Book Prospectus

Seattle Schools: A New Western History of Education, 1850-1990

Nancy Beadie, ed.

Contact: Nancy Beadie Educational Leadership and Policy Studies College of Education, Box 353600 , WA 98195

[email protected] (206) 221-3428 (o) (206) 324-1580 (h)

Seattle Schools Book Proposal 1 Introductory Remarks

The book described here is the first book in the New Western History to make education its central focus. It is also the first book to imagine the history of education in the United States from a western perspective. Practitioners of the new western history have investigated many dimensions of social and institutional life, from industries to churches, clubs to labor unions, regulatory agencies to ethnic groups and neighborhoods. Seldom, however, have education or schools appeared as more than incidental examples within these histories. Similarly, historians of education have long noted differences among regions of the United States in patterns of school development, especially between North and South. Nonetheless, most education history still takes the Northeastern United States as the standard, treating other regions as deviations from the norm. Few scholars have assumed the challenge of re-imagining the history of U.S. education from a regional perspective. More specifically, no one has yet made education the central focus of a study shaped by the principles, theories and themes of the New Western history. This book assumes that challenge.

Content Overview

Framing the history of education in Seattle as a study in new western history highlights several distinguishing features of the case as compared with that of other cities and regions in the United States. First, it highlights the distinctive condition of state and administrative authority in education in many areas of the West. As a new state formed at the height of state authority in education nationwide (see chapter 1), Washington State effectively avoided nineteenth century debates over the legitimacy of tax-supported public schooling. Adopted in 1889, the Washington constitution included one of the most strongly worded provisions for public education of any state to date. Second, a focus on Seattle highlights the distinctive character of education politics in the Northwest. As a new city chartered in 1890, the city of Seattle effectively bypassed the long history of ethnic and ward politics that characterized the politics of schooling in cities such as New York, Chicago, Atlanta, Milwaukee, and Detroit, and that are the focus of many existing histories of urban education. This combination of clear state provision and weak ethnic politicization meant that early leaders of the Seattle schools enjoyed a nearly unparalleled opportunity to assert their authority in education. At the same time, the direct connection between education funding and resource extraction in Washington (through logging of public lands), the radicalization of organized labor in Seattle in the 1910s, and the high proportions of educated and professional women in Seattle and the West, made the texture of education politics in the progressive era somewhat different than in other regions of the country (see chapters 1 through 6).

Another distinguishing feature of Seattle was its self-identity as a city of tolerance with a pluralistic, democratic future. Self-conscious of their roles as city builders in a new, progressive era, municipal leaders cultivated an ideal of civic exceptionalism for Seattle. In effect, they defined Seattle as different and better than other, older cities, and appealed to parents, students and the general public alike to protect the city from decline into troubled ways. Rooted in the Deweyan version of progressivism

Seattle Schools Book Proposal 2 implemented by the first long-term superintendent in the 1900s and 1910s, and renewed by the intercultural movement of the 1930s, this self-identity endured into the 1960s. This self-identity was neither entirely unjustified nor thoroughly correspondent with reality. Despite glaring contradictions, such as the internment of Japanese- Americans in World War II, Seattle managed to avoid the extreme cases of racial hostility in cities like Boston and Chicago, due in part to the relatively small size of Seattle's minority populations, especially with respect to the few schools with truly mixed students populations (see chapters, 7, 8, and 9). It is in the contradictions of this progressive self-identity that the most interesting stories and compelling lessons of the Seattle case may lie. Contradictions between this self-identity and reality were present and apparent to some as early as the 1930s and 40s, but it was in the 1960s and 70s that it was most directly challenged.

Beyond describing the distinguishing features of the history of education in a northwest city, a major contribution of this book lies in its attention to educational issues in the 20th century, particularly to the enduring issues of equity, ethnicity and urban race relations that have dominated education for the last half century. Recently, a substantial body of new scholarship has begun to appear on the "urban educational crisis" of the 1960s and 70s. As in the past, much of this work focuses on eastern and mid-western cities such Boston, Milwaukee, and Detroit. The case of Seattle brings a distinctive perspective to these issues (chapters 9, 10 and 11). In Seattle, as in southwestern cities with substantial Latino populations such as Los Angeles and Houston, issues of racial segregation and discrimination went well beyond black and white. As compared with recent histories of education in the Southwest, however, Seattle and the Pacific Northwest presents yet another story. The substantial presence of Native Americans and multiple Asian populations (Chinese, Japanese, Filipino) shaped the history of education in Seattle in distinctive ways (see chapters 1, 4, 7, 9 and 12).

Several features distinguish this volume from existing histories of urban education. First, education is broadly defined. Although most chapters deal with some aspect of education in the city's public schools, some chapters look at institutions outside the public school system, including a Jewish settlement house, a Labor College, and an experiment in community-based education known as the Seattle Urban Academy. Each chapter, moreover, goes beyond institutional history to look at the experience and meaning of schooling in context. These include contexts such as those of youth culture, teacher identity, legal history, race relations, and labor and community activism. Finally, the stories told in these chapters are not just those recounted in meeting minutes and board reports, though they may also be grounded in such documentation. Drawing on sources such as teachers' letters, student newspapers, oral histories, musical recordings, radio transcripts, and court briefings, the authors of these chapters reveal the many different networks of action and discourses of meaning that have always shaped the history of education in Seattle.

