History for Justice: Michael Katz and the History of Education

I recently told one of my graduate students that I was contributing to the panel on which these papers are based, and he replied that reading Michael Katz's The Irony of Early School Reform: Educational Innovation in Mid-Nineteenth Century Massachusetts (2001a) led him to apply to graduate school. My story is the same. When I was deciding whether to pursue a graduate degree, Katz's Class, Bureaucracy, and Schools (1975) convinced me to study the history of education. What Katz's scholarship, and later his mentorship, taught me was that one could be a historian with an eye toward justice, that one need not compartmentalize scholarly, political, and ethical commitments.

Katz developed countless insights relevant to historians of American education, but two stand out. Each illuminates the hallmark of his scholarship: the use of historical analysis to expose injustice and challenge inequality. The first theme involves the boldness and complexity Katz brought to the analysis of schools as class systems. The basic form of American public education, he argued, describing a structure that took shape by the late nineteenth century and persists today, was not only "universal, tax-supported, free, compulsory," and "bureaucratically arranged" but also "class-biased, and racist" (Katz 1975: 106). Offered in the late 1960s and early 1970s, this insight challenged—and ultimately transformed—a field that still celebrated the egalitarian character of American schooling. Katz made questions about how educational reformers tried to use schools to control working-class people, how public schools reproduced social and economic inequality, and the antidemocratic implications of bureaucracy foundational to the history of American education. The second theme involves Katz's efforts against intellectual silos. Long convinced that "significant problems do not respect disciplinary boundaries" (ibid.: xxiv), Katz produced scholarship that blurred intradisciplinary divisions between intellectual, political, and social history as well as those separating the history of education from histories of social welfare, employment, housing, and cities. This analytic breadth had important consequences for the history of education. Such a wide vantage point highlighted how educational thought rationalized inequality and raised important questions about the intersections between American public schooling and antipoverty policy.

It was no coincidence, Katz consistently argued, that American public schooling emerged hand in hand with an American working class. Both Irony and Reconstructing American Education (Katz 1987) carefully explored the social and economic context that gave rise to American public education as well as the intellectual frameworks that motivated reformers who led the common school charge. Nineteenth-century public school leaders, many of whom were inspired by early versions of cultural deprivation theory, responded to urbanization, industrialization, and immigration by trying to use public schools to control the behavior of and limit the social disruption caused by poor and working-class children. Throughout his career Katz addressed this issue without pulling any punches. Describing public schools as "imperial institutions designed to civilize the natives" (Katz 1975: xvi), he argued that mid-nineteenth-century urban school reformers aimed to teach a particular culture, morality, and behavior to the children of the poor, who otherwise, these reformers feared, would become criminals and paupers. In so doing, Katz inspired a generation of historians to investigate how educators sought to train exploited populations to accept their economic, political, and social plight. (Luckily, these historians also found much resistance among students and families.) The ways white supremacist educators, philanthropists, and politicians used schooling to stabilize racial and economic hierarchies represents a major theme in African American educational history, especially in James Anderson's seminal work on "schooling for second-class citizenship" (1988: 1), as well as in histories of Native American education (Adams 1995), and the education of immigrants (Fass 1989; Tyack 1974).

Katz was also interested in what schools did to rich children, especially in how and why "the children of the affluent … take the best marks and the best jobs" (Katz 1975: xvi). Irony, which carefully analyzed the closing of a high school in Beverly, Massachusetts, centrally addressed how public schools reproduced social and economic inequality. Wealthier residents of the community, this case showed, supported the...