The Great School Wars: A History of the New York City Public Schools by Diane Ravitch

The Great School Wars: A History of the New York City Public Schools Reviews

• 
  Czarny Pies

  Diane Ravitch's "The Great School Wars: New York City, 1805-1973" is a fabulous book that launched her stellar academic career and which also contributed to her being made Assistant Secretary of State for Education (1991-1993) in the administration of George Bush. Although the prime subject is the Public School System of New York city (NYC) , the book contains the best description of ward politics and the techniques of nineteenth century machine politics (specifically the workings of Boss' Tweeds notorious (Tammany Hall organization) that I have ever read. It is an excellent book of American history in the very broad sense.
  Throughout the time period covered, the public school system of New York City was different from that of the state. The state legislature was continually passing laws to solve the problems peculiar to that of New York city. The basic difference was that the state was essentially white and Protestant whereas the city which was the entry point for immigration becoming the home first to a large population of Irish Catholics, then to Italian Catholics and Jews and finally to Blacks and Puerto Ricans. All the different groups of new arrivals were regarded with some disdain by those who preceded them. All had issues with the Public Schools system as they found it.
  Ravitch organizes her narrative around 4 "wars" and three "inter-war" periods.
  The First School War took place during the period from 1805-1842 when the Catholic Church attempted to take control the public schools. At the start of the 19th century, up to 40% of the school children were not in school. Of those attending , 75% were in private schools and 25% were in the schools of the Society for Free Schools a charitable or benevolent society dominated by affluent Protestants especially Quakers. The Free School Society used the Lancastrian system where teachers would be responsible for up to 1000 pupils while most of the teaching would be done by student monitors. The Catholic Church wanted NYC to fund its schools which used conventional methods.
  As a result of the Catholic lobbying, NYC decided to pay subsidies to the Catholic or Parochial schools. The city also set up its own free schools overseen by school boards in each of the city wards. The free schools of the city were financed through a real estate tax implemented in the 1844.
  During the so-called inter-war period, Tammany Hall which controlled the city wards was able to take control of the public system. Tammany Hall hired mainly Catholic teachers. The focus in the class was on rote learning. There were typically 80 to 100 students per class.
  The goal of the Second School War (1873 to 1896) was to put educational professionals in charge of the system. The experts wanted to implement Pestalozzi 's method and to move away from rote learning. These reformers proposed centralized management at the city level which was vehemently opposed by Tammany Hall. In 1896, the reformers won as NYC abolished the local boards and put the management of all schools under one central board.
  During, the interwar period from 1897 to 1913 the reformers shifted the focus away from the 3Rs to building complete citizens. Vocational or industrial training begin. There was much less emphasis on memorization.
  However, as the modernization advanced, there was a massive immigration of central European Jews and Italians which created a great shortage of schools and class space.
  The Third School War (1914-1919) was a struggle to lower costs. The central board of NYC adopted the Gary Plan which created more class space by reducing academic instruction to half of the day. A gymnasium would be used as a classroom in the morning and as a physical education facility in the afternoon. To increase the utilization of the available spare even more, evening shifts were added. As late as 1930, 50,000 students (or 4.5%of the total ) were still studying in evening platoons.
  Things improved. By 1940 the average class size was down to 30 because of a declining school age population and the building program of the New Deal .
  The Fourth School War (1954 - 1973) was waged against racial injustice. The goal was first to achieve Integration and later to put schools under community control.
  The Supreme Court in 1954 banned segregation in schools. NYC tried to respond by busing students further away from their homes in order to create racially balanced schools. This approach did not work because the white communities resisted and because the non-White population had become the majority throughout the city.
  The next thing tried was to put the schools under the control of community boards. To test the concept, three 3 "Demonstration districts" created in 1966. The boards in the Demonstration Districts fell under the control of ideologues Black Power and Marxism. The UFT (United Federation of Teachers) rose up in resistance to the Demonstration boards. Strikes and noisy protests degenerating into riots followed.
  The fourth war ended when in 1969 when state governor Nelson Rockefeller passed a new bill creating 30 to 33 school districts each having a community board board. The teachers accepted the new state law in exchange for guarantees of job security. Ultimately the UFT was the big winner as it was able to take control of the new community boards through the electoral process.
  Ravitch's writing is truly masterful as she is able to present the big picture while neglecting none of the detail. She observes that the issue of centralization versus decentralization came up during every war. NYC switched back and forth on the question. Neither approach proved to be a panacea. The activists always managed to change things but the outcomes were seldom what they hoped for.
  
