Sherman Dorn

Desegregation history

Eduwonkette made me wince a few weeks ago with her entry, Did School Integration Really Do Much Good? She quoted a relatively new economic study using Louisiana, but there's a fairly sizable literature on this already, including classic works by Roz Mickelson and Jennifer Hochschild, among many many others. Yes, there is evidence of cognitive (achievement) effects of desegregation that are not attributable to better funding. Not everyone agrees with those evidentiary claims, but one of the consequences of NCLB on research is that accountability has sucked the air out of all sorts of questions, including the consequences of ending effective desegregation in dozens of our large metropolitan areas.

Is Bush the worst?

I agree with K.C. Johnson: James Buchanan was a worse president than George W. Bush. I don't agree with him on why historians are inclined to judge Bush worse than anyone else, but it is a bit disappointing to see a clear majority picking Bush. I mean, there are so many bad presidents from whom to pick,...

Disclosure: I never voted for Bush. Then again, I never voted for Buchanan, either.

Jim Anderson retrospective, part 2

A few days ago I described the 20th-anniversary Jim Anderson retrospective at AERA. Now it's my turn to address some of the topics raised in that session, in a personal historiography, or my reading of The Education of Blacks in the South, originally published in 1988.

For me, the thesis of the book was not particularly a surprise, for several reasons. First, my undergraduate advisor Paul Jefferson had exposed me to a broad variety of historical arguments from the very first course I took with him, which used Herbert Aptheker's documentary collection, to a seminar course where I wrote an historiographical essay on W.E.B. DuBois's Black Reconstruction. Bryn Mawr College sociologist David Karen had exposed me to both structural-functionalists and radical education critics in a course I took with him when I was a junior (or at least I vaguely recall its being spring 1986). Then in grad school I had Michael Katz as an advisor.

But probably the teacher who lay the groundwork the most for Anderson was Bob Engs, for whom I read C. Vann Woodward's Origins of the New South. Because Engs and Anderson use the same material to arrive at very different interpretations of the role of foundations in Southern education, it says a great deal about Engs as a teacher that he made Anderson make sense for me even while he was telling me that Anderson's book was polemical. I like both men a great deal, so perhaps a broader explanation is in order.

Engs and Anderson were both pioneers as African American historians in elite majority-white universities in the same time (the early 1970s), Engs at Penn and Anderson at Illinois. I wish I could say they were part of a continuous record going back decades, but in an case they've become part of diverse faculties for the past several.

Engs turned his first research project into a book ten years before Anderson's, with Freedom's First Generation about the Hampton, Virginia, community. Anderson took a decade and a half to write his first book (something Vanessa Siddle Walked called "lingering with an idea," but I thought of as "a darned good example of a leader in my field who didn't write 7 articles a year before tenure"). And they are different books: While Anderson writes only of education, Engs writes a local history, focusing on the contingent conditions that allowed Hampton's African American community to thrive after the Civil War and hang on to wealth in the very late 19th century even while the curtain of segregation and disfranchising was closing in from all sides.

Engs saw the Hampton Institute as one of those contingencies, and Samuel Chapman Armstrong (Hampton's first leader) as a friend of the Hampton African American community. Where Anderson saw a conspiracy to undermine equality, Engs saw irony with Armstrong's showing one face to the white community and another to Hampton's African Americans. Where Engs saw opportunity that some grabbed in the midst of oppression, Anderson saw structural limitations that were covered up by a tamed education system. Let me make clear that their views of the Southern political economy and educational structure are similar; the great interpretive differences lie in the role of the foundations.

Despite those deep differences in the interpretation of late 19th century Southern education, Engs laid the groundwork for my "oh, yes, of course" reading of Anderson in several ways. First, he made me and other graduate students read Willie Lee Rose's Rehearsal for Reconstrution and C. Vann Woodward and Jacqueline Jones and Exodusters and several others in a way that raised important questions about the South's history after the Civil War. I was also his teaching assistant one semester for his Southern postwar history class (that's postwar as in post-Civil War), and apart from his tolerance for the awkward naive grad student I was then, I figured out how he could say the most outlandish things in a lecture and get the southern white male students to recommend that all of their friends take his classes. With a light baritone, he stood at the front of class, uttering outrageous interpretations in a quiet, patient manner, as if they wouldn't ruffle anyone's feathers. The students loved him (and I presume students still love him at Penn).

So in many ways, I bought much of Anderson's argument because of Engs. If it's any comfort, Bob, it's because of Anderson's discussion of communities that I bought your argument, too. Ultimately, the best scholarship in each book is about different levels of action. Anderson effectively demonstrates that white philanthropists did conspire to impose a certain type of education on the South. Yet in his work on community efforts, Anderson bolsters Engs's argument that at the local level, there was a lot more going on. I'm not sure we have to establish the moral worth of Samuel Chapman Armstrong to evaluate either book. (Some years ago, Engs wrote a biography of Armstrong, and it's much more sympathetic than I expect Anderson's version would be.)

I have both learned from Anderson's work and also failed to give it credit in one case. It was because of his book that my own dissertation research on graduation in the 20th century involved looking at the extent of high school availability in the 1950s and 1960s. And like John Rury, I am returning to the scope of high school education in the 20th century South. In Schools as Imagined Communities, Deirdre Cobb-Roberts, Barbara Shircliffe, and I could have enriched the introduction by discussing Anderson's work. Mea culpa.

As those at the AERA panel said, Anderson's book helped open up the history of Southern education after the Civil War, giving the subject the gravitas that it deserves and momentum that has served many other historians well. The rest of us in the field can only hope to leave an intellectual legacy as significant as Jim Anderson's.

Jim Anderson retrospective, part 1

Last Tuesday in New York, a roundtable panel presented a 20-year retrospective on Jim Anderson's The Education of Blacks in the South, 1865-1935, chaired by Joy Williamson (U. Washington). In this entry, I'll summarize some of the perspectives of the panelists. In the next entry (tomorrow, I hope), I'll present my personal engagement with the book.

