The Eight-Year Study

Abstract

An essay review of

Stories of the Eight-Year Study: Reexamining Secondary Education in America

(Kridel, Craig, & Bullough, Robert V., Jr. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007)

Notes

Notes

1 Kridel and Bullough composed nine portraits or vignettes concluding with a chapter entitled “Reexamining Secondary Education in America,” followed by two appendices, one listing the Thirty Schools, the second listing associated testing bureaus and projects. Among those participants portrayed are Wilford Merton Aikin (1882–1965), V. T. Thayer (1886–1979), Eugene Randolph Smith (1876–1968), Ralph Tyler (1902–1994), Alice V. Keliher (1903–1995), Caroline Beaumont Zachry (1894–1945), Harold Alberty (1890–1971), Boyd Bode (1873–1953), and Margaret Willis (1899–1987). Kridel and Bullough have long been interested in biography: see, for instance, Kridel (1998) and Bullough (1979). In Bullough’s recent work, however, the biographic interest recedes in favor of case studies of so-called teacher development in which, curiously, subject matter (let alone intellectual reconstruction) plays no role whatsoever (2008, pp. 202, 205, 228).

2 Kridel and Bullough (2007, p. 7) acknowledge that “teachers brought differing degrees of enthusiasm for curricular experimentation.” There were “tensions” (2007, p. 52) regarding replacement of the Carnegie unit, the organizational documentation of study, as well as “fireworks” as faculty began a “sixteenth-month struggle” (2007, p. 53) over “independence” from the Carnegie Foundation (see also, 2007, pp. 55–59) and from demands for annual standardized testing (2007, p. 55). (While the former was achieved, the Study was besieged by tests, over 200 of them [2007, p. 82]!) There was “tension” (2007, p. 77) between Smith and Tyler, although the two co-edited the final report on evaluation (1942). From the outset, Kridel and Bullough (2007, p. 60) report that participants pursued “very different, often contrasting, agendas.” Elsewhere, Kridel (in Lipka et al., 1998, p. 18) underscores that sponsoring organization, the Progressive Education Association, was no “unified front.”

3 As Judith Green (2008, p. 35) points out, democracy is institutional. It is also “deep,” at the subjective “level of habits, practices, attitudes, and hopes in daily living” (Green, 2008, pp. 35–36). One limitation of the Eight-Year Study—at least as it is refracted through the Kridel-Bullough book—is that it emphasized experimentation as institutional, focused on the school. Even when focused on daily practices (and these were often associated with “behavior”), it is the school that is judged effective or not. For instance, “If pupils, then, shortly before graduation from high school have not developed such interests [which promise individual happiness and common welfare], or if their interests lie in a few fields which are inappropriate to their talents and opportunities, the school has failed” (Smith, Tyler, & the Evaluation Staff, 1942, p. 314, emphasis added; see also, pp. 434, 457). Accompanying this devolution of democracy to its organizational structures was dilution of the concept to social processes: “Democracy was reduced merely to learning how to get along with others, a matter of human relations” (Bullough & Kridel, 2003, p. 165). Despite a cautionary note concerning “institutionalism” (Giles, McCutchen, & Zechiel, 1942, p. 154), the experimentation of the Eight-Year Study seems structured by it.

4 Laurel Tanner (2009, p. 214) complains that Tyler’s second and third principles receive less attention than the first and fourth, but given Tyler’s positioning of these between objectives and evaluation, that seems inevitable. So positioned, as Tanner (2009, p. 214) herself acknowledges, principles two and three become reduced to “what learning experiences will be most suitable for attaining the objectives and how shall learning experienced be organized.”Tanner (2009, p. 214) associates the significance of Goodlad’s work with its attention to these neglected second and third principles. In the final paragraph of Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction, Tyler (1949, p. 128) invites readers to devise different sequences. (My thanks to William Schubert for making this point.) Whatever their sequence, the “principles” remained.

5 Reorganization and reconstruction become related through creative curriculum design, as in the use of “juxtaposition” in curriculum development. “The strategy of juxtaposition,”Janet Miller (2005, p. 144) and her colleagues suggest, “is one that invites inconsistencies, ambiguities, ambivalence, and foregrounds the fact that there will always be ‘unspoken themes’ that cannot or will not be interrogated.” For an extended discussion, see Pinar, 2009, p. 154 n. 13.