Seattle Schools Book Proposal 3

Organizational Structure

The book is organized into three parts, each highlighting a different set of educational issues. The first part focuses on issues of authority in education. As a new western city, Seattle developed in the context of new and changing definitions of professional authority in the progressive era. Chapters 2, 3 and 4 explore several dimensions of this changing authority in education. In chapter 2, Steve Woolworth shows how schools in Seattle exercised greater authority over children's health in the 1910s than they have since or than other cities did at the time. He also illuminates the origins of certain testing and special education practices that continue to be controversial today. Women played important roles in this story, as they did in many other educational changes in this period, whether as nurses, teachers, club women, social workers or psychologists. In chapter 3, Susan Pynchon uses private correspondence to explore the ways that women conceived of their authority as teachers in the progressive era, and to examine their struggles to acquire and maintain professional status--a struggle that also continues to be salient today. In chapter 4, Dasha Koenig tells how the women who organized the Jewish Settlement House in Seattle developed programs of Americanization and acculturation for immigrant women that were then taken over by the Seattle schools. Besides providing another opportunity to analyze the gender dimensions of professionalization and state formation at the turn of the twentieth century, Koenig's account provides an interesting precedent for analyzing the role of PTA women in the development of new school curricula in the 1930s-50s, as described in the book's next section.

The second section of the book focuses on the role of politics and different social groups in shaping school curricula and institutions. Chapters 5 and 6 describe two episodes of labor involvement in education. In the 1910s labor and business leaders throughout the country struggled with each other over vocational education and its introduction into public schools. During precisely the same period, Seattle achieved its distinctive reputation as a radical labor town. With attention to this distinctive historical context, Kelly Matika and Marc Rousseau analyze the fate of manual labor education in the and the development of the Seattle Worker's College, respectively. Both cases illuminate the ways in which the content and meaning of education were shaped both by complex national politics, and by the capacities of individual leaders to negotiate that politics at the local level.

These dynamics played out again and again in other reform movements throughout the twentieth century and continue to this day. For example, in chapter 7, Jennifer Preisman examines a precedent for current concerns about school violence and crime among youth. She shows how national waves of concern over youth crime and violence in the 1930s and 40s led white middle class parents, educators and police to try to control and mediate youth cultures in Seattle schools and to adopt special extra-curricular programs aimed at addressing those concerns. In chapter 8, Patricia Kim recounts how local educational leaders successfully brought a national standards movement in music education to Seattle in the 1960s and early 70s in a program that

Seattle Schools Book Proposal 4 has not been rivaled since. Not unlike current standards movements in areas such as mathematics, the program as presented by Kim provides one model of how a reform aimed at universal access to high standards was once institutionalized.

Part three of the book focuses on cases of community conflict over school issues in Seattle. Again with a salience that continues to resonate today, these cases all revolve around the history of ethnic and racial relations in the city. Beginning with the intercultural and inter-group education movement in the 1930s and 40s described by Yoon Pak in chapter 9, the book examines several efforts by Seattle civic and educational leaders to initiate or respond to demands that schools promote harmonious inter-group relations. Despite salient contradictions of these efforts by the reality of racial segregation in both housing and schooling for Asians and African-Americans, Seattle managed to sustain a self-identity as a city of tolerance into the 1960s. With the pressure of both civil rights groups and the courts in the 1960s and 70s, however, city leaders were forced to recognize that inter-group relations were not as harmonious as they liked to pretend. In response to demands for school desegregation, both the Seattle Public Schools and an independent philanthropic foundation developed proposals for revitalizing and reorganizing education in Seattle's Central District, where many African-Americans and other minority populations lived. The rise and fall of these experiments with "continuous learning" and "community control" are described by Jennifer Harris in chapter 10. Meanwhile, as Shawn Olson Brown recounts in chapter 11, opponents of school desegregation organized their own response to issues of race in Seattle education in a legal battle that eventually went to the U. S. Supreme Court.

One thing these stories reveal is the moral ambiguity of history and education. Seattle is a case that occupies neither extreme of the often-bifurcated debates about the significance of schooling in American society. Neither a hot-bed of educational radicalism nor a tightly controlled instrument of capitalist industry, neither a scene of violent racial conflict nor a multiracial utopia, Seattle is a case that highlights the moral ambiguity that is the norm of ordinary school experience. Historically, Seattle is an urban school district with a self-identity of tolerance that was eventually challenged by the politics and realities of the 1960s and 70s. It is also a district that provides many examples of educators, students and leaders making authentic attempts to meet the complexities and exigencies of their times. This ambiguous world is the reality for most people in both history and education. Perhaps there are important things to be learned from a case that embodies ambiguity rather than extremes.

Seattle Schools Book Proposal 5

Market and Audience

This book builds upon traditional urban histories of education in other cities such as Detroit, Chicago and New York (i.e., Mirel, 1992; Wrigley, 1982; Ravitch, 1983). At the same time it extends this model through attention to diverse populations and leadership, as in some recent work focused on multi-ethnic issues and conflicts over schooling in cities such as Milwaukee, Kansas City, Los Angeles, Houston and Detroit. (i.e., Dougherty, 2004; Reese, 1986; Raftery, 1992; San Miguel, 2001; Vinyard, 1998). The book also builds and draws upon three existing studies of education in Seattle (Nelson, 1988; Pieroth, 2004; Pak, 2002). To acknowledge the important foundation laid by the first of these Seattle studies, it is proposed that Bryce Nelson be asked to write a preface for the present book.

At the same time as this book builds on existing literature, it also departs from it in both focus and scope. It is the first book since Frederick Bolton's 1934 History of Education in Washington State (U.S. Department of Interior) to take a chronologically extensive look at the history of education in the Northwest since the period of statehood. It is also the first book on education in the Northwest, and one of the few in the field as a whole, to look at the history of education from the perspectives of multiple groups and populations who shaped that history. To do this the book draws both on previously unexamined primary sources, and on secondary historical works of Northwest history focused on subjects other than education (i.e., DuBrow, 2002; Taylor,1994; Frank, 1994; Blair, 2001; Harmon, 1998). As an edited book focused on the history of education in a particular place and based on the work graduate students and graduate alumni from a particular university, this book most closely follows the model of a book recently published by leading historian of education William Reese, Hoosier Schools (Indiana University Press, 1998). At the same time, as a volume focused on the history of education in a western city, this is the first book to use the major themes and analytical insights of the now extensive literature in the new western history (i.e., White, 1991; Limerick, 1987; Wunder, 1994, 1998) to analyze issues in the history of education.