Rubén Donato (University of Colorado) noted that students who read the book for the first time generally have bimodal responses. Many of them react to Anderson's argument as if they've never heard such a radical idea. Donato called these the "Oh, wow" reactions. But he also said a slice of students react with a little more cynicism: "Of course," because of their experiences or their friends' and families' experiences with schooling.

Donato also noted that most readers of Anderson's book come to it as graduate students, and he is worried that its arguments rarely filter into undergraduate history courses. While I think he's wrong in terms of Anderson's broader arguments (I'll explain this in my more personal post), he is correct about the readership for the book.

John Rury (Kansas) noted first that Anderson's book represents the maturation of revisionist education historiography. The book is sophisticated, nuanced, and detailed, and it carries an argument more successfully than almost any other challenging/radical history of education published in the prior 20 years. (This last weekend, Anderson and a whole bunch of new scholars were at Penn for the 40th-year anniversary of Michael Katz's Irony of Early School Reform/non-Festschrift conference.)

Rury also noted that for much of the book, Anderson was writing an elite history, a "reform by imposition" story that focused on the network of foundations active in the late 19th and early 20th century. While he shifted later in the book to discuss community efforts (see below on Vanessa Siddle Walker's comments), Anderson's book was remarkable in its focus.

Finally (at least in my notes), Rury noted that Anderson's book left a huge agenda in its wake, and scholars have been either riding that wake or trying to catch up to it since.

Eileen Tamura (Hawaii) focused on the part of the book Rury avoided, where Anderson discusses human agency. Tamura pointed out that while the elites involved in foundation work discussed how education could tame the political and economic aspirations of African Americans, Black communities were willing to tax themselves a second time through voluntary contributions to raise buildings and pay for operating expenses of schools. In this way, Tamura argues, Anderson pointed out how there were multiple discourses, with the local discourse undercutting the foundations' efforts to impose a tame sort of education. Tamura suggested that one of the chunks on the agenda left by the book was the way that cultural capital works in networks (my awkwardness not hers).

Vanessa Siddle Walker (Emory) also focused on the actions of Black communities and community members, and Siddle Walker focused on several historiographical points: First, Anderson identified the undercurrents in a way that would not have been possible with a single storyline. Her language was that Anderson identified a "story within a story" rather than just recycling old ideas. Second, Siddle Walker pointed out how Anderson was patient with his work ("lingered with an idea"), something you can identify if you look at the 42 newspaper series, 63 government publication series, and 30+ pages of bibliographic references in the book, as well as the acknowledgments that note the broad professional network Anderson used in working on the book.

Third, Siddle Walker argued that Anderson's work showed the importance of believing in the value of community perspective. She argued that this is the ethic of good oral historians, and couched a warning as well: often enough, historians are confronted with relatively little response, which does not mean that there isn't a story so much as the fact that the historian may not have gained entree to the community's trust.

Finally, Siddle Walker argued that Anderson's book made the story (stories?) accessible, readable and free of jargon that some others indulge in. (Was she referring here to Aronowitz or Giroux?)

Anderson then responded, gave credit to David Tyack for raising questions he had not considered when looking at Southern education after the Civil War, and then made four general points. First, he said that he should have paid more attention to the members of those communities who were still living in the 1970s and 1980s. He said that his own mother read the book and then told him, "You should have talked to me before you wrote it." If he had the chance to do it over, he said, he'd include oral history (which he did not).

Second, Anderson explained the background behind his book's not receiving the History of Education Society Outstanding Book Award for that year: he was on the award committee, and when his book was mentioned, he said that it wasn't that worthy a book and he'd have to recuse himself anyway. So the committee chose another book (I forget which...). The larger point here is that Anderson had no idea how positive the reception would be over time.

Third, Anderson was skeptical that his book was as definitive as some have implied. It was a broad overview, he said, and there is so much more to be done and so much that has been since, from Sieglinde Lim's work on Chinese immigrants in the Mississippi Delta to Siddle Walker's work, Adam Fairclough, David Cecelski, and so forth.

Finally, Anderson pointed out that Rury was essentially correct in terms of the origins of the book as a top-down perspective, and only in the middle of the work did he discover community culture, and then had to revise his views.

The discussion afterwards was mostly warm and fuzzy recollections, but there was one sharp question by Tyrone Freeman, asking Anderson's views on today's education foundations, from Gates to Broad, and whether they, too, were trying to impose a specific view that might be as pernicious as what he described. Anderson demurred, saying that the key to his work was discovering that the public representation of white philanthropists' work was dramatically different from the private work that was detailed in their papers. Since we don't know that private conversation going on today, he said, he couldn't comment.

For the most part, I sat back, took sketchy notes, and just enjoyed the conversation. Now, don't you wish someone was taking better notes, or that you were there yourself?

When you make speeches the issue...

I don't generally talk about electoral politics in this blog, but yesterday's speech by Barack Obama strikes me as historic, whether or not Obama wins the Democratic party's nomination or the general election. Historians are often wrong in their predictions (we earn a rear-view mirror with that degree, not a crystal ball), but this is about a judgment involving historical perspective, and I'm reasonably comfortable in that.

Moreover, I think that anyone who thought that the Jeremiah Wright controversy would inevitably and permanently damage the Obama campaign missed the way it created an opportunity for the best orator on the American political stage. Put bluntly, here's how the conversation went, in meta-narrative style:

Look at what your pastor said!

He was wrong.

You haven't denounced him enough.

He's no longer connected with my campaign.

Explain why you haven't left your congregation!

Okay, if you really want me to talk some more...

If there's one thing that his rivals don't want to demand of Barack Obama, it's that he give a speech.

Turn anything into a lesson, but will it stick?

