress the role of ideology in the common school movement is
not to deny the importance of economic, ethnic, religious, or political
interests or loyalties; a speculator trying to sell town lots, for example,
might promote schooling for quite mercenary motives. Nor is an emphasis on the decentralized character of the movement an assertion
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that it stemmed from some mystical grass-roots democracy. Although
enthusiasts for causes often speak in universal terms, the leadership
of social movements is usually rooted in particular parts of the social
order. It seems likely to us that the promoters of public education in
states and communities across the country were predominantly members of the group Daniel Walker Howe identifies as the carriers of
Victorian culture: Anglo-Saxon in ethnic background, evangelical
Protestant in religion, and bourgeois in economic status and outlook
(although, from their large numbers and geographical distribution,
hardly members of a narrow ruling elite) (Howe 1976, pp. 3-28).
They never doubted, however, that they spoke for a mainstream
population with a common ideology of America as a Protestant nation. Arthur Schlesinger, Sr., has argued that religion was the
reforms
strongest impetus behind most mid-nineteenth-century
(Schlesinger, 1950, pp. 3-27). United with a powerful republican
political ideology, Protestantism gave promoters a powerful symbol
system, networks of communication through the churches and missionary associations, and a common conception of the origins and
destiny of mankind and of ethical behavior. The McGuffeyReaders, for
example, written by a minister, clearly expressed what school reformers took to be a national civic and moral consensus.
Of course, the school promoters did not speak for all Americans.
Intolerant of the Roman Catholic Church, they so alienated Catholics
that they hastened the growth of a separate parochial school system,
the largest "alternative school" system then as now. Reformers were
mostly quite ethnocentric and wanted to assimilate immigrants to
their own version of Americanism. As bourgeois citizens at or near the
apex of their local communities, they praised America as a land of
economic opportunity and justice and tended to blame the poor for
their plight (Elson 1964). They wore the blinders of their class, religion, and ethnic background. By and large, however, they tried to
employ arguments designed to appeal to the largest number of citizens, freely mixing political, religious, and economic reasoning, confident that in a providential universe there could be little incongruity
between patriotism, godliness, and prosperity. Mostly lay people-or
persons who spent only a short time as educational reformers-they
rarely used narrowly professional appeals or deferred to expert
knowledge.
Social movements seek change and hence can arouse vehement
opposition. The prohibition movement, for example, created dissent
and energized political party conflicts throughout the nineteenth century (Jensen 1971; Kleppner 1970). The genius of the public school
movement, however, was that its leaders were able to wrap their cause
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in a noncontroversial Americanism. There was some conflict and disagreement, to be sure, as we suggested: communities argued over, for
example, the location of school buildings, racial segregation, class bias
or privilege, the teaching of foreign languages, Bible reading, the
extension of the curriculum and the creation of high schools, and
slurs about Catholics in schoolbooks (Tyack 1974). Communities differed greatly in their support of schooling. In sections of Illinois
where Yankees had migrated, there was much greater public enthusiasm for the common school than in places where migrants from
the American South predominated (Jensen 1978, pp. 16-17, 42-43).
In the United States, as a whole, Protestants often drew a truce line at
the schoolhouse door, unlike Protestants in some other Englishspeaking nations. One reason was that Protestants could agree on a
moral common denominator, the Protestant-republican ideology, to
be taught in the public school. Political parties rarely differed-as did
the Conservative and Labor parties in England, for example-over
the basic philosophy of public schooling. Thus two major sources of
contention found in other English-speaking countries were largely
lacking in the United States (Smith 1967).
Sustaining this similarity of ideology was the similar background
and communication network which united these widely separated
school promoters. Americans of the nineteenth century were extremely mobile, reproducing familiar institutions as they moved from
place to place. Though widely scattered, the bourgeois town leaders
were not hicks, out of touch with the metropolis. Farmers were entrepreneurs who produced for world markets and often were familiar
with advanced techniques of agriculture. Ministers kept in touch
through missionary newsletters and church periodicals. Land
speculators, laying out the plots of new towns on the frontier, had to
keep informed about transportation and commerce. Adept at boosterism in education, politics, religion, and business, Victorian opinion
shapers learned skills of persuasion in many domains as they shifted
from one job to another and one place to another (Potts 1971; Meyer
et al., in press).