The audiences for this book include western historians, historians of education in the U.S, and practitioners and students of education in the Northwest. A premise of the book is that the study of local history can be a powerful means of discovering agency in the present as well as in the past. Each of the chapters in this book takes a close look at the dilemmas of educators and at the conditions of living, teaching and learning in a particular time and place. One of the benefits of this case study approach is that it can force us to confront the complexity of history and human agency--to re-examine generalizations, whether those generalizations are ones achieved by social science or presumed by prejudice. In this way, the book aims at revealing the moral space of contingency and choice in which educators and parents, students and community members have lived in the past, as they continue to do in the present.

Seattle Schools Book Proposal 6 Chapter List Seattle Schools: A New Western History of Education, 1850-1990

A. Part I: Schools, the State, and Professional Authority, 1850-1930

1. Introduction--Education in the New West: Issues of Authority in the Schools, 1850-1930, by Nancy Beadie, Mariah Voutilainen and Molly Franklin (with assistance from Kristen Brady)

2. From Outhouse to Clinic: The Rise and Fall of Medical Authority in the Seattle Public Schools, 1892-1922, by Steve Woolworth

3. "I Cannot Bear to Be at the Bottom of the Ladder": Seattle Teachers and the Meaning of Professionalism, 1900-1920, by Susan Pynchon

4. Educating the Immigrant Woman: Seattle Public Schools and the Council of Jewish Women, 1909-1930, by Dasha Koenig

B. Part II: Schools, Politics and Curriculum, 1910-1980

5. The Seattle Schools’ Case for Manual Training, 1910-1920, by Kelly Matika

6. Workers' Education in a Labor City: Seattle Workers’ College, 1915-1931, by Marc Rousseau

7. "Today's Children Are Tomorrow's Headlines": Youth Crime, Moral Panic, and the Seattle Public Schools, 1929-1940, by Jennifer Preisman

8. Making Music Their Own: Schools, Community, and Standards of Excellence in Seattle, 1960-75, by Patricia Kim

C. Part III: Schools, Community and Conflict, 1920-1990

9. The Regressive Turn in the Seattle Schools' Progressive Ideology: Intercultural and Inter-group Education, 1930s-1950s, by Yoon Pak

10. Making Sense of a School that Never Was: The Seattle Urban Academy, 1968-1971, by Jennifer Harris

11. Strategies of Resistance: Initiative 350 and the Legal and Political History of School Desegregation in Seattle, 1977-1982, by Shawn Olson Brown

12. Conclusion--Discovering Agency: Community and Cosmopolitanism in the History of Seattle Schools, 1920-1990, by Nancy Beadie, Kathy Kimball and Emily Whitmore (with assistance from Taylor Kokjohn and Erin Peinado)

Seattle Schools Book Proposal 7 CHAPTER OUTLINE

Seattle Schools: A New Western History of Education, 1880-1990

Part I: Schools, the State, and Professional Authority, 1850-1930

Chapter 1: Introduction Education in the New West: Issues of Authority in the History of Seattle Schools, 1850-1930 by Nancy Beadie, Mariah Voutlinainen and Molly Franklin (with assistance from Kristen Brady)

When Washington became a state in 1889, tax-supported public schooling was an established fact in the rest of the country. States in the Northeast and the Mid-West had agitated over common schooling since at least the 1830s, and had managed to quell most remaining resistance by the 1850s. Southern states had sustained resistance until Reconstruction, but by the 1880s had developed comprehensive state education systems with many of the same elements of standardization common to states in the North. At the federal level, Congress came very close to creating a national system of education in the 1880s--closer than it has ever come before or since. In other words, by 1889, the principle of state authority over schooling was no longer a matter of serious debate. In fact, the very concept of "the State" achieved something of an apotheosis at about the time that Washington achieved statehood. What difference did this coincidence of state formation make for education in Seattle and Washington State? This chapter explores this and other questions about the significance of Seattle as a case study of urban education in the West. Historians of education have long noted differences among regions of the United States in patterns of school development, especially between North and South. Nonetheless, most education history still takes the Northeastern United States as the standard, treating other regions as deviations from the norm. Few scholars have assumed the challenge of re-imagining the history of U.S. education from a regional perspective. More specifically, no one has yet made education the central focus of a study shaped by the principles, theories and themes of the New Western history. This chapter frames the significance of the Seattle case in this context. One theme of the new western history is the importance of the federal government in development of the West. As contrasted with eastern states, western states developed largely after the Civil War, when the federal government consolidated its power. Consequently, the federal government played a larger role in early state development in the west than it did in eastern states. This distinction can be seen in education as well as in other policy areas. Arguably, the first government provisions for education in the Washington Territory were those included in the treaties negotiated by agents of the federal government with Native American tribes. Beginning with the Medicine Creek Treaty of 1853, these treaties all included clear guarantees that the federal government would build, staff and maintain agricultural, industrial and common schools on Indian reservations for the first twenty years following the treaties' ratification. In fact, education was one of the chief "benefits" offered by the federal

