The Teacher Wars (14 page)

Margaret Haley and the Teachers Federation would have liked to believe that in Young's absence, they carried on her legacy. At times they did, but amid increasing political and business pressure on schools during the interwar years, teachers unions in Chicago and beyond often found themselves making unsavory alliances, and engaging in rough-and-tumble politics far afield from education itself.

Chicago mayor William Dever was a good-government reformist Democrat. Voters elected him in 1923 to clean up the mess left behind by “Big Bill” Thompson, whose Board of Education, it was discovered, embezzled $8 million in school funds. Dever appointed William McAndrew as schools superintendent. A thoroughly modern bicycle enthusiast, McAndrew had risen to national prominence as an administrator in the Brooklyn public schools, where his ideas were shaped by
Frederick Winslow Taylor, the founder of the “scientific management” movement. Taylor, an engineer, believed every aspect of the manufacturing process should be measured, such as how many hems an individual worker could sew in an hour, or how much money a company lost due to worker error, such as errant stitches. This would help companies improve job training, and make it easier to assign laborers to specific repetitive tasks they could complete quickly, in what Taylor termed the “One Best Way.” To encourage good performance, he believed workers should receive small pay bonuses for crafting good products.

Though Taylor intended his theories to be applied to factory work, they soon became a fad among public school administrators, who were eager, during the bullish 1920s, to embrace innovative business practices. Prominent journals such as
Educational Review
published
intricate tables for judging teachers' output. Teachers would be measured by evidence of their students' learning, which could be demonstrated through test scores or examples of children's essays, penmanship, and drawings.
A study by education researcher William Lancelot explained how administrators could record a “pupil change” score for every teacher, by testing how much the teacher's students knew on a given subject at the beginning and then the end
of a term. (Today this calculation is called a teacher's “value-added” score.) Lancelot applied his pupil change method to math instructors at Iowa State College and found that, indeed, some teachers were more effective than others. Yet gains for students who studied with the best teachers were modest: an average of less than three additional points on a hundred-point grading scale. Why?
According to peer reviewer Helen Walker—as well as many of today's critics of value added—the pupil change measurement ultimately had a “low relationship” to true teacher quality, since so many factors beyond a teacher's control could affect a student's test score, from class size to family involvement in education.

Student achievement was not the only factor measured in the new efficiency rubrics. Evaluation systems called for teachers to be judged on their personal characteristics and given
numeric ratings in largely subjective categories, such as “obedience,” “honesty of work,” “dress,” “voice,” and “force of character.” A teacher's command of classroom discipline would also be assessed, by counting the number of students who were late or unruly, and even by measuring the number of seconds and minutes it took for a teacher to distribute or collect worksheets. Principals would painstakingly record all this data on spreadsheets—then handwritten, of course—and higher-level administrators could subsequently grade principals by looking at the performance of an entire school.

McAndrew, the Chicago schools superintendent, believed fervently in these new, supposedly rationalized teacher rating systems. In his 1916 book,
The Public and Its Schools
, he wrote that evaluating teachers based on their students' test scores was far superior to the traditional method: a principal “
walking through the rooms once a day.” His zeal for rooting out and firing inefficient teachers who could not improve is more than a little reminiscent of Michelle Rhee, the recent Washington, D.C., schools chancellor who seemed to take delight in mass layoffs. McAndrew wrote:

When he arrived in Chicago, McAndrew immediately took two steps that earned him the ire of Margaret Haley and the rest of organized labor. First, he moved to disband the beloved teacher councils Young had founded. Like most Taylorites, McAndrew believed in the principle of a rational, expertise-driven manager presiding decisively over employees. If administrators had access to the knowledge and data necessary to improve the school system, they would not need to meet regularly with teachers to hear their ideas. He then proposed that junior high students be assigned, based on IQ scores, to either vocational or academic-track schools. The Chicago school board supported McAndrew's proposal, releasing
a 1924 “research bulletin” claiming that IQ tests given to World War I army recruits had proven there were five levels of supposedly innate intelligence, each corresponding with an occupational class: “Professional and business,” “clerical,” “skilled trades,” “semi-skilled trades,” and “unskilled labor.”

The Federation, like Ella Flagg Young, preferred a Deweyite “single track” approach to the curriculum: that schools should help all children become facile with their hands, but ought not to direct students toward specific jobs, nor neglect academics. Alongside the teachers union, male organized labor in Chicago helped lead the opposition to vocational determinism. The leader of the Illinois State Federation of Labor, John Walker, believed dual-track schools would make public education “
a training place for cheap labor, beasts of burden, at the expense of the development of the children as broad-minded, big-hearted, intelligent, fine types of citizenship.” The AFL published a pamphlet warning that IQ tests could be used to sear the children of working-class parents with “
the brand of inferiority.”

