From child study to efficiency: district administrators and the use of testing in the Chicago public schools, 1899 to 1928

Abstract

Historians have documented the dramatic battle over the mass introduction of IQ testing waged by Chicago’s unionised teachers in 1924 against Superintendent McAndrew and the Chicago Board of Education. The efforts of Chicago’s mid‐level district administrators and their work with principals and teachers to address the real and perceived differences of the students pouring into classrooms in this era have garnered less consideration. Examining the work of district administrators responsible for the educational programmes intended to manage “backward”, “subnormal” and “feeble‐minded” children provides a rich case to analyse how these district administrators made use of the emerging field of testing to address the educational issues they confronted. The use of testing in Chicago’s schools during the early twentieth century represents a moment when the line between administrative and pedagogical progressives appeared unclear and illustrates the complexity of educators’ pedagogic beliefs and practices. It offers examples of educators making use of educational testing and resisting it. This study analyses the reports of Chicago’s district administrators and superintendents, who often identified as progressive educators. These administrators seemed able to question the use of testing at least in part because of the vibrant progressive reform movement that existed in Chicago during this era. Indeed, although teacher resistance complicated the use of testing on a wide scale in Chicago, the early concerns of these mid‐level district administrators in the 1910s proved critical to keeping intelligence testing at bay until the mid‐1920s.

Keywords:

• intelligence testing
• progressive education
• district administrators
• Chicago

Notes

¹Mary J. Herrick, The Chicago Schools: A Social and Political History (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1971); David Tyack, The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974); Julia Wrigley, Class Politics and Public Schools: Chicago 1900–1950 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1982); David J. Hogan, Class and Reform: School and Society in Chicago, 1880–1930 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985). Recent scholarship on the history of teacher unionism in post‐Progressive Era Chicago sheds light on the subtleties of teachers’ aims to unionise – driven by both school reform and self‐interest. See John F. Lyons, Teachers and Reform: Chicago Public Education, 1929–1970 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2008).

²Herrick, The Chicago Schools; Wrigley, Class Politics and Public Schools; Hogan, Class and Reform.

³Tyack, The One Best System.

⁴Hogan, Class and Reform, 185–86.

⁵Herrick, The Chicago Schools; Wrigley, Class Politics and Public Schools; Hogan, Class and Reform.

⁶Kate Rousmaniere, “Go to the Principal’s Office: Toward a Social History of the School Principal in North America,” History of Education Quarterly 47, no. 1 (2007): 5–6.

⁷Ibid., 11.

⁸Herbert M. Kliebard, The Struggle for the American Curriculum, 1893–1958, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1995); Richard L. McCormick, “Evaluating the Progressives,” in Major Problems in the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era: Documents and Essays, ed. Leon Fink, 2nd ed. (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2001), 367–79; Scott Davies, “The Paradox of Progressive Education: A Frame Analysis,” Sociology of Education 75, no. 4 (2002): 269–86.

⁹Kate Rousmaniere, “Go to the Principal’s Office,” 5.

¹⁰Barry M. Franklin, From “Backwardness” to “At‐Risk”: Childhood Learning Difficulties and the Contradictions of School Reform (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994); David A. Gamson, “District Progressivism: Rethinking Reform in Urban School Systems, 1900–1928,” Paedagogica Historica 39, no. 4 (2003): 417–34.

¹¹Chicago is located in the state of Illinois, which passed its first compulsory schooling law in 1883. This contributed to the increase in the number of students attending public schools in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

¹²Herrick, The Chicago Schools, 403.

¹³Walter Nugent, “Demography,” in The Encyclopedia of Chicago, ed. James R. Grossman, Ann Durkin Keating, and Janice L. Reiff (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 233–37, 235; Bernard J. Weiss, American Education and the European Immigrant, 1840–1940 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1982), xiii.

¹⁴H.B. Chapman, “Bureaus of Educational Research and the Special Class Program,” Educational Research Bulletin 6, no. 7 (March 30, 1927): 144–46.

¹⁵Psychologist G. Stanley Hall was the foremost authority and advocate of child study in the United States in the late nineteenth century. He praised the establishment of the Illinois Society for the Study of Children in 1894. Kliebard, The Struggle for the American Curriculum, 37. Dr. W.S. Christopher was active in the child study movement in Illinois and spoke to groups interested in it, including the Illinois Society for the Study of Children.

¹⁶ Forty‐Fifth Annual Report of the Board of Education for the Year Ending June 23, 1899 (Board of Education of the City of Chicago, 1899), 27.