A friend of mine has done something unusual with the celebrations of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday this year. She teaches young adolescents with moderate cognitive disabilities and behavior problems, and this year, she chose King's 1964 Nobel Prize acceptance speech as the basis for a series of lessons in reading, language arts, civics, etc. in the last week or two. She says she wasn't sure how basing a spelling test on a Nobel Prize speech would go over, but she did it anyway.

There's a test of what the students learned beyond the question of whether the speech taught the students some new words. She reported that when she asked the students if they agreed with King's arguments (in favor of "unarmed truth and unconditional love" over militarism), they all said yes... in a week where she had at least a handful of minor conflicts to break up. So perhaps we should say that their understanding of King's message, or maybe their own behavior, is a work in progress.

On the other hand, I'm not sure we're doing much better as a society than my friend's students. We're happy to give King his day, as long as we can ignore his ideas about justice and peace.

Maybe it's time we adults change.

License glasses

Ju Honisch responded to the idea of Egypt's copyrighting antiquities with a wonderful comment that reminds me of Andre Codrescu:

I think soon somebody will invent license glasses. They will be a little like blinkers and will only allow you to see those things you have paid your share of license fees for. There will of course be providers that give you grand right or budget perception glasses.

Alun Salt's original description exaggerated the intent, which would apply royalty/license fees to those who create physical reproductions (a la Las Vegas's Luxor Hotel), though the Alun Salt description suggests a far more general application a la RIAA's expansive definition of copyright.

In case you couldn't tell, I like Ju's bon mot.

Whose values would be valued in a neoliberal education world: Michelle Rhee's or Marc Dean Millot's?

Marc Dean Millot explains why he's a critic of DC Chancellor Michelle Rhee (hat tip), and here's the key paragraph:

What I see in Chancellor Rhee's approach, abetted, permitted or endorsed by Mayor Fenty, is 1) insensitivity and arrogance towards others, combined with 2) a reliance on fear to control staff, and 3) a considerable willingness not to apply analogous performance criteria and public criticism to themselves. Managers cannot be harder and harsher with others than they are on themselves and expect support from their staff, respect from their board, or trust from the public. And managers without all three cannot succeed in a turn-around.

There are three points here. One is the immediate and obvious one: Humiliation and denigration are not great motivators, nor is "making an example of" a significant proportion of the people you work with. I don't know Rhee, but this is not the first time I've seen reports of her approach to people being problematic. And Millot is right on the general principle.

---

The second point is that mayoral control of schools is no panacea and often a fig-leaf reform. As Monday's Washington Post story on the matter indicates, politics don't disappear with mayoral control. And that's why I was disappointed to see the brief mention of David Tyack's One Best System in Wong, Shen, Anagnostopolous, and Rutledge's new book, The Education Mayor. Tyack showed how governance reformers in the early 20th century claimed to be "taking politics out of school" in changing ward-based urban school boards to nonpartisan boards often appointed by courts or mayors. Wong et al. seriously misread Tyack in claiming that the historical lesson is that we need to keep politics out of school. Tyack documented how the new boards may have been nonpartisan but were certainly political, elitist, highly connected, and contributors to instead of brakes on bureaucracy. We have seen plenty of the last (continuing bureaucracy) in Chicago and New York City, where mayoral control appears to have changed the address of the bureaucracy instead of the basic facts. Beyond the obscuring of bureaucratic continuation, the arguments in favor of mayoral control contain a romantic view that is all too familiar to historians: change the structure and you can reduce if not eliminate the presumably nasty consequences of education politics. There are at least two fallacies in this romantic view: An unrealistic view of structural change as a panacea, and the blithe assumption that we'd want public education without politics. As long as education is tied to citizenship, politics will inevitably be involved, and that's not a bad thing. (You think Brown v. Board of Education and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 weren't political??)

The third point is obvious in the today but subtler when looking at the long term (or long duree if you're a devotee of the French Annalist school): there is a distinction between policy and approaches to handling people, and you don't know what will win out in the end. You can agree with the policy orientations of people whom you'd never trust (Millot's response to Rhee), and you can see and admire the human qualities of people with whom you have fundamental policy disagreements (me and Mike Huckabee, to take one example; I mean my view of him, not the converse). Often, the historical perspective focuses on the policy issues instead of the person, in part because extant records that focus on personality are often sensationalist instead of subtle. One exception is the record of a few common-school reformers from the early 19th century, whose views on "school management" were an intimate and conscious part of their ouvre. While one or two of the crankier education historians from the 1970s portrayed Horace Mann and his ilk as 19th century Darth Vaders, top-down class-oriented stealers of democracy, the truth that good historians of various stripes recognize is that a number of class-conscious reformers had a serious argument about the need to be kinder to students. One of the arguments for women as teachers was that they'd be more nurturing. (Sexist? Yes. Motivated by some understanding that beating kids isn't great? Absolutely. Ignores the fact that in the 19th century, women as well as men beat students? You bet.) And Mann is famous for pointing out that Massachusetts teachers regularly beat and humiliated students... and his argument that such mistreatment was unnecessary and wrong.

That fact notwithstanding, Mann, Henry Barnard, and others still fit into a broad movement of 19th century social reformers who held a set of overlapping traits, which in retrospect we associate with northern Whig parties, the growth of merchant capitalism, concerns about poverty and social disorder, a belief in the ability of the state to address such concerns, and an environmentalist analysis of social problems. When most educational historiography mentions Michael Katz's The Irony of Early School Reform, it is usually in reference to the vote abolishing the high school in Beverly, Massachusetts, but the Beverly story is only the first of three parts. The other two sections emphasize the rise and fall of environmental thinking in the mid-19th century. By the 1870s and 1880s, the optimistic environmentalism from a few decades before had become overshadowed by Social Darwinism and "scientific charity." Katz argued that the early promises of reformatories and other social reforms overpromised and ignored the corrupting influences of institutions and the expenses of running truly beneficial programs. (Disclosure: I'm a Katz student, or I was in grad school.)

