Education and the City

Theory, History and Contemporary Practice

Gerald Grace

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415417457
• eBook ISBN: 9781135668839
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

City schools, especially those attended by working class and ethnic minority pupils are teh catalysts of many significant issues in educational debate and policy making. They bring into sharp focus questions to do with class, gender and race relations in education; concepts of equality of opportunity and of social justice; and controversies about the wider political economic and social context of mass schooling.

America, Western Europe and Australia have all taken a keen interest in the problems of urban schooling. The contributors to this collection of original essays all share a concern about these problems, although they approach them from a wide range of theoretical and ideological positions.

Gerald Grace and his contributors criticis the current limitations of urban education as a field of study and they present a foundation for a more historically located and critically informed inquiry into problems, conflicts and contradictions in urban schooling. Part I presents contributions on theories of the urban. Part II focuses upon the history of urban education both in Britain and the USA. Part III discusses contemporary policy and practice with essays relating to education in inner city London and in New York City.

This book was first published in 1984.

Part I

The study of the urban

1

Urban education: policy science or critical scholarship?

Gerald Grace

If the argument of the urban sociologist Ray Pahl (1975) is accepted, that metropolitan cities in all societies provide a crucial arena for the making visible of fundamental social, economic, cultural and political relations and conflicts, then the potential value of a field of study concerned with urban education would appear to be high. Urban education, conceived of as the investigation of such relations and conflicts as they impinge upon and are exemplified in metropolitan education systems, could be intellectually and practically fruitful. On the other hand, if urban education continues to justify Raynor's description of it (in Raynor and Barnes 1978: p. 3) as ‘a loose collection of disparate topics gathered under one heading, lacking in definition and therefore susceptible to whim, current concern or the crisis of the moment’, then it will be a mystification and a diversion.

It is in the hope of advancing the former cause and of resisting the latter that this paper is written. It has two purposes. The first is to provide some epistemological location for the existing field of urban education by placing it in its theoretical and historical context. The intention here is to trace the origins of urban education study in the USA in the 1960s, to examine the nature of the researches and publications developed subsequently in this field and to consider the ways in which such researches and publications have influenced the development of urban education study in Britain from the early 1970s. The second purpose is to offer a critique of the study of urban education as it currently exists and to suggest a possible reformulation of its theory and its practice.

Urban education studies in America

Urban education as a ‘topic of inquiry’¹ or as a discrete area of study began to take significant institutional form in the USA in the 1960s and early 1970s. Among the first courses were those directed by Robert J. Havighurst at Chicago University in 1960. Havighurst, originally a science educator, then psychologist and sociologist of education, became one of the founding fathers of the subject.² Commissioned by the Chicago Board of Education to make an appraisal of the problems confronting the city's schools, his reputation was first established by the subsequent report The Public Schools of Chicago (1964). By 1965, he was Director of the new Center for the Study of Metropolitan Problems in Education at the University of Missouri and in 1967 occupied the new chair in urban education at Fordham University in New York City. His publications, Education in Metropolitan Areas (1966) and Metropolitanism: Its Challenge to Education (1968) provided an important focus for the growing interest in urban affairs among educationists and policy makers.³

At the same time, other developments were taking place. At Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, a co-ordinating committee for work in urban education had been established in 1966 under the chairmanship of A.H. Passow. Teachers College and Teachers College Press played an important part in the early institutionalisation and dissemination of urban education study. In 1962, supported by a grant from the Ford Foundation, a Work Conference on Curriculum and Teaching in Depressed Urban Areas had been organised at the college. This resulted in the publication of a reader, Education in Depressed Areas (1963), which became a widely used text. Further annual conferences and published collections of papers consolidated the field with texts such as Education of the Disadvantaged (1967), Developing Programs for the Educationally Disadvantaged (1968) and Reaching the Disadvantaged Learner (1970). The appearance of specialist journals in the form of Urban Education (1964) and Education and Urban Society (1968) marked a further stage in the institutionalisation process, as did the appearance of social foundations courses in urban education in many teacher colleges and universities.⁴ By this time, interest in education and the urban question was widely shared among educationists, administrators, policy makers and government departments in America. In 1969 the Secretary of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare announced the formation of a number of task forces to assist him in long-range planning, budgeting and legislative process. An Urban Education Task Force was established to assist in ‘finding solutions for the educational crisis in the urban areas of the nation’ and to produce ‘recommendations for steps that could be taken by the Administration to deal effectively with the crisis’, (Riles 1970: p. 351). The Urban Education Task Force Report was published in 1970, and this substantial document with its analysis of the ‘urban education problem’ and its suggestions for action and policy became a focus for academic and political discussion and debate. By 1972 it was possible for the editors of a collection of papers in honour of R.J. Havighurst to remark that it was becoming difficult for an educationist to keep up with the amount and range of disciplinary work in urban education.⁵

