121.Obstacles On The Road To Centralization: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

Obstacles On The Road To Centralization 

Three major obstacles stood in the way of the great goal of using American schools to 
realize a scientifically programmed society. The first was the fact that American 
schooling was locally controlled. In 1930, when the massive socializing scheme was 
swinging into high gear, helped substantially by an attention-absorbing depression, this 
nation still had 144,102 local school boards. 17 At least 1.1 million elected citizens of local 
stature made decisions for this country's schools out of their wisdom and experience. Out 
of 70 million adults between the ages of thirty and sixty- five, one in every sixty-three was 
on a school board (thirty years earlier, the figure had been one in twenty). Contrast either 
ratio with today's figure of one in five thousand. 

The first task of scientifically managed schooling was to transfer management from a 
citizen yeomanry to a professional elite under the camouflage of consolidation for 
economy's sake. By 1932, the number of school districts was down to 127,300; by 1937 
to 1 19,018; by 1950 to 83,719; by 1960 to 40,520; by 1970 to 18,000; by 1990 to 15,361. 
Citizen oversight was slowly squeezed out of the school institution, replaced by 
homogeneous managerial oversight, managers screened and trained, watched, loyalty- 



checked by Columbia, Stanford, Chicago, the Cleveland Conference, and similar 
organizations with private agendas for public schooling. 

The second obstacle to an ideological takeover of schools was the historic influence of 
teachers as role models. Old-fashioned teachers had a disturbing proclivity to stress 
development of intellect through difficult reading, heavy writing assignments, and intense 
discussion. The problem of proud and independent teachers was harder to solve than the 
reading problem. As late as 1930 there were still 149,400 one-room/one-teacher schools 
in America, places not only cheap to operate but successful at developing tough-minded, 
independent thinkers. Most of the rest of our schools were small and administrator- free, 
too. The idea of principals who did not teach came very late in the school game in most 
places. The fantastic notion of a parasitic army of assistant principals, coordinators, and 
all the rest of the various familiar specialists of institutional schooling didn't exist at all 
until 1905, except in the speculations of teacher college dreamers. 

Two solutions were proposed around 1903 to suppress teacher influence and make 
instruction teacher-proof. The first was to grow a heretofore unknown administrative 
hierarchy of nonteaching principals, assistant principals, subject coordinators and the rest, 
to drop the teacher's status rank. And if degrading teacher status proved inadequate, 
another weapon, the standardized test, was soon to be available. By displacing the 
judgmental function from a visible teacher to a remote bastion of educational scientists 
somewhere, no mere classroom person could stray very far from approved texts without 
falling test scores among his or her students signaling the presence of such a deviant. 18 
Both these initiatives were underway as WWI ended. 

The third obstacle to effective centralization of management was the intimate 
neighborhood context of most American schools, one where school procedures could 
never escape organic oversight by parents and other local interests. Not a good venue 
from which to orchestrate the undermining of traditional society. James Bryant Conant, 
one of the inventors of the poison gas, Lewisite, and by then chairman of a key Carnegie 
commission, reported in an ongoing national news story after the Sputnik moment that it 
was the small size of our schools causing the problem. Only large schools, said Conant, 
could have faculty and facilities large enough to cover the math and science we 
(presumably) lacked and Russia (presumably) had. The bigger the better. 

In one bold stroke the American factory school of Lancaster days was reborn. Here a de- 
intellectualized Prussian-style curriculum could reign undetected. From 1960 to 1990, 
while student population was increasing 61 percent, the number of school administrators 
grew 342 percent. In constant dollars, costs shot up 331 percent, and teachers, who had 
fallen from 95 percent of all school personnel in 1915 to 70 percent in 1950, now fell still 
further, down and down until recently they comprised less than 50 percent of the jobs in 
the school game. School had become an employment project, the largest hiring hall in the 
world, bigger than agriculture, bigger than armies. 

One other significant set of numbers parallels the absolute growth in the power and 
expense of government schooling, but inversely. In 1960, when these gigantic child 



welfare agencies called schools were just setting out on their enhanced mission, 85 
percent of African American children in New York were from intact, two-parent 
households. In 1990 in New York City, with the school budget drawing $9,300 a kid for 
its social welfare definition of education, that number dropped below 30 percent. School 
and the social work bureaucracies had done their work well, fashioning what looked to be 
a permanent underclass, one stripped of its possibility of escape, turned against itself. 
Scientific management had proven its value, although what that was obviously depended 
on one's perspective. 



1 'Down from 355,000 in 1900. 

ls None of this apparatus of checks and balances ever worked exactly as intended. A degraded, demoralized teaching staff (and even many 
demoralized administrators) lacks interest or even energy to police the system effectively. Gross abuses are legion, the custom almost 
everywhere; records are changed, numbers regularly falsified. A common habit in my day was to fill out phony lunch forms en masse to make 
schools eligible for Title I monies. The chief legal officer for the state of California told me in Sacramento a few years ago that his state was 
unable to effectively monitor the compulsory attendance laws, a truth I can vouch for from firsthand experience. 



Chapter Ten