From the New Deal to the War on Schools

Race, Inequality, and the Rise of the Punitive Education State

Daniel S. Moak

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781469668215
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Politique d'éducation

In an era defined by political polarization, both major U.S. parties have come to share a remarkably similar understanding of the education system as well as a set of punitive strategies for fixing it. Combining an intellectual history of social policy with a sweeping history of the educational system, Daniel S. Moak looks beyond the rise of neoliberalism to find the origin of today's education woes in Great Society reforms. In the wake of World War II, a coalition of thinkers gained dominance in U.S. policymaking. They identified educational opportunity as the ideal means of addressing racial and economic inequality by incorporating individuals into a free market economy. The passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) in 1965 secured an expansive federal commitment to this goal. However, when social problems failed to improve, the underlying logic led policymakers to hold schools responsible. Moak documents how a vision of education as a panacea for society's flaws led us to turn away from redistributive economic policies and down the path to market-based reforms, No Child Left Behind, mass school closures, teacher layoffs, and other policies that plague the public education system to this day.

Part I From Political Economy to Equal Opportunity

The Struggle over Ideas, 1932–1965

CHAPTER ONE To Reconstruct or Adjust?

The Battle within the Progressive Education Movement, 1920s–1940s

In July 2010, just two years after the start of the Great Recession that devastated the lives of millions of Americans and helped launch him into the presidency, President Barack Obama walked up to a lectern to address the Centennial Conference of the National Urban League. The destruction of the Great Recession was still roiling the nation, 8.7 million would lose their jobs, the unemployment rate topped 10%, 10 million people lost their homes, and one in seven Americans was living below the poverty line.¹ As President Obama was greeted joyfully by the crowd in Washington, D.C., he told the audience he wanted to focus on “an issue I believe will largely determine not only African American success, but the success of our nation in the 21st century.”² The issue was reforming the education system. Indeed, according to the president, “education is an economic issue—if not ‘the’ economic issue of our time.”³ After lamenting that the existing education system had produced racial achievement gaps and students ill prepared for the labor market, and placed American in an inferior position to international competitors—the president pressed for more and better testing, workforce training, and greater accountability for schools and teachers. As the Great Recession was exposing the horrors of years of neoliberal economic policies, the president excoriated the educational—not the economic—status quo, proclaiming “this status quo is morally inexcusable, it’s economically indefensible, and all of us are going to have to roll up our sleeves to change it.”⁴

This speech by President Obama is indicative of the current consensus that the education system is in crisis, and that educational reforms are key to solving myriad social problems. Both major political parties and important interest groups have voiced concerns about the quality of schooling, the effectiveness of teachers, the difficulty of curriculum, the need for more accountability, and the comparative effectiveness of the public education system in the United States. Underlying this diagnosis of school deficiency is a remarkable consensus about the purpose of the education system. Elites from across the political spectrum promote the idea that the public education system should be focused on imparting skills that offer individuals the potential for future success within the existing social and economic order. From the political right, this view of education is defended as the most efficient way of ensuring that individual earnings are tied to the skills the individual brings to marketplace and that there is a steady supply of skilled workers for the labor market, and as the best means of preserving the nation’s international preeminence.⁵ The political left embraces this understanding out of a belief that an education system ordered on these principles provides the best means of economic mobility for the meritorious and offers a path to success even for individuals from traditionally disadvantaged groups.⁶

What is striking about this vision of the purpose and function of education in American society is its narrowness. The role of education is reduced to developing and then efficiently and equally distributing the opportunity for individuals to compete in the existing social and economic order. If these educational conditions are met, subsequent inequalities that arise are viewed as essentially justified. Absent from this vision of education is any notion that it is possible or desirable for the public education system to challenge the existing structural order, which guarantees that even equitable educational opportunity ultimately results in inequality.⁷ In short, the current educational consensus has no broader social vision for challenging the extreme inequities that can result from a capitalist economic system.

An examination of the past indicates that liberal incorporationist vision has deep—but not uncontested—roots in American political thought. This chapter returns to another era of economic turmoil, the Great Depression, to trace a significant division within the progressive education movement from the 1920s to the 1940s—the division between the social efficiency progressives and the social reconstructionists.⁸ As progressives, social efficiency progressives and social reconstructionists agreed broadly that dramatic changes were needed in educational practice in order to prepare students for participation in a democratic society; however, the two groups differed significantly about the appropriate educational methods, the role of teachers, the relationship between education and political economy, and the requirements of democracy.⁹ Broadly, the central cleavage between the two groups was that, whereas the scientific efficiency progressives believed that education should help adjust the individual for success in the existing economic status quo, the social reconstructionists argued that the schools should help prepare students to fundamentally change the social order.¹⁰

The focus of this chapter and the one that follows is on the particular debates between the key individuals and organizations within progressive groups that preceded the founding of the federal education state. The attention to ideas—and which ideas emerged ascendant—clarifies which visions helped stitch together the coalition that was ultimately successful in passing the most significant federal expansion in the realm of education policy.¹¹ Furthermore, focusing on the debate with progressive education reveals the tight connection between education and political economy. As the Great Depression opened a space for radical reimaging of the economic and educational possibilities, educational visions that called for fundamental changes to the economic structures of the United States proved much less able to accommodate the political and material moment when this crisis faded.

