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

 

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.