The local leader in the common school movement was often a
prominent person who took it on himself or herself to exhort neighbors to found schools or to see that proper standards were maintained. Legitimacy came from appeal to common values and from a
personal reputation for virtue. The common school institutionalized
those beliefs and became what Willard Waller called "a museum of
virtue" (Waller 1965, pp. 424-25). Thus a local leader might be a
Congregational minister in Oregon who served as county superintendent while founding a church; a newspaper editor from Vermont
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who exhorted his readers to support public schools; a pioneer woman
teacher in Indiana who went from house to house to persuade parents
to send their children to the one-room school; or a lawyer in a Michigan town who persuaded his neighbors that a graded school would
attract more settlers and improve the community (Tyack 1966). No
sharp line can be drawn between symbolic action-the mobilization of
opinion-and practical action-serving as school trustee-since often
the same person engaged in both activities. Even those who worked
on a larger scale, as did state superintendents, usually combined
moral exhortation and the dissemination of the latest professional
techniques. They were, as Robert Wiebe notes, both the keepers of a
pedagogical model and the evangelists of a cause (Wiebe 1969). The
product of their efforts was a relatively uniform network of public
schools, similar in part because the guiding force was the ideology of a
national social movement which operated on a geographically scattered population.
Success brought changes, as with most social movements. New dissenting sects in time became flourishing churches, as H. Richard
Niebuhr illustrates in the case of the Methodists (Niebuhr 1957, pp.
29-33, 54-75). So it was with public schools as they became institutionalized and acquired hierarchies and professional leaders who
gave them continuity and direction. The "organizational revolution"
that altered most American institutions at the turn of the twentieth
century also changed public schooling (Hays 1972, pp. 2-3, 6-8).
There had been some career educators, insiders, who had devoted
their lives to standardizing and bureaucratizing public education during the period from 1840 to 1890-especially in the cities and in the
more settled regions of the country-but lay influence had remained
strong. The efforts by educators to routinize the charisma of the
evangelical leaders led, in fact, to persistent conflict with large urban
school boards and to assertions that educators were trying to turn city
school systems into dulling pedagogical machines (Rice 1893). During
the years from 1890 to 1920, the balance of power over education
began to tilt in favor of the professional insiders. Outside social
movements during the Progressive era, such as the vocational education crusade, did influence the schools, sometimes with the support of
change-minded professional managers, but those who occupied positions within the system as superintendents and experts gained much
greater autonomy and power over decision making after 1900. Professional managers, as we shall see, probably came from social origins
similar to those of the nineteenth-century leaders and continued to
express concerns and values similar to those of their forebears as they
advocated new "scientific" schemes for improvement with evangelical
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enthusiasm. Ellwood Cubberley spoke of the "religious" dimension to
school leadership, for example (Cubberley 1909). But a new stage in
leadership had arrived, to which we now turn.
Professional
Managers,
1890-1960
The years surrounding the turn of the twentieth century were a time
of revolution in the organizational character of American society.
During these years, in education, as in other domains, leadership
increasingly became the function of specialized managers in large and
complex organizations. The professional managers who guided the
transformation of the public schools usually shared a belief that they
were continuing a common historical tradition and working toward a
similar collective future-that they were, in a favorite word of the day,
at a favorable and crucial point in the evolution of human society and
of public education. They shared many concerns with the Victorian
school promoters, especially the older belief in shaping character and
citizenship. But there were significant differences in the outlooks and
strategies of the later leaders. Whereas the educational evangelists of
mid-century sought to arouse the citizenry against evils, the new professional managers talked more and more of social problems to be
solved by experts. The later ideology justified leadership by elites and
the transformation of politics into administration since only experts
were qualified to direct the course of human evolution according to
scientific principles (Tyack 1977).
