Carter G Woodson and Black Thought in Modern Education

At the close of my recent post about Modern Educational Thinking, I lamented that Kleibard’s overview of curriculum and education in the early 20th century contained no examination of the theories or practices affecting people of color. So, I turn to Brown & Brown & Grant’s Black Intellectual Thought in Education.

Although there is much to consider in this time period, I’d like to focus briefly on the work of Carter G. Woodson. Woodson is often thought of as the “father of Black History” but situating him in the intellectual currents of the time helps give a clearer view of the uniqueness and innovations of Black thinkers in the early 20th century. In some ways the challenges facing Black people in Jim Crow America necessitated the generation of cultural and racial theories which seem at home in discourses around race and society today.

It’s important to recognize the expansiveness of the White Supremacist project of this era. Following reconstruction, it seems as if almost the entire nation engaged in an aggressive purposeful forgetting of the causes of the Civil War and its immediate aftermath. Textbooks, for example, promoted racist attitudes and race science to “settle” the issue of including Blacks in American society. There’s a great article in the Chronicle of High Education about how the academy worked to sustain white supremacy. I recommend it because it gives a good view of just how fucked up we really are. Also, these attitudes constructed the racist discourse currently active in our politics and society.

In short, white academics constructed racist justifications for suppressing Black citizens. This included appeals to “science” to prove that Black children were incapable of learning anything beyond what was required for manual labor, that Black people were inherently lazy and needed white supervision to accomplish anything, and that Black men were constantly lusting after white women. It’s an incomplete list but you get the picture. This is ground better covered elsewhere, as in the article linked above, or the exhaustive work of Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Yes, that one!)

So, what response did Black people have to such ideas, at an academic level? There were a few. One response was the call for Black intellectual leadership. W.E.B. duBois argued that there needed to be a class of talented, educated, and eventually wealthy Black individuals and families to lead the masses of Blacks still relegated to sharecropping and manual labor. Opposed to this view was Booker T. Washington who felt that approach was too limited and, possibly, created a class of leaders who had little in common with their people. Instead, he felt there should be broad programs to focus on education. He specifically felt that education should help laborers gain skills which could be used to better their local communities. If the average Black person had to rely on skilled white labor, they were forever subject to the capricious and racist attitudes pervading white society. So, the argument became over whether to develop the capacity for self sustaining communities from the top down or the bottom up.

The racist stereotypes and the preeminence of the Dunning school of thinking intruded on these debates and created a more urgent need to challenge racialist thinking. Flowing from the work of Alain LeRoy Locke, the argument for a “New Negro” emerged. This was a view not far from what we would probably call cosmopolitan today. Locke felt that people of all races, and whites especially, would benefit from more contact with people unlike themselves. He urged the increasing presence of Blacks in media, journalism, and the arts. Through this social and cultural interaction society at large would develop a “new psychology” of Blacks in America and around the world. This is only a portion of Locke's work so please do not construe this as the whole of his thought.

Woodson critiqued this idea as failing to undo the harm of these stereotypes. If, as Woodson felt, the white view was one in which Black people had no history beyond that of enslavement and barbarism, how does saying ‘look how far we’ve come’ negate that view? The “New Negro” in some sense legitimized the white racist stereotypes and, therefore, was unable to adequately combat them. Woodson felt that instead of showing the world how great Black people were now, or could be soon, that the world needed to know that Black people were always great. Woodson’s life work grew out of this idea. Informed, in part, by the lack of any attention to Black history while pursuing his doctorate (the first African American to earn a doctorate in history) Woodson began to document Black history in detail.

Beyond publishing academic articles, he started journals, weeklies, newspapers, and other publications meant for consumption by the general public. Woodson wrote dozens of textbooks for use in segregated schools, and instituted Black History Week as a way for any school to focus exclusively on and celebrate the history of Black people. This later turned into Black History Month. He was specifically critical of the idea of “mis-education”. He felt that neglecting to teach Black children about their history denied them a chance to build a sense of self, place, and purpose in the world. Curriculum which purported to be educative was, in fact, precisely the opposite and only served to push Black children out of school.