Seattle Schools Book Proposal 8 government in exchange for Indian land. As it turned out, these promises were rarely fulfilled, or only at a minimal level. By 1880, they had given way to a new federal policy of transporting Indian children to off-site boarding schools, specifically the Chemawa Indian school in Oregon (known originally as Hamilton school), where Puyallup children were sent as early as 1879. Ten years before statehood, in other words, the federal government established schools for residents of Washington Territory. Admitted as a state in 1889, Washington State had one of the most strongly worded constitutional provisions for education of any state to date. Drafted at the height of federal level interest in education and during a national movement toward standardization in education, Article IX of the Constitution required that the state "make ample provision for the education of all children residing within its borders, without distinction or preference on account of race, color, caste, or sex." To this day, these provisions of the constitution shape the possibilities of education in Washington State. In addition to specifying extensive state responsibility for education, the constitution tied public funding of education to an economic policy with substantial environmental impact. Specifically, the constitution dedicated a share of the proceeds from the logging of public land to the support of education. As with other aspects of development in the West, in other words, public policy in education effectively facilitated transformation of the land and environment. When it came to actual educational practice, however, much early schooling occurred outside government control and oversight. For many residents of Washington Territory, including Native Americans, the first formal schooling was provided by Catholic orders and institutions. As in many areas of the West, Catholics provided the first public-minded social institutions of any kind, including not only schools, but orphanages and hospitals. Typically these institutions served Protestants and Catholics alike. Some received government subsidies. In the 1870s and 1880s, however, a new politics of the "secular" state labeled such institutions "parochial" or "sectarian" and established a basis for excluding them from public support. This new politics was often justified with appeals to anti-Catholicism, on the one hand, and to the superiority of professional expertise and authority on the other. Unlike eastern states such as New York, Massachusetts and Maryland, where some political compromises with large Catholic populations had been worked out over the course of the nineteenth century, Washington State organized at a time when the anti-Catholic secularism was at it's height. Reflecting this fact, section 4 of Article IX of the constitution specified that "all schools maintained or supported wholly or in part by the public funds shall be forever free from sectarian control or influence." Another factor that distinguished education in Seattle and the West from other regions of the country was a high level of female participation in higher schooling and in trade and professional occupations. The feminization of high schools was considered a national problem by the 1870s, but the issue was most salient in the West, where 69.4% of high school students were female in 1872. This figure declined somewhat in subsequent decades, but other figures show the continued importance of women in education in the West. The proportion of women who attended high school, the proportion of teachers who were women, and the proportion of female workers who worked in occupations favoring formal education, were all high in the West relative to other regions of the country. For Seattle specifically, a comparative study of three cities

Seattle Schools Book Proposal 9 in 1920 showed that 28.8% of white female teenagers attended high school in Seattle, as compared with 18.7% for Bridgeport, Connecticut and 17.8% for St. Louis, Missouri. Moreover, a higher proportion of Seattle's female high school students pursued an academic curriculum than in the other two cities. What was the significance of this female influence for the construction of professional authority in education in Seattle and the West? How do we assess the impact of these educated women as teachers, club members, lobbyists and voters? Educated women were active in education and urban affairs throughout the country from 1880 to 1930, but women appear to have been a particularly well-organized influence on Seattle schools. An early organizer and former faculty member at the Illinois State Normal School, Julia Kennedy, became the first superintendent of Seattle schools in 1888. Washington State was one of the first to grant women suffrage (1910) and Seattle was the first big city to elect a female mayor (Bertha Knight Landes in 1924). What can the somewhat exceptional case of Seattle and the West reveal about the significance women and education in the development of professional and state authority in the progressive period? One possible factor in the relatively strong influence of women in Seattle in this period was a corresponding weakness of other forms of political affiliation. As a young city at the turn of the twentieth century, Seattle did not have a 50-year or 250-year history of ethnic and ward-based politics as did cities like Boston, Chicago or St. Louis. As a new city chartered in 1890, the city of Seattle effectively bypassed the long history of ethnic and ward politics that characterized the politics of schooling in cities such as New York, Chicago, Atlanta, Milwaukee, and Detroit, and that are the focus of many existing histories of urban education. This combination of clear state provision and weak ethnic politicization meant that early leaders of the Seattle schools enjoyed a nearly unparalleled opportunity to assert their authority in education. At the same time, the direct connection between education funding and resource extraction in Washington (through logging of public lands), the radicalization of organized labor in Seattle in the 1910s, and the high proportions of educated and professional women in Seattle and the West, made the texture of education politics in the progressive era somewhat different than in other regions of the country. This chapter summarizes and describes these issues and connects with the larger literature in the new western history.

Chapter 2 From Outhouse to Clinic: The Rise and Fall of Medical Authority in the Seattle Public Schools, 1892-1922 by Steve Woolworth

This chapter synthesizes the findings of five case studies that document the rise, and subsequent decline, of medical authority in the Seattle Public Schools. Beginning with the policies of school sanitation and infectious disease control in the 1890s, the essay then charts the trajectory of medical science and authority into the public schools through an analysis of student medical examinations, the formation of the school medical department and clinic, and the use of diagnostic practices in the child study laboratory. The essay also describes the response by school and public health officials to the Spanish Influenza epidemic of 1918, and the legal and political challenge to

Seattle Schools Book Proposal 10 medical authority that followed resulting in the end of compulsory school vaccinations and the closing of the school clinic. The essay gives special attention to the administrative conflicts that occurred between the schools and the city health department over the coordination of medical policies in schools, as well as, those disputes that occurred between physicians and educators within the schools. The essay concludes with a discussion of the theoretical and historical significance of these developments in relation to current practices in special education and the management of infectious disease control policies and practices.

