4.9) Rosenwald Schools and County Training Schools for African Americans

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Del curso dictado por University of Pennsylvania

American Education Reform: History, Policy, Practice

calificación

University of Pennsylvania

American Education Reform: History, Policy, Practice

calificación

Discover what shapes how we talk about schools today by exploring the history of U.S. education reform. Engage with the main actors, key decisions, and major turning points in this history. See how social forces drive reform. Learn about how the critical tensions embedded in U.S. education policy and practice apply to schools nationally, globally— and where you live.

De la lección

The Progressive Era

This module looks at the Progressive movement writ large; the U.S. settlement movement as a source of urban school reform; the changes “administrative progressives” effected in the governance of urban school districts; the influence of the U.S. Army’s World War I intelligence- testing program on the American school system; social efficiency schooling and its theoretical foundations; the Committee of Ten, 1892–93; the Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education, 1918; and Booker T.Washington and W.E.B. DuBois.

4.1) Introduction3:58

4.2) Progressive Seedbeds of Education Reform4:31

4.3) Rise of the Administrative Progressives in American School Reform 6:22

4.4) Psychological Testing Movement7:17

4.5) Social Efficiency Schooling 6:15

4.6) The Committee of Ten5:07

4.7) The Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education7:00

4.8) The Southern Education Movement 7:59

4.9) Rosenwald Schools and County Training Schools for African Americans6:40

Conoce a los instructores

Dr. John L. Puckett
Professor of Education
Graduate School of Education
Dr. Michael Charles Johanek
Senior Fellow
Graduate School of Education

Let's look now at the development of black elementary and

secondary schools after 1900.

>> Hm. >> How were these schools funded and

what did they teach?

In 1900, the US census counted a total of

770,000 black children enrolled in elementary schools across the South.

36% of black children ages 5 to 14,

compared to 55% of white children in that age group.

Private philanthropic black schools staffed by black teachers accounted for

less than 1% of this total.

Yet as conduits to higher education,

they wielded an influence disproportionate to their numbers.

In 1900, about one-half of Southern black children,

age 10 to 15 were employed in agricultural labor.

After 1910, black laborers began to migrate to the North and

into the industrializing cities of the New South in search of higher wages,

better living conditions, and education for their children.

Rural white elites grudgingly acknowledged that they would have to

provide more public schools for

blacks if they hoped to retain black labor in the agricultural sector.

Northern philanthropy played an important role,

especially the school fundraising efforts of the Anna T.

Jeanes Fund, a total of $5.7 million, and

the school construction projects of the Rosenwald Fund.

Founded by the Chicago philanthropist and president of Sears Roebuck and

Company, Julius Rosenwald, the fund helped build rural black school houses.

Yet the fund operated solely on a matching basis, with land, labor, and

construction materials provided by black citizens and most of the cash

coming from their private contributions or the direct taxes they paid.

The fund donated about a third of the total.

>> Hm.

Rosenwald schools were sturdy, three and four-teacher, wood-framed buildings.

They replaced dilapidated one-room structures that creaked in the wind.

Almost 3,500 Rosenwald schools were built by the mid 1920s.

Yet only about 15% of all Southern rural schools serving black children on

the eve of the Great Depression were Rosenwald schools.

Rickety, one-room structures that creaked in the wind were still the norm for

black schoolchildren.

By 1930, the Southern blacks had the majority of the school aged children in

public schools.

By 1940, they had achieved approximate parity with the whites in

the percentage of black children attending elementary.

Yet they paid a voluntary double tax for

this right, as white school boards routinely allocated

disproportionate amounts of local tax dollars to white schools.

Whites refused to allocate any tax dollars to transport black chil, school children

even as school boards paid for school buses to transport white children.

Across the Jim Crow states,

white schools received about three times as many tax dollars as black schools.

In the Deep South,

four states spent almost five times as much on white schools.

One, South Carolina, spent ten times as much on white schools.

As James Anderson observes, quote, to be sure, the overwhelming majority of younger

black pupils attended wretched and inadequate one-teacher elementary schools.

>> [COUGH] Next we look at an institution called the county training school,

which Northern philanthropists invented and funded for the purpose of

embedding manual and industrial training in black rural schools.

As Anderson notes, the county training school was a unique

educational institution, sponsored by the General Education Board, the John F.

Slater Fund and the Anna T.

Jeanes Fund.

According to Anderson,

quote, the basic idea was to establish an industrial boarding school

centrally located in the counties of the Southern states with facilities and

teachers to operate seven elementary grades and three years of secondary and

normal school courses to train industrial teachers for the little country schools.

End quote.

By 1917, each of the former states of the Confederacy had at

least one county training school.

State superintendents of black rural schools were

charged with ensuring that the county training schools followed

an approved curriculum of industrial training.

By 1933, given a widespread lack of public high schools for blacks,

county trading schools were, in Anderson's words, in quote, a far-reaching and

dominant institution in Southern black secondary education, end quote.

In about a third of the counties in 15 Southern and border states in 1933,

a county training school represented the only opportunity black youths had for

a secondary education.

>> Hm.

Some black teachers and principals defied the philanthropists and implemented

liberal arts curricular, sometimes masking them as industrial training courses.

These schools were exemplars of black agency and community action.

As blacks gained increasing access to public high schools after 1935,

the county training schools disappeared, some of them becoming black high schools.

Anderson provides this epitaph,

quote, their purpose was to adjust black Southerners to a life of subordination.

And they were oppressive in form and content, except when their

intended purposes were subverted by local school officials, unquote.

In our next module, we look at a generation of progressive educators who

took a counterpoint position to the administrative progressives and

their social efficiency agendas.

David Tyack calls this group the pedagogical progressives,

a term we adopt from him.

We will center our module on John Dewey.

Although the world-famous John Dewey is often associated with

pedagogical progressives, he rejected their tendency toward child

centeredness at the expense of important social and academic aims.

We interpret Dewey as a foil for examining the claims of

both the administrative and pedagogical progressives.

[MUSIC]

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