Woodson's view of history of Black History was to its totality. He would write one day of the ancient metallurgists in Ethiopia who smelted iron before any Greek or Latin culture had emerged and then turn the next day to discussing how white universities could not hope to train teachers of Black children because they had no sense of the immediate conditions of Black people in their communities or in the country. In some ways, I feel like Woodson outlined the idea of culturally responsive pedagogy decades before it entered the mainstream of educational thinking. He may be one of the earliest thinkers to recognize that classrooms weren't simply communicating cultural norms and values but were active participants in constructing those norms and values. Hence his critique that "the 'educated Negroes' have the attitude of contempt toward their on people" because "he went to be educated in a system which dismisses the Negro as a nonentity" (Woodson, 1933, p1.). Curriculum, he felt, was central to communicating and reproducing the ideology of white supremacy and, crucially, even approaches which were not outright racist contributed to white supremacy through omission. This was just as true in Black schools as in white ones. Woodson articulated the groundwork of the hidden curriculum and the null curriculum some 70 years before they were published by white men in largely still white institutions of higher learning.

To return to my first statement, I think it's a stunning encapsulation of Woodson's critique that Kliebard's historical overview of educational thinking neglects to mention even a single important Black educator, administrator, or intellectual of the era including Woodson himself. It is made even more gobsmackingly omissive by the fact that its first edition was published not in 1926 but in 1986. The third edition was published in 2004!

I'll leave you today with Anna Julia Cooper's 1892 A Voice from the South which begins,

IN the clash and clatter of our American Conflict, it has been said that the South remains Silent. Like the Sphinx she inspires vociferous disputation, but herself takes little part in the noisy controversy. One muffled strain in the Silent South, a jarring chord and a vague and uncomprehended cadenza has been and still is the Negro. And of that muffled chord, the one mute and voiceless note has been the sadly expectant Black Woman,

                         An infant crying in the night,
                         An infant crying for the light;
                         And with no language--but a cry.

        The colored man's inheritance and apportionment is still the sombre crux, the perplexing cul de sac of the nation,--the dumb skeleton in the closet provoking ceaseless harangues, indeed, but little understood and seldom consulted.

On Modern Educational Thinking, Part 3

Let's start with a quick tl;dr of what I've covered in the last two posts about Modern Educational Thinking:

3 (of 4) competing influence on education in the period leading up to the 1950s.

1. Humanists - A "Classical Education" focused on the Roman, Greek, and Enlightenment traditions with a heavy focus on ancient languages, textuality, history, geometry, and logic. Flaws include: limited applicability to the daily needs of the masses, few teachers had the knowledge to teach it, it was difficult and students were expected to be in class for long hours which competed with their families need for them to work/labor at home
2. Developmentalists - The first of the "scientific" theories which emerged out of equal parts German psychology and social Darwinism. The major premise of developmentalists remains influential today: children should learn material appropriate for their social and intellectual capabilities. Flaws include: "science" was a very flexible term that often included "random thoughts of random white guys", initial attempts at gauging children's social and intellectual development followed social-epoch theory, tended to assume that certain classes of people would never develop as far because they weren't as evolved. 
3. Social Efficacy - Social institutions should reflect the broad needs of society and the nation, including schools. This led to the pairing of schools deciding they needed to teach kids the citizenship values of the nation with the idea that schools should reflect the labor conditions which they were preparing students for. There was a big focus on testing and measurement to eliminate inefficient uses of time and money. Flaws include: immigrants and poors were assumed to have bad values, the masses were destined for factory floors so schools should literally emulate factories, curriculum often scaled back to the basics and applied via highly regimented direct instruction.

Which brings us to today's focus, the fourth big influence on Modern Educational Thinking, the social meliorists. Broadly speaking, the social meliorists felt similarly to the social efficacy crowd that institutions should be used for the good of the community; however, they diverged greatly in what that would look like. Especially focused on schools, social meliorists felt that school could be used to directly improve the individual.

