If a principal is unable with a reasonable share of his time from other duties to show a teacher how to acquire teaching ability, he must take steps to secure for the teacher freedom to enter other employment. To permit the waste of the lives of children and of the community’s money through poor teaching is not only the worst of management, but a negligent dishonesty that is scandalous. There has grown up here a fallacy that the schools should be run to give employment to us and in case of doubt the benefit should be given us, the employees. No private school, no public service, runs on that basis. It is an absurdity.
When he arrived in Chicago, McAndrew immediately took two steps that earned him the ire of Margaret Haley and the rest of organized labor. First, he moved to disband the beloved teacher councils Young had founded. Like most Taylorites, McAndrew believed in the principle of a rational, expertise-driven manager presiding decisively over employees. If administrators had access to the knowledge and data necessary to improve the school system, they would not need to meet regularly with teachers to hear their ideas. He then proposed that junior high students be assigned, based on IQ scores, to either vocational or academic-track schools. The Chicago school board supported McAndrew’s proposal, releasing a 1924 “research bulletin” claiming that IQ tests given to World War I army recruits had proven there were five levels of supposedly innate intelligence, each corresponding with an occupational class: “Professional and business,” “clerical,” “skilled trades,” “semi-skilled trades,” and “unskilled labor.”
The Federation, like Ella Flagg Young, preferred a Deweyite “single track” approach to the curriculum: that schools should help all children become facile with their hands, but ought not to direct students toward specific jobs, nor neglect academics. Alongside the teachers union, male organized labor in Chicago helped lead the opposition to vocational determinism. The leader of the Illinois State Federation of Labor, John Walker, believed dual-track schools would make public education “a training place for cheap labor, beasts of burden, at the expense of the development of the children as broad-minded, big-hearted, intelligent, fine types of citizenship.” The AFL published a pamphlet warning that IQ tests could be used to sear the children of working-class parents with “the brand of inferiority.”
The unions were right to push back against high-stakes IQ testing. By 1922—two years before McAndrew came to Chicago—respected researchers had begun to decry the wartime intelligence studies as bunk science that failed to account for the differences in recruits’ previous schooling. A study of over 100,000 New York City fifth graders found socioeconomic factors such as family income and access to health care outweighed IQ as predictors of academic success. What’s more, IQ appeared to be changeable over time, not a measure of innate talent. Harper’s published a study showing that after living in the North for several years, southern-born blacks were able to score higher on IQ tests.
Nevertheless, under the sway of efficiency reformers who hoped to match children to jobs, schools rushed to buy and administer standardized IQ exams. A 1932 survey of 150 school districts found three-quarters used intelligence tests to assign students to different academic tracks. IQ testing had replaced phrenology as school reform’s favored “science” for sorting and classifying children.
As Haley fought against tracking and McAndrew’s other efficiency policies—such as the requirement that teachers check in on a timesheet four times each day—she won support from the normally anti-union Chicago Tribune, which warned the superintendent against “antagonizing the bulk of the teaching force” through an overly top-down reform agenda. Yet in her passion for removing McAndrew from office, Haley teamed up with a shady character: “Big Bill” Thompson, the corrupt former mayor, who hoped to regain his office and run for president under the isolationist slogan “America First.” In a March 30, 1927, ad in the Tribune, Thompson accused McAndrew and Mayor Dever of being “pro-British rats who are poisoning the wells of historical truth” by selecting history textbooks that called George Washington a “rebel” instead of a hero. Those allegations were false. In fact, McAndrew strongly supported American patriotism in the school curriculum. Yet with backing from the Teachers Federation, Thompson defeated Dever and then axed McAndrew, whose reform ideas were never fully implemented. Even after the “rat” McAndrew’s departure, the Board of Education continued to hear testimony on so-called anti-American “propaganda” in schools.
