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10 Conclusion Then and Since In 1875, after what it deemed to be an unsatisfactory experience with an imported and unaffordable educational system during Reconstruction, Alabama’s government devolved a great deal of the responsibility for public schooling to parents and trustees. This educational localism was in harmony with the way in which most of the state’s population actually lived. In fact, the arrangements were not dissimilar to those operating elsewhere in the United States where, in 1900, 60.4 percent of the population was “rural” according to the census definition . In 1910 nearly 38 percent of the nation’s public school students attended 212,380 one-room schools. Nearly all one-room schools were rural and had just one teacher. Some had minuscule enrollments—for example, a quarter of Iowa’s rural schools had ten or fewer pupils.These schools were under the governance of their communities and were mostly roughly built and ill equipped. Their teachers were poorly trained and transient but responsible for instructing students in the few subjects they could not learn at home.1 Yet America was undergoing change at an ever-accelerating pace and Alabama was not immune to what was happening elsewhere. In 1913 Alabama’s department of education advised rural teachers of how their communities were being enlarged by technologies such as telephones and automobiles as well as by railroad expansion, better roads, rural mail routes, the parcel post, and other developments: “Every bridge constructed across a small stream makes it impossible to cut off one small community from another but a few rods away.” Teachers were told that they must rise to the challenge of the expanded community.2 Such advice was being delivered in the context of a national debate about the need for a revolution in agriculture and rural life using the school as the vehicle . In addition, the advice was framed by changing educational ideas being disseminated by people such as Mabel Carney, Ellwood Cubberley, and John 160 Conclusion: Then and Since Dewey.3 Schools were increasingly becoming subject to central direction by professional education experts and bureaucratic management. The legislation devised and sponsored by William Francis Feagin and enacted in 1915 made Alabama’s schooling system more recognizable in law as the enterprise of a modern state. It was intended to create the conditions for delivering improved educational outcomes and to meet the challenge of the changes that were abroad in the land. Yet, while greater professional control, bureaucratic management, improved funding, and growing standardization may have helped in the development of an effective public schooling system, they were not enough. The educational provisions of the expanded community were not markedly better than those of the localized community. In 1912, Alabama ranked last of the forty-eight states in “educational efficiency.” After World War I discrepancies persisted among rural and urban schools, black and white schools, and the schools of different sections. Illiteracy was one ready gauge of the problems. In 1927 Alabama ranked forty-fifth of forty-eight states in literacy levels. It had the seventh highest level of white illiteracy.4 On the eve of World War II Alabama was forty-sixth in per capita pupil expenditure and forty-fifth in annual teacher salaries.5 State governors such as Thomas E. Kilby (1919–1923) and Bibb Graves (1927–1931) sought to make an impact on school reform with varying degrees of success; some problems seemed intractable. In 1930 Danylu Belser, an educationist , freshly pointed out the inconsistent benefits of local taxation—once so optimistically seen as the solution for educational reform. He said it had brought about “gross inequality of opportunity in Alabama.” He explained that richer counties could provide adequate school terms, trained teachers, good buildings, and at least a minimum of the materials and equipment necessary for good teaching. Counties in which property values were low could offer none of these essentials.6 Implicit in any state system of schooling is the notion that a public good is involved. But the nature of public good and its price are matters determined politically. Even deciding on which groups comprise “the public” is a political matter. In 1901, Alabama’s constitution was devised to protect the vested interests of planters and big mules. Its fiscal articles influenced who would benefit from public schooling.Those without full civil rights received the least benefit; the landless and those whose economic status was insecure, such as tenant farmers, were also at a disadvantage. In 1936 the writer...

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