Much of the split between these two philosophies came from the practical split between factory labor focused education and farm labor focused education. Up through the 1940s, as much as 20% of the US population was engaged directly in farming and half of the US population was rural through the 1920s. Unlike the factory, where it was uncommon for laborers to live, the demands of farm life necessarily included "domestic" components. These were not cognitively simple tasks, either. Farmers had to track, breed, and/or slaughter livestock, understand the botany and ecology of their crops, and plan both agriculturally and financially for future growing seasons. The early stages of social meliorism emerged out of the feeling that schools should aid their farmer-students in developing the skills to be self sufficient.

It's not hard to see how these ideologies were incompatible. On one hand, there was a move to radically simplify and atomize each step in a chain of labor. Each factory worker only needed to know his (and it was his) job and not the jobs of other workers. On the other hand, every farmer needed to know everything about the labor of farming, the management of a farm, and daily living on a farm.

I want to add some of my own analysis here, too. The social meliorists seem to me to be very closely aligned with the Progressive movement of the early 20th century. It's often assumed that progressive education came much later but I feel there is a deeper connection here. Although the texts I'm pulling from don't make this connection explicitly, the progressive movement was also born out of the economic situation of America's farmers. A lot of hay is made of the need for labor reforms and challenging the phenomenally corrupt state and federal government of the time but the origins came from a popular movement among farmers to challenge the power of the railroads. Farmers relied on the railroads to transport their goods to mills and markets around the nation which made them very sensitive to changes in freight pricing. The railroads operated with effective monopolies over vast areas of farmland and the earliest moves toward "trust busting" were by organized farmers. One early example was a change made in New York to state road laws. Prior to 1898, roads were maintained by local landowners at their own expense, competing directly with railways for the transit of goods over even relatively short distances. Railways would buy up land adjacent to existing roadways and then "fail" to maintain the roads, thus encouraging the use of rail. In 1898, New York assumed the responsibility of roadway maintenance at the state level and levied a transport tax for funding which primarily fell on the railroads. This was done as direct relief to the farmers of New York. By about 1910, most states had followed suit and the first federal agency overseeing roadways was created, the American Association for Highway Improvement. I know it's not a school-specific example but America's large rural population made it influential throughout the early 20th century and it acted as the kickstart for the Progressive era. This has some clear connections to the goals of the social meliorists, as we are about to see.

So, one of the ways this idea of self-sufficiency through broad knowledge entered the curriculum was through "experience curriculum" or, simply put, learning by doing. Obviously this has some important applications to farming and Massachusetts passed the Smith-Hughes Act in 1913 to encourage agricultural vocational training in the state's rural schools. This became a model piece of legislation and saw support from the US Farm Bureau. This legislation funded schools that did something similar to what we call "project based learning" today. Students would learn about farming by doing farming. Later curriculum reforms would be influenced by this approach. One important work was Kilpatrick's The Project Method published in 1918. Kilpatrick took the farming projects and argued that all of education could be based on projects organized around a central theme. Unlike the scientific-efficiency curriculum, inquiry and interests were placed at the center of Kilpatrick's project method. Teachers were "glue" connecting and unifying the educational matter underlying students' interests. From what I'm reading, it seems like Kilpatrick tapped into a current within schools which wanted to resist the influence of the social efficiency crowd because this articulation of this method became a popular alternative to the factory model of schooling.

You might expect me to be quite positive about the social meliorists and their progressivism but it was not all good. Much like other Progressive Era political reforms, there was a moral element to the social meliorists which sought not just to instruct the individual and promote self-sufficiency but to civilize individuals; that is, they were seeking to teach the then-popular christian values of moderation, temperance, and comity, too. Much like the temperance movement was a protestant effort to reign in the perceived moral failures of catholic immigrants, progressive education also included elements aimed at teaching virtue. This was not all that different from the mission to teach democratic values seen in the efficiency classrooms and, in this area at least, they found some common ground. A project in a progressive school might have revolved around finding ways to behave during public assemblies, like church, and in this way also sought to establish specific cultural norms, albeit through individual discovery. Another example would be John Dewey's Democracy in Education where he combines developmentalist psychology and social meliorist methods to argue that education creates the ideal democratic citizen (a social efficiency conclusion). Dewey was weird. I don't want to talk about him.