During the first three decades of teacher unionism, the path-breaking Chicago Teachers Federation boasted achievements of high idealism: bringing tax-dodging corporations to heel, resisting IQ determinism on behalf of poor children, and helping women earn the right to vote. Yet the teachers union movement was (and remains today) a pragmatic, even sometimes cynical, lobbying effort, and one that protected some poorly performing teachers. By partnering with nativist political forces to target McAndrew as insufficiently patriotic, Margaret Haley and her “lady labor sluggers” had emboldened a movement—ideological litmus testing for professional educators—that was already wreaking havoc on American urban education.
* * *
*1 There has been a century of debate over how to define “progressive” education. The reformers who sought to constrain the influence of female teachers in cities like Chicago and New York thought of themselves as “progressives,” for they believed they were applying modern, efficient business methods to the management of sprawling, inefficient school systems. Their administrative progressivism can be clearly contrasted, however, with the pedagogical progressivism espoused by Francis Wayland Parker and John Dewey. These schools of thought are well defined in The Struggle for the American Curriculum, by Herbert Kliebard.
*2 Merit pay and budget cutting often did go hand in hand. When Atlanta instituted teacher merit pay in 1915, overall teacher pay in the district declined by $15,000.
*3 Catharine Beecher had predicted the end of corporal punishment if female teachers replaced male teachers. This did not occur.
• Chapter Five •
“An Orgy of Investigation”
WITCH HUNTS AND SOCIAL MOVEMENT UNIONISM DURING THE WARS
In 1917, Mary McDowell taught Latin at Manual Training High School in the working-class neighborhood of Park Slope, Brooklyn. She was a square-jawed single woman in her early forties who lived with her widowed mother just south of Prospect Park. Befitting the caricature of an old-maid schoolmarm, McDowell was plain-looking and unglamorous, with thin, wire glasses framing her eyes in perfect circles. But while most of her female colleagues had only been to normal school, McDowell, a Quaker, had graduated from Swarthmore, studied at Oxford University in England, and then earned a master’s degree at Columbia. Since the onset of the Great War she had been donating $35 per month, a fifth of her modest income, to the American Friends Service Committee, to be used for civilian relief efforts in France.
In a 1914 performance evaluation, Manual’s principal noted McDowell “is a fine example for girls. I am impressed with her conscientiousness, her earnest desire to give the best. She is not of the 2:30 type”—meaning she did not rush out of school as soon as the final bell rang. But McDowell ran into trouble three years later, when a Yale-educated engineer named Horace Mann Snyder replaced her previous boss. Named by his superintendent father after the common schools visionary, Snyder arrived in Brooklyn filled to the brim with the popular education reform theories of the day and began implementing them with gusto. At the time, only 17 percent of Americans completed high school, where the classical, academic curriculum prevailed. Vocational tracking and sports programs were seen as a way to reduce dropouts by making school more engaging and relevant to teenagers. Snyder planned to introduce IQ testing to split Manual freshmen into three tracks, which would determine the courses they took for the next four years as well as the opportunities open to them after graduation. If only a third of Manual’s students would be prepared for college, an old-fashioned, full-time Latin teacher like McDowell would almost certainly be considere
d superfluous—a dinosaur teaching a dead language to poor children ill equipped to use it.
The principal’s second major enthusiasm was for “citizenship” training, a craze that swept the nation’s schools during World War I. What Snyder had in mind was less a rigorous civics curriculum than a sort of suffusion of Manual High School with patriotic spirit. He required teachers to transcribe patriotic quotations on the blackboard each day and distribute leaflets encouraging students to buy war savings stamps. McDowell fulfilled these directives. But when Snyder asked her to spend an hour each week discussing the general merits of the United States above all other nations, McDowell demurred. She was there to teach Latin; diligent study, she believed, was the most patriotic way for her students to spend their time. Snyder retaliated via the teacher evaluation system.