• 
  Andrew Fairweather

  ‘The School Wars’ fulfilled my expectations. Ravitch’s study is a thoughtful history of the New York City school system that focuses on the controversies surrounding centralization and local control, starting with the secular/protestant/centralizing faction of the Public School Society against the pro-local Catholic faction, whose dislike of "utopian schemes” sought greater say in what sorts of (particularly religious) lessons their children learnt in school. These issues of system vs. local control would resurface numerous times, up until the 1960s and 70s, which are contemporary with the publishing of ’The Great School Wars.'
  
  Centralization in the 19th century saw the role of schools as to encourage inquiry rather than promote a particular doctrine. Nevertheless, Ravitch, who I take to be fair in her summary of both points of view, believes that “[…] no school can wholly eliminate the teaching of values and beliefs, for to do so would make it impossible to distinguish between right and wrong, in human relations as well as history. An uneasy compromise is struck by accepting a notion of 'common values,' but what constitutes common values at one point in time may not a decade later. The need to adjust to dissident views guarantees a constant potential for conflict between the school and the community.”
  
  The evils of local control, despite their focus on the “values” of education, were numerous still. Little arbitrary bureaucracies sprung up everywhere—competition within local wards led to bizarre practices school ward districts building schools in inconvenient places for families so as long as it worked to the advantage of the district (that is, increased attendance maximally so that the ward district would receive more funding). The end result was that while some wards were severely overcrowded, others were empty of students and schools. The competition between the local wards did not lead to greater efficiency, but a gaming of the system of funds distribution. Local control was thus not necessarily synonymous with democratic process. Such problems plagued the schools of the 19th century—“reform” would be synonymous with centralization, and the crusade would often be led by those who had no children in the public schools.
  
  The early 20th century was a battleground for the professionalization and centralization of the schools in New York City. But it was a centralization which came with a totally different philosophy from the “Lancastrian” rote memorization tactics of the 19th century. Ravitch makes the point that after WWI there was a frantic sense of a search for normalcy after the upheaval of the War, resulting in a backlash against the reforms of progressivism—this resulted in a philosophy of education which was less concerned with uplifting society. Instead, “freeing individual potential” would be its emphasis, a child-centric model which drew from new methods rooted in Freud.
  
  
  “The problem of educational retardation which had plagued the schools for decades was simply defined out of existence: no longer would children fail, because each would perform according to his own ability. This meant that a child in the slowest track could be promoted to the slowest track in the next grade, and the schools could boast of a 100 percent promotion policy.”
  
  
  Traditional school subject were thus abandoned for subjects which aimed to educate “the whole child.” The school was tasked with correcting not just education retardation, but maladjustment and personality disorders. It was supposed to be the school that wold solve all of these problems. This weird marriage of embracing the child as an individual coupled with greater centralization in the schools matched to modern educational practices lead to a strange situation where “the school system was attempting to standardize even individualization.”
  
  By the mid 20th century, the centralized system (which had enjoyed national score averages above that of the rest of the nation) began to come under fire when performance suffered and ethnic demographics changed in the late 50s and early 60s. There were similarities and crucial differences between the school wars of the 19th and mid 20th centuries. While both shared a common cause (lack of assimilation of students into a normative culture and language barriers resulting in poor performance) the environment had changed completely. It is true that the 20th century had one advantage over the 19th—the welfare system designed to help the needy. But if in the 19th century the child was expected (even encouraged) to leave school at 14 to help contribute to household income, in the 20th century there were laws against this (rightly so, of course…). The world of the 20th century was also a world where credentials besides age were required to work well paid jobs. Finally, the school wars of the 19th century did not involve discrimination based on skin color—one could more easily pass as a member of a “desirable” normative category. This was simply not possible for many Blacks and Puerto Ricans coming to New York in the 40s and 50s, despite any intentions towards assimilation. I’d also add the fact that the unions of post-war America were increasingly larger yet less activist pets of their industries/corporations they were tied to. This saw their membership as more exclusive… leaving the lowest paid and least desirable jobs to the city’s newcomers.
  