Similarly, research by social meliorists resembled research under the other curriculum regimes. Experts in schools of psychology, philosophy, and education departments, along with those in various foundations and think-tanks still held control. It was rare that any teacher had influence over the curriculum which she (and it has almost always been she) taught. Even through the roaring twenties and the formal separation of many schools of education from psychology or philosophy departments, teachers remained somewhat undereducated. Although an increasing portion had completed university education, there were large variations in what kind of training that meant. Decisions about policy and curriculum were considered best left to the experts and developed in academic or laboratory settings. There's a great story I learned recently about the Lincoln School. It was formed by Teacher's College was meant to be a laboratory school showcasing the best ideas in project learning and, controversially, drew its student body from the working class immigrant families of Manhattan. During this school's existence, it was almost impossible to get a faculty member of Teacher's College to actually visit the school because they viewed it as a waste of their time. No faculty of Teacher's College conducted research at the Lincoln School before it was closed in 1946!

Through the teens and twenties, social efficiency and social meliorism competed for dominance among a variety of curricula but during the Great Depression social meliorism truly became ascendant. As thousands and thousands of factory workers lost their jobs and farmers watched their crops blow away in the Oklahoma dust, teachers and schools felt the pain of the depression too. In Chicago, teachers went unpaid for months on end. Nationwide there were cuts to education. The social efficiency movement, associated as it was with the factories and industrial systems falling apart around the world, lost its luster quickly. Progressive educators like George Counts began to argue that letting the industrialists and efficiency movement continue to influence education would inevitably perpetuate the existing social order. In a sense, social justice entered the education world and its doorway was social meliorism.

Counts and others built on Kilpatrick's project method and the self-sufficiency of the previous generation's progressive era schooling to call for a curriculum that developed a sense of the coherent and integrated self - an explicit rejection of the reduction of a student to the task they were set to accomplish. They also sought to improve upon the progressive ideals, arguing that there was no sense of social welfare among progressive educators, only the "anarchy of extreme individualism", according to Counts. In 1932, following a comparative study of the Soviet education system, Counts published Dare the School Build a New Social Order, calling for a complex nationwide overhaul of schools. Among his ideas was the recentering of curriculum on the social welfare needs of the learners and the inclusion of teachers in matters of curriculum as they had more useful local knowledge.

While many of these ideas clearly came from the political left, most progressive educators were not outright Marxists. I would categorize them along the lines of modern democratic socialists who preferred the government and its institutions reign in the excesses of industry. As fascism emerged in Europe and revealed one possible outcome of a cozy relationship between the state and industry, social meliorism gained even more steam as a seemingly anti-fascist approach to schooling. What emerged throughout the country was a kind of hybrid between the structure of social efficiency and the aims of the social meliorists. Bell schedules and age-cohorts remained, as did the efforts to promote a particular vision of American democracy, but the aims of the curriculum were shifting from being about basic preparations for work on an assembly line to preparation for the much broader "duties of life." Teaching higher mathematics, like algebra and geometry, were broadly added to high school mathematics, as were foreign languages, history, and a focus on positive social relationships  added to curricula across the country. The seminal Eight-Year Study seemed to confirm the efficacy of this approach and prompted more schools to shift to this version of progressive education. Colleges, however, did not follow the recommendations to relax admissions standards, especially after World War II and the glut of new applicants.

The advent World War II also saw the needs of the federal government have their first direct impact on the curriculum. Criticisms of American social structures became more muted and perceived as unpatriotic. At the same time, demand for the kinds of people who would win the war increased. Unlike the first World War where it was paramount to have the most soldiers, the government felt technological and material supremacy was more important than outright manpower. Funds were made available for advancing math and science, especially as related to aviation and navigation. History and social science refocused around understanding the war. Industrial education also returned as factories were retooled to build the arsenal of democracy and demand for laborers returned.