Although the new generation of educators coming to power in the
early twentieth century differed somewhat among themselves in their
pedagogical principles, in their language of justification, and in the
particulars of the reforms they advocated, what they shared was in
many ways more striking than what they disagreed about. Michael
Sadler wrote that the key to the new "educational revival" was the
word "social" (Cohen 1967, pp. 288-89). The school reformers interpreted their social mandate in two major ways. One was to unify a
population that was ethnically, religiously, and economically diverse
and to give it a sense of collective purpose and loyalty. The second was
to adapt training in school to actual conditions in society and thereby
to change the definition of equality from sameness of treatment-an
earlier ideal-to differentiated treatment depending on individual
needs and the demands of the adult lives they would lead. In their
view this kind of individualization was not to promote individuality,
however; it was simply a means of fitting each person more efficiently
for a place in society. A "socially efficient" school system would thus
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provide both a sense of civic unity and a specialized course of study
adapted to academic talents and vocational destiny. Experts in the
science of education should create such a system of schooling in districts buffered from "politics" (Strayer 1930).
In his book, Changing Conceptionsof Education (1909), Cubberley
gave classic exposition to this evolutionary vision and practical program of the new generation of educational leaders. This work
foreshadowed the argument of his later books on educational administration and his History of Public Education in the United States,
which sold 100,000 copies and provided generations of educators
with knowledge of the traditions within which they worked and a
common set of images of potentiality. His view of education, at first a
mixture of selective memory and professional hopes, came to be selfevident to readers as the century wore on (Sears and Henderson
1957, chaps. 7-8).
In Conceptions Cubberley argued that the main force that had
changed American society was the vast increase in industrial production that brought transformations in politics, family life, religion, and
education. Concurrent with this economic revolution, and in large
part because of it, came the growth of cities and a massive influx of
immigrants (at the end of the century many millions of southeastern
Europeans, whom Cubberley thought inferior and hard to assimilate).
These developments weakened the older village modes of child rearing and social control which had kept the young "in the path of
rectitude" and taught them the attitudes and skills they needed to be
productive citizens. In the past decade, Cubberley noted, the "concentration of capital and business enterprises in all fields" accelerated,
trusts were formed, labor became splintered into many specialized
small tasks, and organizations became more hierarchical. "Success is
higher up the ladder now than it was a generation ago, while the
crowd about the bottom of the ladder increases every year." As a
result of this segmentation of labor, "the danger from class subdivision is constantly increasing, and the task is more and more thrown
upon the school of instilling into all a social and political consciousness
that will lead to unity amid diversity." To increase "social efficiency"
the schools should "give up the exceedingly democratic idea that all
are equal, and that our society is devoid of classes, as a few cities have
in large part done, and to begin a specialization of effort along many
new lines in an attempt better to adapt the school to the needs of these
many classes in the city life." At the same time that it differentiates the
curriculum to meet the different destinies of these classes, the school
must "awaken a social consciousness as opposed to class consciousness,
to bring out the important social and civic lessons." The school curMay 1980
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riculum is effective only insofar as it is "closely related with the needs
and problems of our social, civic, and industrial life" (Cubberley
1909).
Like his fellow educational leaders, Cubberley was quite aware of
these problems induced by urbanization, immigration, corruption in
politics, and the decline of previous forms of socialization in the older
village America. He had no doubt, however, that under proper guidance the school could meet any challenge:
Our state governments are weak and inefficient, we say; the
school must then teach, and teach in some effective manner, the
principles of strong and effective government. Our city governments are corrupt, we hear; fundamental moral and economic
principles must then be taught to the masses, so that they may
realize the importance of civic righteousness, and understand as
well who ultimately pays the bills for all mismanagement. Our
people waste their money and their leisure in idle and profligate
ways, we say; a knowledge of values and of how to utilize leisure
time must then be taught.
The time had come when universities should teach education as "a
study of means of improving the state and of advancing the public
welfare." Education was too important a matter to leave to parents or
politicians. It was a job for trained experts, noble men "with red blood
in their veins," who "know the world, its needs, and its problems,"
who "have largeness of vision, and the courage to do and to dare,"
and who can "train the youth with whom they come in contact for
useful and efficient action" (Cubberley 1909).