  Of course, one cannot think of “progressive schooling” in this period and not think of the push for integration. Ravitch points out rightly that the integration movement, an ostensibly anti-racist movement, was premised upon assumptions of its students which were arguably racist—that, in confusing class with race, students in white (richer) areas were superior in their studies in comparison to predominantly black and Puerto Rican (poorer) areas, because these areas *were* white/black rather than low income with all the attendant setbacks and lack of resources that come with being low-income. Reflecting on the work of Preston Wilcox, a black social worker who rejected integration and played a role in the establishment of IS 201, Ravtich states that,
  
  
  “The integration program […] was explicitly based on the tenet that a predominantly black and Puerto Rican school could *never* be a good school. A leaflet distributed by Galamison’s City-wide Committee for Integrated Schools stated this position succinctly ”*Can segregated schools be made equal?*” Throughout history segregated public schools have been separate but *never equal*. In the Harlems throughout the country, separate minority-group public schools have always resulted in inferior education. It is on this basis that the Supreme Court handed down its historic 1954 school decision.” Wilcox understood that the implication of this view was that there was something inherent in the minority groups which was inferior, and he could not accept this.”
  
  
  It seems natural to me that wealthy areas with stabler household and neighborhood environments would have students with better performance and disciplinary issues. How bussing and integration was meant to solve this problem was anyone’s guess. That said, I think integration was a symptom of not being able (or willing?) to take the much greater issue of determining *why* minority neighborhoods within societies were floundering and *what* was needed to address this problem. After all, they might’ve found problems to be dealt with that required solutions much greater and more ambitious than schooling could provide.
  
  An interesting result of this debacle is that during the integrationist period, many activists saw integration as the panacea for equalizing performance in schools and thus broadening opportunity. It was white New Yorkers who argued for the neighborhood model of schooling, being staunchly opposed to the idea of their children being bussed to schools that were famously low performing (and black, of course, though you don’t have to be a racist to be opposed to the idea that your child will be sent to a school miles away from their neighborhood). When people lost patience with integration, largely because of the infeasibility of relaxing parents in regards to the bussing issue as well as (what seemed to Ravitch) the obvious fact that you could not have a 50% white 50% minority system in a city whose children were increasingly less white, it became the activists who took up the mantle of neighborhood schooling, calling it “community control.”
  
  The narrative ends here, in the 70s, with community control not producing better results in reading writing and arithmetic. I must say, it was all quite depressing. Furthermore, the question remains unanswered—do the people benefit more from a benevolent despot style model of centralization, or the warring states model of local control? Does local control necessarily imply community involvement (Ravitch proves that this is not necessarily the case). I am not sure which conclusions to draw from this incredible book, but I have an inkling that it might begin with removing that charge that the schools must be complete and total “socialization machines.” We need different institutions to do different jobs and do them well. It’s why I’m against social workers working in public libraries. Public libraries should also not be treatment centers. Schools and other educational institutions (like any institution) must find a purpose and do it well. It’s purpose must be outlined by a philosophy which perhaps defies quantification. What is education, but a inspiration to wonder? We’ve lost our way, somehow.
• 
  Elyssa

  The history of the NYC school system is a long and involved saga. I was impressed with the amount of research that the author undertook to complete this book. By dividing the history into segments of the wars between different factions and interest groups, the author effectively illustrated major trends that repeat themselves in different forms. For example, the reader clearly sees the similarities between the immigration of early Irish settlers and their attempts at integration into the school system and the struggles with the integration of African-Americans and Puerto Ricans in the 1960s.
  
  I would have given this book more stars, but I grappled with it because I often found the text to be too dry and unengaging. There were sections that read like a roster of chronoligical events and it hard to focus. In the end, I stuck with the book because there are very few books that contain such a comprehensive history.
• 
  Erendira

  Multiple copies: Main LA339.N5 R38