Jeanes Fund on Black Schooling in the South, 1900–1930
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The Next Needed Thing: The impact of the Jeanes Fund on Black schooling in the South, 1900{1930 Daniel Kreisman Georgia State University [email protected] December, 2015 Abstract At the outset of the 20th century, two large philanthropies targeted southern black schools to combat \separate but equal". The first, The Rosenwald Fund, built nearly 5,000 school- houses. The second, The Jeanes Fund, built a corps of trained \Supervisors" who undertook tasks ranging from teacher training to fundraising { hence their motto, \the next needed thing." I exploit variation in the timing and placement of Jeanes and Rosenwald to esti- mate the impact of the Jeanes Fund, to revise estimates of the effects of Rosenwald, and to compare per-dollar effects of investments in human resources (Jeanes) and physical capital (Rosenwald) respectively. JEL No. I24, I25, N01, N32. Keywords: Education, Achievement Gap, Philanthropy, Jeanes, Rosenwald. ∗Dept. of Economics, Georgia State University, P.O. Box 3992, Atlanta, GA 30302-3992. Thanks to Jeff Grog- ger, Kerwin Charles, Bob Lalonde and two anonymous referees for two rounds of suggestions and insight, to Dan Aaronson and Bhash Mazumder for Rosenwald data and helpful suggestions, to Celeste Carruthers and Marianne Wanamaker for county level educational records, and to Josiah Pamoja, Kayin Shabazz, Katherine Hollis and Peyman Firouzi for archival work and research assistance. Thanks also to seminar participants at the University of Chicago, the University of Michigan, UPenn and UMass Amherst, and to Chicago's Committee on Education and the Institute of Education Science for fellowship support. This research was directly supported by a grant from the American Educational Research Association which receives funds for its Grants Program from the National Science Foundation under Grant #DRL-0941014. Opinions reflect those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the granting agencies. Any and all errors are my own. 1 1 Introduction In the years between the end of Reconstruction in the late 1870's and Brown v. Board of Edu- cation in 1954, educational resources for Southern blacks were a fraction of those for whites. By as late as 1940, black per-pupil expenditures were less than half, student-teacher ratios were 25 percent higher and the average term was 10 percent shorter (Margo, 1990; Card and Krueger, 1992). Yet, Southern blacks born between 1900 and 1930, during the height of \Jim Crow", im- proved on their white counterparts and their Northern black peers in both schooling outcomes and even school inputs (see Figure 1). Margo (1990, 1991) attributes some of this to improved schooling conditions resulting from the threat of northern migration. He and others (Donohue, Heckman and Todd, 2002; Collins and Margo, 2006) also cite the existence of large Northern philanthropies, but stop short of estimating their impact. Recent empirical evidence has begun to emerge demonstrating that these philanthropies indeed played an instrumental role. Aaronson and Mazumder (2011) estimate that the Julius Rosenwald Fund, which built nearly 5,000 rural schools for Southern black students between 1914 and 1931, accounts for up to 40% of gains in enrollment and literacy made by blacks relative to whites during these years. Subsequent work by Carruthers and Wanamaker (2013) suggests, though, that these funds crowded out additional public expenditures for blacks, mitigating relative gains in school inputs. I add to this literature by estimating the impact of the Anna T. Jeanes Fund, which built a corps of trained and experienced black educators to serve as \Supervisors" in Southern black schools beginning in 1909. These \Jeanes Supervisors," most of them women, were assigned to Southern counties and served a variety of tasks in each county's black schools, including: teacher training, curriculum development, administrative work and fundraising, often for Rosenwald Schools, amongst myriad other tasks. The varied nature of their work inspired their motto, The next needed thing. By 1930 the Jeanes Fund had placed Supervisors in over 40% of Southern counties, ostensibly reaching nearly half of Southern black pupils. To my knowledge, no attempt has been made to estimate the program's effects and little research, even of an historical nature, exists.1 In the following I use novel county-level data created from recently archived administrative records from the Jeanes Fund to estimate the program's impact on enrollment and literacy measured in the Decennial Census from 1900-1930. I combine these data with records from the Rosenwald Fund to estimate the impact of each program through 1930, exploiting variation in timing, location and level of treatment across counties and birth cohorts. I take advantage of the fact that each program targeted only black students by differencing off the white population, effectively estimating impacts on black-white gaps, allowing me to control for county fixed effects and state-cohort time trends. Variation in both the timing and nature of these two efforts allows me to compare returns on investments in human resources (Jeanes Supervisors) and physical 1See Fultz (1995), Jones (1937), Liston (1928), McCluer (2009) and Pincham (2005) for historical studies of the Jeanes program. 