In the postwar period, it became increasingly clear that there was a new entrant to the US education system. Whereas up until then, it was largely accepted that the "experts" should decide the scope of curriculum, now many argued that the government should ultimately decide curriculum. The debate between the four influence at the beginning of the 20th century subsided and a new debate emerged: just how much of a role should the federal government have in education? Inroads made during the war were hard to give up and many of the programs were regarded as successful. In my mind, the end of this early era, the Modern origins of our current education system, ended with two major events that cemented the role of the federal government in education. First, of course, was the need to compete against global communism. The launch of Sputnik led directly to the passage of the National Defense Education Act in 1958, legislating for the first time the entrance of the federal government into education. Second was the Civil Rights movement. Brown v. BOE was in 1954 and ruled that segregation of public schools was unconstitutional. What followed were policies of massive resistance in various pro-segregation states and communities which limited meaningful change until the 1960s. Activists increasingly turned to federal level reforms to supercede states, culminating in 1964's Civil Rights Act. In 1965 the Elementary and Secondary Education Act provided federal funding for education and further cemented federal control.

Both of these movements dramatically altered the discourse about education in the US even though none of the tensions between humanism, developmentalists, social efficiency, and social meliorism were resolved. From that point onward, the power over curriculum rested in the hands of policymakers at the federal level. This is not to say those initial four ideologies of curriculum ever went away. The Civil Rights movement drew heavily on the arguments of the social meliorists. Social efficiency ideas found a home with the need to make US technology competitive with the Soviet Union and, later, with a globalized marketplace and the advent of the current testing regime. The science of child development remained an important area of study and continues to drive decisions about early childhood education and literacy. Only the humanists seem quiet today. It's only in certain private schools and classics departments where their version of curriculum remains but the idea that learning "the classics" is essential is still around. While the list of classics may be different, many educators still believe there is value in a canonical set of texts. One major holdover from humanists is the reliance on "close reading" of a text, often to the exclusion of the reader or social context.

There are about a million things which I haven't mentioned. It's not exactly fair to a pair of well-researched academic books to try and cram them into a trio of blog posts but I hope it's been interesting, if not informative. I feel a bit more organized in my thinking about education in that era which was kind of the point of all of this.

That said, there are some important omissions which I ought to point out. The Kliebard text, which is the foundation of my summaries, is a very important text in education. It is one of the only attempts to condense many of the major educational ideas of this period into a manageable and coherent text. I've seen it cited in all kinds of circumstances and it will even be getting a new 4th edition sometime in the next year or two. Yet, it leaves out a really really important set of educators and students from this era: black people! This was the time of debate between W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington about the uses of education for African Americans. This era saw the advent of Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Separate but equal was enshrined as law by Plessy v Ferguson in 1896 and created an entirely separate class of schools for blacks, especially in the South, which lasted the duration of the period covered by Kliebard. Yet these events barely merit a mention in a book meant to be comprehensive.

Equally omitted, although oddly present, are women. Throughout the text Kliebard makes sure to mention that most teachers are women. He even points out that the reason teachers have low status in the US is partly because it is thought of as "women's work" and has been historically deprofessionalized. But that's it. I had expected an analysis of women striving for educational change, looking for respect in their chosen profession, or really any indication that women were more than the passive recipients of patriarchal oppression in the education field. I found little. It makes no sense, either, because this was an era heavily influenced by Elizabeth Peabody and Margarethe Shurtz. I have to turn to the Lageman text about the the history of educational research to learn, for example, that Ella Flagg Young who conducted her dissertation research at the Chicago Lab School under John Dewey had significant influence on his famous Democracy in Education and was the superintendent of schools for the City of Chicago!

Let's hope that the 4th edition sees the inclusion of these clearly integral parts of modern educational thinking.

On Modern Educational Thinking, Part 2

Last month I wrote a bit about some of the early trends in modern educational thinking. The turn of the 20th century saw many of the ideas we still have about schooling coalesce and I offered a glimpse at two of the four major ideologies driving educational change in that era. The humanists pursued a classical education and argued the traditional methods, curriculum, and purpose of schooling were the best for the intellectual and spiritual growth of children. One of the first major challenges to this view came from the developmentalists who felt that what students learn should be related to their mental and social development. However, this came with the odd baggage of "social-epoch theory" and was often combined with social darwinist thinking. 

