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.
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