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4. Centralization and Its Discontents among New York City Teachers
- Temple University Press
- Chapter
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N ew York City teachers were active and vocal opponents of centralization. While their French counterparts had publicly supported centralization during the 1880s, they had done so timidly, uncertain of their collective power. But in New York City, teachers were part of a loose-knit, but vocal coalition of city dwellers that opposed what they saw as an elitist intrusion into a matter of local control. Teachers spoke up in a number of ways. For one week in late April 1895, the New York City Teachers’ Association organized a series of rallies to protest the centralization bill that was then making its way through the state legislature, a bill that would eliminate the power of neighborhood wards over matters directly affecting the schools and vest it in a central Board of Education . One rally held at City College attracted four thousand teachers, more than 90 percent of the teachers’ corps.1 School, a newspaper dedicated to the city teachers’ perspectives on education issues, railed against the reform. In March 1896, thirty-five hundred teachers signed a petition against the bill. When the bill came to the mayor’s desk for approval in April, hundreds of teachers flooded City Hall to demand, in vain, that the mayor, William Strong, reject it. The teachers had their allies—political party officials, spokesmen for the religious communities , and community leaders from the Bronx and Harlem—but there was little question about where the thrust of resistance to centralization would come from: within the school system itself. Throughout this episode, the teachers’ right to make collective claims on the city administration was never questioned. Two decades later, however, teachers’ participation in city politics was less acceptable. By 1916, the Progressive movement in American education was in full swing. The Progressive movement was a cluster of ideas about education that privileged managerial expertise, rigid hierarchy, and impersonal bureaucracy Centralization and Its Discontents among New York City Teachers 4 66 Centralizing Education and Mobilizing Teachers as tools for social justice and social control. Positive change could come about, the argument went, only by extracting administration from the evils of partisan politics—which, for most reformers, was the only kind of politics there was—and putting it in the hands of politically disinterested, civically enlightened experts.2 By the time World War I began, the administrative “professionals ” who had fought for centralization were now entrenched in New York City’s schooling apparatus. Leveraging their positions in the Board of Education and the Board of Superintendents, these newcomers sought to depoliticize education , to “take the schools out of politics” in the name of efficiency and costcutting . These administrators had powerful political patrons: the Republican Party and a small minority faction of the Democratic Party, along with a series of city organizations devoted to “municipal reform” and “good government.” Since teachers were simultaneously the biggest drain on the city’s education budget and the most important workers in the education system, their activities came under closer scrutiny than ever before, both in and out of the classroom.3 During the two decades between the battle over centralization and the American entrance into World War I, teachers did not cease their political activity altogether. As described previously, teachers agitated over the Davis Bill in 1900. Over the next decade, women teachers demanded equal pay for equal work; fought for the right of married teachers to continue work in the classroom; and participated in movements for birth control, trade union rights, and economic justice.4 Both men and women classroom teachers reached out in solidarity to teachers in other cities and around the country through the NEA and, as of 1916, the AFT. More so in the United States than in France, teachers brought a rich set of experiences in different forms of political activity into their associational life. However, administrators now labeled their interest in collective political advocacy “unprofessional” and unseemly. There was clearly a gendered dimension to this reaction—most of the city teachers were women elementary school teachers who the “professionals” clearly believed could be exploited more easily than the men. Indeed, the most politically successful of the pre–World War I teachers’ organizations was the IAWT, which fought for equal pay for equal work in the teaching profession. There was also an ethnic dimension to the new regime’s hostility to teachers’ politics. The new immigrants to the city between 1890 and 1920 were primarily Italians and Eastern European Jews, groups that the centralized administration believed would be...