6 Not only did advanced study in the arts, humanities, and sciences play no prominent role in the Study, on occasion there appear instances of outright anti-intellectualism. Consider Caroline Zachry’s (1940/1968) apparent positioning of “study” as secondary to what students “do” in the school:

Classroom study and discussion of history, economics, of government and politics are not academic if they are carried on by young people who are engaging in such experiences, with teachers who are themselves active citizens. In these circumstances, discussion of democratic ideals is not mere lip-service. (p. 526)

The slur upon “academic” is underlined by the apparent assumption that classroom discussion amounts to “lip-service” (see also, Giles, McCutchen, & Zechiel, 1942, p. 159). It is not obvious to me how student councils and the extensive documentation of students’ private situations—including anatomical and sexual references (see Zachry, 1940/1968, pp. 185, 140)—and the forefronting of vocational guidance (see Zachry, 1940/1968, p. 519) improve upon the academic understanding of democratic ideals. An exaggerated interest in the student profile is also evident in Appraising and Record Student Progress: see Smith, Tyler, & the Evaluation Staff, 1942, pp. 409–429.

7 Aikin (1942a, p. 132) asserts: “Our people prize the individual human personality above everything else.” Evidently, it was the student’s, not the teacher’s, “individual human personality” that was prized (see note 8).

8 Not only was singleness of purpose recommended for each school; discovering the “chief reason” for the school’s “existence” constituted the second “major principle” guiding all Thirty Schools in the Eight-Year Study (Aikin, 1942a, p. 18). Both concepts—“chief reason” and “the school”—can occlude the academic freedom of individual teachers. “Although there should be differences among the schools,”Aikin (1942a, p. 36) allows, “growing out of the differences in home background, interests, needs and purposes of the student body, the major goals should be the same throughout the city.” Where is an acknowledgment of intellectual differences among the faculty? Where is any invitation to teach what and how one finds subjectively expressive and pedagogically appropriate? As Sharon Todd (2009, p. 106) points out, “democracy is an ongoing project of struggle, rooted in human pluralism, that actually can be undermined by calls for harmony and consensus.” In the Eight-Year Study, the emphasis was upon “common beliefs” (Kridel & Bullough, 2007, p. 12) comprising the “school philosophy” (Bullough & Kridel, 2003, p. 166) expressing “faculty unity” (Giles, McCutchen, & Zechiel, 1942, pp. 167, 208, 210).

9 “We are devoting much time to the setting up and formulation of objectives,”Tyler (1949, p. 62, emphasis added) explains, “because they are the most critical criteria for guiding all the other activities of the curriculum-maker.” Tyler suggests teachers start with student “needs,” a sticky wicket as the Kridel-Bullough discussion of the concept makes clear (see 2007, p. 130; see also Bullough & Kridel, 2003, p. 151; Giles, McCutchen, & Zechiel, 1942, pp. 7–8). I say start with teachers’ individual replies to the canonical curriculum question “what knowledge is of most worth?” That ongoing question incorporates concerns for students and society in its attunement to the historical moment through juxtapositions (see note 5) of “new” and canonical academic knowledge.