Mann's twelve reports are the most interesting body of common-school reform writing to me, in part because there is so much complexity to them. He wanted teachers to be kinder to kids and to use more effective teaching methods. He certainly fit comfortably into the world of early- and mid-19th century Whig reformers, belonging to a temperance society and key in the creation of a state asylum while in the Massachusetts legislature. That reformist attitude was perfectly consistent with the background fear of social disorder. In a letter to a friend, Mann explained his acceptance of the Board of Education secretary position by saying, "Having found the present generation composed of materials almost unmalleable, I am about transferring my efforts to the next. Men are cast-iron; children are wax." Maybe he was influenced by religious riots in Massachusetts in the prior few years, but in any case that fear lasted until his very last report in 1848, which resonated with the news of revolution Europe and the publication of the Communist Manifesto. We had to have common schooling, Mann said, or else we would have classes bent on mutual conflict:

Now, surely, nothing but Universal Education can counter-work this tendency to the domination of capital and the servility of labor. If one class possesses all the wealth and the education, while the residue of society is ignorant and poor, it matters not by what name the relation between them may be called; the latter, in fact and in truth, will be the servile dependents and subjects of the former.

For students of 19th century history, this should be familiar; it is an echo of the developing free-labor ideology in the North. And as Maris Vinovskis has pointed out, Mann had an approach to education that approximated human capital arguments:

But if education be equably diffused, it will draw property after it, by the strongest of all attractions; for such a thing never did happen, and never can happen, as that an intelligent and practical body of men should be permanently poor. Property and labor, in different classes, are essentially antagonistic; but property and labor, in the same class, are essentially fraternal.

Educate the tykes, and they'll all have some prosperity and a stake in society. But Mann's fear is less about the South than events across the Atlantic:

The people of Massachusetts have, in some degree, appreciated the truth, that the unexampled prosperity of the State,-its comfort, its competence, its general intelligence and virtue,-is attributable to the education, more or less perfect, which all its people have received; but are they sensible of a fact equally important?-namely, that it is to this same education that two thirds of the people are indebted for not being, to-day, the vassals of as severe a tyranny, in the form of capital, as the lower classes of Europe are bound to in the form of brute force.

To Mann, poverty and conflict lurk under the surface of an industrial economy, something that only education can forestall. This was not the naked instrumentalism that Bowles, Gintis, and others claimed in the 1970s, but neither were common-school reformers unconnected to early 19th century industrialization: there were intimately vested in it and saw education's connections to it in multiple ways, including ameliorating social tensions.

In the long run, the more child-friendly views of Mann did not become a part of bureaucratic school culture. As hundreds of my students have pointed out to me over the years, common school reforms were far more successful in changing the structure of schools than in directly affecting the cultural practices inside a classroom. Some things changed, certainly: as other historians (e.g., David Tyack and Larry Cuban) note, chalkboards slowly became institutionalized in school construction, and in the early 1960s, Mann's view of an 'unvarnished' Bible reading instead of sectarian instruction had become the norm. But those were compartmentalized practices, the type of add-on that Larry Cuban has frequently noted is easier for schools to accommodate. (Note: I am dramatically underestimating the issues involved in shifting away from sectarian instruction. Nonetheless, )

One operative question that 1970s and 1980s historians wrestled with is the extent to which the growth of bureaucracy and the decline of early 19th century environmentalism were the consequence of early industrial capitalism. We have a much richer and more complex picture of 19th century school history today, and yet that question remains (or should remain) interesting. The truly large-factory model of education tried in early 19th century cities died as many schools shifted from monitorial schools to smaller, self-contained classes and choral recitation. On the one hand, one could argue that the organization of graded elementary school in many ways mirrored the less-mechanized and smaller factories in the U.S. better than they did some of the much larger factories in England, where monitorial instruction was invented. But that argument that emphasizes the parallel between graded elementary schools and factories overemphasizes the importance of larger cities, when much of early industrialization happened in towns rather than the largest cities.

And that city-town distortion ignores rural places. As Nancy Beadie's recent research uncovers, the building of schools in small towns and rural places may have been as important a part of local economic development in indirect terms as in any human capital effects. The marshaling of local resources for something as simple as church or school buildings required a complex web of economic and social relationships, quasi-private loan networks and reciprocal property relationships that helped incorporate small towns and rural places into a regional economic watershed. ("Watershed" is an unfortunately naturalized metaphor, but I'm not sure there are better alternatives: web and ecology are as inapt.) There's far more to industrialization than building schools, but Beadie's work shows the potential subtlety of schooling's effects and the relationship between economic life and formal education.

And even the subtler views skip some important topics, including the role of mid-19th century higher education, a fuzzily-bordered sector that included institutions called academies, high schools, normal schools, and colleges. And then there's the growth of Sunday schools, and the links between Northern missionary groups and Reconstruction education. So I'm feeling still a bit at sea, wanting a more synthetic interpretive history of 19th century education that wrestles with the bigger economic questions.

What is unquestionable is that Mann's kinder, gentler school didn't survive in the nascent bureaucracy that he helped build. School bureaucracies were easily corrupted into hierarchies that held low expectations for the poorest students. We have the historical example of a structurally-oriented school reformer who still held complex views about what should happen inside the classroom, views that did respect the potential and humanity of children in ways that we should not ignore. Yet his humane vision of schools lost out, at least for most of a century. The structure he imagined did not require humane treatment of its inhabitants.

So today, as we witness another experimental phase in the structure of American education, I read Marc Dean Millot's blogging with both a smile and heartache. Millot writes with passion about treating people with respect. Yet he is in favor of building the same type of structure that Michelle Rhee favors. Whose ways of treating humans would win out in that structure?

E-book versions of "Schools as Imagined Communities"

You can buy Schools as Imagined Communities as a Kindle e-book or through eBooks.com, with royalties going to non-profit organizations.