Chapter 3 "I Cannot Bear to Be at the Bottom of the Ladder": Seattle Teachers and the Meaning of Professionalism, 1900-1920 by Susan Pynchon

Much has been written about issues of professionalism in teaching. Historians, sociologists, and feminists have analyzed the structure of professional authority in education, the politics of labor and salary issues for teachers, and significance of the feminization of teaching in defining teachers' professional status. Seldom, however, have scholars grounded their analysis of such issues in evidence of how teachers themselves articulated issues of professionalism and authority in teaching. This chapter explores the meaning of teacher professionalism from the perspective of teachers themselves. Grounded in two collections of correspondence from the first two decades of the twentieth century Grace Labaree Foster (Seattle area teacher from 1901-1906) and Gertrude Jackson (Seattle area teacher in 1918), the chapter follows the struggles of two women who sought to establish their professional authority in Seattle schools, highlighting what they identified as sources and issues of authority in their context and time. To put these two individual cases in perspective, the chapter links the specific concerns of these teachers to available data about the larger population of teachers in this period, and to school district policies and practices with regard to teaching. What was the culture of school teaching in Seattle at the turn of the twentieth century? What were the choices and opportunity structures that confronted women who taught? How did the professional culture of women teachers in this western city compare with that in non-urban areas of the Northwest and in other areas of the country?

Chapter 4 Educating the Immigrant Woman: The Seattle Public Schools and the Council of Jewish Women, 1909-1930 by Dasha Koenig

In this essay, I explore the early history of educating immigrant women in Seattle. I focus on two organizations, the Seattle Public Schools and the Seattle Section of the National Council of Jewish Women. My goals are to document the objectives behind focusing on the Americanization of immigrant women and immigrant mothers, and describe the assimilation strategies employed by the local public schools and the

Seattle Schools Book Proposal 11 Council. Immigrant women and especially mothers of immigrant families were quickly targeted by the Americanization movement since they were perceived as a gateway to the immigrant home. The strategy of effective assimilation of immigrant mothers was to shape the whole immigrant family, especially the immigrant children, the future second generation of America. Educating the immigrant mother in the proper American ways was also expected to prevent family breakup, improve the health of immigrant children, and alleviate juvenile delinquency. Public schools were used as the primary official tool for assimilation of adult immigrants, including immigrant women and mothers, especially by the Bureau of Education, the Bureau of Naturalization, the Council of National Defense, and Committee on Public Information. The Council of Jewish Women, a significant national immigrant organization at the time, developed a well-defined strategy and massive efforts to approach and educate immigrant women and mothers. An interesting finding of this study documents the interplay of the strategies of these two organizations, the Seattle Public Schools and the Seattle Section of the Council. On a more general level, this study presents a glimpse into the history of immigrant women education, the roots of English as a Second Language teaching, and a piece of local Northwestern immigration and education history. At a time of searching for the best methods to teach our children a multicultural approach to life, living through the greatest immigrant influx in the history of the United States, and deciding how to proceed in the English-only initiative cases, this study explores ways of thinking which marked the beginnings of the processes we live with today.

Part II: Schools, Politics and Curriculum, 1910-1960

Chapter 5 Workers' Education in a Labor City: Seattle Workers’ College, 1915-1931 by Marc Rousseau

In September of 1919, the Seattle Workers’ College opened for business in rented rooms at the Seattle Labor Temple. Nearly five hundred men and women registered in the first week for one or more classes and activities offered by this popular new adjunct of the Central Labor Council of Seattle and Vicinity. Students of any age or gender, whether union-affiliated or not, were welcome to participate in Seattle’s latest radical experiment. The entire curriculum, which ran the gamut from traditional, 10-week college-level lecture courses, weekly public lectures, and drama and music clubs, was taught by a faculty comprised almost entirely of radical professors from the University of Washington. Barely three years later, however, the Central Labor Council was forced to abandon its ambitious attempt at raising the consciousness of Seattle’s rank-and-file, as a combination of precipitous economic depression and internecine quarreling within the Council’s ranks depleted the College’s student base and support infrastructure, respectively. [should you mention context of general strike?] Despite the College’s short life span, its existence is significant in both educational and historiographical terms. Seattle’s Central Labor Council played an important role in bringing the concept of workers’ education to the attention of American

Seattle Schools Book Proposal 12 organized labor, which eagerly embraced the effort in spite of the AFL national leadership’s official discouragement. At its zenith, the workers’ education movement encompassed more than 300 institutions, including 100 audacious enough to label themselves “colleges.” In addition, Seattle’s version was a sophisticated manifestation of the concept, transcending the basic and “Americanization” classes characteristic of many other workers’ colleges. Historiographically, the Seattle Workers’ College represents another contribution to the theme of identity formation abroad in recent histories of marginalized groups in the Progressive Era. This chapter will explore the origins of the Seattle Workers’ College, including the political and social contexts in which it emerged. It will trace the trajectory of the institution, from its abortive beginning in 1915, through its various incarnations, to its decline and eventual, lingering demise in 1931. In addition, the chapter will examine the curriculum and faculty, and finally, situate the college in Progressive Era historiography.

Chapter 6 The Seattle Schools’ Case for Manual Training, 1910-1920 by Kelly Matika

Even as the Seattle schools’ manual training program moved in the 1910s from focusing purely on classroom handwork – intended to connect the ‘hands’ to the traditional curriculum of the ‘mind’ – to incorporating vocational elements, school managers continued to emphasize the same academically-oriented arguments used during the initial introduction of manual training in the 1880s. This chapter will consider the reasons that Seattle’s school managers might have felt compelled to continue to use these justifications, rather than moving towards vocational ones which were used nationally at the time. I will investigate four factors evident both internally in the Seattle school system and externally in its economic and community environment which may have influenced this decision, namely the need to: address sources of protest, acknowledge Seattle’s economic base, justify costs to an efficiency minded school board and certain citizen groups, and reflect the educational philosophy of Seattle’s superintendent, Frank Cooper. In order to explicate these factors, I will include both primary evidence found in school documents and reports and secondary evidence from the literature on manual and vocational training. Protest to manual training came primarily from two groups, the community and the teachers. Parents in working class families were particularly skeptical of vocational models, wanting their children to “get an education” rather than spend time at school learning those things that could be taught at work. Teachers were also reluctant to accept manual training as an appropriate and equal educational experience, evident in their resistance to grading manual training work, reluctance to accept a primarily manual training-based program as satisfactory for promotion to high school, and in their proclivity for keeping students from their manual training course as punishment. The economic environment in Seattle was also a factor. At this time Seattle was a commercial rather than a manufacturing city. Since vocational offerings in the classroom were slanted disproportionately towards manufacturing work, the economic advantages of manual training in a city such as Seattle may have been questionable, making academic justifications more attractive. Also, in the late teens as efficiency became a