10 The reference to curriculum theory obligates me to point out a glaring lapse of judgment in Stories of the Eight-Year Study, a one-sentence reduction of contemporary curriculum theory to identity politics (see Kridel & Bullough, 2007, p. 167). While, I, too, have decried the excesses of identity politics (see Pinar, 2009, p. 22), the entire U.S. field can hardly be reduced to that phenomenon. While not “blind” to race, class, and gender (2007, p. 44), Kridel and Bullough (2007, p. 9) “wish” the Study’s participants had addressed “more directly such issues.” Those rare references to class are usually in the context of other points (see Giles, McCutchen, & Zechiel, 1942, pp. 167, 227, 236, 254). As Kridel points out, only brief attention was paid to non-collegebound students (in Lipka et al., 1998, p. 27), often (but hardly always) associated with working-class and poor families. Thirty Schools’ graduates did acknowledge the importance of racial, religious, and class tolerance (Chamberlin, Chamberlin, Drought, & Scott, 1942, p. 122; see also p. 116). The only reference I found to women (and then, parenthetically) occurred in Exploring the Curriculum (p. 42). I found only one reference to “Indians” (also in Exploring the Curriculum, p. 270), and that to the indigenous peoples of Central America. While obviously not of paramount concern, nonetheless “race” was referenced regularly in the schools’ depiction of their participation in the Study (see Thirty Schools, 1943, pp. 32, 103, 234, 276, 380, 544, 709) and in Exploring the Curriculum (see pp. 17, 18, 45, 51, 88, 258, 319, 330). In its Motion Picture Program, Kridel and Bullough (2007, p. 103) note, the Keliher Commission did excerpt Fury to depict a lynching. There was, Kridel tells us elsewhere (in Lipka et al., 1998, p. 31), a Secondary School Study for Negroes (a project of the Commission on Secondary Schools of the Association of Colleges and Secondary School for Negroes) that was “very much within the experimental tradition of the Eight-Year Study and the Southern Study.” In the Adolescents Study (conducted from 1934 to 1938), the concept of difference seems confined to heredity (see Zachry, 1940/1968, p. 40) or to psychology rather than to culture or ethnicity or politics: “Differences in economic status, in national and ethnic origin, largely ignored among playmates in the elementary-school age, are not unlikely in adolescence to give rise to keen self-doubt and hostility. The adolescents’ increased sensitivity to difference may here be supplemented by parental attitudes” (Zachry, 1940/1968, p. 363, emphasis added). On one occasion difference, indeed, “abnormality,” was valorized positively, that in a reference to the Ohio State University School’s Mr. Weidemann’s seventh-grade mathematics class, who concluded that “the only normal characteristic about an individual is his abnormality” (Giles, McCutchen, & Zechiel, 1942, pp. 64–65).

11 In his canonical essay on the intellectual history of the field, Jackson (1992; see Pinar et al., 1995, pp. 25–41) points out that Tyler extended Bobbitt’s two-step model of (1) defining educational objectives and (2) devising learning experiences by adding two additional steps, the third involving the organization of learning experiences and the fourth requiring their evaluation. Representing no reconceptualization of curriculum development, the work of both Bobbitt and Tyler “lie[s] within the single tradition of the curriculum specialist as advice given to practitioners” (1992, p. 27). Jackson wonders why Bobbitt and Tyler were so widely read; he looks for those rhetorical qualities of their books that might explain their wide influence: “Most notable among these [rhetorical] qualities is the strong appeal to common sense” (1992, p. 27). Common sense, one might add, that condemned teaching to implementation, setting up the profession for its “gracious submission” (Pinar, 2004, p. 65) decades later (see Taubman, 2009).

12 The only criticism Kridel and Bullough (2007, p. 96) allow themselves is that Tyler “worked within the safety of the status quo.” That is evident in Tyler’s resolution of the “uneasiness” (2007, p. 85) he is reported to have felt between the Study’s dedication to experimentation and the demand (by the General Education Board) to develop tests. Tyler chose to develop tests. Later, he expressed pride in doing so, claiming to have introduced “evaluation” (even coining the concept “assessment”) to education (2007, p. 91). In the era of dominated by standardized testing, this seems a dubious legacy indeed.

13 The truth is that the Ohio State University School faculty “objected” to the 10-minute homeroom period, “feeling that guidance could not be scheduled and that meeting a group of students for 10 minutes was a waste of time. The plan was soon abandoned” (Thirty Schools, 1943, p. 723).

