"The Rise and Fall of Medical Authority in the Seattle

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 University of Washington Seattle, 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 Seattle Public Schools and the development of the Seattle Worker's College, respectively.

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