Seattle Schools Book Proposal 13 central goal in work and schools, the utility of manual training, an expensive proposition, was coming under examination. One benefit of claiming academic and general goals for manual training was that these were more difficult to measure than purely vocational ones, thus deflecting potential criticism that manual training “wasn’t working.” Another important factor in choosing these academically oriented goals was Seattle Superintendent Cooper’s own ideas about education. Because the state educational structure’s role was virtually non-existent in regards to manual training until 1910, and then minimal until 1917 after the passage of the Smith-Hughes Act, Cooper had the autonomy to draw upon his own educational philosophy and that of national organizations to form the practices and the stated purposes of the program. The chapter will conclude with a brief description of why Seattle school managers may have felt compelled to create such a program. At a time when the apprenticeship system was deteriorating, and the need for highly skilled workers diminishing, it was symbolically important to many, including educators, businessmen, and workers, that labor take an equal role to professional training in school. The schools, in becoming the institution of choice to bridge the gap formerly held by apprenticeships and the family, took on more aspects of what can be generally termed the whole education of the person.

Chapter 7 "Today's Children Are Tomorrow's Headlines": Youth Crime, Moral Panic, and the Seattle Public Schools, 1929-1940 by Jennifer Preisman

This essay will look closely at how educators in one city, Seattle, Washington, approached the problem of youth and violence between 1929 and 1940. Newspapers in the 1930s spoke of an ominous phenomenon, a scourge of childhood crime and victimization that set parents on edge. The state of childhood in the years preceding World War II seemed particularly dire. Juvenile crime seemed not only rampant, but increasing, while crimes against young people also appeared to be at an all-time high. This situation and its accompanying coverage in the press led to an intense dialogue about childhood -- what it "used to be" and what it "should be." Yet, while schools influenced five or more hours of most children's lives after World War I, they have not been explored as agencies of importance in the literature about our cultural fears of and for children. This essay will add education as a unit of analysis to the body of writing that focuses on the legal, political, and cultural dimensions of historical moral panics about youth crime during this period. Specifically, this essay will examine the relationship between the Seattle schools and youth cultures, and the ways that educators attempted to modify the shape of those cultures in order to protect children. School records, school newspapers, and local periodicals suggest that teachers, administrators, and educational organizations engaged in three broad activities to impact youth cultures. First, they worked politically to keep kids away from "dangerous influences" in the community. Second, they involved kids in a set of "campaigns" in their schools to persuade young people to modify their own behavior. And finally, they worked to create school-based extracurricular programs

Seattle Schools Book Proposal 14 to replace the existing youth cultures in the city. The essay will conclude with a discussion of the significance of the role of the school in building or maintaining cultural anxieties about young people.

Chapter 8 Making Music Their Own: Schools, Community, and Standards of Excellence in Seattle, 1960-75 by Patricia Kim

The history of music education in America’s urban schools is a saga of academic and artistic successes and defeats, of coexisting and conflicting philosophies, of varying responses to local and national conditions, of inclusion and removal from the curriculum. In-depth analysis of historical issues in urban music education usually contradicts simplistic generalizations. The compilation of case studies is an integral means to capturing a glimpse of past realities, beliefs, and aspirations at the local and national level in order to create a substantial body of knowledge from which to make present day decisions. The extraordinary leadership provided by local music educators with national influence, evidence of student achievement through sound recordings of their performances, and the need for voter’s approval every two years for a school tax levy beg both a narrow lens and a narrator in the Seattle case. This essay is an historical telling of Seattle’s school music programs in relationship to community support, with biographical sketches of the most visible leaders in education and policy, as well as implementation strategies for all student learners to achieve standards of excellence articulated by the Music Educators National Conference at that time. Primary source evidence (newspaper articles, Seattle School Board minutes and reports, as well as sound recordings), secondary source evidence, and personal interviews indicate at least two major peak periods followed by major downturns in the history of Seattle Public Schools. All indications suggest an unprecedented zenith in the 1960s and early 1970s followed by a fallout from which the Seattle School District has not recovered to this day. Community support is captured from a perspective of academic philosophy (curriculum prioritization), revenue sources (federal government, corporate, and individual giving that includes financial contributions as we donations of time and expertise), music as means to meet the needs of the society at large serving utilitarian purposes. Creating and articulating a rationale for including or excluding music from the school curriculum is critical to the strongest influencers of educational leadership and policy. Exploring the compound factors of musical standards, educational practices, and community needs as they interact in the formation of music education programs in the Seattle case may provide insights that would have implications for current and future educational perspectives and practice.

