History along the Way: Stories beyond the Texas Roadside Markers

Chapter 8. “To Have What We Must”

115 “To Have What We Must” In the late afternoon of Sunday, April 11, 1965, at an informal ceremony just down the road from his Texas Hill Country ranch, Pres. Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, a sweeping reform measure that marked a new progressive era for the nation’s schools. Not one averse to symbolism, the president elected to sign the bill and make his remarks against the backdrop of the one-room Junction Schoolhouse, where he had brieflyattended classes as a young child. Foradded historical effect, he asked his former schoolteacher, Kate Deadrich Loney, to sit by his side at the rustic table as he signed the monumental legislation. He did so with one pen, which he then presented to her. As Johnson ’s wife Lady Bird later wrote, “It was an accurate, corny, warm setting for the signing of a great education bill, one of the landmarks , one of thevictories, one of the real triumphs to be cherished by the Johnson Administration.”1 While the setting was replete with rural charm, iconic imagery, and undeniable nostalgia, it was also one strangely paradoxical in nature. The former schoolhouse, then owned by an Oklahoma couple who used it as a summer home, had ended its academic service almost two decades earlier as the result of statewide educational reforms that led to unprecedented numbers of consolidations . Such state and local reforms, in effect, mirrored national trends that by the 1960s led to the extensive modernization of programs under the direction of the federal government. With his signing of the bill at the historic Junction Schoolhouse, the president not only ushered in a new era of education but also signaled that such sites, and the rudimentary three Rs curriculum of “reading , ’riting, and ’rithmetic” they represented, were squarely in the 8 116 ChApter 8 past. It was a point of no return, although in reality that point had been passed years before in Texas. Rural common schools underpinned the state’s agrarian economy from the late nineteenth century into the middle of the twentieth century. While they were technically the outgrowth of the antebellum Common School Movement led by Massachusetts reformer Horace Mann, they were in reality in Texas, by virtue of the Civil War and Reconstruction, much later adaptations. In 1884 a new state school law promoted the growth of common schools (locally controlled with limited state assistance), and their numbers flourished as a result. In 1904–5, there were more than 10,000 rural common districts in Texas but only 868 independent districts . The peak came in 1909–10, when there were 11,682 common districts and 1,001 independents. The decline began immediately afterward, with increased pressure for centralized control and school consolidations. In 1914 the Texas superintendent for public instruction, F. M. Bailey, left no doubt about his reform objectives when, referencing the dawn of a modern era, he noted, “Our small, short-termed, poorly-housed, inadequately equipped, and ineffectively taught schools must give place to larger schools.”2 Despite similar attacks throughout the Progressive Era of the early twentieth century and beyond, rural common schools managed to survive, especially in areas of the state largely unaffected by urban growth. Such was the case in Gillespie County in theTexas Hill Country. There, distinct rural communities prospered, easily identified by such determinants as crossroads, stores, churches, cotton gins, and schoolhouses. While farms there were largely dispersed , the agricultural communities retained recognized cores of commercial, social, and religious activities. When fundamental change finally came to the rural communities , it came relatively quickly—within a matter of only a couple of decades. The economic depression of the 1930s, followed immediately by sweeping societal and commercial changes related toWorld War II, clearly marked the beginning of the decline.Within that context, the contributing factors were diverse: urban growth fueled by migration from rural areas, declining crop prices, improved transportation systems, new agricultural technologies and “to hAve WhAt We must” 117 more productive practices, and the implosion of an irrelevant and outmoded tenancy system. As young people left the farms, the number of children in the rural areas understandably declined as well. While the final blow against the rural school system is attributed to legislative action inTexas, marginal population numbers in some common schools presaged the inevitable. As one rural schoolteacher noted, “The trouble was, they was running out of kids.”3 Renewed calls for reform...