During the late nineteenth century, New York City had a teacher evaluation system in which principals rated 99.5 percent of teachers as “good.” When reformer William Maxwell became superintendent in 1898, he was frustrated by the lack of centralized information on teachers’ performance. He instituted a new system, which required principals to grade teachers on a finer scale, from A to D. Within a few years, it was generally regarded, in the words of The New York Times, as “a joke”; principals resented the copious paperwork involved, and the vast majority of teachers, including McDowell, received a B+ each year, indicating better-than-average performance. But at Manual High School, Snyder was determined to punish McDowell for her resistance to his patriotism agenda. He decreased her rating to a B, threatening that “C or D more accurately reflects the present value of your services to the city and State.” The animus between the two intensified just before Christmas break in 1917, when Snyder asked every member of his faculty to sign a so-called “loyalty pledge” then circulating throughout the New York City school system, at the behest of the mayor, the superintendent, and the Board of Education. There were several versions of the pledge, but the text of the one McDowell was asked to sign most likely looked something like this:
We, the teachers of the public schools of the City of New York, do solemnly pledge our unqualified loyalty to the President and Congress of the United States in this war with the imperial governments of Germany and Austria.
We pledge ourselves actively to inculcate in our pupils by word and deed love of flag and unquestioning loyalty to the military policy of the government and to the measures and principles proclaimed by the President and Congress.
We declare ourselves to be in sympathy with the purposes of the government and its efforts to make the world safe for democracy, and believe that our highest duty at this moment is to uphold the hands of the President and Congress in this crisis.
We believe that any teachers whose views prevent them from subscribing to such sentiments should not be permitted to teach the youth of our city.
Of New York City’s twenty thousand teachers, hundreds initially expressed reluctance to recite these words or sign their name to them. But when they realized their jobs were at stake, all but thirty relented. McDowell was one of the holdouts. For a strict Quaker, this vow was impossible. She was a pacifist who opposed, in principle, all wars, no matter what their cause. After she expressed her views in a letter to Principal Snyder, she was suspended without pay. In May 1918 McDowell went on “trial” at the Upper East Side headquarters of the Department of Education. This was not an actual procedure of the city or state legal systems, but rather an internally conducted employment hearing to determine whether McDowell would lose her tenure protections and her job. The room overflowed with reporters, as well as teacher and Quaker supporters of McDowell. The “judge,” called a trial examiner, noted that as a thirteen-year veteran of the New York City schools, McDowell had a “flawless” teaching record. There was no evidence she had ever indoctrinated her students into her own pacifist or Quaker beliefs. At issue, then, were her private convictions. New York City schools superintendent William Ettinger pressed McDowell, who was on the witness stand, to state whether she would personally take up arms to resist a military invasion. McDowell said she was sure most Americans, including her own students, would do so, but that she could not; there were “many ways of resisting” hostility other than with violence. Her attorneys noted that Quakers had been instrumental in building New York State’s public school system, and an 1830 declaration by the state board of education had affirmed the right of schoolteachers not to be questioned on their religious beliefs.
It was no matter. A jingoistic climate had invaded the public schools, and teachers with dissident politics were being targeted for dismissal, regardless of their excellence in the classroom—and especially if they taught unpopular subjects that did not fit within the vocational framework, like the classics or foreign languages. McDowell was declared guilty of “conduct unbecoming a teacher” and fired.
For educators during World War I, the combination of dissident politics and opposition to IQ testing, strict vocational tracking, or new forms of teacher evaluation could prove especially professionally risky. Alexander Fichlander, a respected Brooklyn principal, was a pacifist who refused to sign the loyalty pledge. He also supported the AFT-affiliated New York City Teachers Union, which was founded in 1916 to emulate the success of Margaret Haley’s organization in Chicago. Fichlander was well known as a critic of the city’s A–D teacher rating system, which he thought imposed a bureaucratic burden on principals without actually improving instruction for students. In 1917 the Board of Education denied him a promotion he had already won from his Brooklyn district supervisor, to be the principal of a larger elementary school. John Greene, a member of the committee who made the decision, said the honor would only give Fichlander “a sphere for wider influence for his unpatriotic views. Here is a man who debased his citizenship and who refused to sign the declaration of loyalty to the United States.”