Part III: Schools, Communities and Conflict, 1960-1990

Chapter 9 The Regressive Turn in the Seattle Schools' Progressive Ideology:

Seattle Schools Book Proposal 15 Education for Intercultural and Intergroup Education, 1930s-1950s by Yoon Pak

Education for intercultural and intergroup relations became an increased feature of schools during World War II. The wholesale massacre of Jews in Europe coupled with the growth of totalitarianism abroad fueled educators in the United States to achieve a systematic program of prejudice reduction, with religious toleration at the forefront. Complementary to that approach would be an introduction to human relations across racial and ethnic identities. Relying on recent and revolutionary social scientific data on the non-biological basis of race, educators in the US sought to combat social ills in their own backyard. The specific attention to race relations during World War II also became relevant in urban sites where the growth in the defense industry lured workers from all parts of the United States in hopes of gainful employment. Growing tensions between ethnic and racial groups surfaced. While some school districts on the West Coast United States, such as San Diego, embarked on a formalized intercultural program to reform its schools to teach for diversity, Seattle, for example, relied on their progressive tradition of tolerance. This chapter investigates the Seattle schools leadership in progressive pedagogy during the 1930s and how that became the benchmark for addressing racial and religious intolerance up through the 1950s. While education for tolerance was a radical move preceding the war, the limits of a color-blind philosophy proved to be outmoded during and after World War II. The Seattle schools' eschewal of a district-wide program in intergroup education grew as community groups, especially the Seattle Urban League, began to assert their control in school reform efforts. Whereas the schools early resistance against conservative political groups during World War I served useful in sustaining its progressive ideology, its resistance against liberal community organizations in the 1950s marked a move toward social regression. The superintendent's actions against implementing Negro History Week and his support for minstrel shows, all justified in the name of tolerance, exemplified the ways in which the schools were a reflection of the city's efforts to talk around the issue of race. As such, I attempt to provide a historical analysis of the nuanced ways in which the schools and the city of Seattle broached the teaching of race relations post-World War II and the implications of tolerance education in the face of school desegregation efforts after 1954.

Chapter 10 Making Sense of a School that Never Was: The Seattle Urban Academy, 1968-1971 by Jennifer Harris

Between 1968 and 1971 a proposal was crafted for an educational institution within Seattle's Central District including elementary, middle, and high school age youth. The Seattle Urban Academy (SUA) design was funded primarily by Battelle Memorial Research Institute to be an innovative school for at-risk, primarily African American youth that would be shaped and defined by the surrounding community. While the school never materialized, several documents point to the fact that the SUA played a

Seattle Schools Book Proposal 16 significant role in educational changes that occurred in Seattle during this period. The SUA planning may have also served as a catalyst for Central Area community mobilization while operating within a larger national context. As well, it provides an apt case study for examining the history of urban educational reform, while affording a better understanding of our current policy debates, particularly with regard to public, private, and non-profit educational partnerships that are so prevalent today. A number of historians have pointed out the historically ambivalent relationship that African American communities have had with educational philanthropies who sought to control the course of Black education in the United States (Anderson, 1988; Ratteray, 1992; Urban, 1992). A relevant question for this study is how did federal and private foundation and research grants to urban communities in the late 1960s and early 1970s respond to the communities that they were working within? Was Battelle genuinely listening to and collaborating with community participants or following a pattern of imposing an educational framework from outside? Sources for this project include the Palmer Smith Papers of the University of Washington Special Collections, Seattle School Board papers from the Seattle Public School Archives, and local newspaper articles. Ethnographic interviews with former SUA participants are also included.

Chapter 11 Strategies of Resistance: Initiative 350 and the Legal and Political History of School Desegregation in Seattle, 1977-1982 by Shawn Olson Brown

In 1977, the Seattle Public Schools adopted the third in a series of controversial plans for school desegregation. Because this plan, like those that preceded it, was adopted by without a court order, Seattle is often cited as an exception in the history of school desegregation--as the only large urban school district to desegregate "voluntarily." A close look at the context of this plan, however, reveals a more complex story. It is true that the Seattle learned from the experiences of other cities and decided to develop its own desegregation plan rather than to have one forced upon it by the courts. It is not true, though, that Seattle somehow escaped the maze of legal action, threats, and heated elections that characterized school desegregation in other cities. Moreover, the controversy around school desegregation in Seattle did not end with the adoption of the "Seattle Plan" in 1977. Only days after the Plan was officially adopted, the Citizens for Voluntary Integration Committee (CiVIC) established itself as a non-profit organization and mounted a state-wide campaign to eliminate the Seattle Plan and another mandatory busing programs like it in the state. The group was successful in passing Initiative 350 in the November 1978 election, which banned busing for purposes of racial balancing. The passage of Initiative 350 touched off a string of lawsuits that eventually wound their way to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1982. This chapter describes the sophisticated political strategies that CiVIC employed to resist school desegregation and the legal significance of Washington v. Seattle School District, 458 U.S. 457 (1982), the resulting Supreme Court case. In particular the chapter explores the ways that CiVIC shaped the discussion of race and inclusion in

Seattle Schools Book Proposal 17 local politics. It also suggests how the political and legal legacy of this episode continues to shape Seattle schools today.

Chapter 12: Conclusion Discovering Agency: Community, Conflict and Contradiction in the History of Education in the Northwest, 1920-1990 by Nancy Beadie, Kathy Kimball, and Emily Whitmore (with assistance from Taylor Kokjohn and Erin Peinado)