Cubberley was not one to mince his words. He illustrates the point
made recently by James Gilbert that "education and not politics was
the principal arena in which the issues of modern industrial capitalism
were joined" and "discussed with forthrightness" (Gilbert 1977, pp.
110-11). Cubberley's generation of educational entrepreneurs
worked with astonishing energy to engineer an improved American
society through education. In the process they carved out for themselves careers of prestige and profit. Some educators disagreed with
Cubberley's vision of an educational system differentiated by class, for
they feared, as did John Dewey, that his approach would do more to
industrialize humanity than to humanize industry (Featherstone
1972; Wirth 1972). Others questioned specific techniques he sponsored, like intelligence testing or cost accounting borrowed from business (Callahan 1962; Karier 1973). A number attacked his hierarchical ideal of management as elitist and undemocratic (Stephens 1967).
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nomic changes, his admiration for educational science, his romantic
view of efficiency, his call for lowering the wall between school and
society, his belief that schooling increasingly shaped the economic
career of graduates, his claims for professional autonomy in decision
making, and his conviction that society should and would become
more collective and less individualistic. They wanted to be managers
of a secular millennium that seemed not far off.
In many respects Cubberley's interpretation resembles more recent
accounts of the organizational revolution of the turn of the century.
Business and industry led the way in this revolution. Beginning in the
1890s, there was a massive consolidation of wealth and power in the
leading sectors of the economy, until in 1920 the largest 5 percent of
all industries earned 79 percent of total corporate net income (U.S.
Bureau of the Census 1975, 11:915). The number of workers and
specialization of labor in factories increased greatly during this
period, especially in the steel, textile, electrical, and metal fabrication
industries (Nelson 1975, chap 1). Governments also expanded
rapidly. In 1891 there was a total of 157,442 federal civilian employees, of whom over half were in the post office; by 1920 the
number had grown to 655,265 (U.S. Bureau of the Census 1975,
11:1102-3). The median size of state departments of education in
1890 was only two, but by 1930 it was 28 (NEA 1931, pp. 5-8).
As Alfred Chandler has shown, businessmen invented new strategies of management to control the vast and complex structures they
had created. Beginning with functional specialization in the railroads,
and spreading to the multidivision industries created by consolidation, the new managers developed elaborate statistical and managerial
techniques to monitor production processes, transport, and markets
and used new budgeting methods to forecast and plan for the future
operations of giant firms. Once relatively simple and parsimonious in
hierarchy, businesses developed multilevel and functionally differentiated networks of management. They depended increasingly on
recruiting experts trained in new techniques in the new schools of
business which were created after 1900 (Chandler 1977).
Such changes in organizational leadership spread rapidly to other
sectors of American life-schools, universities, governments, voluntary associations, and the professions. What Burton Bledstein calls
"the culture of professionalism" had been growing since the Civil
War, and during the Progressive era this set of attitudes toward the
ideal of "scheduled mobility" in hierarchical careers merged with a
mania for "efficiency and uplift" through scientific design of work
and organizational differentiation (Bledstein 1976). The older doctrine of the self-made man and practice of multiple occupations-in
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which the jack-of-all trades could turn his hand to any job-became
replaced in elite circles by the concept of specialized careers (this was
infused with moral-meritocratic overtones that resembled in some
ways the older providential view of society; expertise and hierarchy
allowed a person to rise as far as his or her talents would permit, while
the expert served society better than the nonspecialist) (Rodgers 1978,
pp. 233-42). Universities created new vocational training programs
for these specialists. Occupational associations multiplied and sought
to control entry and certification and to set professional norms. This
new "middle class" of specialists increasingly identified themselves as
members of national occupations and formed associations to advance
their interests. Political interest groups gained new influence, voter
participation declined, and advocates of efficiency and expertise
sought to turn political questions into administrative decisions (Burnham 1965; Wiebe 1967).
Such changes deeply affected governance and leadership in public
education. Elites and educators embued with the new professionalism
cooperated in successful campaigns to centralize control of city
schools in small boards based on the corporate model (in which a
small group of trustees-preferably "successful men"-delegated the
actual running of schools to expert superintendents) (Tyack 1974, pt.