Today I'd like to look at the next of two trends to develop in that era. Since both were roughly concurrent, I will start with the one which I feel has the strongest connection to today's education reform movement, social efficacy education. Although the developmentalists called themselves scientific, that term would today most look like the social efficacy movement. Let's not forget that it was easy to call yourself a scientist and never really do much more than speculate wildly but with some internally consistent logic. Phrenology was a science and was probably just as valid as culture-epoch theory - that is to say, not valid at all. 

So, social efficacy education also emerged from Germany and also depended greatly on Prussian models of schooling. One key difference here is that social efficacy was focused very closely on efficiency. Although the term social efficacy originates in Benjamin Kidd's Social Evolution, the foundation for this way of schooling owes a lot of credit to the writings of Edward Ross. Ross's 1901 Social Control made the case for large scale national organization of society and many of his ideas filtered down to educational sociologists and reformers like Snedden, Finney, Ellwood, and Peters (apparently not everyone has a wikipedia!). According to Ross, all of our social institutions, including schools, should be geared toward building a more moral and civilized society. That these morals and civilization were white, western, and protestant christian was not just beside the point - it was the point. Much like the Prussian system of schooling, America needed to create its citizens through the inculcation of moral rightness. He felt that schools had the opportunity to replace the flaws of parenting and see children educated by "picked persons" who would eliminate anti-social tendencies. 

The second half of social efficacy education is probably the one you're more familiar with - the "industrialization" of the school environment. Classes were broken into discrete subjects, students sat in rows, followed a "bell", and generally proceeded through a day in a way which resembled factory labor. These reforms were championed by Frederick Winslow Taylor who, like Ross, was not specifically interested in education so much as in reforming all of society. His Principles of Scientific Management became the definitive book on running any manufacturing in the US. Much like today, schools were under pressure to meet the needs of industry - most students were still not completing high school and just about all of them became some kind of manual laborer, many in factories. Scientific management required that each individual task be broken down into the simplest constituent tasks and managers would order and organize these tasks in ways to cut costs, increase speed, and improve quality. 

Taylor didn't just promote his theories of management as the correct way to run a business. He felt they would improve every facet of life. Indeed he actually argued in front of Congress that principles of scientific management would bring about an end to war and that employers would, by the very nature of his principles, uphold the Golden Rule (an especially interesting claim given that two years later the outbreak of WWI would see those same principles march millions to their death). Under scientific management we would see the "substitution of peace for war; the substitution of hearty brotherly cooperation for competition and strife; of both pulling hard in the same direction instead of pulling apart; of replacing suspicion with mutual confidence; of becoming friends instead of enemies" (p.30). 

It's not hard to see how Taylor's scientific management and Ross' push for unified moral social institutions came together in schools. When people argue today that schools have not changed in 100 years, they are talking about the schools which this movement created. They are orderly like a factory and they are meant to produce a specific kind of social output by teaching the values American society "ought" to have. Schools nationwide saw another important application of this approach - they could build curriculum around it and point to a real and positive outcome after students completed their schooling: employment. 

In Gary, Indiana, John Bobbit remade the school system according to rules adapted from thinkers like Ross and Taylor. The school was renamed a "plant" (as in a place where manufacturing takes place) and the superintendent of schools war retitled "educational engineer". Not to different from today's districts having CEOs and boards of directors! In his classrooms, students were broken into "platoons" (again with the militarism) and he systematized the movement of platoons through the school spaces (if you've been in an elementary school ever, they still do this). With regard to curriculum, Bobbit also applied scientific management. Human experience should be broken into separate fields, the job of each field should be ascertained and specific activities identified. Around those jobs and activities, educational engineers and their staff would create instructional objectives and then build out the curriculum in detail on a day-to-day basis. Interestingly, Bobbit liked measuring students in a variety of ways and grouping them according to ability in order to cut down on educational "waste". After all, women would mostly not be working in factories and had roles at home which required different courses (home ec. anyone?).