Zotero - love at first byte

This tells you something about my semester: it's taken until this weekend for me to try out Zotero, essentially an open-source citation database system. (I do wait until others on the bleeding edge show a new tool is useful, but I try to be in the second wave of adopters of useful tools.) It's free, thanks to the Center for History and New Media, and while I have been frustrated with the expensive software that my university purchased a site license to some years ago, at first blush Zotero is elegant and workable, including things such as snagging citations from Worldcat and JSTOR and my own university's library catalog.

But it took me about 5 minutes to set up, 5 minutes to play with it, and four minutes to use it to send a citation to students this afternoon. There is nothing in Zotero that you couldn't do manually with about 10 times the effort. But in the same way that learning a word processor's style system eventually pays off in hours, days, and weeks of time saved, so will Zotero. Goodbye, EndNote and ProCite. I have forsaken you for Zotero.

(Extra credit: how many pop-culture references exist for that phrase in the title, love at first byte?)

Technology as culture, part 1

When the Honors College asked me to teach one of their lower-division arts/humanities classes this fall, I had two thoughts:

• If I do run for the leadership of the faculty union chapter, it'll be an interesting semester. (For most faculty, an Honors College class is an overload, not part of the regular load.)
• I'm in the social-science end of history. What the heck do I teach?

Because the Honors College classes have less structure than courses I normally teach (to wit, the start of this course's description is "An introduction to western arts and letters..."), I had both greater freedom to design my class and somewhat different (and greater) expectations. An introduction to western arts and letters! I'm an Americanist, and my strength really is in social science history. In the end, I decided to design an introduction to culture studies using technology as a centerpiece, using Thomas Misa's From Leonardo to the Internet and David Nye's America as Second Creation as nonfiction books and a few novels to round it out. My students would disagree with my judgment at this point: if/when I teach this again, I'll have Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and William Gibson's Neuromancer as the fiction.

Having undergraduates write entries in a group blog about class sessions is working well in the last few semesters, giving me a good sense of what students are responding to. It hasn't worked as well in graduate classes, and perhaps that's a difference in the age of students or the frequency of classes.  But this semester, students' blogging has revealed where students are making connections I was hoping they'd make, where they are making additional connections that delight me, and where I've fallen through in setting up themes of the course.

I set up the first half of the course to undercut the technology-as-progress narrative most students brought into the course. Misa's conceit is that the uses of technology has varied among wealth-producing and wealth-consuming eras and places. But since Misa's first chapter focuses on Leonardo da Vinci, that gave me an avenue to ask questions about Renaissance art. As my friend and colleague Greg McColm reminds me, the cathedral in Florence is an opening to all sorts of topics, from winch technology to blueprints to ... well, the use of perspective in art, given the history of the cathedral dome (with Filippo Brunelleschi, who helped propagate ideas about perspective drawing).

In addition to readings and a few other matters, I made students try their hand at technical drawings of ordinary objects (one student had a mousetrap; I couldn't resist!) and then at perspective drawing, and they had to find a description of how European art acquired perspective. The majority of students found descriptions with a progress narrative. I noted the fact, and over the next month we talked about Misa's central question each chapter (was the technology in question wealth-producing or -consuming?). No connections made back to perspective drawings and the overarching narrative.

So we began reading some cyberpunk as a break between nonfiction books, and we had the completely expected discussion about the genre's being dystopian. Then several students complained that it was disorienting. Okay, I said, time to bring European art back into it (after making a few connections with some of the Misa chapters), and I brought out Paul Cezanne's Still Life with Apples and a Pot of Primroses, a painting with multiple perspectives. The students were largely silent while I showed how Cezanne had different vanishing points for different parts of the painting, let alone the non-perspective way of showing depth in the apples themselves. Disorienting, I asked? Er, a little bit, came the general response, but we're familiar with it... though we're sure that it was considered odd at the time!  (That response was expected, though I should have pushed the parallel to the complaints about cyberpunk; are we disoriented whenever we're unfamiliar with a genre's conventions?)

After showing the class how subsequent artists took Cezanne as a springboard for breaking away from perspective, I asked the question I'd been waiting to spring on the class since the first day:

So if early 20th century painters broke away from perspective, why is the Renaissance use of perspective drawings considered progress?

There was a little bit of discussion on that, but not much. So I left class, wondering if I'd see any blogs mentioning it.

It's been several weeks, and not a peep. That part of the course design has now officially flopped. Other things have gone well, fortunately, and the blog entries show that disparate threads in the course are coming together for a number of students. I think I've convinced students that narratives of progress are limited, including with technology (that's a main argument in Nye's book), and while I wish I had nailed the perspective-drawing-progress item, you don't get everything.

Being thankful for the Supreme Court's protection of free speech

As FIRE's William Creeley notes, not only can we be grateful for Supreme Court decisions protecting speech, such as the 64-year-old West Virginia v. Barnett case on the pledge of allegiance, but we also have an interesting retrospective on the case, including the two children (now much older, of course).

I need to finish editing and uploading an MP3 for an online class presentation, and then it's time for me to head home. If you're in the U.S., have a great holiday tomorrow!

The gender of early social-science clientele(s)

Some of the discussion on the "Social Reform and Social Science in Chicago and Beyond" panel focused on the relationship between social sciences and social reform movements. Neither Jane Addams nor Myles Horton did their work as disinterested social scientists—far from it. Addams may have been a sort-of-elitist social progressive, but she used city residents in gathering data on garbage collection in Chicago (as another audience member at the panel pointed out). Horton was more self-consciously deliberate about countering myths of social-scientific expertise. In the Addams case and Chicago, what is clear is that she relied primarily on women, in a way that was growing less common as social science faculty began looking towards powerful organizations as the clients for expertise. As Kurt Danziger has noted, U.S. psychologists switched from parents and teachers as clients to school administrators as clients. But what also happened is that the shift was between women as clients to men as clients.

Given Mary Ann Dzuback's work on women and social science in the early 20th century, I am cautious about this impression, but I'll put this out as a hypothesis, and perhaps a suggestion for an interesting dissertation.