The
unions were right to push back against high-stakes IQ testing. By 1922—two years
before
McAndrew came to Chicago—respected researchers had begun to decry the wartime intelligence studies as bunk science that failed to account for the differences in recruits' previous schooling. A study of over 100,000 New York City fifth graders found socioeconomic factors such as family income and access to health care outweighed IQ as predictors of academic success. What's more, IQ appeared to be changeable over time, not a measure of innate talent.
Harper's
published a study showing that after living in the North for several years, southern-born blacks were able to score higher on IQ tests.

Nevertheless, under the sway of efficiency reformers who hoped to match children to jobs, schools rushed to buy and administer standardized IQ exams. A 1932 survey of 150 school districts found three-quarters used intelligence tests to assign students to different academic tracks. IQ testing had replaced phrenology as school reform's favored “science” for sorting and classifying children.

As Haley fought against tracking and McAndrew's other efficiency policies—such as the requirement that teachers check in on a timesheet four times each day—she won support from the normally anti-union
Chicago Tribune
, which warned the superintendent against “
antagonizing the bulk of the teaching force” through an overly top-down reform agenda. Yet in her passion for removing McAndrew from office,
Haley teamed up with a shady character: “Big Bill” Thompson, the corrupt former mayor, who hoped to regain his office and run for president under the isolationist slogan “America First.” In a
March 30, 1927, ad in the
Tribune
, Thompson accused McAndrew and Mayor Dever of being “pro-British rats who are poisoning the wells of historical truth” by selecting history textbooks that called George Washington a “rebel” instead of a hero.
Those allegations were false. In fact, McAndrew strongly supported American patriotism in the school curriculum. Yet with backing from the Teachers Federation, Thompson defeated Dever and then axed McAndrew, whose reform ideas were never fully implemented. Even after the “rat” McAndrew's departure, the Board of Education continued to hear testimony on so-called anti-American “propaganda” in schools.

During the first three decades of teacher unionism, the path-breaking Chicago Teachers Federation boasted achievements of high idealism: bringing tax-dodging corporations to heel, resisting IQ determinism on behalf of poor children, and helping women earn the right to vote. Yet the teachers union movement was (and remains today) a pragmatic, even sometimes cynical, lobbying effort, and one that protected some poorly performing teachers. By partnering with nativist political forces to target McAndrew as insufficiently patriotic, Margaret Haley and her “lady labor sluggers” had emboldened a movement—ideological litmus testing for professional educators—that was already wreaking havoc on American urban education.

WITCH HUNTS AND SOCIAL MOVEMENT UNIONISM DURING THE WARS

In 1917,
Mary McDowell taught Latin at Manual Training High School in the working-class neighborhood of Park Slope, Brooklyn. She was a square-jawed single woman in her early forties who lived with her widowed mother just south of Prospect Park. Befitting the caricature of an old-maid schoolmarm, McDowell was plain-looking and unglamorous, with thin, wire glasses framing her eyes in perfect circles. But while most of her female colleagues had only been to normal school, McDowell, a Quaker, had graduated from Swarthmore, studied at Oxford University in England, and then earned a master's degree at Columbia. Since the onset of the Great War she had been donating $35 per month, a fifth of her modest income, to the American Friends Service Committee, to be used for civilian relief efforts in France.

In a 1914 performance evaluation, Manual's principal noted McDowell “is a fine example for girls. I am impressed with her conscientiousness, her earnest desire to give the best. She is not of the 2:30 type”—meaning she did not rush out of school as soon as the final bell rang. But McDowell ran into trouble three years later, when a Yale-educated engineer named Horace Mann Snyder replaced her previous boss. Named by his superintendent father after the common schools visionary, Snyder arrived in Brooklyn filled to the brim with the popular education reform theories of the day and began implementing them with gusto. At the time, only
17 percent of Americans completed high school, where the classical, academic
curriculum prevailed. Vocational tracking and sports programs were seen as a way to reduce dropouts by making school more engaging and relevant to teenagers. Snyder planned to introduce IQ testing to split Manual freshmen into three tracks, which would determine the courses they took for the next four years as well as the opportunities open to them after graduation. If only a third of Manual's students would be prepared for college, an old-fashioned, full-time Latin teacher like McDowell would almost certainly be considered superfluous—a dinosaur teaching a dead language to poor children ill equipped to use it.

The principal's second major enthusiasm was for “citizenship” training, a craze that swept the nation's schools during World War I. What Snyder had in mind was less a rigorous civics curriculum than a sort of suffusion of Manual High School with patriotic spirit. He required teachers to transcribe patriotic quotations on the blackboard each day and distribute leaflets encouraging students to buy war savings stamps. McDowell fulfilled these directives. But when Snyder asked her to spend an hour each week discussing the general merits of the United States above all other nations, McDowell demurred. She was there to teach Latin; diligent study, she believed, was the most patriotic way for her students to spend their time. Snyder retaliated via the teacher evaluation system.