As a historian and teacher who regularly uses local primary sources in my teaching and research, I strongly believe in the study of local history as a means of discovering agency in the present. At a local level, the particular conditions of living, teaching and learning in a certain context move to the foreground. We are confronted with the complexity of history and human agency--and are often forced to re-examine easy generalizations and ideological stances. To me, the ultimate commitment of both history and teaching is to help people discover this moral space of contingency and choice. In this chapter I explore this idea with respect to the history of Seattle schools. How might a city's exploration of its own educational history challenge its teachers, students, citizens and leaders to reconsider the nature of their agency in the present? The history of schooling in particular ethnic and cultural communities in Seattle provides multiple opportunities to explore issues of historical contingency and choice. For example, with respect to the history of Catholic schooling in the U.S., the case of Seattle and Washington State provides an interesting opportunity to explore ongoing issues of church and state. In the Northwest, as in other areas of the country, Catholics responded to the anti-Catholicism characteristic of many public institutions, including public schools, by promoting the organization of a separate Catholic school system. The roots of this system were established in the 1880s, but a particularly extensive program of Catholic school building occurred in Seattle (and in other cities in the U.S.) in the 1920s. In the context of increased Catholic-institution building, anti-Catholic organizations such as the Klu Klux Klan promoted legislation in both Oregon and Washington that would require all children to attend public schools. In Oregon, the legislation passed (it was later struck down by the Supreme Court). In Washington, the KKK effort was defeated. The historical study of Catholic education in Seattle and the Northwest thus allows us both to reconstruct some of the ethnic and religious diversity that has always existed in education, and to explore the issues of historical contingency and choice that shaped different results in different contexts. The educational experiences of Japanese-Americans residents of Seattle during World War II provide plenty of opportunities to examine issues of moral ambiguity and contradiction in education, as powerfully illuminated by Yoon Pak's existing study of the actions of school personnel and the writings of both Nisei and Caucasian students in Seattle's Washington Middle School on the eve of internment (2002). In that context, educators and students alike found themselves powerless to resist dictates of government and society that directly contradicted the principles of democracy and

Seattle Schools Book Proposal 18 citizenship they had taught and learned together. Once removed to Camp Minodoka, Japanese families and Nisei and Caucasian teachers encountered similar contradictions, as the War Relocation Authority established programs aimed at teaching ideas and practices of “democracy” to the “colonists” in the camp. Examples of these programs included a student council at the camp’s Hunt High School; a “self- government council” for the camp as a whole; Americanization classes for both Issei and Nissei; and a camp “extra-curriculum” of community activities and public events. Administrators of the WRA and of Camp Minidoka framed the goals of these programs in progressive terms: as a “learning by doing” approach to democratic education. They did so, however, in a context that denied residents the basic rights of democratic citizenship, a contradiction to which residents responded in a variety of ways, as indicated both by surviving records and newly collected oral histories. Historically, the Central District of Seattle has been the home of a large proportion of the city's African-American population and provides opportunities to explore multiple issues of community identity, conflict and choice in education. As already thoroughly described and analyzed by historian Quintard Taylor (1994), the District was historically defined both by active community-building on the part of African- American residents (beginning in the 1850s) and by racist discrimination in housing and real estate elsewhere in the city. These same dynamics of community identity and racial exclusion shaped schooling in the District as well. As Jennifer Harris describes in chapter 10 of this volume, in the late 1960 and early 1970s this dynamic came to a head in competing plans for two different schools based on two different models for responding to the education and Civil Rights issues of the time. Today, the Central District is confronting new versions of this challenge, as schools historically identified as central agencies of African-American community identity in the neighborhood are transformed by rapid gentrification. In this context, teachers, administrators and community members are turning to history as they struggle to retain a school's identity and strength in the African-American community while addressing ongoing educational issues and the challenges of changing conditions. As these cases illuminate, Seattle is a place that occupies neither extreme of the often-bifurcated debates about the significance of schooling in American society. Neither a hot-bed of educational radicalism nor a tightly controlled instrument of capitalist industry, neither a scene of violent racial conflict nor a multiracial utopia, Seattle is a case that highlights the moral ambiguity that is the norm of ordinary school experience. Historically, Seattle is an urban school district with a self-identity of tolerance that was eventually challenged by the politics and realities of the 1960s and 70s. It is also a district that provides many examples of educators, students and leaders making authentic attempts to meet the complexities and exigencies of their times. This ambiguous world is the reality for most people in both history and education. Perhaps there are important things to be learned from a case that embodies ambiguity rather than extremes.

Seattle Schools Book Proposal 19 References

Anderson, J. (1988). The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Blair, K., ed. (2001). Women in Pacific Northwest History. Revised edition. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Doughtery, J. (2004). More than One Struggle: The Evolution of Black School Reform in Milwaukee. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.

DuBrow, G. with Graves, D. (2002). Sento at Sixth and Main. Seattle: Seattle Arts Commission and University of Washington Press.

Frank, D. (1994). Purchasing Power: Consumer Organizing, Gender, and the Seattle Labor Movement, 1919-1929. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Harmon, A. (1998). Indians in the Making: Ethnic Relations and Indian Identities around Puget Sound. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Limerick, P. (1987). The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West. New York: Norton.

Mirel, J. (1992). The Rise and Fall of an Urban School System : Detroit, 1907-81. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Nelson, B. (1988). Good Schools: The Seattle Public School System, 1901-1930. Seattle: University of Washington.

Pak, Y. (2002). Wherever I Go, I Will Always Be a Loyal American: Schooling Seattle’s Japanese Americans during World War II. New York: RoutledgeFalmer.

Pieroth, D. (2004). Seattle’s Women Teachers of the Interwar Years: Shapers of a Livable City. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Ravitch, D. (1983). The Troubled Crusade: American Education 1945-1980. New York: Basic Books.

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Reese, W. J. (1986). Power and the Promise of School Reform: Grass-roots movements during the Progressive Era. Boston: Routledge.

Seattle Schools Book Proposal 20 . (1998). Hoosier Schools: Past and Present. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

San Miguel, G. (2001). Brown, Not White: School Integration and the Chicano Movement in Houston. College Station: Texas A & M.

Taylor, Q. (1994). The Forging of a Black Community: Seattle’s Central District from 1870 through the Civil Rights Era. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Urban, W. (1992). Black Scholar: Horace Mann Bond, 1904-1972. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.

Vinyard, J. (1998). For Faith and Fortune: The Education of Catholic Immigrants in Detroit, 1805-1925. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Wrigley, J. (1982). Class Politics and Public Schools : Chicago, 1900-1950. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

Seattle Schools Book Proposal 21