The Teacher Wars (13 page)

Though Addams was entirely well intentioned, her support for Superintendent Cooley's teacher evaluation plan may well have been misplaced. Cooley attempted
to keep teachers' evaluation reports secret from them, which meant the system was useless as a tool for improving classroom practice. Subsequent school board investigations of the secret evaluations found that some teachers with very high scores—in the ninety-fifth percentile or above—had been denied raises and promotions, while less highly rated teachers had been rewarded for loyalty to administrators. Jane Addams found the Board of Education entirely frustrating. She could broker no consensus on how to improve the quality of teaching or lower class sizes to better serve troubled children. Education in Chicago seemed hopelessly politicized, with efforts at reform cyclically stymied by either inept administration or the resistant teachers union.

In 1909 the Chicago Board of Education, now filled with Mayor Dunne's more progressive appointees, hired a superintendent they hoped could break through these divides—Ella Flagg Young, an expert on teacher training.

By the time she became the nation's first female leader of a major school system, Young had already built an extraordinary reputation. She was a dainty, utterly serious, and fiercely intellectual woman, whose much older husband had died when Young was still in her twenties. After several years' teaching, she ran the normal division of the city's first high school. There she attempted to turn girls as young as thirteen into competent teachers by sending them for six months to train in one of the city's poorest elementary schools. But many of the normalites had received poor grammar school educations and were ill prepared to teach struggling immigrant children.
When Young attempted to toss incompetents out of the training program,
she found city aldermen were protecting them, often because their parents were politically connected.

Young went on to serve for thirty years as a celebrated elementary school principal and then as a district-level assistant superintendent. A number of her ideas were startlingly ahead of their time. She
discouraged her teachers from assigning homework, on the grounds that more privileged children would get help from their parents, while children from less-educated families would be left further and further behind, contributing to the problem we today call the “achievement gap.” When she noticed some poor children arrived at school dirty,
she established school baths, and she lowered as many class sizes as she could from seventy to fifty-four students. She opposed the use of the term “
melting pot” to describe Chicago schools full of immigrants, because she believed the phrase obscured children's individuality and disrespected their various cultures. At the same time, she saw the teaching of proper English as perhaps the school system's most vitally important responsibility and was appalled by many teachers' lack of good grammar and writing skills.

Political opponents would later paint Young and other progressive educators across the nation as toadies of teachers unions. But throughout her long career Young was a frequent critic of the quality of the teacher corps. In an 1887 address on “
How to Teach Parents to Discriminate Between Good and Bad Teaching,” she pointed out that political debates about education reform were frustrating because journalists and the public had very little reliable information about what went on in schools. Instead of allowing sensationalistic muckrakers to sketch only the most appalling classrooms, administrators should observe every teacher's classroom regularly, and classroom doors should always be open to parents, too. The education profession had too much of a “thin skin,” Young lamented, and ought to strive more deliberately toward improvement and transparency. This suggestion, an incursion on teachers' privacy in the classroom, was the sort of thing that usually enraged Margaret Haley, but the Federation leader was always willing to listen to Young's thoughts, because
Young was “endowed with the keenest intellect
I have ever met in man or in woman,” Haley wrote. What's more, Young's critiques were accompanied by real respect for teachers.

She had hosted a
teachers' book club at her own home every other week; the women, some of whom had little more than a seventh-grade education, read and discussed Shakespeare and Dante. Young arranged for educational theorists to speak to teachers about the latest research on child development. The academics who participated,
including John Dewey and the Harvard philosopher William James, were excited by the opportunity to test their ideas on real-world practitioners, and for the female teachers it was thrilling to be taken seriously by leading thinkers.

Working with Dewey at the University of Chicago, in 1900 Young completed a PhD dissertation in pedagogy, called “Isolation in the School.” It was as much a critique of ineffective management in any field as an essay on education issues in particular. For employees to feel respected and want to work hard, Young wrote, there must be “
an interplay of thought between the members of each part” of a large organization, in which teachers, principals, and administrators all learned from the expertise of their colleagues, both those below and those above them in the professional hierarchy. Teachers should not be made to feel like mere “
automatons,” mechanically reproducing the favored textbook-based lessons of school administrators, many of whom had only limited teaching experience themselves. When school systems were organized more democratically, Young believed, children would better understand, through direct observation, the key rights and responsibilities of citizenship.

These ideas were tested at the University of Chicago Laboratory School, which Dewey founded in 1896, and where Young served for a time as the director of instruction. About 140 students attended the school; most were the children of professors or other professionals associated with the university. Dewey often expressed horror at what he called the “
medieval” techniques of traditional public schools, in which children read textbooks, memorized their contents, and studied each subject, such as history or biology, in isolation from the others, hunched over a desk. In an 1894 letter to his wife, Alice, he wrote, “
When you think of the thousands and thousands of young ones who are practically ruined … in the Chicago
schools every year, it is enough to make you go out and howl on the street corners like the Salvation Army.” By contrast, the Lab School's curriculum was based on an observation from child psychology, one that Dewey had also noticed as a young father: Children's games, from cops and robbers to playing house, often imitated the professional and domestic occupations of the adults around them. Instead of approaching learning through books and memorization, Dewey hoped to craft a “
new education” based on “scientific” observations of how children actually learned—through playful experimentation in which they sought to understand the workings of the grown-up world.