¹⁷Ibid., 72.

¹⁸Ibid., 73.

¹⁹Ibid., 74.

²⁰Ibid., 75.

²¹Ibid.

²² Fifty‐fifth Annual Report of the Board of Education for the Year Ended June 30, 1909 (Board of Education of the City of Chicago, 1909), 165–66.

²³Ibid., 163–64.

²⁵Ibid., 166.

²⁴Ibid., 164.

²⁶Ibid.

²⁷ Fifty‐seventh Annual Report of the Board of Education for the Year Ended June 30, 1911 (Board of Education of the City of Chicago, 1911), 119.

²⁸ Fifty‐fourth Annual Report of the Board of Education for the Year Ended June 30, 1908 (Board of Education of the City of Chicago, 1908), 70.

²⁹Ibid., 70–74.

³⁰Ibid., 107.

³¹Ibid., 151–55.

³²Ibid., 290–91.

³³Franklin, From “Backwardness” to “At–Risk,” 14–15.

³⁴Ibid., 6–7.

³⁵ Sixtieth Annual Report of the Board of Education for the Year Ending June 30, 1914 (Board of Education of the City of Chicago, 1914), 125.

³⁶Ibid., 126.

³⁷Ibid., 128.

³⁸For more on the relationship between Ella Flagg Young and the Chicago Federation of Teachers see Kate Rousmaniere, Citizen Teacher: The Life and Leadership of Margaret Haley (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005).

³⁹ Sixtieth Annual Report of the Board of Education for the Year Ending June 30, 1914, 160.

⁴⁰Ibid., 160–61.

⁴¹Ibid., 161.

⁴²Ibid., 165.

⁴³Ibid.

⁴⁴ Fifty‐Ninth Annual Report of the Board of Education for the Year Ending June 30, 1913 (Board of Education of the City of Chicago, 1913), 188.

⁴⁵Ibid.

⁴⁶Ibid., 190.

⁴⁷Ibid.

⁴⁸John D. Shoop, Report of the Superintendent of Schools for the Year 1915–16: Reports on the Work for Exceptional Children and on School Lunches in the Elementary Schools (Board of Education of the City of Chicago, 1916), 2.

⁴⁹Ibid., 3–4.

⁵⁰Ibid.,12. Psychopathists were considered specialists in mental diseases.

⁵¹Ibid.

⁵²Ibid., 21.

⁵³Ibid., 22.

⁵⁴Ibid., 22–23.

⁵⁵ Sixty‐fourth Annual Report of the Board of Education for the Year Ending June 30, 1918 (Board of Education of the City of Chicago, 1918), 44.

⁵⁶Gamson, District Progressivism.

⁵⁷ Sixty‐fourth Annual Report, 69.

⁵⁸Ibid.

⁵⁹Ibid.

⁶⁰ Sixty‐sixth Annual Report of the Board of Education for the Year Ending June 30, 1922 (Board of Education of the City of Chicago), 88–89; Chicago Principals’ Club, Supervision: A Platform and a Policy, Report by the Education Committee, no. 1 (1923): 19–20, Archives of the Chicago Board of Education.

⁶²Herrick, The Chicago Schools, 158.

⁶¹Kate Rousmaniere, “Chicago Teachers Federation,” in The Encyclopedia of Chicago, ed. James R. Grossman, Ann Durkin Keating, and Janice L. Reiff (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 152.

⁶³Department of Education, Annual Report of the Superintendent of Schools for the Year Ending June 30, 1924 (Board of Education of the City of Chicago, 1924), 54.

⁶⁴Ibid., 55.

⁶⁵Department of Education, Annual Report of the Superintendent of Schools for the Year Ending June 30, 1925 (Board of Education of the City of Chicago, 1925), 95.

⁶⁶Arthur Zilversmit, “Schooling for Work,” in The Encyclopedia of Chicago, ed. James R. Grossman, Ann Durkin Keating, and Janice L. Reiff (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2004), 735–39, 737.

⁶⁷Linda Darling‐Hammond, The Right to Learn: A Blueprint for Creating Schools that Work (San Francisco, CA: Jossey Bass, 1997), 41; Kate Rousmaniere, Citizen Teacher, 192.

⁶⁸Hogan, Class and Reform, 185–86.

⁶⁹Jackie M. Blount, Destined to Rule the Schools: Women and the Superintendency, 1873–1995 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 168–69.

⁷⁰Lyons, Teachers and Reform, 24.