3). Less successfully, reformers tried to consolidate one-room rural
schools and to reduce the number of school districts; this campaign
did not gain strong momentum until mid-century (Sher 1977, chaps.
1-2). However, educators persuaded state legislatures to pass manifold regulations to bureaucratize schools. Aided by educational associations and university educationists, enlarged state departments of
education policed the new standards of teacher and administrator
certification, uniform curricula, school construction, pupil accounting
and compulsory attendance, and school finance (Flanders 1925).
The centralization of city schools under small boards with cosmopolitan outlooks, the consolidation of rural schools, the imposition
of uniform state standards-these served to make schools that were
already fairly homogeneous even less provincial and more alike in
their practices. They also lessened the role of local lay people in governance and heightened the autonomy of professionals. The person
in charge was regarded more and more as the expert, the designated
bureaucratic official (usually the superintendent) (Tyack 1977).
In the twentieth century educational organizations grew enormously in size and gave local educators a sense of professional unity.
The National Education Association (NEA), for example, which typically had only 3,000-5,000 members during the nineteenth century,
passed the 100,000 mark in 1922. Educational
specialties
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multiplied-superintendents,
principals, counselors, vocational educators, attendance officers, and the rest-and almost all developed
their own organizations, giving them a sense of being members of a
national guild. Regional accrediting associations helped to
determine-and
often freeze-the new uniform standards (Wesley
1957, chap. 24).
The theory and practice of "professionalism" and the attempts to
"take the schools out of politics" tended to change educational leadership from a "cause" (promoted by many advocates in a social movement) into a "function" to be performed by experts (Katz 1971, chap.
2). One problem faced by those who sought to create a profession of
educational leadership, however, was that the field of educational
administration was so new and its content so uncertain. In 1890-91, in
the 20 leading universities with schools of departments of education,
only two courses were offered in "supervision and management"
(Luckey 1903, p. 157). There were no full-fledged programs to prepare administrators until Teachers College, Columbia University, developed one in the early twentieth century. Other universities rapidly
followed suit (Tyack 1977, pp. 279-82).
But what was to be taught? Influential academics and professional
managers favored teaching the skills of "scientific management" as
developed in business and the quantitative techniques called "the science of education." As in business, government, and other complex
organizations, leaders in education believed that the systematic collection of statistical data could guide analysis and decision making. Accepting the notion that schools should be divorced as much as possible
from "politics," educators argued that they should be delegated most
decisions over curriculum and instruction, planning of buildings, and
selection and supervision of employees. Like students preparing to
become businessmen, they took courses in budgeting, personnel
finance, and public relations (Callahan 1962).
management,
Textbooks and research in school administration tended to stress
practical techniques far more than philosophical or social scientific
principles. Within the "science" of education, administrators tended
to pay most attention to those fields that bore most closely on organizational questions, such as the testing and classification of pupils, the
diversification of structure and curriculum, and the evaluation of staff
and students (Newlon 1934, chaps. 10-11). The field of "child accounting" burgeoned-the keeping of detailed records of attendance,
progress and test scores-as a hallmark of increased bureaucratization. Whereas nineteenth-century superintendents often spent much
time in their reports discussing philosophical questions and the rationale of the common school, in the twentieth century they paid
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more attention to compiling statistical tables, cost accounting, budget
forecasts, and internal audits of performance-all techniques common in the newly organized industries (Troen 1975, chaps. 9-10).
Relatively few superintendents pursued degrees at these new university centers of educational administration-like Teachers College,
Columbia; Stanford; or the midwestern state universities-but those
who did often found themselves at the center of the palace politics of
public schooling. Leading professors at such schools often became
placement barons, people to whom major school systems turned for
recommendations of superintendents and other high officials. This
sponsor system sometimes was national in scope, sometimes regional
or statewide. In either case the sponsor system provided a powerful
incentive to ambitious men (and they were almost all men in the "old
boy" network) (Rose 1969).
In return, the superintendents thus placed often invited their
mentors to come to "survey" their city systems and advise them on the
latest procedures issuing from the new science of education. This
symbiotic relationship between the leading universities and major
school systems became an important channel of influence on the
structure and functioning of urban education. Experts came to cities
with a template of approved practices which they would lay on the
existing schools. Aided in their work by foundations and the U.S.
