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Part 3 ____________________________ Religion and Urban Schools The previous chapters have explored religion in rural and small-town district schools in terms of process, using a patchwork quilt of evidence from appeals and letters to describe broad trends in New York’s 11,000 district schools. This section on urban schools also examines process but does so in a different way. The relatively small number of incorporated cities in New York State (twenty-one in 1870) makes for a different narrative form—one that can examine policies in many, if not most, cities and can show direct influences of one city’s policies on another. As we shall see, city boards of education closely observed changes in each other’s schools, while a burgeoning newspaper industry not only fed its readers up-to-date statewide news but engaged in intracity editorial debates, linking cities as distant as Albany and Rochester in daily communication. Religious and political organizations— sometimes one and the same—played important roles in city school politics. All watched the legislature and the State Superintendent with increasing attention for decisions that they knew could affect their schools directly. And unlike most rural district school trustees, city school boards produced and published detailed records (city newspapers reported daily events as well), many of which survive today. In short, there is a story to tell within the broader historical processes at work. Chapter 7 sets the context of this story, exploring the ways in which city school “systems” operated after the Civil War, both the features that they shared as urban systems (as distinct from district ones) and the points at which they differed. Although the chapter does not examine religion as an issue per se, it does set up a framework for subsequent chapters by exploring 141 the politics of urban school districts. In particular, this chapter tests the tension between local control and centralization in urban schools—between school-level and ward-level control and central boards of education—and suggests the ways in which this tension played out over religion. Chapter 8 offers a chronological account of the development of urban public school policy toward religious exercises from 1865 to 1900. Drawing on the experiences of the state’s principal cities—Albany, Buffalo, Rochester, Brooklyn, and New York—as well as some smaller ones, the chapter develops a story that is as full of color and compromise as it is of discord. City by city, New Yorkers developed a variety of strategies for coping with the demands of a religiously diverse citizenry for and against religious instruction in their public schools. Not surprisingly, these policies reflected the great variety of contexts and relative autonomy of urban school boards. They also reflected the importance of site-level decision making in urban systems, what sociologists have called “loose coupling.”1 In terms of change over time, urban religious policy faced a major reform period in the 1870s but then remained relatively stable through the turn of the century—and relatively free from state-level interference. Chapter 9 examines the second key aspect of religion in urban public schools: publicly funded parochial schools. From 1865 to 1880, at least four separate small cities—not to mention several villages that would soon be cities—negotiated plans with Catholic churches to operate parochial schools under the auspices of city boards of education. In Brooklyn and New York City, the state legislature provided brief periods of public funds for religious schools of different denominations. By the end of the 1870s, many of these arrangements had fizzled. Others survived, however, and in the 1890s, the issue resurfaced in state politics. This time state activism, not local circumstance , ended most city arrangements and in the process drove a wedge between the spheres of public and private education that would endure for well over a century. Despite their relatively short life, however, church-state deals were important and widespread expressions of decentralized, democratic control, and they reflected an unsung but vital phase of the common school system’s growth in New York State in the context of religious pluralism. 142 Religion and Urban Schools ...

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