Obviously there's a lot more going on here than just these few men. One great example I've totally skipped is the Douglas Commission in 1905 in Massachusetts. Massachusetts was the first state to have compulsory education and, even today, is a leader in education. In short, the Douglas Commission argues that schools in Massachusetts had changed too little in the last 80 years (so, since 1825) and they were doing a poor job of preparing students for the demands of living in an industrialized society. Honestly, you could substitute industry and factories for technology and the internet and this report would read just as well today. All over the US, similar conclusions were being reached and they all fall under the same social efficacy umbrella. Namely, schools need to make two things: citizens and labor. Citizens needed to uphold what were seen as American values. Laborers needed both the basic skills and temperament to work on the factory floor. Schools, it seemed, were in the best position to do this work and many teachers, administrators, and lawmakers were happy to direct them to do it. They were even happier that there was an intense focus on efficiency and cutting waste as it was their responsibility to ensure the proper use of taxpayer funds. 

As I said when introducing social efficacy, so much of the movement has lasted down to modern day schooling. Whether it's the physical movement of students through the school day or the idea that schools are engaged in citizenship, we see the work of these reformers continue on. I especially want to note the intermingling of labor needs with curriculum. I think this idea about schooling is probably still the strongest driver of school reform and changes today. Many many people reduce the role of school to preparing students for the workforce and the recent recession followed by a slow recovery has amplified these voices. It's not an accident that schools are under significant pressure to prepare students of all ages for work in STEM fields because that's where the jobs are (you'll all be doctors who program sexting apps!). It's also no mistake that schools are trying to reorganize themselves to look like today's workplaces. If we look back a decade to the NCLB/RTtT era we also see a renewed attempt to apply standardization across all classrooms and curriculua, something which would have made Taylor and Bobbit proud. 

But what of research in this era? After all, my recent return to blogging was prompted by my thinking about educational research. Well, unlike the humanists who pretty much didn't do research of any kind, and the developmentalists whose research was something akin to child study, social efficacy researchers came in two flavors. First, the practical research which was done by districts and schools was largely meant to be immediately applied. This was data driven and sought to eliminate wasted time, space, or money and much of it came directly from factory-style management practices. Not a lot was devoted to pedagogy. 

Second was standardized testing. Edward Thorndike, an early developer of psychological testing also sought to push schools to implement more standardized testing across ages and schools. His tests, however, were more focused on student's intellectual abilities. Meanwhile, Leonard Ayres, who had just previously run schools in Puerto Rico (recently "acquired" from the Spanish) was hired by a think-tank, the Russel Sage Foundation, to do school surveys. These were early forms of standardized tests which evaluated students knowledge across a variety of topics from curricular subjects to their recognition of important places and objects. Famously, students in Boston failed to identify farm animals and produce leading to one of the first culturally relevant test revisions. By the 1910s schools around the nation were implementing standardized tests on a regular basis as a means to drive curriculum, evaluate teachers, and identify the "feeble-minded". I also want to add that much of this early research was still considered psychological, not educational. It wasn't until later that most schools of education gained some degree of independence (or actually became their own school). 

One particular type of standardized test gained prominence among the social efficacy crowd, the IQ test. While at Stanford, Lewis Terman building on the work of German psychologists (who else did we go to during this period?) developed the very first tests for measuring a person's intelligence quotient. Terman's tests were put to use evaluating draftees and recruits and group men according to their mental ability during the US build up to WWI to. Following the war, industry and schools adopted these tests to better sort and group laborers and students. By the 1920s, statistical analysis of schools based on a variety of tests and data was commonplace. Two major trends in education research were well established: research was primarily quantitative, and research was primarily clinical and empirical. These laid the groundwork for the growth of behaviorist studies, which, I think you can see, have an interesting relationship to the ever growing need for factory workers.

In my next post, I will look at the final of the four major influence on modern US education. Like social efficacy education, I feel that this fourth influence still has effects today. In part as a response to the powerful social efficacy movement, but also partly because of progressive era reform politics, the social meliorists sought to use schools to fix society's problems.