The chapter begins by outlining the core ideological commitments and the educational program of the social efficiency progressives through an examination of the writings of some of the most important members of this coalition. This group dominated the progressive educational landscape for much of the early decades of the twentieth century. However, the stock market crash of 1929 and the extended economic hardship of the Great Depression gave rise to a rival group of progressives, the social reconstructionists—who held surprising influence throughout the 1930s. These two groups vigorously competed for the soul of public education, as they offered distinct, and often contradictory, policy prescriptions for the education system. These educational disagreements mapped onto broader political disagreements between the two groups over fairness of a capitalist economy, the requirements of equality, and support of New Deal policies. Although neither group was completely able to implement their vision, social efficiency progressives proved much more successful in imprinting substantial portions of their methodological and ideological program on American education. Indeed, the consequences of these victories by the social efficiency progressives continue to reverberate throughout the education system today.

The Social Efficiency Progressives

In the early decades of the twentieth century, the Progressive Era brought a growing national faith that methods and knowledge of the sciences could be harnessed to address national concerns such as the growth of large corporations and corruption in government. A group of individuals who held similar hope for the promise of science in guiding best practices in the organization and methods of teaching dominated the national conversation in education during the first half of the twentieth century. Broadly known as the progressive education movement, these social scientists and educators advocated for a sharp departure from the traditional curricula and methods of teaching, pushing for new approaches that were better suited to address current national problems and needs.

Spurred by the rapid changes brought by industrialization, urbanization, and demographic change in the early twentieth century, the progressive education movement was also a reaction to educational conservatives. Associated with organizations such as the American Legion and Daughters of the American Revolution, educational conservatives argued that the central purpose of schools was to maintain both traditional education practice and social mores. These conservatives argued that teachers should be authorities that focused on delivering and instilling the traditional values of patriotism, religion, culture, and economics to students.¹² Educational progressives viewed the traditional approach as an overly rigid system that failed to take the needs of the child into account. Progressives argued that the significant societal changes demanded revolutionary educational change and pushed for a child-centered pedagogy that drew from scientific approaches in order to discover best educational practices.¹³

United by their faith in science and their rejection of traditional educational methods, the progressive education movement had a powerful and continuing effect on the ideas and methods of the nation’s education system. However, the broad label of progressive education masks substantial and significant differences within this group. As educational historian David Labaree has noted, “the progressive education movement in the United States was not a single entity, but a cluster of overlapping and competing tendencies.”¹⁴ The beginning of the twentieth century brought the emergence of a powerful coalition of progressive academics and educators—the social efficiency progressives. This group of progressive educators pressed for dramatic educational reforms, arguing that children and society more broadly could best be served by creating a more rational and systemic approach to education. Many of the coalition’s most prominent members, including Edward L. Thorndike, Henry H. Goddard, Charles H. Judd, and Robert M. Yerkes, came from the newly emerging academic field of psychology. Education was also emerging as an academic field and as a separate department in many universities, and influential early members of the field such as John Franklin Bobbitt, Ellwood P. Cubberley, David Snedden, and Charles Prosser were also social efficiency progressives.

Although this coalition was certainly not uniform in their ideological outlook, it was united by several common commitments and beliefs about needed educational reforms. Focused on the need to make the schools more efficient and more reflective of the needs of society, social efficiency progressives proposed a number of reforms to school governance, organization, and teaching methods, including tracking, intelligence testing, standardized achievement testing, routinized teaching methods, and vocational education. This educational vision was accompanied by a belief that all children were not equal in intelligence or potential value to society, and efficiency therefore demanded that children of different intelligence be treated differently. This group of progressives advocated turning away from the rote formalism of existing pedagogy that involved teaching students of all abilities the same thing and the tendency to focus on college preparation in high school with methods that were scientifically proven to be effective and were more appropriate for each student’s ability and future station in life. The educational vision and ideological commitments of the social efficiency progressives dominated the landscape of the early progressive education movement.

One of the core commitments that united social efficiency progressives was a desire to introduce the principles of industrial management into the public school system. Largely inspired by Frederick W. Taylor’s writings about effective industrial management, social efficiency advocates sought to adapt the management principles outlined by Taylor to the day-to-day operation of the school.¹⁵ For this group of progressives, the implementation of industrial management methods such as routinization, constant evaluation, differentiation, and efficiency provided promising avenues of reforming the education system. The desire to introduce scientific management techniques spawned dramatic reform proposals that touched nearly every aspect of schooling, including administrative organization, the curricula, and the act of teaching itself.

John Franklin Bobbitt was one of the staunchest and most influential advocates of introducing the logic of industrial management into the schools’ scientific management. A longtime professor of school administration at the University of Chicago, Bobbitt also served briefly as assistant schools superintendent of Los Angeles and Toledo.¹⁶ Bobbitt was one of the most enthusiastic proponents of extending the methods of business management into the schools, a position he outlined early in his career for the 1913 Yearbook of the National Society for the Science of Education. In the extensive piece, entitled “The Supervision of City Schools: Some General Principles of Management Applied to the Problems of City-School Systems,” Bobbitt argued that since “education is a s...