There was broad public support for the witch hunts that ensnared Fichlander and McDowell. On November 18, 1917, the editorial board of The New York Times declared: “The Board of Education should root out all the disloyal or doubtful teachers. This little private war of these misguided or out-of-equilibrium persons on the United States must stop. They must be put out of the schools; and if they continue to profess sedition publicly, they must be locked up.”
The moral panic about supposedly unpatriotic educators was driven by international war hysteria combined with agitation over the growing domestic political strength of teachers unions. In 1917 and 1918, Congress passed the Espionage and Sedition Acts, which sought to ban public speech and actions “disloyal” to the United States military and government, especially among socialists, communists, pacifists, immigrants, and other groups perceived as affiliated with European leftism. More than any other force, the American Legion, a veterans’ organization, pushed this ethos of unquestioning patriotism onto the nation’s public schools. The Legion was influential: 16 U.S. senators and 130 congressmen identified as members. It promoted the idea that the Communist Party in Moscow actively recruited American teachers in order to enlist them in brainwashing the nation’s youth. The Legion saw all left-of-center political activity as unacceptably anti-American. In a directive to its local affiliates, the group asked its one million members to watch for “reds and pinks” working in public schools, asserting, “There is little difference between some kinds of so-called Socialism, liberalism, radicalism, and Communism.”
In 1921 the Legion partnered with the National Education Association to counteract the growing influence of Margaret Haley’s AFT, which both organizations were eager to paint as unprofessional, thuggish, and radical—a labor union in the mold of Bolshevism, which any decent teacher should shun. With the support of the NEA, the Legion introduced an annual “American Education Week” in November, during which teachers were asked to preach that “Revolutionists, Communists, and extreme pacifists are a menace” to “life, liberty, justice, security, and happiness.” The curriculum suggested the following essay topic: “Patriotism,
the Paramount Human Emotion.”
The Legion also cultivated a relationship with newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, an opponent of the income tax and increased funding for teacher salaries and schools (all priorities of the AFT). In 1935 Hearst’s papers ran a series of articles written by a Legion commander, attacking public school teachers who explained the Depression as a failure of free markets. Teachers who did not purchase Liberty Bonds, did not display the American flag in their classrooms, or did not salute the flag were depicted in Legion literature as a “fifth column” loyal to the Soviet Union. Principals, school boards, and mayors sympathetic to the Legion—or scared to buck the group—targeted such teachers for investigation and sometimes dismissal. In 1939, the Legion’s advocacy helped prompt the House Un-American Activities Committee to investigate communist influence within the AFT.
Between 1917 and 1960, several waves of patriotic moral panic convulsed the nation’s schools, in what the historian Howard K. Beale termed “an orgy of investigation” that targeted tens of thousands of teachers. Over the course of four decades, the American public was periodically riveted by the drama of teachers fired or put on trial for their leftist political beliefs—even “taking the Fifth” or “naming names” in front of congressional committees. Joining the American Legion’s campaign of fear were conservative advocacy groups like the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the Daughters of the American Revolution, and the Christian Front, an anti-Semitic organization associated with the Catholic radio preacher Father Coughlin. At the local level, activists often targeted individual teachers for dismissal. The education historian and commentator Diane Ravitch remembers that in Houston in the early 1950s, at the height of McCarthyism, her public high school came under the sway of mothers who were members of the Minute Women of the USA, an anticommunist group that also opposed New Deal social programs and the formation of the United Nations. Under pressure, the school’s librarian removed books about the Soviet Union from the shelves, and the school board forced Ravitch’s favorite teacher, Nelda Davis, out of her job in retaliation for her liberal internationalist views. Davis had also opposed racial segregation.
The Teacher Wars Page 11