Office of Education, these professors and other experts rapidly
spread their version of the one best system of schooling-one supposedly justified by the new "science" of education-in reports bristling with statistics and largely conservative presuppositions about the
good society (Caswell 1929).
The majority of school districts, of course, remained small, and
until the 1930s their professional leaders had only minimal specialized training. The approved patterns of governance, structures,
and procedures pioneered by the university leaders, however, were
set forth with remarkable unanimity in textbooks on administration,
in professional associations, in state regulation, and in the new codes
of professional ethnics. These helped to create the standard operating
ideology and procedures of public education (Newlon 1934). Whereas
many local leaders in public education in the nineteenth century had
been lay people or short-term or part-time educators, during the
twentieth century superintendents were mostly career professionals.
Typically, superintendents were Protestants in their mid-forties, came
from rural areas, had spent about 20 years moving up from teacher to
principal to superintendent (with intermediate steps on the ladder in
cities), and regarded themselves as professionals with a special mandate to make educational decisions (Tyack 1977, pp. 263-68).
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Although many of their duties were mundane and they had to endure
the "meddling" of lay boards and interest groups, they largely endorsed a role as expert "school executives," much like their counterparts in other complex organizations. They, too, had visible career
ladders and spent most of their work lives in the schools (Callahan
1962).
Why did the business model of leadership and practice so pervade
public education? Germs of it were already there in nineteenthcentury cities, as we have seen, and in the calls by lay businessmen like
Charles Francis Adams for scientifically trained school managers
(Adams 1880). Not only schools but almost all American institutions
profoundly reflected the ideals and practices of business (Cochran
1972). Despite the aim of "taking schools out of politics," school superintendents were vulnerable to lay criticism and thus often thought it
was wise to adopt rhetoric and organizational techniques from prestigious business in order to win public support, especially from the
local elites who predominated on school boards (Callahan 1962).
There is abundant evidence, as well, that school "executives" tended
to share the outlook of businessmen on social issues and a common
ideal of the good society (Spring 1972, chap. 1). Functionalist
sociologists suggest that similar systems of management emerged in
both business corporations and large school systems because both
faced similar problems of coordination and planning created by the
size and complexity of their operations (Swift 1971). John Higham
has argued that the new patterns of specialized governance in both
business and education were part of a new "system of integration" he
calls "technical unity." This principle gradually replaced the older
Protestant-republican millennial ideology which had helped to unify
the common school movement. By "technical unity" he means
... a reordering of human relations by rational procedures designed to maximize efficiency. Technical unity connects people
by occupational function rather than ideological faith. It rests on
specialized knowledge rather than general beliefs. It has had
transforming effects in virtually every sphere of life. As a method
of production, technical integration materialized early in the factory system. As a structure of authority it has taken the form of
bureaucracy. As a system of values, it endorses a certain kind of
interdependence, embodied in the image of the machine. Technical relations are machinelike in being impersonal, utilitarian,
and functionally interlocking. Since the Civil War, the growth of
technical unity has been the single most important tendency in
American social history; and its end is not in sight. [Higham
1974, p. 19]
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Seen through this lens one can view the shift of leadership in education from a broad social movement based on religious millennial
hopes to a specialized function of professional administrators based
on a secularized version of that same optimism.
But it would be a mistake, as we have suggested, to suppose that the
earlier Protestant-republican ideology suddenly died out. In the early
twentieth century, Higham says, "an extraordinary quickening of
ideology occurred in the very midst of a dazzling elaboration of technical systems" (Higham 1974, p. 19). In education, in particular, many
of the people who argued for new forms of "social engineering" were
themselves heirs of the Victorian evangelicals and spoke in glowing
terms of America's destiny. They did not consider "science" or "efficiency" antithetical to idealism. The earlier moral and political purposes remained, although the language used to clothe the ideas
shifted from the rhetoric of evangelical Protestantism to that of social
efficiency. Faith in progress had undergirded the notion of America
as a redeemer nation. Now the common belief in social evolution gave
the authority of science and history to that optimism (Drost 1967).
