To Get a Better School System: One Hundred Years of Education Reform in Texas (review)

Most recent works on the history of education in Texas have focused on cultural and social issues, with authors' attentions divided between the day-to-day experiences of school children and the integration battles that occurred in rural and urban schools alike. Until now, no single volume had captured the modernization of Texas's public education system, but Professor Gene Preuss's account of the passage of the 1949 Gilmer-Aikin school finance and reorganization laws thereafter will be the lynchpin for every work on the history of Texas public education. Although the bulk of To Get a Better School System takes place during the twentieth century, Preuss presents evidence from the Mexican period that even early Texans understood the importance of an education system to the economic success of the region. The author examines a variety of explanations for the poor school system in Texas prior to 1949, including political ideologies, anthropological and sociological attitudes, as well as economic variables with which state and local officials coped at various times in the state's history. From the bills' sponsors, Representative Claud Gilmer and Senator A. M. Aikin, to state school superintendent L. A. Woods, to the sheer number of educators, researchers, and legislators who played a role in shaping and passing the legislation, Preuss demonstrates that the reforms belonged not to a single person or entity but to a collective spirit of progress and justice.

At the heart of the work is a two-pronged argument regarding public education reform in Texas. First, a confluence of events in the late 1930s and early 1940s—the number of young male Texans rejected for military service due to their illiteracy, the shift of population from rural to urban locales, patriotism and the ideals of equality and democracy following World War II, and low salaries in a variety of occupations—created the energy that spurred Texas legislators and education officials to implement reform laws. Second, the spirit of reform in Texas and other parts of the U.S. foreshadowed and assisted in the institution of wider political and social reforms that occurred during the 1950s. Preuss noted that World War II helped Texans and many Americans understand that education, heretofore a local issue, was now essential to preserve democracy and the American system. Solving the financial and educational inequalities within the state's schools was the first step toward social and political equality for all Texans.

To Get a Better School System is well written; it reads like a primary source reader with an understated narrative that highlights the thoughts of those persons involved in the social, political, and economic debates. Preuss's talent lies not in recording and quoting from historical documents, but in using the information so fluidly that at times the characters seem to converse with each other. The author's reliance on primary material, however, does not keep him from assessing blame for the condition of Texas's pre-1949 public education system. Almost from the outset, Preuss credits the Radical Reconstruction legislature for its attempts to reform Texas schools—centralized state oversight, compulsory attendance, and local tax laws—while he castigates the Redeemers for destroying "a forward-looking school system" that left Texans with a "reactionary system" (16). It took decades of progressive lobbying, two world wars, an economic catastrophe, renewed public support, and the Cold War-fueled economic boom to reverse the course set by the post-Reconstruction legislatures.