14 Bush’s billion-dollar reading “boondoggle” is one such “intervention” (see Dillon, 2008). While not instigated by that fascistic administration, “Teach for America” reflects the fantasy that untainted (by experience) teachers from elite institutions can pull rabbits out of hats, a contemporary version of noblesse oblige. The test-driven curriculum emptied of academic knowledge (focused instead on “skills”) is rationalized by an expensive quixotic search for “what works” (for an intellectually deadening illustration, see Slavin, 2008) that derives from an early 20th-century gendered (Seigfried, 1996, p. 194) faith that “the scientific study of the nature of human learning will lead to principles for effective teaching” (Egan, 2002, p. 74). Ignorant of the intellectual history of the academic field of education, politicians plod on: One New York City charter school promised to pay teachers $125,000 plus a potential performance bonus (Gootman, 2008a). As in the Eight-Year Study, such “performance” is not a matter of individual accomplishment; instead, it ascertained by school-, even district-wide, students’ test scores. It is never conceived as offering an intellectually provocative curriculum (Hu, 2008; Schemo, 2007). Not only has New York City mayor Michael R. Bloomberg wanted teachers’ salaries linked to their students’ scores standardized exams (Gootman, 2007), but he also proposed that tenure be likewise linked! That latter demand was rejected by New York State legislators, although not, evidently, due to concerns for academic freedom (Hakim & Peters, 2008; Taubman, 2009). Now the Obama administration is dangling “stimulus funds” to “persuade” states to link test scores to teacher evaluations (Dillon, 2009). In one survey, an overwhelming majority of teachers disagreed that the emphasis on testing had improved the quality of education in the schools where they taught (Gootman, 2008b). Recall that the idea that evaluation should inform pedagogy was a Bobbitt-era idea (see 1918, pp. 42, 45) influential in the Eight-Year Study.

15 “If a firm plan for educational reconstruction had been implemented at the war’s end (including integrated public schools),” Joel Williamson (1984, p. 51) suggests, “a great deal of suffering might have been prevented” (see also, Tyack & Hansot, 1990, p. 88). Once Southerners regained political control of the South in 1877, “Negro education was the primary target” (Trelease, 1971, p. 294). In addition to its racial association (Du Bois, 1935/1975), including “the radical reconstruction of black subjectivity” (Mercer, 1994, p. 302), “reconstruction” has also been associated with gender, and not only with feminism (see, e.g., Braidotti, 1994, p. 40) but with the “reconstruction of masculinity” (Kimmel, 1996, p. 333), not a restoration but a shattering of patriarchy, itself with racial implications. These modalities of “deep democracy” (see note 3) could be addressed in a reconstructed (but probably not in the reorganized) school curriculum.

16 Even Bobbitt (1918, pp. 43, 49, 64) emphasizes the “new” with his term curriculum discoverer. Alas, what is “new” in Bobbitt’s curriculum is learning ever-more efficient performance of adult activities. In the reports of the Eight-Year Study, the “new” is associated with solving those problems posed by adolescents. Advanced academic study—when not caricatured (see Giles, McCutchen, & Zechiel, 1942, pp. 260–261)—seems limited to learning theory (see p. 154) and “workshops” (pp. 219ff, 262, 297, 303, 307) focused on organizational, not academic, issues. There is one reference to “new knowledge” in Aikin’s summary (see 1942a, p. 23), but it is to subjective knowledge, for example, students “seeking deeper and broader meaning in their maturing experiences.” Despite the claim that “we are trying to develop students … who desire … to explore new fields of thought” (1942a, p. 144), Aikin emphasizes that the “source of the curriculum is to be found in the concerns of youth and in the nature of the society which the school serves” (p. 135). How “new fields of thought” can be explored by students without teachers engaged in sustained academic study is not obvious. Absent in the Study, at least on any systematic basis, were university faculty outside colleges of education. (Herbert E. Hawkes, dean of Columbia College, constitutes one exception; see Aikin, 1942a, pp. 147–150; also Cremin, 1961, p. 256.) The closest reference to “new knowledge” in the study of the Thirty Schools’ graduates is “the assembly and organization of masses of new materials” (McConn, 1942, p. xviii). In Exploring the Curriculum there is one appreciative acknowledgment of advanced study in one’s field (see p. 225). In the humanities, “new” knowledge enables ongoing articulation of the historical moment (Roberts, 1995, p. 126). Its centrality in the sciences requires no comment.

17 Even critical pedagogue William Stanley (2007, p. 384) observed recently, “It is clear that schools alone are in no position to create a new democratic social order.” This is no new insight, of course. “By the eve of World War I,” Robert Westbrook (1991, p. 192) reminds, “Dewey was more fully aware that the democratic reconstruction of American society he envisioned could not take place simply by a revolution in the classroom, that, indeed, the revolution in the classroom could not take place until the society’s adults had been won over to radical democracy.”