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The best schools in this state are found in Davenport, Des Moines, and Mason City, that is, the buildings cost two or three hundred thousand dollars. We have some nice buildings costing from forty to one hundred thousand dollars. — A. M. Deyoe, superintendent of public instruction, to C. S. Risdon, superintendent, Independence, Kansas, 20 November 1916 5 educational reform in early twentieth-century iowa Iowa’s Educational Apparatus Before 1913 At the turn of the century, a formal, state-level educational apparatus with significant juridical clout simply did not exist in Iowa. There was a state superintendent of public instruction and a state board of educational examiners. Neither possessed much real authority. The state superintendent was an elected state official, serving two-year terms of office. He was charged with the ‘‘general supervision of all the county superintendents and the common schools of the state,’’ but had no specific authority to supervise either.1 With only one deputy and a stenographer to assist him, the general supervision exercised could not involve the actual inspection of schools; for this he was entirely dependent upon the various county superintendents .2 In practice he acted as a conduit for the flow of information on educational matters between the county superintendents and the state legislature . Candidates seldom actively campaigned for the position in either primary or general elections. Typically, each of the two major parties selected as its candidate the most highly regarded educational figure in the state it could persuade to run; whichever party won the governorship (usually the Republicans) ‘‘won’’ the state superintendency as well. The winner then spent much of the next two years helping county superintendents organize annual county teachers institutes and in attending as many of these as possible. He also prepared an annual report advising the General Assembly on educational matters, particularly regarding ‘‘needed’’ legislation. 59 The Board of Educational Examiners was charged with holding at least two state teachers examinations annually and with passing upon the quali- fications of those applying for state teaching certificates. Since only a few of the larger urban districts in the state required teachers to hold state certificates in order to teach, the board did not have much to do. Members of the board consisted of the state superintendent, the president of the State University of Iowa (now the University of Iowa), the president of the state teachers college (now the University of Northern Iowa), and two other persons , one of whom was required to be a woman, appointed by the governor to serve four-year terms. County superintendents wielded more power. They were elected in partisan elections to serve two-year terms; most served three or more consecutive terms. Their principal responsibility was to examine applicants who did not possess a state certificate for teaching positions within their respective counties and to issue certificates of various ‘‘grades,’’ the lowest of which was the one-year ‘‘provisional’’ certificate. Although county superintendents possessed the authority to visit all the schools in their counties, in practice they restricted their supervision to the many ungraded, country schools.3 For this reason, the county superintendent tended to function as the superintendent of the rural schools in the county. Town and city school districts had their own superintendents who enjoyed considerably greater prestige in educational circles, commanded higher salaries, and had little reason to interact with county superintendents.4 Real authority in school matters rested with the myriad local school districts . Prior to 1913, three general types of districts were recognized: (1) independent districts, consisting of any territory containing a village, town, or city, incorporated or unincorporated, with 100 or more inhabitants; (2) school townships, consisting of all the rural territory of a civil township (thirty-six government sections) not otherwise organized into independent (i.e., ‘‘urban’’) or rural independent districts, which in turn were further subdivided into an average of nine subdistricts, each with its own school and the prerogative of electing a school director to the township’s school board; and (3) rural independent districts, consisting of any territory formerly composing a subdistrict in a school township that had in effect legally seceded from the township by majority vote of its electors. In 1900, there were 461 independent districts, 1,187 school townships (with 9,423 subdistricts ), and 3,225 rural independent districts. According to the reports of the county superintendents, in these 13,109 units there were a total of 12,615 ungraded and 5...

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