Indeed, the legacy of the earlier social movement that created the
common school gave the new educational executives much of their
moral capital, their fund of metaphors, and their continuing appeal to
an evangelical tradition. Mostly Anglo-Saxon Protestants of rural
background, seeing schools as "museums of virtue," superintendents
often recurred to the older heroic conceptions of leadership when
they reflected on their work (Cubberley 1909). It was the task of
educational leaders, said the 1933 Yearbookof the American Association of School Administrators (AASA), "to mold human character and
to ameliorate the whole intellectual, moral, social, civic, and economic
status of their fellows" (see NEA 1933, pp. 159, 278, 325-30, 334-35).
Amid criticism of public education in 1952 the same Yearbookdeclared: "Today's mid-century attacks upon the schools and school
leaders are not more powerful nor more vicious than those of 100
years ago. The Horace Manns and Henry Barnards had to win support by sheer missionary zeal and convincing logic." It concluded that
now, as then, "It is the superintendent of great heart and courageous
spirit, possessed of sound judgment and deep understanding, who
will carry the profession and the schools forward.... His world will be
immeasurably enriched by his service and leadership." Nothing less
would do than to attract to the superintendency "the wisest, the
strongest, the bravest, and the most understanding of the truly great
men and women our civilization produces" (AASA 1952, pp. 63, 437,
444).
Of course, such incantations-like
inspirational speeches at
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conventions-may simply have become background music for harried
bureaucrats. The rhetoric of charisma rarely matched the routines of
the work. But at least until the last generation, this sense of millennial
hope complemented the language of professionalism, the cult of efficiency and scientisin. The dual traditions of leadership often
merged in both the minds of the citizens and in the individuals who
bore the day-to-day responsibility for running the schools.
Epilogue
We have suggested that past educational leaders shared a strong faith
in the mission of the common school, informed in the first period by a
sense of America's providential destiny and in the second by a trust in
science and business efficiency. It may be that unusually fortunate
circumstances favored this optimism. In the nineteenth century most
evangelical Protestants shared a common image of a godly society,
and this consensus helped school promoters command widespread
pan-Protestant support for public education. Although growing religious and ethnic pluralism had weakened this common understanding by the Progressive era, a new claim to public trust arose: the
contention that experts could carry out the public interest in education if freed from "politics." That public education actually served
sectarian world views and favored certain political and economic
interests seems quite clear in retrospect, but it is striking that there
was so little partisan Protestant contest over public instruction and
that political parties rarely conflicted openly over either the philosophy or the spoils of the common school. The supposedly areligious
and apolitical character of public education was not only a myth useful to educators but also a sign of a basic societal agreement that
sectarian discord and political conflict should stop at the schoolhouse
door. Disagreements have more often focused on how the schools
should achieve their ends than on what those purposes should be.
In the last generation this earlier and remarkably stable entente has
come under sharp attack as traditional forms of governance have
become delegitimized and claims demythologized (Cuban 1976). The
historic optimism of school people has radically declined, especially
after the failed hopes and unfulfilled promises of the antipoverty
decade. Under attack from many quarters, administrators have often
abandoned the millennial aspirations and faith in expertise of earlier
times and sought survival in a low profile. Much of this conflict and
change has resulted from a widening gap between the insiders who
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siders who sought to change education by participating in protest
movements. Rather than trying to create new institutions as part of a
mainstream coalition, the participants in recent social movements in
education have largely been disaffected people who have sought to
alter an existing establishment (Watson 1977).
The magnitude of the recent changes in the politics and governance of education can be glimpsed by scanning the books on that
subject written in the 1950s. Reading these standard studies, wrote
Stephen Bailey, "is a little like studying modern geography with a
pre-World War II textbook, and a pre-World War I atlas" (Bailey
1969). At center stage in the 1950s scenario was the school board and
the superintendent. Local interest groups occasionally entered the
dialogue but were politely shunted aside. In the wings, giving faint
signals, was the state department of education. The school lawyer was
the man who defended the board when a parent sued the district
because a child slipped on the icy steps of the high school. Now and
then, people debated abstractly about the benefits and dangers of
federal influence if and when Congress decided to grant federal aid.