(Other dissertation ideas to come out of my listening to panels: the need for an international history of curriculum and curriculum policies, and the need for a serious history of cosmetology as a curriculum subject.... And now someone will accuse me of taking listening- or thinking-depressing drugs this morning.)

Needed: a model of peer-reviewing interactive projects

One of the sessions at the Social Science History Association was organized by several members of the H-Net Council about Web 2.0 and the teaching of history. I was the chair and had a marvelous time listening to others and serving as traffic cop an identifier of speakers. (I also got my two cents' worth in, too.)

One general point of agreement was the need to figure out how to make work in this way recognized in a professional sense. It's not too hard to add an open-access model of publication to older models of publication—get a grant or other set of resources and do work in return for that work's being available to the world, and one program officer for the National Endowment for the Humanities confirmed that NEH is moving more towards giving preferences to projects with open-access outcomes.

The problem is how faculty who work on such projects can gain professional respect and reward for such work. As one colleague in the room noted, administrators will often support externally-funded projects, but if peers will not value a project, faculty will not have a great incentive to engage in such work, especially tenure-track faculty, even in primarily teaching institutions.

The key lever is how to provide peer judgment on such work. Faculty are reasonably comfortable with the work of peers in new realms if there is some method of peer review, ... But how is an interactive activity reviewable? I can imagine how technology can be used to engage in all sorts of reviews (that's how a growing proportion of journal manuscript reviews happen, electronically), but what if you don't control all of the material? That's a problem even with reviews of primary document collections: selecting, editing, and annotating primary documents is hard work, but the recognition and evaluation of that work is different from the review of original writing.

Maybe librarians and archivists can help think about reviewing work that is interactive. They have to become engaged in that collaboration with existing documents and imagining what other people will do (users!) all the time, and they have to evaluate such projects.

Chicago and social movements: blogging a conference

This weekend I am at the Social Science History Association, and the current session on Chicago and social-science research is one of the sessions that combine a national academic conference with a local context. After all, we're meeting in Chicago this weekend.

The first paper by Victoria Brown was about Jane Addams and is part of a biographical project beyond this paper. I came late, so I won't summarize it. Laura Westhoff's paper is about Myles Horton's education in Chicago. The idea of Horton being educated in part in the Park School of Sociology is ... fascinating. I am not sure what I think of it, except that we need to rethink both Horton and Park as a result. Is this democratic social knowledge? How much was Horton using his education or mapping it onto preexisting ideas... And how much did Park promote a particular view of a functioning society or educate students who then could go do what they wanted, later? Hmmn...

Disclosure: I've had two cups of coffee, something I don't usually have in the morning. So I've had listening-enhancing drugs.

Veterans Day

My father was a veteran, the base pediatrician for George AFB in the late 1950s. My maternal grandfather was a veteran, cooking for troops in Europe after the WW1 armistice. 

I'm not a veteran, and neither are any of my siblings or my cousins. We came of age in Vietnam and then held our breath through much of the 1980s. Like many of our same-age peers, our distrust of government was coupled with a sense that there were no good wars. We never thought about the consequences of the all-voluntary force except that we would not be cannon fodder as a result.

Except that there are some social consequences of the all-volunteer force in a long war. I know plenty of those in one of the military services or reserves, or a veteran, but my family is not at risk of being sent overseas, at least not without a draft. I don't remember where I heard the following notable fact this week (probably listening to the podcast of the political roundup on the PBS NewsHour), but the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq are the longest wars since the 18th century when there hasn't been a draft. As a result, there is no sense of shared burden. Tax cuts are our burden, and we are urged to go spend money this and next month, else the terrorists win.

To our nation's shame, we are in our first credit-card war.

Roy Rosenzweig

T. Mills Kelly has the best remembrance of Roy Rosenzweig today. Rosenzweig was a pioneer in digital history who began the Center for History and New Media (see the original page). (Hat tip.)

Call for papers: Politics, Activism, and the History of America's Public Schools

Forwarded from an e-mail, an opportunity for graduate students and new scholars in the history of education.

"Politics, Activism, and the History of America’s Public Schools"
A Conference Celebrating the 40th Anniversary of The Irony of Early School Reform, April 12, 2008
University of Pennsylvania

Upon its publication, Professor Michael B. Katz’s The Irony of Early School Reform (1968) underscored the possibility of using historical study to shed light on the contemporary state of schooling in the United States. This one-day conference aims to bring together emerging and veteran scholars whose work, like Irony, excavates the past to expose the present.

Conference organizers are soliciting papers from younger scholars—graduate students and assistant professors in the early stages of their career—whose work engages the history of America's public schools with an eye toward contemporary challenges and debates. The conference program committee will organize panels from submitted papers. During these panels, young scholars will have 15 minutes to present their papers, after which they will be discussed in a rigorous yet supportive workshop setting facilitated by a leading expert in the field.

With generous support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York City, the Spencer Foundation, and various departments and programs at the University of Pennsylvania, we have been able to secure the participation of some of the most eminent researchers in the history of American Education. We also will be able to offer a select group of younger scholars funding to offset travel costs. By bringing together junior and senior scholars for a day of critique, encouragement, and shared questioning, we hope to strengthen the community of scholars committed to studying the history of American education.

Submission deadline: December 8, 2007

Submission Procedures: Please send the following information as attachments to penn_edconf08@hotmail.com

• A paper proposal of 350 words that identifies the topic, its significance, and preliminary findings.
• A c.v. containing email and mailing addresses

Don't get mad; get historiographical

The New York Times preview of Gregory Clark's A Farewell to Alms has prompted a flurry of responses by people who haven't yet read the book. Hrrmrmrmrm... Obviously, it's touched a nerve among historians, perhaps moreso than the flurry responding to Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel. Both books are orthogonal looks at the "rise of Europe" in ways that are couched as "new explanations."