2 infrastructure (Rosenwald Schools) as inputs in education when initial resource levels are low. I find that \full exposure" to a Jeanes Supervisor, ranging from 8 to 14 years of a Supervisor's presence in the county by including lags, would have closed the black-white enrollment gap by approximately 3.5 percentage points and the literacy gap by between 3.5 and 4.3 percentage points. In relative terms, this is enough to close the baseline enrollment gap of 8.5 percentage point by roughly 40%, and the baseline literacy gap of 10 percentage points by almost the same margin. In reality, few if any students experienced this level of \full" exposure. Black children born between the turn of the century and 1915 in fact had a Jeanes Supervisor for about 3.2 years on average between the time they were born and when they exited middle school. Taking into account the actual level of exposure Southern black children experienced, I estimate that the Jeanes program decreased the black-white literacy gap by 1 percentage point, or 5% of the 20 percentage point decrease in the black-white gap between 1900 and 1930. Importantly, I estimate that each year a Supervisor was in the county increased the like- lihood of getting a Rosenwald School by 5 percent, and that accounting for the presence of the Jeanes program reduces estimates of the effect of Rosenwald on enrollment and literacy by roughly one-third. Ultimately, I use these estimates to calculate per-dollar impacts of both Jeanes and Rosenwald using archived records of salary and construction costs respectively. I find that Rosenwald investments yielded higher returns per-dollar spent by between 17 and 42 per- cent, suggesting that when initial physical resource levels are very low or non-existent, returns to infrastructure investments can be high. The remainder of the paper is as follows. Section 2 discusses background on both programs, relevant literature and historical context; Section 3 describes the data used for analysis; Section 4 lays out the empirical strategy and estimates impacts on enrollment and literacy; Section 5 discusses the relationship between Jeanes Supervisors and the placement of Rosenwald Schools; Section 6 presents back of the envelope comparisons of dollar-for-dollar impacts; and Section 7 summarizes with suggestions for future research. 2 Background 2.1 Race, Education and Philanthropy in the South In 1896 the Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that laws enacted with the explicit purpose of segregating blacks from whites, known as \separate but equal," did not violate the 14th Amendment as long as the separate facilities were in fact equal. In reality, the resulting differences were quite large and it would be another 58 years until the Court would overturn this ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. The effects of \separate but equal" were most obvious in education, evidenced in the sub- standard conditions chronicled by DuBois (1911), Myrdal (1944), Bond (1966) and others. In comprehensive work on the relationship between race, education and earnings, Margo (1986, 1990) argues that even had educational resources been equalized, black children still would have 3 lagged due to overwhelming differences in family background; what he calls \intergenerational drag"; Fishback and Baskin (1991) reach a similar conclusion using individual-level from Geor- gia. There is some evidence of convergence in school quality during this time though. Donohue et al. (2002) argue that from 1910 to the mid-1930's black school quality in the South improved, but much less so relative to whites. Fewer explanations are offered for convergence in schooling outcomes during these years, when the effects of \Jim Crow" were most harshly felt. Donohue et al. conclude that schools built by Northern philanthropies, primarily Rosenwald, accounted for at most one-third of the decrease in the black-white gap between 1910 and 1930, and put no estimate on the effects of other funds such as Jeanes and Slater.2 The key questions are, what factors led to this early input convergence, and why did modest input convergence lead to relatively large gains in achievement? While the role of philanthropy in these matters has been documented in the historical lit- erature, attempts at causal estimates of the impacts of these programs on schooling outcomes are scarce.3 Evidence presented here, in Aaronson and Mazumder (2011), and in Carruthers and Wanamaker (2013), indicates that Northern philanthropy played an instrumental role in black education before 1940 supporting both infrastructure and human resources, ultimately narrowing the black-white attainment gap, and less so the black-white resource gap. Of note, The George Peabody Fund, which supported Southern education (although primarily not for blacks) between 1867 and 1914, became a template for American philanthropy.