Urban studies and urban education

The phenomenon of the rise of urban education in the 1960s can be seen to be a part of the general expansion of urban studies which took place at this time both in the USA and in Europe. In treating urban education as a field of academic and policy concern it is important to reflect upon the social and political context in which all forms of urban study flourished and it is important also to examine the theoretical roots of urban studies in general. Writing of this period in America, Cohen (1977: p. 120) refers to the ‘alienation and rebelliousness throughout America … the war in Vietnam, the oppression of the black population, the blighting of cities, the lawlessness of politics, the corruptibility and impersonality of institutions’. Castells (1977: p. 405) points to the riots of blacks in Harlem in 1964 and in Watts in 1965 as constituting ‘a most significant factor in the breakdown of social order in the cities during the sixties'. The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (1968, p. 410) (Kerner Report) had warned Americans that ‘none of us can escape the consequences of the continuing economic and social decay of the central city.’ It is no random coincidence that urban studies should begin to flourish at this time with contributions coming from urban economics, geography and environmental studies, urban planning, design and administration, locational studies and political science. It would seem to be clear that the rise of urban studies as a general field was facilitated by the expectation that academics and researchers would be able to provide some strategies for policy makers faced with increasingly volatile urban situations. During the 1960s and early 1970s journals were founded, courses established and research projects launched to examine the causes of the ‘urban crisis’. Whilst this phenomenon was most visible in America it had its parallels in Europe. Pickvance (1976) has interestingly pointed out the way in which the French government provided funds for urban research in universities and independent research institutions following the ‘events’ of May 1968 in Paris.⁶

What might be seen as a crisis in legitimation in social, economic, race and political relations, particularly in America, was being interpreted in this period as a problem of the cities. Since the most dramatic manifestations of economic decay, social deprivation, race conflict and political resistance found their expression in the metropolitan cities it was possible for such an interpretation to command a prima facie credibility. Urban studies arose therefore in conditions of crisis (understood in these terms) and their fundamental mandate was to find solutions for the crisis.

The Chicago School

The theoretical roots of urban studies may be discerned at two levels, a level which drew upon the theoretical and methodological legacy of the Chicago School of urban sociology and a level which drew upon a wider range of disciplines loosely organised around the notion of an ‘urban system’. The Chicago School as the only systematic school of urban sociology provided crucial and influential inputs into the field of urban studies. Park's (Park, Burgess and McKenzie 1925) view of the city as an organised unit in space ‘produced by laws of its own’ offered a paradigmatic framework to be elaborated or contested. A preoccupation with the moral and social order of the city and its relationships with social solidarity at local levels in ‘natural areas’ or ‘communities' fitted well with contemporary concern over just such questions. The concentric zone theory of urban growth associated with Burgess (ibid.) and the work on human ecology of McKenzie (ibid.), Hawley (1950) and Duncan et al (1960) provided models for further empirical inquiry into the interaction of environment, population, technology and social organisation. Wirth's theories (1938, 1964) of city forms of social life made ‘urbanism’ a distinct phenomenon for investigation.⁷ The Chicago School provided not only the first corpus of systematic urban study but also the models, the procedures and the parameters for future study. The work of Park, McKenzie, Burgess and Wirth generated a type of ‘urban imagination’ which was compelling because it caught something of the dramatic structural changes and cosmopolitan cultural variety of a great city. The forms of urban ecological and spatial modelling which emanated from this school, the brilliance of its urban ethnography and community studies and its insistence upon direct empirical engagement with the social life of cities all help to explain its considerable influence.⁸ But perhaps the most important theoretical function of the Chicago School was to provide a legitimation for the developing field of Urban Studies. By making available a sociological definition of the city constituted in terms of its own laws and characterised by new forms of social relations (urbanism) related to dimension, density and heterogeneity of population, the Chicago School assisted crucially in the construction of an urban problematic.

Policy science

While Chicago School urban sociology legitimated the field and provided important theoretical and methodological models for use or criticism, the particular conditions of the urban crisis in America in the 1960s and early 1970s were seen to require a more wide-ranging and modern treatment. This was to be found in notions of inter-disciplinary inquiry which took as their major focus the structure, operation and functioning of ‘urban systems’. In essence, urban systems were taken to represent complex divisions of labour located in space and involving a dense and heterogeneous population, an intricate pattern of exchange, consumption, distribution and movement all held in a delicate state of equilibrium but constantly in danger of crisis because of technical, economic, social or political dysfunctions. The investigation of urban systems provided an appropriately scientific and policy-related focus for a new field which required both research funding and political and institutional recognition. The 1960s saw the rise of concepts of the urban system and of issues of planning, management and control associated with such systems; thus ‘the urban research industry was mobilised towards an understanding of the urban system so that “planners” could intervene to push the system in the chosen direction’ (Pahl 1975: p. 294). Castells (1976: p. 63) observes that the Chicago School's initial concern with integration in the city had by the 1960s been extended to other questions, ‘problems of management of the system as a whole … public sector intervention to organise the consumption of collective goods, attempts to manage the social tensions produced by the spatial expression of processes of ethnic and social segregation’. The policy science⁹ features of the urban studies of this period are epitomised in publications such as Urban Research and Policy Planning (1967), The Urban Challenge to Government (1969), Financing the Metropolis (1970), Urban Economics: Processes and Problems (1972), Urban Management and Social Change (1974). While it is impossible to put a precise location upon the emergence of this technicist phase of urban studies, the founding of the Urban Affairs Quarterly (1965) designed ‘to facilitate interchange … between those engaged in basic or applied research and those responsible for making or implementing policy and programs’ provides at least a significant marker of this development.

It is within the American social and political context which has been described and against a background of wider developments in urban studies that the emergence of urban ed...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part I: The study of the urban
• Part II: Historical location
• Part III: Contemporary policy and practice
• Index of names
• Index of subjects