For historians who know the extensive literature on early modern Europe and industrialization, these books are provocative and somewhat discomfiting, in part because they appear at first glance to be ignoring the existing literature. I've already read  one criticism of Clark saying he was just reworking Fernand Braudel's annaliste approach. I understand this (I had similar questions when reading the NYT article), but I haven't read the book and feel it's better to hold that as a question until specialists have a chance to read the thing.

But even without reading it, I can suggest an approach that can accommodate criticism and provocation, which is to treat it as an extension of a long line of provocative arguments about the rise of Europe, from Lynn White to Jared Diamond and beyond. As an undergraduate, I had a wonderful experience taking a course in early-modern Europe, where Susan Stuard used every week to explore a different explanation for the "rise of Europe," thereby turning historiography into a puzzle. It was fabulous, and it also provided a way to think about Clark's book, regardless of the merits: "Yes, dear, you're quite clever. While I'm cooking, could you please go join that bookshelf over there? I think you'll find lots of friends with similar interests."

Raul Hilberg, 81

Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg died over the weekend. I never met him, but he deeply affected my understanding of history and human cruelty. As a child raised in a American Jewish household in the 1960s and 1970s, I was exposed to the first generation of Holocaust education. (I didn't know until a few years ago that American Jews took a few decades after WW2 to start that project seriously, and the NY Times article linked above notes that Hilberg's advisor tried to discourage him from the subject as unvalued in history.) That first wave of Holocaust education hadn't yet absorbed Hilberg's ideas, and so the dominant arguments were that Hitler was evil and that we must never forget. Fortunately, I also met several survivors, including Mel Mermelstein, people whose specificity was a useful antidote to the oversimplification of early Holocaust education. (I met Mermelstein before his legal battles with the Holocaust-denying Institute for Historical Review.) For my bar mitzvah, I looked closely at the trial of Adolf Eichmann.

When I was in college, I took several classes from Jane Caplan, including a German history course. I don't remember whether I found the Hilberg volumes in my history intro class or in one of Caplan's classes; I suspect the latter. I read large chunks of his opus, though I'll readily admit I skimmed significant portions. (Someone who claims to have read every word of all three volumes as a sideline to undergraduate course requirements with a full liberal-arts college load... well, I'd be skeptical.)

Hilberg's account was meticulous, detailed, horrific, and mesmerizing. His description of the bureaucracy of genocide answered questions that had lain unformed in my mind for years. I had little understanding of historiographical dynamics, but I knew this was important. I cannot imagine that anyone who has read Hilberg could simplify the Holocaust or other genocides with any shred of historical conscience.

(p. 73/104; see prior entry for context)

Hiram Hover's gone

Hiram Hover's pseudonymous blog is now gone, not only on hiatus but now unavailable from the domain and only available in snippets from archive.org. D***.

Americas secondary enrollment trace, late 20th c.

Thanks to a a great Excel chart tip, I can now provide one way of summarizing synthetic-cohort educational attainment data from the following countries using census data from the second half of the 20th century:

• Brazil
  
• Chile
  
• Colombia
  
• Costa Rica
  
• Ecuador
  
• Those born in Mexico and enumerated in either Mexico or the U.S. in 1960, 1970, 1990, or 2000
  
• United States
  
• Venezuela

All of this is courtesy of the International Public Use Microdata Sample library, a wonderful resource available without use charge to any researcher in the world. You can download this Excel file with the relevant chart and use the scroll bar on the right to highlight the key data from any country, period, and sex combination. More in the full entry...

---

Very roughly, each line indicates the proportion at each age that would have completed secondary education but only secondary education (no university degree), if a hypothetical cohort went through ages 15-35 with the same educational experiences implied for the intercensal period by the census microdata at each end of the period in question.

There are the usual number of quirks and quibbles—quirkles?—embodied in this chart, from some key model issues to the algorithmic details:

• The census estimates at the base of this chart start with only those born in the country, with the exception of Mexico (explained below)
  
• I assume that there is no substantial differential mortality by educational attainment for the years in question
  
• I assume similarly that out-migration does not substantially affect attainment (again with the exception of Mexico)
  
• I estimate the cross-sectional proportion with a credential at an exact age as the average of the proportions in surrounding single-year age intervals, smoothed in the case of the Latin American countries at many ages as three-year averages (in the age intervals). Many of the increments are again smoothed with moving three-year averages and then fixed at 0 if slightly negative.
  
• The model I'm using (from Carl Schmertmann's 2002 article [$]) is an estimate of intercensal increments without weighting by person-years, unlike most intercensal estimate techniques.

Of all these issues, the migration assumptions are the ones that will raise the most eyebrows, and I hope that if you've read this far, you're wondering why I combined the U.S. and Mexico census data. The basic answer to the latter question is because I could. Both Mexico and the U.S. conducted censuses in 1960, 1970, 1990, and 2000, and I was curious if the results would be affected by including U.S. residents born in Mexico. I discovered that for some ages (older teens and those in their 20s), more than 10% of those born in Mexico were residing in the U.S. for some of the censuses. That's a fascinating statistic in itself, and the existence of the same-year censuses suggests a potential for cross-national social histories using the censuses in question. I'm still puzzling over questions of "effects," since we don't know who spent which years where from the census stats, just the end result for the population as a whole.

I used the secondary-and-only-secondary-attainment line because it shows both secondary and college attainment. The up-slope shows secondary attainment, and the downslope shows college attainment (absent some late secondary graduation).

Bon appetit!

Oh, yes: For those following these things, my son's team won their first tournament game today, 14-2 (ten-run rule after four innings). By doing so, they've saved their #2 and #3 pitchers for tomorrow's game. Then everything gets harried, regardless of the results, and all teams go through their experienced pitchers. Spahn and Sain, then pray for rain?

Corporate donors and universities

From the cutting-room floor: Adam Emerson and I talked for about half an hour last weekend while he was preparing today's article, Corporate U, and I think he did a nice job of putting the corporate sponsorship of one university program into a broader national contemporary perspective. I shouldn't be surprised that the historical perspective was left out (he quotes me far down in the story), but I thought I gave him the best statement on the history: "If you look just at the names of major universities like Leland Stanford University or Carnegie Mellon University, you'll understand that wealthy philanthropic influence on universities have a long history." I don't know if I said exactly those words, but it was close.

The other gripe is also minor: he quoted me on a general concern about the influence on the curriculum but not on the two questions I have in general:

• Did a donor have substantive influence on the shape of the curriculum, or did the faculty sponsors determine the shape?
• Did a program go through a university approval process controlled by faculty?

In talking with him, I said that there was no problem with professional programs having close relationships with the field, and many faculty have an obligation to keep close ties to practitioners, but that there was a difference between consulting with practitioners and turning your curriculum over to them. In this particular program, faculty seemed genuinely enthusiastic when they came to USF's undergraduate council, and I suspect they would have told Emerson that while they value Jordan Zimmerman's enthusiasm and support, they determine the curriculum. From what I understand, the program had existed for a number of years; this was a revision, not the creation of an entirely new entity.

Given that in the USF case, the program in question is advertising, I'm not surprised that the donor wants to claim far more influence than I suspect faculty would say he had.  After all, he wants to make a case for his own influence.

Education history and school renewal

Today's brief N.Y. Times story, Massachusetts Acts To Save the Country's First Public High School, is about efforts to revive academics in the first public high school, which opened in the 1820s. The school is troubled, far from its origins as part of the 19th century expansion of the public sphere into tertiary education

English High was neither the first secondary school nor the first "public school" (a concept that only became clearly distinguished from private schooling later in the 19th century). There were plenty of schools called academies, seminaries, colleges, and so forth, and their curriculum, academic intensity, and potential student pool all overlapped. As Nancy Beadie and Kim Tolley have documented, New York state provided partial support of academies for part of the 19th century.

But English High represented an idea that was controversial for much of the 19th century: using public funds to provide more advanced education for a small group of students. Today, we think of high school as a universal adolescent experience, but it wasn't until the middle third of the 20th century. In Massachusetts, the legislature repeatedly required towns of a certain size to have high schools, a requirement that was generally ignored until the 1850s. In one case famous among education historians, the town of Beverly, Massachusetts, first started a high school when the state sued.  Then a few years later, the town voted to abolish the school. (The reasons why have been argued over for the last 40 years: see Michael B. Katz's The Irony of Early School Reform and Maris Vinovskis's The Origins of Public High Schools.)

Part of the reason for the controversy in Beverly and elsewhere was the limited enrollment in high schools; few could afford to keep their kids out of work long enough to attend, but taxes still supported the schools. Part also came from competition for legitimacy (and students) from academies. High schools didn't really acquire political legitimacy until after an 1873 lawsuit filed to block public tax support of the Kalamazoo Union High School. The suit failed, and while the state supreme court only had precedential power over Michigan, it essentially knocked the legs out of the anti-high-school movement.

Many interpret the growth of high schools in the late 19th and early 20th century as a direct outgrowth of the Kalamazoo case, and the webpage linked above includes a similar argument:

Although this issue had been heard by other courts, Justice Cooley's prestige helped to make the Kalamazoo School Case a leading decision that was cited in many courts in surrounding states. In Michigan the effect was profound. The number of high schools in the state increased from 107 in the early 1870's to 278 by 1890.

But that's not quite true. As David Labaree notes in The Making of an American High School, the growing credential value of high schools gave people in cities a powerful incentive to push for more access to high schools. That growth in high schools eliminated the institutional prestige of the earlier high schools, such as English High in Boston or Central High in Philadelphia.  Central High reacquired higher status in the 1940s when the city differentiated its high schools, creating an elite tier.

The history of English High would make a wonderful dissertation project, from its origins through various phases: A quick search of Worldcat reveals enough secondary materials to make a go of it.

The Loeb Rule

A few days ago, I asked if any readers knew the history of early teacher unionization and the Loeb Rule. In comments, CCPhysicist asked for an explanation, so here it is, briefly: Until 1917, there was a forceful teachers union in Chicago, the Chicago Teachers Federation, led for a number of years by Margaret Haley. In a coalition with local progressives such as Jane Addams, the CTF was successful in a number of efforts, most notably a fight against corporate tax exemptions that were impovershing the city and its schools.

The CTF was part of the Chicago Federation of Labor and Local 1 of the American Federation of Teachers. But in 1917, the Board of Education forbid teachers from affiliating with labor unions, and the CTF crumbled.  It wasn't until the postwar era that teachers unions would rise again to prominence.

(See Kate Rousmaniere's entry on the Chicago Teachers Federation in the Electronic Encyclopedia of Chicago.)

State High School Exit Examination database

University of Minnesota sociologist Rob Warren has created a database listing the historical development of State High School Exit Examinations. This is the type of baseline work that makes other research possible. 

Thanks, Rob!

Sweden ho! (in June)

In late June, I'm headed outside North America for the first time since 1973. It's for the 2007 meeting of the Society for the History of Children and Youth, and appropriately enough I committed myself to looking at educational attainment internationally.

Even though I'm late with the registration, it's a virtual steal, only 1000 kronors, and I can get a hotel room for 540 kronors/night (apart from VAT, of course). Cool! So I have my plane reservations, registration, hotel accommodations in Linkoping, and I think I have everything I need (visas apparently don't need to be acquired before travel), with two exceptions...

I can't make train reservations to get between Copenhagen airport and Linkoping University yet, and I need to find a hotel in Copenhagen the last night before I fly back. I just need to wait a few weeks for the train reservations, but if someone has suggestions for a hotel that's a little different from the Danish version of corporate hotels (e.g., Scandic Sydhavnen), please let me know!

Why I am a history-education half-breed

The last of my Michael-Katz-student bloggish discussions, on my being a history-education half-breed and other matters of scholarly parochialism, is over at Ed