The board decided annually how much of a raise it could afford to
give the teachers. Ethnic issues if they were considered at all, were
usually perceived as problems in "intergroup relations."
In the 1960s traditional goals and governance were sharply challenged by new participants in the political arena. In cities, especially,
groups that had once been at the fringes of decision making now
wanted to share the power-notably teachers, minority groups, and
students. Teachers demanded collective negotiations. The American
Federation of Teachers and the NEA competed with one another for
the loyalty of militant teachers; strikes became commonplace (Cole
1969). Members of minority groups, especially blacks, developed various strategies to influence educational policy, including court cases,
boycotts, and more militant actions, as in the momentous strike and
decentralization crisis in New York City in 1968-69. Disappointed
with the results of years of effort to desegregate schools, some blacks
opted instead for community control. Ethnic self-determination and
pride sparked campaigns for affirmative action in hiring minorities,
for new bilingual programs, and for courses in ethnic history. Students in many kinds of communities contested the authority of school
administrators to restrict dress and other forms of expression and
pressed for changes in school regulations and curriculum. Lawyers
supported by federal legal aid grants took many school districts to
court for violation of constitutional rights (Nordin 1977).
There had been, of course, no golden age when all people sup-
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ported the public school. But in the 1960s and 1970s the tempo and
character of educational criticism changed. So successful had been the
earlier "reform" of buffering schools from lay constituencies that
educators had become increasingly insulated from the diverse publics
they served-especially from groups that felt that they were outsiders,
excluded from influence. No longer willing to concede that the experts knew best-especially in the light of new studies showing testscore declines and other pathologies-activists
pressured school
boards and legislatures for changes. Splintered into numerous special
interest groups, these reformers competed with one another for attention and funds. Disillusioned by the overpromising of educators
during the Great Society programs of the 1960s, many citizens came
to believe that tax cuts and retrenchment made more sense than
"throwing money at problems."
The new educational politics has posed sharp dilemmas for those
who seek to guide American public education. Managers socialized to
an ideology of buffered expertise find the new participatory politics
and litigiousness baffling and frustrating. Long accustomed to expansion and optimism, educators face cutbacks and basic questioning of
the value of the common school. The older millennial claims now
sound quaint. Few today would affirm that the teacher "is the prophet
of the true God and the usherer in of the true Kingdom of God" or
would recall that John Dewey wrote those words in 1897 (Dewey
1929, p. 17). Despite the new challenges to public education, however,
we believe that the American faith in schooling praised by Michael
Sadler in 1903 is not dead. Indeed, a central task of educational
leaders today is once again to reformulate the purposes and improve
the performance of the common school so that it matches the aspirations of the American people.
Notes
We gratefullyacknowledgethe support of Stanford'sInstitutefor Research
on Educational Finance and Governance. The essay, of course, does not
necessarilyreflect the views of that agency or its sponsor, the National Institute of Education.
1. For reviews of leadership research in education, see Cunningham and
Gephart (1973) and Cunningham, Hack, and Nystrand (1977); for a comprehensive listing of studies in the social sciences, see Edinger and Searing
(1967).
2. We are much indebted to Professor Daniel Calhoun for a conversation
in which he suggested what he called the "proto-urban"characterof voluntary associationsand helped us to reformulate our essay.
May 1980
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From Social Movement to Professional Management
3. For insights into private power we are indebted to Corinne Gilb (1966).
4. Comparative career lines compiled from data in the Dictionaryof American Biography (1935).
5. A good source of the self-conceptions of leaders is the set of obituaries
published from time to time in the National Education Association's Addresses
and Proceedings; see, e.g., 1885, pp. 13-18; 1886, pp. 246-58; and 1888, pp.
667-84.
6. See, e.g., Meyer, Tyack, Nagel, and Gordon (in press). See the critique
by Meyer and Roth (1970), and the differing orientations in the reader edited
by Gusfield (1974). Roberta Ash provides a radical historical perspective in
Social Movementsin America (1972); for a brief survey of recent approaches to
social movements, see Zald and Berger (1978).
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