Although Dewey talked about centering the school experience more on children's natural curiosity and less on adult-led lessons from books, he did not advocate a passive role for teachers. Educators should “
direct the child's activities” by presenting her with interesting questions and the tools she would need to answer them, Dewey wrote. In one
Lab School project, students were asked to consider the role of the textile industry in shaping human history. They examined raw flax, cotton plants, and wool, running each material through a spinning wheel. Through this practice, they learned cotton fiber is more difficult to separate from its plant than flax fiber is, which explains why linen and wool clothing predated cotton, why American cotton producers relied so heavily on slave labor, and also why the invention of the cotton mill was such a boon to the economy of the antebellum United States, making slavery less politically viable.

With lessons like these, Dewey hoped students would learn to respect and understand both the abstract and physical worlds. He often recalled his own childhood in Burlington, Vermont, where his grandparents manufactured candles and soap at home from materials produced on their farm.
Dewey worried that turn-of-the-century urban children had no exposure to the process of how labor transformed the products of nature into the products of industry. He hoped students at the Lab School would come to understand that every item one ate, wore, or used carried a history of human ingenuity.

Dewey's approach hardly acknowledged the ways in which the population of the Lab School differed from the population of Chicago public schools. Lab School students were fluent in English, well fed, and well clothed. Few, if any, faced the prospect of leaving school at age twelve in order to help support their families. On the other hand, many Chicago public school students had parents who turned raw materials into industrial goods every single day, whether they worked as carpenters or butchers. Unlike more affluent children, they were not at all disconnected from the means of production.

In later decades, new types of experimental schools would demonstrate that progressive pedagogy could produce excellent results for disadvantaged students, too. Ella Flagg Young, however, had a very difficult time implementing in Chicago public schools the ideas she and Dewey had pioneered at the University of Chicago. As superintendent,
she did experience some significant successes: She increased teacher pay and pension contributions, established afterschool and summer programs for struggling students, hired the first speech pathology specialists and female physical education instructors, and convened “teacher councils” that met twice per year to share ideas with top administrators. She decreased high school dropout rates by adding vocational electives in architecture, accounting, shorthand, mechanical drawing, and other skills.

The teachers union backed her. But the city's business elite did not.

In 1915 Chicago's new Republican mayor, William “Big Bill” Thompson, appointed Jacob Loeb and a number of other tax cutters to the Board of Education. Loeb was the founder of a Chicago insurance company and was elected the board president. His first agenda item was a 7.5 percent budget cut; he also opposed the very concept of female principals or administrators. Loeb led a coordinated effort to push Young from her job and essentially kill the Teachers Federation. The school board passed
the “Loeb Rule,” which forbade “membership by teachers in organizations affiliated with a trade
union.” Unionization, the board claimed, was “hostile to discipline, prejudicial to the efficiency of the teaching force, and detrimental to the welfare of schools.”

At the Auditorium Building on September 8, the labor movement hosted a rally to organize against the Loeb Rule. Samuel Gompers of the American Federation of Labor told the crowd that businessmen were engaged in a campaign “
to eliminate men of brain and heart and sympathy and character” from the teaching force. U.S. Assistant Secretary of Labor Louis Post, a former member of Mayor Dunne's progressive school board, spoke about the threat the Teachers Federation had long posed to corporate interests more interested in lowering their own taxes than in improving the education of other people's children. “All over this country, in one form or another, it is a fight between what has been called
the Interests, the special interests, and the interests of the public, the interests of the common people. That is the fight.”

After a long legal and political battle, the Teachers Federation agreed to disaffiliate from the AFL, possibly in a deal with Loeb to reinstate teachers who had been fired because of their union activism. Yet during the same period, the Federation won three longer-lasting victories for unionized teachers. First, in 1913, Haley and other Illinois suffragists successfully lobbied the state legislature in favor of women's right to vote. Federation members were finally empowered at the ballot box.

Second, in 1916, the Chicago Teachers Federation
founded the American Federation of Teachers, which launched with locals in Chicago; New York City; Gary, Indiana; Atlanta; St. Paul, Minnesota; and Washington, D.C. The AFT organized an additional 174 affiliates over the next four years.

Last, Loeb's virulent attack on the Federation, including his attempted firing of popular and effective classroom teachers in retaliation for their opposition to his policies, raised the ire of liberal good-government reformers. Together with the Federation and the Chicago City Council,
they lobbied the state legislature to pass a bill in 1917 granting teachers tenure protection after a three-year probationary period. Previously, teachers' contracts were year to year and could be terminated at any time. After the Otis Bill passed, to
dismiss a tenured teacher the school board would have to hold hearings in which teachers had the right to legal representation.

The first American teachers to win tenure rights were those in New Jersey, in 1909. Tenure is by far the most controversial aspect of contemporary teacher unionism, but in the period before World War I, there was relative consensus among union leaders, school reformers, and intellectuals in favor of tenure. It had long been a feature of the celebrated Prussian education system, which had helped convince Harvard president Charles William Eliot and New York City's reformist superintendent William Maxwell to support stronger job security protections for teachers.
In New York, the new three-year probationary period followed by tenure was seen as a clean government reform after decades of politically influenced teacher appointments, in which schools were part of the patronage machine. Tenure was also popular among leaders of the National Education Association, although the NEA was hostile to classroom teachers affiliating with blue-collar organized labor.

Fed up with Chicago politics, Ella Flagg Young made plans to retire and move to California. When she stepped down from the Chicago superintendency on January 1, 1916, she released a statement to the press that could still define progressive pedagogy today, with its view of the teacher as a creative and independent intellectual guide for children: